Designing Your Home Security System
Monitor or not to Monitor
POTS Line
VOIP
Cell
Home Automation
Choosing your Brand of Home Security
DIY or Professional Installation
Designing Your Home Security SystemWhen it comes to home security there are a lot of things to consider. You must remember that you are installing a security system so that you can protect your family and your processions.What does an Alarm System do?An alarm system does all of the following depending on the equipment that you choose:

Notify you of doors or windows that are opened

Notify you if windows are broken

Notify you of movement inside your home
These are all things that would be caused by an unwanted intruder but there are other things that can bring harm to your family or your home. Home Security Systems can also provide notifications for the following:

Early warning of a fire

Early warning of Carbon Monoxide gases

Early warning of freezing

Early warning of flooding
There are multiple levels of protection that you must consider when you are designing your alarm system. If you consider that 50-60% of burglaries happen by the intruder breaking through the front or back doors you could just install an essential security system.Essential Security SystemAn essential security system provides contacts on your main entry doors and a motion detector in the main pathway of your home. In most homes this is the hallway leading to the bedrooms. This type of system assumes that if the intruder enters your home through an unprotected opening such as a window that the motion detector will detect them and sound the alarm. It is always best to detect an intruder before they have entered your home. If they start to make entry and the alarm system sounds the burglar can make the choice to run away and not ransack your home. This system has adequate coverage when your system is armed in away mode because all sensors are armed. If you are at home and asleep the system is armed in stay mode which automatically shuts of the motion detector. There are two times that your home and family are most vulnerable and those are when you are away from your home and when you are asleep in your home. The essential home security system will only provide the best coverage when you are away from your home.Full Perimeter ProtectionThe goal of having a security system is to be notified if any opening to your house is violated. You want to receive this notification as quickly as possible. In order to have this happen you must have contacts installed at every window and door in your home. This forms a security curtain around your home so that the potential intruder cannot get in undetected. If you want typical full perimeter protection you will want to install contacts on every door and window.Advanced Full Perimeter ProtectionIn order for full perimeter protection to work the intruder must open a door or window. In many cases the burglar will break a window and then reach inside to unlatch the lock and then open the window or door. In this scenario the alarm system will sound. If the intruder does not open the window or door then the alarm system will not sound. In this case the only way the intruder will be detected is if they pass by the motion detector. This is why the motion detector is a secondary or backup device. The goal is to keep the burglar outside the home. In order to do this with advanced protection you can install glass break detectors. This type of detector is built to hear breaking glass and when it does the alarm will sound. Another advantage of a glass break detector is that they can be programmed to be a 24 hour device. This means that they will sound the alarm even if the system is not armed. When you incorporate all of the following types of protection you have utilized every form of protection available for your home and family.Additional Protection available from your Security SystemSo far we have only talked about protection from an unwanted intruder of the human variety. There are a few unwanted intruders and potentially more detrimental to your home and family and should be incorporated into your total home protection plan. These unwanted intruders are:

Fire

Carbon Monoxide

Flooding
*Fire Facts:Chances are you will have a fire

Number of home fires your household can expect in an average lifetime: 5

Chances your household will have a reported home fire in an average lifetime: 1 in 4

Chances that someone in your household will suffer a fire injury in an average lifetime: 1 in 10

