Down the Rabbit Hole of Smart Home Tech

Photo by Dan LeFebvre on Unsplash

Down the Rabbit Hole of Smart Home Tech

Tiffany White
by Tiffany White
2 min read

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It all started innocently enough. Scroll YouTube and find some tech related videos. The algorithm surfaced this:

And then I watched this from the sidebar:

And then this:

And the rest, is well…

Bitten by the YouTube algorithm

You gotta hand it to Google for their clever1 algorithm-foo. I’m not complaining though; I’m a technophile through and through. All of this intrigued me as I had already started smart home stuff when I moved here last year.

Now that I’ve dipped my toe into the proverbial smart home waters, I decided to binge watch all the smart home videos on YouTube2.

The result is…all of this…

       
Wyze Sense Motion Sensor Starter Kit (View full size)
       
Wyze Cam Pan (View full size)
       
Sonos system complete with the Sonos One (View full size)
       
SmartThings Hub. I didn't understand what a hub did exactly but I'll talk about it in another post (View full size)
       
SmartThings multi-purpose sensor (View full size)
       
SmartThings motion sensor (View full size)
       
Cheap-o light strips for behind my TV (View full size)
       
HomePod (View full size)
       
Echo Dot mounts (View full size)
       
Aotnex Wyze Cam Pan mount (View full size)

The purpose

I love tech, I love cool shit, and this allows me to do cool shit with the tech I have. Some of the videos I’ve watched have me slack-jawed in awe.

As for the cameras: I have a lot of expensive tech. And the last apartment I lived in was so bad, I mean, criminals, dealers, felons, everywhere, I have become increasingly paranoid after leaving that place. Now, this place is so much better and the next is a affordable luxury apartment, so I shouldn’t have to worry about any of this. But I can’t help it; it’s ingrained in me to the point where I couldn’t walk to the laundry room when I first moved here, which is right down the hall. The effects of poverty are immense and not to be discussed in this post. But I learned most of my life that people will take what is not theirs without giving a flying f*ck about it.

I have a lot of expensive things I have bought over the years and much more in the past two years. I don’t want to lose it. So I have the camera, ‎Home Inventory Mac App, and great renter’s insurance.

More to come

I am doing the whole vlog thing and will probably put it up on YouTube or Vimeo, not sure yet. I just want to chronicle this whole journey in any form I can, not for posterity per se but just for me.

  1. Mostly not clever these days. ↩

  2. Or just Smart Home Solver and Undecided with Matt Ferrell ↩

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