Paul’s Tech Makeover: Some Closure At Last (Premium)

In the past week, a few unrelated events have brought some closure to what I will call the first phase of our personal tech makeover in Pennsylvania.

As I assume the entire planet knows by now, we bought a family home in Pennsylvania and moved here in August. Since then, we’ve been busy renovating the house and emptying our savings account in the process. Why didn’t anyone tell us that this would be so expensive?

Kidding. But the relevant part of this story for Thurrott.com readers is that I’ve used this move to rethink the personal technologies we use at home, and have begun using, for the first time, some smart home solutions.

And it’s been going … OK. As I’ve described in previous articles in this series.

But, as noted, this past week has been kind of interesting in that a number of outstanding issues from the past have either been resolved or soon will be. And it occurred to me that I could provide a little update to each.

Electrical

First, the electrical. Most of the money we put aside for the renovations ended up in the hands of my new electrician. And while my wife is still pretty upset about this, we did at least accomplish what I had wanted. Which was to completely overhaul the electrical in the house, replace and all the dated light switches and power receptacles, and dramatically reduce the number of those switches, plus remove all of the phone jacks and almost all of the cable TV coaxial jacks.

It was a lot of work. And while it’s not technically done yet, the hard stuff—redoing the light switches so that they are all new and consistent, and reducing the number of them—is done. Back in August, I wrote about this work, and then about a month later I provided an update where you can see all the holes in the walls from the switch removals.

So this week, the house is getting painted. And while that isn’t particularly interesting from a tech perspective (or otherwise, really), this work does close the loop on that switch/ receptacle work. Because it is the painters who filled and patched all those holes we made earlier. And while I was nervous about this initially, thinking that maybe we’d always be able to see the outlines of the holes, it came out pretty great. And it only took two months. Cough.

Smart lights

Figuring out a smart approach to smart lights was also part of our electrical budget. I knew going into this that there were various approaches—smart lights with dumb switches vs. smart switches with dumb lights being one of the more obvious debates—but I figured we’d start small, and we did.

As of now, we’ve got Philips Hue smart lights behind the TV in the living room, and in my daughter’s room, and we’ll be adding some ambient lights in the sun room as soon as they arrive.

In the kitchen, we added light strips above and below the cabinets, though they are not Philips parts. I think that will do it for now, though I may try smart lights when my new podcast studio gets built once the painting is completed.

Cord cutting … and Internet

Next, if you’ve been following this series, I’m sure you’ve seen my various articles about cord cutting and our ultimate defeat because of the terribleness of the services we tried. Since then, RCN has installed cable TV in the house, and while this wouldn’t normally merit much discussion, the install triggered a few other notable changes. And it’s all been extremely positive. Which is nice, again, considering the terribleness of our cord cutting experiences.

It’s a long story, sorry.

Basically, all of the wiring in this house was pretty screwed up. And not just the electrical: There were phone jacks and coaxial jacks everywhere in this house—some rooms had three of each for some reason—and, as noted, I had resolved to remove almost all of them as part of that earlier work.

When the cable modem was installed alongside Google WiFi in July, and before our move, we placed it in the sun room for no particular reason. And I had expected to move it to wherever my office would be after we moved.

As it turns out, we got lucky: That sun room connection is one of the few in the house that actually has a good signal, which allows the cable modem to work at full speed. We discovered this when the cable guy arrived a few weeks ago to add cable TV: He yanked a handful of coaxial cables and coaxial splitters out of the wall behind my desk. The signal was too degraded to move the cable modem into my office, so I decided to just leave well enough alone. It was working fine from the sun room.

But for all of the coax in the house, the one room in which there was no connection is—you guessed it—the living room. So I had to reschedule the cable TV install and wait for an electrician to come to wire the living room for coax. I know.

Anyway, that happened yesterday. As part of the install, he ran a new, clean cable from the source by the electrical box in the cellar to the living room wall behind the TV. And a couple of hours later, the cable guy came back and installed the TiVo-based DVR box.

There was just one problem: The TiVo wasn’t connecting to the home Wi-Fi for some reason. As the guy was troubleshooting this, however, the obvious occurred to me: Could we move the cable modem into the living room? And then connect the TiVo using an Ethernet cable instead?

Why yes. Yes, we could.