Chances that someone in your household will suffer an injury in a reported fire in an average lifetime: 1 in 89
Households can expect to average a home fire every 15 years or five fires in an average lifetime. (Life expectancy now averages 78 years in the U.S., according to the Statistical Abstract.) That is one of the results of the latest survey of unreported fires, conducted by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 2004-2005, when combined with NFPA’s annual tracking of reported fires.Most of these will be small fires resulting in little or no damage and will not be reported to a fire department, but even a trivial fire causes at least some temporary anxiety.Your household has a one in four chance of having a home fire large enough to be reported to a fire department during an average lifetime.Someone in your household also has a one in ten chance of suffering a fire injury in a home fire an average lifetime. More likely than not, this will be a minor injury suffered in a fire that you did not report to the fire department. You might not even remember the injury a month after it happened. About one out of nine of these injuries will occur in a reported home fire, which means someone in your household has a one in 89 chance of suffering a fire injury in a reported home fire in an average lifetime.As you can see the likelihood of having a fire is high and the best protection is a smoke detector. A smoke detector provides early notification so that you can save your family and your processions. The average damage done by a fire can be far worse than the loss from a burglary but many people still neglect to make sure that they have a working detector.Protection from FloodingJust a few inches of water from a flood can cause tens of thousands of dollars in damage. From 2008 to 2012, the average residential flood claim amounted to more than $38,000. Flood insurance is the best way to protect yourself from devastating financial loss.Here are some startling facts:Property damage resulting from water damage due to plumbing failures and freezing pipes is the second most common cause of homeowner loss.Water caused $9.1 billion in annual homeowner policy property losses annually from 2007 to 2009 – approximately 23 percent of all homeowner property losses.”Water damage claims have been growing faster than other components of homeowners insurance.” – American Insurance AssociationDesigning the Layout of your Alarm SystemNow that you are aware of the different types of protection and they work you can begin to layout your alarm system. I have always used the following method in setting up my alarm system installations. Grab a piece of paper and start at your front door. Go to each opening in your home and write down the name of each door and window. Make sure that you have the following column titles on your list:Zone Type Zone NameI always walk clockwise around each new installation. This makes sure that I do not miss any openings in the home and I also have a list with all of the names of the openings which I will use later for programming the panel. At the end of your walk through you will have a list of all the areas that you want to protect and their names. Make sure you include a minimum of one motion detector in the main hallway of the house. If you have a two story home you will want to see if the motion detector can be located so that the stairway is included. You will be able to use this list in the event that you decide to do an installation on your own (DIY) or when you have a professional provide you with a quote.

Microsoft Windows can get messy. It’s not (always) the operating system’s fault. You download tons of apps and files, and create new content stuff of your own, until your “Downloads” directory looks like a landfill for old content. Your desktop is so full of icons, you can’t see your pretty wallpaper. Your Start Menu looks like an app buffet. In short, your operating system is a mess, but it’s not unfixable.

We take spring cleaning very seriously at Lifehacker. Far be it from us to let an opportunity to refresh, reorganize, and declutter our homes lives pass us by. We’re also pretty psyched to hit the reset button on our tech usage, take a close look at our finances, and give the heave-ho to the day-to-day habits that have gotten a little musty. Welcome to Spring Cleaning Week, wherein we clear the cobwebs of winter and set the stage for sunny days ahead. Let’s clean things up, shall we?

There are a few free apps you can use to add some much-needed organization to your Windows world. Here are a few of our favorites:

DropIt

Screenshot: DropIt
We covered this app a long time ago, but it’s worth resurrecting. DropIt is a great utility that can help you stay organized if you’re the kind of person who dumps everything you download (or copy to your PC) into a single folder-one giant, sprawling hub that many files enter, but rarely leave.

DropIt allows you to set up a ton of different rules that fire off whenever you drag files onto the utility’s little icon. For example, you can set the app to always move image files into your primary photos folder, video files into your videos folder, and Word documents into-you guessed it-your documents folder.

That’s just the start. If you want to get more advanced, DropIt can automatically scan folders (like your Downloads folder) and apply more advanced filters to anything it finds, like automatically unzipping archives, renaming files based on your parameters, or compressing large batches of files that are otherwise taking up a bit more space than you want.

Automation is a great way to help you stay organized in Windows, and DropIt practically gives you a virtual helper at your fingertips.

digiKam

Screenshot: digiKam
If your sprawling photo library needs some serious organization but you don’t want to pay for something like Adobe Lightroom, the open-source app digiKam is a great alternative.

Use this app to sort your photos and create (or edit) metadata so you can find exactly what you’re looking for in one easy-to-access library. If you’re also a bit of a photo perfectionist, you can use digiKam to edit your regular and RAW shots to make them picture-perfect.

This app is a much better solution for organizing shots than just dumping them into arbitrary Windows folders. Your disorganized hard drive will thank you, and you’ll be much less likely to lose (or forget about) images going forward.

