Lisa Stockdale: Welcome to Aging in Full Bloom with Lisa Stockdale, I am
your host, Lisa, and today we have a special guest on the
phone with us, Marlon Buchanan.
Marlon, how are you today?
Marlon Buchanan: Hi, Lisa, I'm doing fine, thank you for having me.
Lisa Stockdale: Of course, where are you calling from?
We're always curious about where our guests are calling in
from.
Marlon Buchanan: I am calling you from Seattle, Washington, where right now
it's wet like most people think.
But we have beautiful summers,
Lisa Stockdale: Seattle and it's wet.
Well, thank you for calling in.
I understand that you have written a book called While
You've Written a book about smart homes.
A manual called the Smart Home Manual.
Is that accurate?
Marlon Buchanan: That is correct, yes.
The Smart Home Manual, the full title and the subtitle is
How to Automate Your Home to keep your family entertained,
comfortable and safe.
Lisa Stockdale: Ok, say it one more time and slow down for us.
Marlon Buchanan: Sure, I know I always thought that the smart home manual how
to automate your home to keep your family entertained,
comfortable and safe.
Lisa Stockdale: All right, tell us what is this idea of a smart home besides
what you have just described?
Is it like a smart phone?
Marlon Buchanan: Well, it's like a smart phone, and that it allows you to do
more than what a regular phone would do.
So smart home allows you to do more than what a regular
home would do so.
And in my terms, it's where things are automated for you.
Like maybe your lights come on and off without you having
to do anything.
Your alarm is armed at the right time, but it's already
your floor is automatically cleaned by a robot vacuum.
But it's just a house that does a little bit more for you
without you having to do anything.
Lisa Stockdale: How do you get there?
How do you make all that happen?
Marlon Buchanan: It can be a journey, but there are nice little baby steps
that you can take to get there.
So there's there's the market is full of all kinds of
different smart devices.
In many ways. I think the hardest part is picking the right
ones for you. But for most people, I'd recommend they start
simple with some smart lighting or a smart plug or a voice
assistant, which I think is especially important for for
seniors.
Lisa Stockdale: Yeah, yeah, I can see how we could be moving in the
direction of assisting seniors and helping them stay home
longer, and we all know that that is indeed where they want
to be. So when did the the book publish?
Marlon Buchanan: The spa menu was published at the end of 2020.
Ok. Seems like forever ago right now, but at the end of
2020.
Lisa Stockdale: Well, it's been a long couple of years for all of us, hasn't
it? But the technology that you reference, I suspect, is
all still relevant.
Marlon Buchanan: Yes, it is, and a lot of the things you can do with a smart
home, they've just incrementally improved over that time.
But the technology and the steps and the advice that is
given in the book and the things I just mentioned are all
still very relevant. Yes.
Lisa Stockdale: Share some of the advice with us.
Give us the top your top three tips for how to make our
homes smart.
Marlon Buchanan: Well, my top tip is to actually make sure you have a good
home network going first.
A lot of people will get devices and then if they have some
Wi-Fi, that doesn't work well, your devices aren't going to
work well. So the first thing you want to do is make sure
your home network is in really good shape, and that's a
step a lot of people skip.
Lisa Stockdale: Well, how is it that an issue of hold on, hold on, let's
stop there for a minute? Isn't that an issue of just
getting the right cable company or is there more to it than
that?
Marlon Buchanan: There's definitely more to it than that, so a cable company
or whoever is going to provide your internet, they'll
definitely help you with your internet connection and
sometimes they have products they'll sell you to help you
with your home network and wi fi.
But sometimes they don't, and a lot of times their products
aren't the best. So what you really want to do is figure
out like how many devices you're going to have, how big a
home do you have?
Where are you going to place your Wi-Fi router?
Does it reach your entire house or do you need to get some
type of mesh system or some type of Wi-Fi extenders to make
your Wi-Fi a lot better?
And then what they won't help you with as much sometimes is
the security and you want to make sure your home network is
really secure.
Lisa Stockdale: And how do you do that?
Marlon Buchanan: Well, you want to make sure that you've got good settings on
your firewall, you want to make sure your firewall is
turned on, that you've got a good router that has a good
firewall. There are particular settings that you want to
make sure that all your Wi-Fi, you want to make sure that
you're using the later Wi-Fi security standards.
You want to make sure that you have a good strong password
for your for your Wi-Fi connection.
And there's a lot of more advanced things, but those those
are the basic facts you definitely want to want to make
sure you've done for your Wi-Fi network and for your for
your home network.
