Tech Friday: Fixed my Alexa smart home Sengled lights headache

| November 14, 2025

If you’re like me and thousands of frustrated smart home users, you’ve probably hit the wall with Sengled bulbs, their Hub and Alexa. For the past six months (and officially since Amazon axed the integration on August 1, 2025), the Sengled Home app error codes with NSURLErrorDomain -1202 — thanks to a flaky SSL certificate […]

Tech Friday: Ultrasound detection and the 4th gen Echo hub

| June 24, 2022

After a week of working with the new “trade-up” from an older Echo (triggered by a $30 trade-in offer) to the 4th generation Amazon Echo “with premium sound, smart home hub (Zigbee) and Alexa” … the results have been mixed. My advice, don’t rush. First, I was looking forward to the idea to not need […]

Leftover “Tech Friday” thoughts for Saturday morning

| June 18, 2022

Not that I was bored or anything while running on generator power for 24 hours, but last week’s outage had my small load-sharing Raspberry Pi “server farm” (semi-joke) that I run at the house (see Brenich.com), in need of service. One thing lead to another and I ended up tinkering a bit more with this […]

Desultory - des-uhl-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee

  1. lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation.
  2. digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark.
My Desultory Blog