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Rise of the Tomb Raider Review: Lara Croft’s Greatest Adventure Yet
It's beyond excellent
Published on November 30, 2015 at 10:59AM
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The Christmas season is nearly upon us, and that means it’s time to choose your gifts, schedule the Christmas parties and take the Christmas lights out of the loft. The internet has made shopping and arranging parties more convenient — so far, so obvious — but it’s made Christmas lights easier to control too. In this article, we’ll show you how how to get started.
Simply connect all of your Christmas lights together using a 4- or 6-way extension lead, then into the smart plug, and you’ll be in business. Open the app on your phone, and you can turn your lights on and off, whether you’re in the same room or a different continent. You can also do more clever things, like automatically turning the lights on at sunset or connecting multiple lights on different plugs and controlling them independently.
Of course this isn’t just useful for Christmas lights; the rest of the year you could use it to turn on a coffee machine, lamps or whatever other appliance you like.
We have a few options along these lines at Mobile Fun. D-Link do a cheap Smart Plug with an easy-to-use app, which offers energy use tracking and overheating protection as a nice bonus. You can get this as a single plug or a discounted pack of three.
- D-Link App Controlled Smart Plug for iOS & Android
- D-Link App Controlled Smart Plug for iOS & Android (3 Pack)
Energenie also do a starter pack for a similar price, offering three plugs, a hub and a remote. Their offering can also use the stellar If This Then That (IFTTT) service, which lets you set up more complex routines. For example, you could turn on your lights earlier if the weather is bad, or coordinate with other elements in your smart home.
So there you have it – an easy way to control your Christmas lights using your Android or iPhone. Let us know what you think in the comments below, and stay tuned for more Christmas light control options in future articles!
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I woke up today to some errors involving SSL at work, about eighty emails from places wanting to inform me of their Cyber Monday deals, and a wicked hangover from a carbocoma I’d been fueling for a couple of days with Thanksgiving leftovers.
This is just a collection of random thoughts written down while doing some server maintenance.
Upon getting to work I had multiple texts involving various 4K TVs and flash sales on them (I’ve got a TV from 2004 that hurts me to look at,) and I kept noticing that every single one was more or less not a good deal. Here’s a good one claiming to be a $1600 savings, but when I checked the MSRP and the incredible $1600 savings ends up being about a 14% sale. Oh well. Supply and demand. I see no great Cyber Monday deals. Oh yeah, if someone wants to buy me a TV feel free.
That tablet (which is the same hardware as the $49 version,) is actually a pretty decent machine. I think they’re selling it at a loss to keep you in the Amazon ecosystem and make it up on the back end.
While investigating some SSL and disconnect issues I fired up Microsoft Edge. I never use it. As in I’ve opened it once to see if a problem I was having with Chrome was in fact Chrome or my connection. Anyway, I opened Edge and went to YouTube and was greeted with a thumbnail of a woman giving birth as the first recommended video with all bits visible, the rest was Hindi softcore porn and top-x lists from the early 2000s.
Clicking on the first (which I edited in the pic here,) brought up a warning that it might not be safe for all audiences. Hrmm. You’d think they’d have changed the thumbnail slightly. It was odd.
There were a few hours this weekend when I lost contact with my VZW friends. Evidently they had a mass outage. Combined with that the new Hangouts has decided to deliver SMSes whenever it feels like it so I’m moving off of it as I noticed one at 10:40 that was sent at 4pm asking me if I wanted to do something that night. *sigh*
I got to spend a lot of Black Friday at work diagnosing what the hell was wrong with a Netis 1200 router. I’m to the point I think it’s DOA (wouldn’t do 2.ghz out of the box, loses settings, has to update the firmware just to get Bridge mode to somewhat work, poisoned the connected routers and shut down my network by advertising it was the gateway to everything, rassafrassa) – have another one and will know soon enough if it’s a hardware failure or just a crappy product.
Got a Chromecast 2 I’ll be playing with later today. My old Chromecast gets to go to work and become the conference room Chromecast as I’m getting tired of people asking for a 100 foot HDMI cable.
Finished Tomb Raider, the reboot that was offered for free on XBOX Gold. Overall feel it was a disservice to the Laura Croft character and physics in general, but it was amusing. Seemed like it was nearly impossible to lose on normal difficulty. Tried to start another free game “So Many Me” but it required an update of nearly a gig and the console was already downloading about a gig of updates for Batman.
As a bit of an update on the site, the SEO fixes have leveled the site out. Unfortunately with only me writing for Pocketables now we have about 1/5th of the content we used to. I’m not sure how people above are going to look at this, but I accomplished what I was attempting. Unfortunately now properly ranking for how to root an HTC EVO 4G and all the stuff we wrote about last year doesn’t help too much. FML.
Thanksgiving projects through Cyber Monday shenanigans by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.
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The 1byone Plasma Ball is a Bluetooth speaker, a Micro-SD card player, and a plasma lightning ball that responds to touch. In each aspect there’s a level of neat, but combined there’s something to nitpick at every level.
The plasma ball by itself is very neat, but in conjunction with music it doesn’t have any wow effect. The lightning shuts off when the music is at a reasonable volume and only pops on at the top 10% or so of the range. This means unless you’re listening to a solid wall of sound (or have it cranked to 11,) the ball stays off most of the time. Fortunately there’s a switch to lock it on and keep it on.
The speaker is loud, but not particularly clear. Perfect for playing The Monster Mash or such, but at low volumes it’s not particularly amazing.
One of the things you think when you think “Bluetooth” is wireless. Well, you can forget about that. This needs to be plugged into a USB power supply at all times. It doesn’t appear to support USB audio so you’ll still need to pair it if you want to use it from your computer.
Speaking of pairing, I paired with no issues last week, walked in expecting it to work with no issues today, nope. A weekend of being plugged into a consistent power supply that’s powered by a computer power supply behind two UPSes and a line conditioner (I’m saying there were no power fluctuations,) and the device was brain dead. I had to physically remove power from the device and plug it back in in order to re-pair it.
It may sound like I hate it, but I don’t. It’s just a little bit of a disappointment as a speaker (except it is very loud, I do give it that.) As a Plasma Ball it’s pretty cool though.
The 1byone Plasma Ball Music Speaker is currently out of stock at Amazon
1byone Plasma Ball Music Speaker review by Paul E King first appeared on Pocketables.
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