Smart Home Perfected

If your Nest thermostat keeps turning off, you are looking at one of five different faults, and the fastest way to tell them apart is to stop asking why it went dark and start noticing when. A screen that sleeps and wakes when you walk up is working as designed. A screen that dies and then comes back with a low battery warning is starving for power. A screen that only drops o...

A Fire Stick not updating is one of three things, and you can tell which in a minute. Either the update never shows up when you check, or it starts to download and never finishes, or it downloads and then sits on the installing screen for an hour. The first is usually nothing wrong at all. The second is storage or network. The third is a stuck install that needs one specific ...

A Fire Stick remote not working is almost never a dead remote. It is flat batteries, a remote that has lost its pairing, a stick that has hung, or a remote that was never told which TV it is pointing at. Each of those has a different tell and a different fix, and the order below is the order that finds the cause fastest without a factory reset you did not need. Every button s...

When your TV keeps turning off by itself, the most likely explanation is not a dying television. It is a setting that shipped switched on from the factory, doing exactly what it was designed to do. Samsung and LG both build in a feature that powers the set down after four hours without a button press, and Samsung documents it as enabled by default. The useful part is that you...

When your TV has sound but no picture, the good news arrives before any repair bill does. That exact combination, audio playing normally into a screen that stays black, rules out most of the frightening possibilities immediately. The set is powered, it is receiving a signal and it is decoding that signal correctly, because none of the audio would be reaching you otherwise. Wh...