Lisa Stockdale: Yeah, and this is becoming more of an issue for a lot of
Americans as they work from home these days, right?
You need a strong internet connection when you're doing
those Zoom calls.
Nothing worse. I've got an office full of people sitting
here smiling at me as I say that or if you are an older
American or older adult and you are, you use those that
technology to communicate with your children who are out of
state or your grandchildren.
You don't want to constantly be getting dropped or booted
out. And I know even in our own home, when I started
working from home more in recent days, all of a sudden we
started having internet problems.
My son is a college student and he's at home right now, and
he would be downstairs in his office and I would be
upstairs in my office and we were like, What is going on
with this cable company?
It had nothing to do with that.
We actually went to Wal-Mart and bought this little thing
that we plugged in, and it was about $50 and life got
better. Life got better.
But who knew what was that little thing that we bought at
Wal-Mart? Do you have any idea?
Marlon Buchanan: It was probably a Wi-Fi extender.
Yes.
Lisa Stockdale: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was a cheap, inexpensive, quick remedy, but we had
to educate ourselves on what was going on because we really
didn't. We thought it was the cable company when the cable
company and all.
Marlon Buchanan: Yeah, and there's I mean, that is common, there's a lot of
little different problems you can have with your wife or
with your home network, but you really want to get those
solved before you start adding devices to it.
And I'm not just trying to sell my book, but there is a
whole chapter on kind of diagnosing what the actual
problems are with your home network and what are some of
the things you can do to fix it?
Yeah. And one of those things is what you guys ended up
doing.
Lisa Stockdale: Ok, and talk to me about the safety in terms of the computer
is what you're talking about.
Does it help keep the hackers out and keep your password
safe and your account information safe?
Or is that something different?
Marlon Buchanan: It's part of it, but there's definitely a lot more you need
to do when it comes to keeping your home computer safe.
So I mentioned making sure your your router has a good
firewall that will help with people trying to get to your
network and having good passwords so people don't connect
to your network that way and then they can get to your
computer. But you know it's good to have a good antivirus
program, a good firewall on your actual computer, and most
modern versions of Windows come with that now.
Windows Defender So you can you want to make sure and get
that, get that set up.
And then really, it's more about what you do while you're
on your computer, being careful about what you click on,
what websites you go to, what programs you download, what
questions you answer when someone calls you on the phone
and making sure that they are who they say they are.
Those are the more ways that you're you're more susceptible
to having something happen to your computer.
Lisa Stockdale: How do you know which websites to avoid?
I mean, I hear people tell us this all the time, but they
don't. I mean, are there clues that this might not be a
good move? How do you know
Marlon Buchanan: There are clues if you are?
One thing to check is if you're using one of your standard
browsers like Chrome or Firefox is, there's usually most
sites today are secure sites, and there's a little there's
a little padlock icon that's near the next to the website
address at the top of the browser.
If you click on that, there's usually more information
about whether or not the site is really secure.
And so that's one way.
Another way is just be careful about clicking links and
emails you want to make.
I prefer most of the time to type out a URL because just
because it shows you one link in the email doesn't mean
that's what you're actually going to get taken to.
Yeah. And so, you know, it's a very bad.
And then there are things that are more automated, which is
what people probably really need.
So I was talking earlier about a router firewall.
Some firewalls have features where they keep updated list
of bad sites and they warn you when you're going to go to
them. Mm-hmm. So that's another good feature to get for
your for your router.
Lisa Stockdale: I did not know about the padlock.
Did you know about the padlock, right?
Oh my gosh. We think we're tech savvy.
We're idiots, aren't we?
We don't know much about this stuff, but but we're probably
Marlon Buchanan: Too much for
Lisa Stockdale: In the majority.
Marlon Buchanan: There's too much for any one person to know.
So yeah, definitely.
You should definitely not feel bad about that.
Lisa Stockdale: Well, I'm I'm happy that we're educating our audience and
that we're putting the information out there because these
are easy things that we can do.
And as you say, and I only know because we have I work for
a company that is tech savvy and our I.T.
people are always warning us about don't open links and in
emails because you never know where you might be going or
what they might be looking at or what the intent or the
purpose is.
So that's definitely good advice.
What else is burning a hole in your pocket to share with
our audience today?
Marlon Buchanan: Well, you ask me what my top three tips are for starting a
smart home, and we got really stuck on some of the home
network advice, which is, like I said, really important to
get into a smart home.
