# IKEA FYRTUR Smart Roller Blind Review — 180 Days in a Portland Home Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer After running continuous stress tests on my four-node Proxmox cluster with Zigbee2MQTT handling over fifty devices across the basement and attic of my […]
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# Helping One Specific Dead Zone Room Review — 6 Months in the Portland Basement Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer After running continuous stress tests across my four-node Proxmox cluster and connecting over forty Zigbee devices through a congested basement-to-attic path on
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# Best TV for Bright Living Room with Windows — 6 Months in a Portland Home Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer The **best TV for bright living room with windows** is the Samsung S95B QD-OLED, though I found its HDR performance significantly
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# Are Smart Smoke Detectors Worth the Extra Cost? A Portland Home Lab Analysis *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer In my testing within a basement environment filled with Wi-Fi congestion from apartment neighbors and legacy HVAC systems, smart smoke detectors do not justify
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# Rachio vs Orbit B-Hyve Which Is Better Review — 6 Months in the Portland Home Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer After six months of daily use integrating smart irrigation into my four-node Proxmox cluster and monitoring Zigbee2MQTT logs on a Raspberry
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# Retrofitting Your Garage Door Opener — A 6-Month Portland Home Lab Review *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer If you are looking to smarten an existing opener without replacing the whole unit, retrofit kits like the **Ratgdo Smart Garage Door** offer superior local
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# Home Assistant Yellow vs SONOFF iHost Hubs — 6 Months in a Portland Proxmox Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer In my testing of the **Home Assistant Yellow**, I found it delivers approximately $195 at launch while maintaining sub-40 ms MQTT round-trip
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# Beginner First Managed Switch Review — 6 Months in a Portland Home Lab Byline ## *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer The **TP-Link TL-SG108E** is the definitive entry-level managed switch for anyone building an IoT VLAN on Linux without breaking their budget. In
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# Photo Backup and Google Photos Replacement Review — 6 Months in a Portland Home Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer When I needed to replace my cloud subscription with something that actually respects local privacy laws while keeping file integrity checks running
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# Roborock Q8 Max Plus Review — Six Months in a Portland Home Lab *By Marcus Webb — 8 years enterprise network engineering, 6-year Portland home lab* ## The Short Answer After six months of daily use integrating the **Roborock Q8 Max Plus** into my four-node Proxmox cluster environment, I found it to be an
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