Canary

How to Hide Home Security Camera Cables

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Most home and office security cameras come with extra long power cables.  Sure, you can avoid the cable altogether with a camera such as the Arlo Pro, but more often than not, owners of security cameras have a power cable attached.  To make it worse, they are really long and (usually) really white.  Not a good match for the house decor. The included photo has two Wyze Cam cables going to different cameras.  Big long winding cables.  Today’s article will discuss ways to manage these long cables.  We’ll look at ways to hide the cable, and how to make it … Read more

Canary Flex: Another Choice for Monitoring Outdoors

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Canary has become one of my favorite home security camera makers.  One of the drawbacks of my Canary All in One Security System is that it can’t go outdoors.  The recently introduced Canary Flex just took the Canary lineup outdoors. This is a trend that we are seeing in home security cameras.  Consumers want a way to monitor the outside of their home but want to do it more easily without having to hire an electrician and run a bunch of wires for power and connectivity.  The call for outdoor monitoring has prompted other companies to roll out easy to … Read more

Big Changes to the Canary Cloud Services Plan

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On October 3, 2017, the Canary Cloud Services Plan has changed and (in our opinion) not for the better.  Let’s review what happened. The Canary All-in-One Home Security System has stood out as one of our favorite home security cameras since June 2016.  They made it even better in October 2016 when they announced increased archival limits and unlimited downloads.  This was a near perfect camera coupled with a near perfect free cloud plan. That all changed on October 3, 2017.  Much of what we loved about the Canary Cloud Plan was reversed.  And if you don’t know what options to … Read more

How a Cloud Outage Effects Home Security Cameras

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Cloud is where it’s at these days.  Everything is going to cloud.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  Sometimes not so much.  Especially when there is a cloud outage. I read about a recent massive cloud outage on the morning of February 28, 2017.  I really didn’t think much about it and went on my way. Within the next thirty minutes, I began to receive alerts on my phone from a few of my home security cameras.  The alerts said that the cameras were not available. I didn’t expect that to happen.  I knew certain camera manufacturers were storing video history in the … Read more

The Best Home Security Cameras for 2017

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We looked at a lot of home security cameras over the past year.  This article is an annual compilation of our knowledge based upon our experience and observations of what’s out there.  While we don’t cover every single camera on the market, we looked at most of the mainstream models.  We think this is a good list of the best home security cameras for 2017. We have several categories for best home security cameras for 2017.  Best means different things to different people so breaking this into a few categories seemed to make sense. Best Environmental Monitoring This is an emerging feature … Read more

Canary Flex versus Nest Cam Outdoor Camera

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The Nest Cam Outdoor is Nest’s solution for outside security camera use.  The folks at Canary decided to take them on by introducing the Canary Flex.  So it’s a good time for our Nest Cam Outdoor versus Canary Flex face off. We previously wrote detailed reviews on these cameras if you would like to read all about them first: Nest Cam Outdoor Review Canary Flex Review Let’s move on to the comparison. Software This category is all about the smartphone app, web app and camera firmware. Both companies offer excellent and easy to use applications.  You can do a lot more with the Nest Cam Outdoor application. … Read more

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