But I think the next step would be just the I know people
don't want to do the thinking planning, they just want to
do the doing. But is to actually think about what you want
to get out of your smart home, like what are the things you
want to do? And there are lots of different places you can
do. Some research that you want is your primary goal safety
and security? Is it making things easier for you?
Is it? Is it conversing with other members of your family?
Is it so you can watch TV?
Easier to think about those things because those affect
which devices you'll you'll want to buy.
So that would be another piece of advice I would give for
everybody just to give a little thought to what you want to
get out of your smart home or just thinking about what you
want to get out of your home. You know, you have to think
of it as a smart home because as I tell people what we call
a smart home now, it's just the regular home of the future.
They're all do them all do this.
Lisa Stockdale: Yeah. So that makes sense.
Maybe make a list, prioritize and figure out what's
important to you.
Be number two. What's number three?
Marlon Buchanan: Number three is to start simple.
I recommend most people, like I mentioned earlier, get just
a maybe a smart bowl to play with that, get a voice
assistant. Things that are easy to use and can give you
some immediate positive feedback as soon as you get it.
So you have some fun with them.
You don't get frustrated with using them.
But my third tip would just be to start simple and play
with it, get more comfortable and then start adding little
pieces as you go.
Lisa Stockdale: Yeah, baby steps, as you said.
Don't be intimidated by the technology.
It's here to stay, so we might as well embrace it and
figure out ways to utilize it that make us happier, safer
and life a little more comfortable.
Marlon Buchanan: Yep, that's right.
Lisa Stockdale: All right. Hey, you also have a website, I want you to share
that with our audience if they'd like to go that route
before they buy the book.
Marlon Buchanan: Your website is called Home Tech Hackers.
And don't worry, it's not a scary site, it's not going to
hack you. It's just just hacking is just a way that people
use to say when they're just playing with technology to
make it work for them. So that's that's the hacking.
I mean, in that.
And I'm there. You'll find lots of free resources and
articles about how to do a lot of the things I just
mentioned. So even if you didn't get the book, there's
actually lots of articles on there to about how to do it.
There's checklists.
So when we're talking about make a list of what things you
want to do, they're checklists on there that you can get
for free. That'll help you do that.
And there's also some links to some of my other other
books. I do have another book that I just released earlier
this year. That's about the reason.
One of the reasons I can talk a lot about home networks is
because the latest book I released is the Home Network
manual, which is about setting up and upgrading and
securing your home network, so you can find out more
information about that.
But the website itself just has a lot of stuff about smart
homes, home technology in general and how to make it easier
for you.
Lisa Stockdale: And I'll just tell you until you emailed me and asked if we
were interested in having you on as a guest, I didn't know
there was such a thing as a smart home.
So this is great information I didn't ask you, but I'm
curious what you do for a living and how it is, you know,
all this stuff?
Marlon Buchanan: Well, my regular day job is I'm an I.T.
director, so I know people at the company are dealing with.
So I have to tell people at my company all of this kind of
stuff. Someone I.T. director at the University of
Washington and that's my day job and I'm also obviously an
author.
Lisa Stockdale: Yeah. And were you self-published or did you have somebody
else do it for you?
Marlon Buchanan: I self-published, but I did work with a team.
I have a couple of editors that I work with and some
designers for the cover and other things, but it is
self-published,
Lisa Stockdale: And it makes another wonderful point that if you've got
information like this to share, you're making complicated
stuff user friendly, consumer friendly and we need that,
that there are ways to get the information out there
without all the traditional paths that we think of.
So thank you for being so innovative and sharing with your
expertise. It means a lot.
Marlon Buchanan: I am happy to do so, that is exactly my goal is to make this
stuff easier for people.
Lisa Stockdale: All right, we will be sure to share your website when this
podcast publishes parting thoughts or did we about cover
it?
Marlon Buchanan: Only that I have is don't don't be afraid to step through
it. This is all stuff that's very important for everyone
gets more important with the pandemic.
It's more important with life as it's going.
So my only parting thoughts are you can do it.
Just give it a try
Lisa Stockdale: That that's a good parting thought you can do it and you
make a good point.
Life is different since the pandemic, and it's probably
going to. We're probably changed forever on some levels.
And so we have to acclimate.
We have to be in the know.
We can't be afraid and stand in the shadows because that's
not how we get where we're going and where we're going is
we're aging in full bloom.
Thank you for being our guest today, listeners.
We hope you enjoy the show.
I'm sure you learned a little something along the way to
next time. May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be forever at your back.