Showing posts with label hometechhacker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hometechhacker. Show all posts

Home Tech Hacker: How to Get Started Creating your Smart Home

Sunday, May 1, 2022

By Marlon Buchanan

Are you interested in giving your home smart home capabilities but aren’t sure where to start? There’s never been a better time to get into smart home technology. Smart homes can enhance and enrich your life by automating mundane tasks and making other activities easier. 

They make your home much safer. They can help you save money. Also, they can be fun to show off!

Here are some good first steps to take on your smart home journey.

Step 1: Make sure your Wi-Fi is solid

Many smart home devices need Wi-Fi to work. Your smart devices will frustrate you if your Wi-Fi network is slow, has a lot of dropouts, or plain just doesn’t reach many areas of your home. 

For help making sure your Wi-Fi is stable, fast, and secure, check out my free Wi-Fi Tuneup ebook. If you are looking for more comprehensive help with making your Wi-Fi and the rest of your home network as good as it can be, check out my book, The Home Network Manual.

Smart bulb
Step 2: Buy a smart bulb

Smart bulbs are a good smart device to start with because they are useful, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive. 

You can program them to turn on and off at certain times of the day. 

You can also create moods and custom atmospheres with lighting and color effects. 

Learning to set up and use a smart bulb will build your smart home device capabilities and confidence.

Smart plug
Step 3: Buy a smart plug


In addition to lighting, being able to automate and remotely turn on and off devices using a smart plug is another key feature of a smart home. 

You can remotely turn on or schedule your coffee maker. 

Also, you can automate holiday lights, lamps, portable heaters, electric blankets, fans, etc.

Echo Dot voice assistant
Step 4: Buy a voice assistant


Buying a voice assistant will truly make your home feel smart. 
Using voice commands to control your smart bulb and smart plug will make you feel more in control. 

Start with a voice assistant that matches your preferred ecosystem, like Google’s Nest Mini, Amazon’s Echo Dot, or Apple’s HomePod Mini.

Step 5: Put it all together

Now that you have a smart bulb, a smart plug, and a voice assistant it is time to put them all together. 

Make sure you link your smart bulb and smart plug with your voice assistant so you can control them by voice. 

Play around with the apps that accompany the smart devices to set up automations like having your coffee maker startup with your morning routine or having a smart bulb turn off with your nighttime routine.

Step 6: Think about what you want out of a smart home

These steps will get you started, but there is so much more a smart home can do. Think about what types of things you want to control and automate in the long term. 

Think about what you want your smart home to be able to do (for inspiration, check out these smart home ideas). This, combined with how much effort and time you want to put into your smart home, determines your next steps.

Marlon Buchanan, Home Tech Hacker
Marlon Buchanan
is a best-selling author, IT Director, and founder of HomeTechHacker.com, a website with free resources to help you make the most of your home technology.



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HomeTechHacker: Why And How to Back Up Your Computer

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

By Marlon Buchanan

Have you recently backed up your important home videos, photos, financial, and other important documents? 

If the answer is no then you are at risk of losing your files to hard drive failures, ransomware, theft or even accidentally deleting a file. The best way to protect yourself from these problems is to implement a proper backup strategy for your important files.

Before we get into the details of a proper backup strategy, let's discuss three different types of backups.

Synology Networked attached storage device
Local backups

Copying your files to a second place somewhere in your home is considered a local backup. This can be as simple as copying your files to a separate directory or hard drive on your computer. 

A better idea would be to buy an external hard drive that you store backups on. 

Even better (and more expensive) would be a networked attached storage (NAS) device like the ones made by Synology and QNAP.

Back up to the cloud

Cloud storage is a very competitive business with a lot of options, both free and paid. OneDrive and iCloud offer 5 GB of free storage. while Dropbox offers 2 GB of free space. Google Drive offers a whopping 15 GB of free storage, but that includes your Google Photos and Gmail storage. 

You can install apps on your computers and mobile devices to automatically backup important files to these cloud accounts. These services can become expensive if you have a lot of data to back up.

Backup to the cloud
Remote backup

The primary goal of cloud backup solutions like OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google drive is to keep your files synced across multiple machines and devices, thereby providing access anywhere. 

