MakeUseOf - Home

A $15 contact sensor turns your smart plug into something actually intelligent

Jonathon Jachura — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:30:17 GMT

Smart plugs are one of the better smart home purchases you can make — inexpensive, easy to set up, and immediately useful for anything with a power cord. Most people plug something in, set a schedule, and leave it there. But a timer doesn't know if you're home. It doesn't know if a door just opened or if anyone's actually in the room. It fires at the time you told it to, no matter what's actually happening in the house.

I finally understand what plastic recycling numbers actually mean — and I've been recycling wrong

Jonathon Jachura — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:30:18 GMT

I'd been doing it wrong for years. Anything with a chasing arrows symbol went straight into the recycling bin — I didn't think twice about it. The number inside the triangle meant nothing to me. So I started digging into where recycling actually goes once it leaves the curb. What I found wasn't encouraging. A lot of stuff I'd been binning was almost certainly ending up in a landfill. If you're the kind of person who patches up air leaks around your windows to cut your heating bill, you probably care whether your recycling habits are doing anything real. Here's what actually matters.

I bought a desk gadget on a whim and now it's the one thing I'd never replace

Mahnoor Faisal — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:00:17 GMT

Between 2 coffee cups, a water bottle, a few devices I'm testing, a tripod, a sunset lamp, my laptop and iPad, and a bunch of charging cables to fuel up all these devices (the coffee and water fuel me, thankfully), my desk is always a mess. Now, most of these I'm fine with. A messy desk is a lived-in desk, whatever.

6 small home upgrades that actually add value when you sell

Chris Hachey — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:01:17 GMT

If you're getting ready to sell a home, you want to get the most money you can for it. Maybe it's the perfect time to sell and the market is a seller's market. Maybe it's a buyer's market, so you need to try and get every cent you can for your place. While you may not want to change what you've done to the home to make it one, it's probably smarter to make some concessions and make the home look brand new again.

Your old phone has 5 sensors built in that can trigger smart home automations

Yadullah Abidi — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:00:17 GMT

A lot of people have a spare Android phone lying around in a drawer somewhere. It doesn't matter how old the phone is, whether it's got a great camera, a cracked screen, or even what model it is — it's a multi-sensor device that dedicated smart home hardware can't quite match.

I bought my first Milwaukee power tool and now I understand why professionals swear by them

Chris Hachey — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:30:17 GMT

I was handed down some tools by my dad when I went to college, mostly for either putting together some furniture or hanging some pictures on my dorm room wall. Ever since then, I've been building up my tool inventory, leading up to the tool bench in my home's basement nearly 20 years later.

This cheap sensor made my robot vacuum actually smart

Jonathon Jachura — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:31:17 GMT

Robot vacuums are only as useful as their timing. Mine kept running at noon on a Tuesday while my kids were home from school, getting underfoot, nudging the machine off course, and generally turning a hands-free cleaning cycle into something I had to babysit. The fix wasn't a smarter schedule or a newer device — it was already sitting in my house. I connected my eufy X10 Pro Omni to my Ring door contact sensor through Alexa, and now it vacuums and mops our kitchen every weekday morning, the moment we leave for school drop-off. It turns out the answer was already in the house. I just needed about three minutes in the Alexa app to connect the devices I already owned.

6 things I 3D print now instead of buying again

Rob LeFebvre — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 21:00:19 GMT

In every household, there are likely things that you buy again and again as you need more. Think paperclips, chip clips, organizing baskets, and the like. But ever since I get into 3D printing, I realized that instead of spending on these sorts of things, I could just print them out and have a functional plastic item at a fraction of the cost in retail. Here are six of the things that I print out now instead of buying again.

This is the only AA battery type I trust when the temperature drops

Chris Hachey — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:31:17 GMT

You want to get the most out of your devices whenever you use them. Having to charge them constantly can be frustrating. It actually pays to look into the battery life of every electronic device you have. If you had a computer in which the battery only lasted 30 minutes, you probably would get rid of that computer as soon as possible.

I built my entire workshop around Ryobi ONE+, and it just works

Jonathon Jachura — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:00:17 GMT

Ryobi has carried a budget stigma for as long as I can remember. Walk into any Home Depot and you'll find the green-and-black tools in the affordable section, quietly implying they're what you buy when you can't justify spending more. I bought into that framing for years — picking up a Ryobi tool when I needed something fast and half-expecting to outgrow it. That was before I built out a full ONE+ 18V collection and actually put the platform through consistent use. Ryobi tools are considerably stronger than their reputation suggests, and for most homeowners, dismissing them outright is the more expensive choice.