John Sciacca

Bluesound launched at last year’s CES, causing me to write a post titled, “Is Bluesound an Audiophile Sonos Killer?” Since then the company has gone on to prove its worth with high-res, 24/192 file playback and a terrific control app that lets users easily stream and enjoy music all around their homes. This year the company is broadening the reach of beautiful music listening to outside of the house by adding BluOS software to an outdoor speaker by sister-company PSB.

First, when you can intersect technology and beer, you are likely never going to go wrong. I have met very few people in this industry that don’t also love a good ale, lager, IPA, Belgian, stout, lambic, or other.

Now, I love craft beer. Like, I love craft beer. In fact I have a separate blog devoted to reviewing the stuff, and I’ve drank/reviewed almost 400 to date. But, I have no real interest in making beer. To me it is too much hassle, too much mess, too much chance for bacteriological contamination ruining the batch, too much chance of crafting gallons of stuff I wouldn’t want to drink. In a way, craft beer is like sausage for me; love to drink it, don’t really want to know how it is made. However the good folks at PicoBrew also love beer, and their new Zymatic fully automatic brewer is just high-tech and awesome enough to make me reconsider my non-brewing ways.

Chances are you have a touchscreen phone that uses some form of swipe or button press combo to unlock the phone for use. As you know, the oils on your fingers can leave smudges behind, and over time can leave a tell-tale treasure map of greasy DNA to tell people which buttons are used to unlock your phone.

Since the touchscreens on smart door locks are used far less frequently – and primarily for entering the home’s unlock code – this can be a real problem, and can leave smart lock owners vulnerable to something far more than someone checking out your emails and selfies. Fortunately Kwikset has added a new technology to foil any would-be fingerprint grabbers with a simple and foolproof method called SecureScreen.

If you have a home, then you probably have a lawn. And if you have a lawn then you probably have an irrigation system. Even with programming and some crude scheduling, these are dumb devices that essentially haven't been changed or seen any real technological updates in years and just run until you remember to tell them to stop. I can’t tell you how many times I wake up to hear my sprinkler system running as it competes with a massive South Carolina rainstorm. Or how I try and remind myself to turn the system off for winter – and back on for summer – but inevitably forget to do it until multiple cycles into the new season. Fortunately, technology in the form of Skydrop is coming to bring some intelligence and Internet control to irrigation controllers.