September
If you are thinking of wiring your home you may find this video useful. It takes a different approach to most home wiring videos and shows you how to do it without having to do major renovations afterwards.
Although I probably wouldn’t adopt this for an entire house I did use this approach many years ago for connecting my basement to the rest of the house, but that was before homeplug adapters were available.
The dark side of the cloud -The dangers of relying on free cloud services to control your smart home devices
August
Good review of he smart home market...link
IKEA have created a new smart home business unit which could see a big increase in smart home offerings.. link
Sonoff have released a new switch called the Sonoff mini which is much smaller than the familiar sonoff basic and more importantly supports DIY mode which lets you use the switch without the Internet
Here is a good video that also shows you how to flash it to Tasmota firmware using OTA upgrade.
The shelly switch is an alternative to sonoff and it supports MQTT without the need for flashing.
It is slightly more expensive that sonoff but even smaller.
Here is a good video that compare the shelly switch to the old Sonoff (not the mini).