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.