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Before Keurig, the coffee in your office was almost certainly terrible. Old, burned, made by someone who would rather poorly eyeball than properly measure. Just altogether gross. After Keurig? You could make your own coffee, a cup at a time, exactly when you needed it. The single-cup brewer was an elegant solution to an extremely […]

I’ve spent thousands of dollars over the years on smart home gear. Like many tech enthusiasts, I started with the usual suspects: smart bulbs, plugs, sensors, voice assistants, and eventually more “advanced” hubs. Every time, the marketing promised intelligence. Every time, I got glorified timers and motion detectors wearing a fancy label. After multiple attempts, I’ve reached the same conclusion many others quietly reach: most “smart home” products are not smart. They are automated, and there’s a massive difference. What “Smart” Actually Means A genuinely smart home system should do three things well: Understand context. Not just that a door opened or motion was detected, but why and what it means right now. Integrate devices meaningfully. Devices shouldn’t just talk to each other; they should share rich, semantic information so the system can reason across them. Be predictive and proactive. It should anticipate needs based on patterns, current state, and human behavior, instead of waiting for a trigger. Current systems almost never do any of these at a level that feels intelligent. The Core Problems (From Someone Who Actually Tried) Take a simple example: the dishwasher. A basic automation might detect the door was opened and then closed, then start the cycle. But it has zero idea whether: Dishes were actually loaded Someone was just checking if the cycle finished More dishes are coming in 30 seconds The person is about to run a quick rinse first The same gap appears everywhere: Lighting at night. The system doesn’t know if you just got up to use the bathroom, you’re wide awake working, or there was an emergency. It just sees “motion after 11 p.m.” and either blasts you with light or leaves you in the dark. Multi-person households. One person’s preference for dim evening lighting conflicts with another person’s need for bright light. Guests have no idea how anything works and accidentally trigger routines. “I’m just doing a quick house tour” vs. actual activity. T

Don’t suffer the buffer. These WIRED-tested home routers will deliver reliable internet across your home, whatever your needs or budget.

This massive 85-inch model is highly customizable but jaw-droppingly expensive.

Eight Sleep’s Pod 5 is great at its job, but its job is also watching you sleep.

The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum by a pretty comfortable margin. If you’ve been thinking about buying one, you may want to plan on doing it sooner than later. The company will raise its price by $250 on September 9th, going from $1,245 to $1,495. Matic told The Verge that the new price reflects […]

The Bublue BuVortex V5 ditches conventional skimming for a vortex-powered design that’s fascinating to watch, even if it’s severely impractical.

The homelab started flat. One /24, everything on it. My workstation, the NAS, the Proxmox host, and — over time — a growing list of workloads sharing the same broadcast domain because that was the path of least resistance. For a while, that was fine. A homelab running one workload doesn't need segmentation any more than a house needs an office door. Then I stood up an Akash provider. An Akash provider is, in shape, a Kubernetes cluster that accepts inbound tenant workloads from the internet — real deployments, paying for compute, containers I didn't write landing in namespaces on my hardware. The provider itself is documented at github.com/jjozzietech/akash-provider-ops-public — this piece is about the network underneath it. The containerisation posture itself is fine. I trust the isolation model. But trust isn't a network design. And the network at that moment had the tenant workload cluster sitting on the same subnet as my workstation, my NAS, and my Proxmox management interface. That was the moment I stopped thinking of the rack as a home network with extra boxes, and started thinking of it as a small data centre. This piece is the network design that came out of that shift. I'll cover the layout, the rules that hold it together, and the Nexus and Proxmox configs that anchor it — with the specifics of my own deployment sanitised. It's not a step-by-step replication guide. It's the design pattern, with enough of the shape to be useful and enough restraint to not double as a recon document for my own rack. // the original design The flat layout looked like this: home lan — 192.168.1.0/24 opnsense (perimeter) cisco nexus (dumb L2 switching) proxmox host workload VMs (all on the same subnet) What it got right: zero routing complexity, everything reachable from everywhere, fast to stand up. If you're running one project on a homelab, this is the correct design. Don't over-engineer it. What stopped working, as soon as the second project landed on the rack, was that the

Fourth of July weekend is the last great grill and griddle sale of the summer, including $250 off my favorite pellet smoker.

Smart speakers have spent the past few years searching for a compelling second act. Beyond music, timers, and controlling your lights, they've struggled to justify taking up space on the kitchen counter. AI promised to change that. Amazon debuted its new hardware powered by a revamped Alexa last fall, and now it's finally Google's turn. […]

With these high-tech automatic litter boxes, gone are the days of scooping and smells. Welcome to the future.

It may be tempting to control an entire power strip with a smart plug, but there are some things you should know about this setup.

