I love my home, but the floorplan is a bit odd. It’s a popular thing in the region: they like to put a room or two adjacent to the front door, neither of which have doors of their own. These rooms seem solely for show rather than …

My Christmas was a general mess. It was supposed to be the first year I got to host it for the family, but then my 18-month-old nephew got sick and ended up in the hospital (don’t worry, he’s doing much better!). Everything fell …

I have an older iMac in my kitchen with a keyboard that’s on its last legs. Some of the keys don’t even work anymore, and it’s an exercise in frustration to use. This evening I tried to plug in an older aluminum keyboard, and it …

…or maybe a couple hundred, I would be interested in making a bid for the Lowe’s IRIS home automation business. It’s sad to see that Lowe’s is exiting the arena; while I wasn’t interested in a cloud-based system, the fact that a …

Amazingly enough, I’m still alive. Surprised?

Built on a similar platform as the HS-WD100+, the HS-WD200+ is a Z-Wave Dimmer that once more earns the “best in class” designation. It offers all the features of the 100+, but with additional enhancements, such as the addition of …

At some point while I clearly wasn’t looking, 2017 managed to escape. Now I’m stuck in 2018, and I have no clue how it happened. My attention span really is that bad.

The Z-Wave interface I’m working on is an inherently asynchronous beast. Callbacks abound, and the use of lambda functions makes that much easier to deal with. This fact led me to select C++11 as the language standard for the …

So there I was, all gung-ho to make some serious progress. I was going to do a bunch of reseach on Z-Wave; I was gonna write a nice little bit of software to replace OpenHAB; and I was gonna blog about it. It was gonna be great! I …

openHAB is a Java-based platform (developed in parallel with Eclipse Smarthome, on which it is based) that provides interface, control, and automation functionality for your home. It supports many devices and networks through …

The HS-WS100+ or HS-WD100+ HomeSeer switches both support multi-way configurations. This will not work with standard three-way switches, however; instead, you need the HS-WA100+. Note that this switch is not a Z-Wave device, does …

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my small collection of servers when I moved into the house, so they ended up stacked on a folding table. While it was functional, it certainly wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world. Plus …