Remote backup systems are best if you’re concerned about backing up large amounts of data at a reasonable price. Popular cloud backup services include Backblaze, Spideroak, and IDrive. 

All of these solutions come with software you can install on your PC(s) and schedule automated backups so you don’t even have to think about it. Some of these solutions have apps that will back up your mobile devices too!

3-2-1: A good backup strategy

Good backup strategies involve keeping multiple copies of your data in multiple places. The more copies of your data, the less risk of data loss. A popular backup technique is the 3-2-1 backup strategy which stands for:
  • 3 copies of your data
  • 2 local copies on 2 different devices (original and backup)
  • 1 offsite backup
To accomplish this, you would combine the local backups with cloud and/or remote backups. 

For example, you could have a process that backs your computer up to an external hard drive or NAS frequently and then performs a daily remote backup. 

Some cloud backup services have direct integration (usually browser-based web apps) with popular NAS providers to make this process even easier.

It’s important to automate whatever backup strategy you choose. Reliable backups are critical and having to remember to backup a file is unreliable. 

There are software and apps available for Windows and Macs to automate remote and local backups as well as sync to the cloud.

Don’t wait until you’ve lost data and it's too late. Start backing up your files today.

Marlon Buchanan is an author, IT Director, and founder of HomeTechHacker.com, a website with free resources to help you make the most of your home technology.



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HomeTechHacker: 5 Steps to Secure Your Home Network

Sunday, March 6, 2022

By Marlon Buchanan

Sensitive financial information. Private family photos. Important computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices that you and your family count on every day. 

If someone breaches your home network security they can compromise all of these things. You count on your home network now more than ever. Take these steps to protect your home network from hackers and other bad actors.

1. Keep the software on your devices up to date

Hackers come up with new ways to break into home networks every day. Often, they exploit weaknesses in the software on devices. Software updates are intended to quickly address these weaknesses, but if you don’t update the software on your devices you’ll still be vulnerable.

I know everyone hates Windows updates, but they do keep your computer protected. Make sure to keep the software on your computers, mobile devices, and especially your router up-to-date. Your router is your home network’s primary defense and keeping it updated is important.

2. Change your Wi-Fi network name and use a good password

If you’re using the default network name and/or password your router came with you need to change it. Often, the default network name gives away the brand of the router, which can give hackers clues about how to break in.

A strong password for everything is a requirement for security in today's world, and the password to your Wi-Fi network is no exception. 

Wi-Fi networks are susceptible to brute-force password-guessing attacks. Use longer passwords to thwart brute-force attacks. A good Wi-Fi password is a hard-to-guess (but easy for you to remember) phrase or sentence that is at least 15 characters long.

3. Use good Wi-Fi security settings

Wi-Fi security has evolved over time because older standards have been cracked. Make sure you’re not using older standards like WEP security and TKIP encryption. These standards are no longer secure. You should be using WPA3 security and AES encryption. If your router doesn't support WPA3 then WPA2 will suffice.

4. Set up a guest Wi-Fi network

If you don’t have a guest network, you may find yourself in a situation where you have guests over and you have to give them your Wi-Fi password so they can access your network. This gives your guests not only your password, which you may use for different accounts, but also access to all of your networked devices (file shares, PCs, streaming devices, etc.).

Even if you trust the people who have your password, you shouldn't trust that all the software and apps they use are free of malware that can compromise the devices on your network. A proper guest network allows you to set a separate and shareable password for your guests and firewalls off your private computer resources from being compromised by guests.

5. Keep good backups of your important data

Having a backup strategy can save you from a catastrophic loss of data if there's a breach, or even if hard drives or computers fail. There are many backup options including backing up to a separate hard drive and remote backup services like iDrive and SpiderOak One.

If you implement these tips, your home network will be well protected. 

You can find more home security tips and ways to improve your home network in my book The Home Network Manual: The Complete Guide to Setting Up, Upgrading, and Securing Your Home Network, available on Amazon Kindle and in audiobook and paperback formats in stores everywhere.

Marlon Buchanan
has worked in the IT field for over twenty-five years as a software developer, a college instructor, and an IT Director. 

He lives in Lake Forest Park, where he can be found researching new smart home projects, playing sports with his children, and writing articles for his blog, HomeTechHacker.com

He holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and master's degrees in software engineering and business administration.



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