It’s time for our annual Fourth of July grill episode here at Decoder. This is when we invite the CEOs of outdoor cooking companies onto the show to explain just how their businesses kind of look like every other business. And this is a very special edition. Today I’m talking to Roger Dahle, the CEO […]

Flipper Devices, a company that built a banned hacking device, now wants to hack your attention span.

First announced over a year ago in April 2025, the Busy Bar will be available for purchase starting on July 14th when the device also starts shipping. Created by the same team behind the Flipper Zero wireless multitool, the Busy Bar is instead described as a "productivity multitool" that relies on a pixelated LED display […]

Flipper Device's new Busy Bar will retail for $249.

I gave GLM-4.5-Air (106B, open weights) 12 coding tasks through opencode on my RTX 3090. It scored 0% — never edited a single file. Same model, same GPU, same tasks, but driven by a ~150-line LangGraph agent instead: 93% . The model was never the problem. The orchestrator was. Here's the benchmark — including the part nobody else measures, the electricity cost per correct task . Setup RTX 3090 (24 GB) + 128 GB RAM , models via ollama , Q4 quants, temp 0.2 5 recent open models × 2 orchestrators (opencode vs custom LangGraph ReAct with ollama-native tool-calling) 17 graded tasks (12 coding in Python/JS/C++ + 5 general-agent) with hidden unit tests Every run priced in GPU watts via my open-source homelab-monitor Results Model tok/s opencode adh. LangGraph adh. LangGraph coding LangGraph general Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B 130 92% 100% 100% 100% GLM-4.5-Air 106B 5.7 0% 100% 89% 100% Devstral Small 24B 49 8% 53% 8% 40% Seed-OSS 36B 9.5 0% 7% 0% 20% DeepSeek-R1-Distill 32B 6.7 0% 0% 0% 0% Tool-adherence = % of tasks where the model actually called a tool instead of just printing code in chat. It was the master variable. (GLM's headline "93%" is its blended score across all 17 tasks: 89% coding + 100% general.) Three takeaways The framework can matter more than the model. opencode sends a frontier-shaped system prompt + 12 tools over its OpenAI-compat path; most local models fall back to chatting. Native tool-calling through a lean agent fixes that — GLM went 0% → 93%. (Qwen3-Coder is the exception: it's tuned for agentic tool use and aces opencode out of the box.) Acting ≠ solving. LangGraph made Devstral act (8% → 53% adherence) but not solve (coding stayed 8%). The framework decides whether a model acts; the model decides whether it's right. The wattmeter ranks honestly. Qwen solved tasks at ~0.0005 BGN each; the models that scored zero still burned 10–30× more energy for nothing. On a home rig, the cheapest model is the fast, correct one — and MoE (Qwen activates ~3B of 30B pe

Four years ago, overlooking a canal in Amsterdam, the smart home industry collectively launched Matter, the one interoperability standard to rule them all. Heralded as the solution to the industry's struggles, Matter was built on open standards and existing technologies and is the result of years of collaboration between traditional rivals, including Apple, Google, Amazon, […]

Everyone is sick of spam calls and creeper sites that show weirdos where you live—but can any service solve it?

I've been using Home Assistant for a few years and Trading212 for longer than that. It was inevitable these two things would end up connected. The Trading212 API is surprisingly good — portfolio value, individual positions, pies, dividends, all there. So I wrote a custom integration to pull it all into HA as sensors, then a Lovelace card to make it actually look decent on a dashboard rather than a wall of entity rows. The card does zero-config auto-discovery which was the bit I spent the most time on. You drop it on a dashboard and it finds your sensors automatically — no copying entity IDs, no manual config unless you want it. Five card types: portfolio overview with a sparkline, scrollable positions list, pies with goal progress, and a combined one if you want everything in one card. The sparkline was fiddly. HA's recorder only writes state changes, not regular samples, so if your portfolio value is flat between polls the chart has gaps. Had to smooth over those client-side. The part I use most though is the automations. Every weekday at 8am Alexa tells me where I stand: action : - action : notify.alexa_media_kitchen data : message : > Portfolio is worth {{ states('sensor.trading212_total_value') | float | round(0) | int }} pounds. Today you are {% if states('sensor.trading212_pnl_today') | float >= 0 %}up{% else %}down{% endif %} {{ states('sensor.trading212_pnl_today') | float | abs | round(2) }} pounds. data : type : tts And Friday at 6pm I get the weekly version with P&L for the week and which position moved the most. I like that it just tells me — if the market's had a bad week I'd probably avoid opening the app, but Alexa doesn't give me the option to ignore it. Both the integration and the card are on GitHub. The card is in HACS as a custom repo while it waits for default catalogue approval: https://github.com/Smart-Home-Assistant-UK/lovelace-trading212-card I wrote up the full setup with all the automation YAML here if you want to copy the whole thing: ful