Have you always had a hankering for some home automation, but felt that the technology was either too expensive or too complicated to install? Throw that excuse out the window. Starting today, Verizon is offering a $10/mo. service (plus the cost of the installation kit) that will let you remotely change your house’s temperature, track energy usage, turn lights and appliances on and off, watch a video feed of your home, and heck, even unlock the front door if you want – all via your web-connected PC, smartphone or FiOS TV. Sigma Design’s Z-Wave technology powers the system. 

We’ve taken it as a sad fact that the US tends to lag behind the rest of the world in terms of broadband speeds. There’s no choice but to accept it, but it still sucks, especially when headlines keep popping up telling us how great they have it in London. A while back, we told you that Virgin Media was rolling out 1.5Gbps services, but only to small number of high-tech business. Now, a new ISP named Hyperoptic is promising to bring 1Gbps connections to the residential masses. There’s a catch, though.