Nathan Reynolds

Editing video on Linux has come a long way, and Kdenlive remains one of the best free tools for the job. But if you have ever sat through a timeline that stutters, a render that crashes at 97 percent, or a greyed-out proxy option that refuses to cooperate, you already know the frustration. I have … Read more

You power on your Linux machine, and then you wait. And wait. Thirty seconds pass before the desktop appears. Your SSD is fast, your processor is modern, yet the boot still drags on. If you are running systemd (which you almost certainly are on any mainstream Linux distribution), the diagnostic tool is already installed. It … Read more

I ran a Minecraft server, a Valheim world, and a Palworld session all at once for 60 days on the hardware in this guide. Picking the best home server for a self-hosted game server is less about raw horsepower and more about balancing single-thread speed, RAM headroom, and 24/7 power draw. After testing seven machines … Read more

Waking up to natural sunlight is one of the best things a smart home can do for you, and nothing beats the feeling of curtains gliding open at sunrise without you lifting a finger. I spent the last 60 days testing the best Zigbee curtain sensor for automated mornings setups I could find, combining actual … Read more

I spent the last 90 days testing eight different energy monitoring clamp devices in my Home Assistant setup, and the results surprised me. The cheapest option delivered the same accuracy as units costing five times more. Some premium monitors forced me to flash custom firmware just to get local control. And one meter tracked my … Read more

Picture this: you are sitting on the couch reading a book, perfectly still, and the lights shut off. That is the number one frustration people have with traditional motion sensors, and it is exactly why presence detection has become such a hot topic in the smart home community. The best presence detection setup for room-by-room … Read more

Last year I ditched Alexa and went all-in on Home Assistant for voice control. That meant testing every piece of Home Assistant Voice Preview hardware I could get my hands on. After 8 months of daily use across three rooms and a kitchen, I have real opinions about which devices actually work. This guide covers … Read more

When I rebuilt my smart home in , I wanted everything running locally with no cloud dependency. After 90 days of testing 7 different hardware setups across two homes, I can tell you that picking the best hardware for running Zigbee2MQTT and Mosquitto makes the difference between a flaky setup and a rock-solid one. Zigbee2MQTT … Read more

When my Zigbee network crossed 60 devices last year, my old CC2531 dongle buckled under the load. Pairing took minutes, motion sensors stopped responding, and the whole mesh turned flaky overnight. That experience sent me down a rabbit hole: testing six of the most popular Zigbee2MQTT coordinators on real large meshes with 100+ devices. I … Read more

Home Assistant turns your Raspberry Pi into a powerful smart home hub that controls lights, sensors, cameras, and hundreds of other devices from one interface. Running it on the default SD card works fine for a while, but that flash storage wears out fast under 24/7 use. That is exactly why so many people end … Read more