ZigBee Ian initially installed some home automation with Wemo switches, then utilised IFTTT. If you used more than a few simple rules with IFTTT then you had to sign up for their paid model. Having a monthly expenditure for some home automation was not something Ian was going to be Read more
Please feel free to contact us. Please note we will include your I.P. Address in any form sent: Your I.P. address – Ian has a keen interest in the following and more: We aim to respond to Contact forms with 48 hours We use and recommend – Those who attempt Read more
Due to changing how we access the internet, moving to 4G data internet connections, it became tricky to host this website ourselves. We use multi internet providers which are selected automatically by our load balancing router, so our outbound I.P. can suddenly change. Using Dynamic DNS servers wasn’t really practical Read more
For the last twenty-plus years, we were contracted to either Sky or Virgin media, who provided our telephone, Internet and TV services. First to go was the telephone due to the number of spam and scam calls we were getting to our landline. This was with a call blocker and Read more
Back to part 1 – Switching from fixed-contract Internet, telephone, and TV providers Cord cutter or Cord buster generally means not getting your TV services from the likes of Virgin or Sky, streaming rather than using packaged TV services. Though we have taken Cord Cutting a stage further. Whilst we Read more
4K Fire Sticks are great. We’re very pleased with them. It’s great, but sometimes there’s a problem with connectivity, probably more related to Wi-Fi. As a result, Ian decided to hard-wire the Fire Sticks directly into the house’s Gigabit network. The Fire Sticks connection to power, and the world is Read more
We show the CCTV cameras we are using as Hog Cams below: ieGeek Security Camera Outdoor with 25m Night Vision ← paid links on this page Some more images below from our Hog Cams: Before opting to install Synology Surveillance Station on a couple of our storage Synology NAS’, we Read more
We are happy to share our settings in .pdf format for the cost of a , these settings took us a little time to work out.
Pi-Hole – Pi-hole is a Linux network-level advertisement and Internet tracker blocking application which acts as a DNS sinkhole and optionally a DHCP server, intended for use on a private network. The designers created it for low-power embedded devices with network capability, such as the Raspberry Pi, but can install Read more
The two images below are a view of a British online newspaper without Pi-Hole and then Pi-Hole active to demonstrate the reduction in internet traffic you will experience if you implement Pi-Hole. By reducing what your internet connection has to download, you are, in effect, speeding up the downloading of Read more