LaunchBox

Screenshot: LaunchBox
We’re not going to ask why you have a bunch of emulators installed on your system, and we’re going to assume that all the ROMs spread across that nightmare of a folder structure in the “Games” portion of your hard drive are completely legal. Right? Regardless, if you just spent the last day getting your nostalgia kick by downloading archives of thousands of different retro games to play on your modern-day PC, keeping these games under control is going to feel overwhelming.

We suggest grabbing LaunchBox, which is a great “game organizer” utility that allows you to quickly find and play titles in your giant library. You can tap into the app’s crowd-sourced database to pepper your titles with useful information, like release dates, genres, publishers, and images, and you can mark certain games as favorites to make theme easier to hunt down when you have a little time to kill.

LaunchBox also makes it (somewhat) easy to import games from your favorite distribution services, like Steam, Battle.net, and GoG (to name a few). If you’re the world’s biggest gamer who plays everything you can download and always grabs new titles to try from all the major services, LaunchBox is a great way to organize your games under one digital roof.

AquaSnap
Screenshot: Nurgo Software
Everyone knows Windows’ Aero Snap shortcuts, right? Hit Windows Key + one of the arrow keys on your keyboard to send your active window flying all around your screen: minimizing, opening, shrinking to fill a quarter or half of your display, and bouncing off your primary display entirely (if you have a multi-monitor setup).

The results of this past election proved once again that the Democrats had a golden opportunity to capitalize on the failings of the Trump Presidency but, fell short of a nation wide mandate. A mandate to seize the gauntlet of the progressive movement that Senator Sanders through down a little over four years ago. The opportunities were there from the very beginning even before this pandemic struck. In their failing to educate the public of the consequences of continued Congressional gridlock, conservatism, and what National Economic Reform’s Ten Articles of Confederation would do led to the results that are playing out today.. More Congressional gridlock, more conservatism and more suffering of millions of Americans are the direct consequences of the Democrats failure to communicate and educate the public. Educate the public that a progressive agenda is necessary to pull the United States out of this Pandemic, and restore this nations health and vitality.

It was the DNC’s intent in this election to only focus on the Trump Administration. They failed to grasp the urgency of the times. They also failed to communicate with the public about the dire conditions millions have been and still are facing even before the Pandemic. The billions of dollars funneled into campaign coffers should have been used to educate the voting public that creating a unified coalition would bring sweeping reforms that are so desperately needed. The reality of what transpired in a year and a half of political campaigning those billions of dollars only created more animosity and division polarizing one extreme over another.

One can remember back in 1992 Ross Perot used his own funds to go on national TV to educate the public on the dire ramifications of not addressing our national debt. That same approach should have been used during this election cycle. By using the medium of television to communicate and educate the public is the most effective way in communicating and educating the public. Had the Biden campaign and the DNC used their resources in this way the results we ae seeing today would have not created the potential for more gridlock in our government. The opportunity was there to educate the public of safety protocols during the siege of this pandemic and how National Economic Reform’s Ten Articles of Confederation provides the necessary progressive reforms that will propel the United States out of the abyss of debt and restore our economy. Restoring our economy so that every American will have the means and the availability of financial and economic security.

The failure of the Democratic party since 2016 has been recruiting a Presidential Candidate who many felt was questionable and more conservative signals that the results of today has not met with the desired results the Democratic party wanted. Then again? By not fully communicating and not educating the public on the merits of a unified progressive platform has left the United States transfixed in our greatest divides since the Civil War. This writers support of Senator Bernie Sanders is well documented. Since 2015 he has laid the groundwork for progressive reforms. He also has the foundations on which these reforms can deliver the goods as they say. But, what did the DNC do, they purposely went out of their way to engineer a candidate who was more in tune with the status-quo of the DNC. They failed to communicate to the public in educating all of us on the ways our lives would be better served with a progressive agenda that was the benchmark of Senators Sanders Presidential campaign and his Our Revolution movement. And this is way there is still really no progress in creating a less toxic environment in Washington and around the country.