January, 2016 | Luke Browning

The Current State of Smart/Connected Lighting in the UK

Since the emergence of home automation hubs such as SmartThings and Wink in the US in the last couple of years, us Brits have been left longing for similar tech to come to our shores.

Xiaomi XiaoYi (Night Vision) Camera Review

Much to my surprise, it seems that China based Xiaomi don’t only make attractive, low cost phones with high end specs, they also make decent looking IP cameras (among other things!). I was recently on the lookout for a couple of cheap cameras so that I can see what’s happening around the house whilst I’m out. Whilst browsing the EU warehouse at GearBest I found stumbled across these for £20/$30 for the top of the range model (they do a model that looks identical but without the night vision) so I thought I’d take a punt.

Visual Studio Community 2015 Crashing on Startup

Since yesterday I have been having a very strange error in Visual Studio Community 2015 where as soon as I open a solution VS crashes with no error. Now the only thing that has changed since yesterday was that I installed a large number of Windows updates that had been waiting for probably several months! I checked my installed updates but found nothing directly related to VS. I did find an update that made changes to .net but was unsure if this was related. The error I received was as follows;