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.

What are the greatest changes in shopping in your lifetime? So asked my 9 year old grandson.

As I thought of the question the local Green Grocer came to mind. Because that is what the greatest change in shopping in my lifetime is.

That was the first place to start with the question of what are the greatest changes in shopping in your lifetime.

Our local green grocer was the most important change in shopping in my lifetime. Beside him was our butcher, a hairdresser and a chemist.

Looking back, we were well catered for as we had quite a few in our suburb. And yes, the greatest changes in shopping in my lifetime were with the small family owned businesses.

Entertainment While Shopping Has Changed
Buying butter was an entertainment in itself.
My sister and I often had to go to a favourite family grocer close by. We were always polite as we asked for a pound or two of butter and other small items.

Out came a big block of wet butter wrapped in grease-proof paper. Brought from the back of the shop, placed on a huge counter top and included two grooved pates.

That was a big change in our shopping in my lifetime… you don’t come across butter bashing nowadays.

Our old friendly Mr. Mahon with the moustache, would cut a square of butter. Lift it to another piece of greaseproof paper with his pates. On it went to the weighing scales, a bit sliced off or added here and there.

Our old grocer would then bash it with gusto, turning it over and over. Upside down and sideways it went, so that it had grooves from the pates, splashes going everywhere, including our faces.

My sister and I thought this was great fun and it always cracked us up. We loved it, as we loved Mahon’s, on the corner, our very favourite grocery shop.

Grocery Shopping
Further afield, we often had to go to another of my mother’s favourite, not so local, green grocer’s. Mr. McKessie, ( spelt phonetically) would take our list, gather the groceries and put them all in a big cardboard box.

And because we were good customers he always delivered them to our house free of charge. But he wasn’t nearly as much fun as old Mr. Mahon. Even so, he was a nice man.

All Things Fresh
So there were very many common services such as home deliveries like:

• Farm eggs

• Fresh vegetables

• Cow’s milk

• Freshly baked bread

• Coal for our open fires

Delivery Services
A man used to come to our house a couple of times a week with farm fresh eggs.

Another used to come every day with fresh vegetables, although my father loved growing his own.

Our milk, topped with beautiful cream, was delivered to our doorstep every single morning.

Unbelievably, come think of it now, our bread came to us in a huge van driven by our “bread-man” named Jerry who became a family friend.

My parents always invited Jerry and his wife to their parties, and there were many during the summer months. Kids and adults all thoroughly enjoyed these times. Alcohol was never included, my parents were teetotallers. Lemonade was a treat, with home made sandwiches and cakes.

The coal-man was another who delivered bags of coal for our open fires. I can still see his sooty face under his tweed cap but I can’t remember his name. We knew them all by name but most of them escape me now.

Mr. Higgins, a service man from the Hoover Company always came to our house to replace our old vacuum cleaner with an updated model.

Our insurance company even sent a man to collect the weekly premium.

People then only paid for their shopping with cash. This in itself has been a huge change in shopping in my lifetime.

In some department stores there was a system whereby the money from the cash registers was transported in a small cylinder on a moving wire track to the central office.

Some Of The Bigger Changes
Some of the bigger changes in shopping were the opening of supermarkets.

• Supermarkets replaced many individual smaller grocery shops. Cash and bank cheques have given way to credit and key cards.

• Internet shopping… the latest trend, but in many minds, doing more harm, to book shops.

• Not many written shopping lists, because mobile phones have taken over.

On a more optimistic note, I hear that book shops are popular again after a decline.

Personal Service Has Most Definitely Changed
So, no one really has to leave home, to purchase almost anything, technology makes it so easy to do online.
And we have a much bigger range of products now, to choose from, and credit cards have given us the greatest ease of payment.

We have longer shopping hours, and weekend shopping. But we have lost the personal service that we oldies had taken for granted and also appreciated.

Because of their frenetic lifestyles, I have heard people say they find shopping very stressful, that is grocery shopping. I’m sure it is when you have to dash home and cook dinner after a days work. I often think there has to be a better, less stressful way.

My mother had the best of both worlds, in the services she had at her disposal. With a full time job looking after 9 people, 7 children plus her and my dad, she was very lucky. Lucky too that she did not have 2 jobs.

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).