And that solved a couple of problems. It got a bunch of crap—that cable modem, a Google WiFi access point, a switch, and a ton of wires and power cords—out of the corner of sun room, where it was all over the floor (and in need of some cabinet or whatever). We moved it all into the living room where the TV is already sitting on such a cabinet. And it means that we can now connect entertainment devices—the 4K smart TV, Apple TV, whatever—via a wired connection, which will improve the performance and quality of streamed 4K content.

So that all just happened. It wasn’t planned, just a happy circumstance.

Smart remote

Separate from all this, a friend had been badgering me to purchase a Logitech Harmony smart remote as part of my complaining about how terrible the Apple TV was, especially its remote. Which, again, is a crime against humanity. I was sort of set against solving yet another Apple problem by throwing even more money at it, but last week, I finally made the purchase. I ended up getting the Logitech Harmony Smart Control pack from Amazon for about $80. (Yes, that’s an affiliate link. Buy it. You need this.) Plus I had a credit, so the end cost was closer to $40.

Folks, this is one of the greatest purchases I’ve ever made. It’s killing me that I actually pushed back on this.

The Harmony remote can learn to control just about anything, as you’d expect. It can create little sequences of events via a smartphone app, too, so I can press the TV on the remote and power up my TV and the attached soundbar, and have the TV select the input to which the cable TV is attached. Another button does the same for the Apple TV.

I’ve tested it with the cable box and the Apple TV for about four days, and it is basically flawless. Meaning that it is nothing like the other TV experiences I’ve had since we moved. The polar opposite, in fact. The remote itself is wonderful to hold, and has all the controls you’ll ever need. The only thing missing is button backlighting. But still. Amazing. (And you can use the smartphone app as the remote instead, if you’d like.)

Seriously, buy one. Now.

Music

We’ve dropped Sonos for Chromecast-based whole-house audio because the latter is much less expensive and offers better sound quality. That decision has worked out great: We have two Google Home appliances, two sets of Chromecast-enabled speakers (in my office and in the sun room), and a soundbar in the living room that can all work in concert, if you will. (Plus a 4K-capable Chromecast Ultra for video on the 4K/UHD set in the living room too.) We’re casting all over the place and it works great.

But back in August, I wrote about my decision-making process in consolidating the multiple music subscription services we had been using down to just one, Spotify Family. The logic was sound: Even if I didn’t use the service, we were still paying a very reasonable $15 per month so everyone else in my family could use. So it made sense for me to drop Google Play Music, which I prefer, since it’s an additional and unnecessary $10 more per month.

And so I’ve suffered with Spotify since then. Spotify has its advantages, including the fact that it’s available everywhere. But its inability to let me access my own music, music which is not available in its catalog, has been eating at me. (I wrote about this problem way back in May 2016, and the situation has never improved.) And the Spotify user interface is terrible. Worst of all, my wife and I spent a night carefully adding music to the Now Playing list as we listened, and when we were done, I went to save it as a playlist: Nope. Spotify does not support that very obvious feature. All that work was lost.

So this past week, I finally had enough. Making the executive decision that $10 a month isn’t really all that much money, I signed up again for the Google Play Music subscription service I so very much prefer. Order has been restored.

I know, it’s a little thing. But I am so much happier using Google Play Music. I feel like I just kept fighting Spotify.

Looking ahead

We still have some electrical work—the electrician is here today installing two ceiling fans—and painting (my office, the kitchen) to go, and a backsplash to install in the kitchen. And that’s the point at which I think we’ll be done with this first stage of renovation.

There are other non-tech things to complete here, that I won’t bore you with. Trees and bushes to remove. Ill-conceived carpet to remove from a bathroom. (I know. Really.)

But when I think ahead to what’s next from a personal tech or smart home perspective, I see a few obvious avenues of exploration. My wife and I investigating smart home security solutions for example, and we’re probably going to augment the smart lights we have with smart switches that will control “dumb” lights. I’m looking at ways in which to centrally control everything more elegantly, perhaps using Wink. I’m testing all of the personal digital assistant appliances, too.

So there will be more. But sitting here almost three months into this move, I feel like we’re in a pretty good place. Though we’ve certainly had our share of mistakes or at least stumbles. But as I noted up front, we always knew that would be the case.

More soon.