Smart homes
Wednesday, February 25th, 2026 | Tech
I’ve started to play around a little with home automation. Despite, or perhaps because, I’m a software engineer, I’m sceptical of this kind of technology. What’s the redundancy? What’s the failover plan? In general, I wish everything was less connected. My new studio lights can be controlled from my phone using Bluetooth. I don’t want this. I want a big button on the back. Buttons almost never break. They don’t need software updates or stop working when there is a new release of iOS.
With modern technology, we often settle for a technology that mostly works and just live with how infuriating it is. Think about all the devices you have to charge every night. Or that sometimes you cannot get signal on your mobile. Signal works most of the time. But a bunch of times it drops out or does not work in certain places and we just live with it. I don’t really want that for my lights. I want to be able to turn them on and off every time like a light switch does.
But despite all of this, I have decided to give it a go, because I am too lazy to turn both lamps on when they are at separate sides of the room. Now I can do them both from my phone. I explicitly went with smart plugs that have a physical button on them, so if whatever infrastructure is used to control them goes down, I can just hit the button to operate them.
As a result, I now have some lovely accent lighting on my canvas prints:
I’ve started to play around a little with home automation. Despite, or perhaps because, I’m a software engineer, I’m sceptical of this kind of technology. What’s the redundancy? What’s the failover plan? In general, I wish everything was less connected. My new studio lights can be controlled from my phone using Bluetooth. I don’t want this. I want a big button on the back. Buttons almost never break. They don’t need software updates or stop working when there is a new release of iOS.
With modern technology, we often settle for a technology that mostly works and just live with how infuriating it is. Think about all the devices you have to charge every night. Or that sometimes you cannot get signal on your mobile. Signal works most of the time. But a bunch of times it drops out or does not work in certain places and we just live with it. I don’t really want that for my lights. I want to be able to turn them on and off every time like a light switch does.
But despite all of this, I have decided to give it a go, because I am too lazy to turn both lamps on when they are at separate sides of the room. Now I can do them both from my phone. I explicitly went with smart plugs that have a physical button on them, so if whatever infrastructure is used to control them goes down, I can just hit the button to operate them.
As a result, I now have some lovely accent lighting on my canvas prints: