Smart lights are damn pretty to set up in the house. The trouble is, they're an expensive addition. So, while the aesthetics might almost make the price worth it, what you really need to know is how they can level-up your life. In order to make you feel less guilty about dropping a hundred or so dollars on some lights, here are some hacks to give your smart lights a practical use too.

Whether you have friends or family members who work and live different schedules than you, or you find yourself sending more “happy belated birthday” messages than you’d like, having the ability to schedule text messages ahead of time is an incredibly useful feature.

The Amazon Echo has been kicking about in Australia for a while now. It's not perfect, but if you're keen to join the future of intelligent homes, now is the time to get on board. Whether you're you're thinking of getting an Echo, hear people talking about "Alexa," or not sure what the one you have is capable of, here are some of the best things you can do with it.

What’s the point of all these digital assistants, anyway? To make life simpler, of course. The Google Assistant, in particular, can not only help answer life’s burning questions and control smart devices, but it can also act as your very own personal reminder bot.

Earlier this year, Google announced that its line of Nest smart home devices would be folded into its “helpful home” initiative. A side effect of this move is IFTTT fans would no longer be able to build triggers and automations using their Nest devices, starting on August 31, 2019.

IFTTT, the tool that lets you automate your digital life, can help any parent whose mental load has reached max capacity — and you kind of feel like a tech magician every time you use it. Here are some great IFTTT applets that can make parenting easier.

(If you’re new to the service, check out our beginner’s guide to understand the basics.)

Woe is the Chrome user who has an overflowing Bookmark Bar - or worse, that single folder they use to store anything interesting they see online.

I love automation; I do. I just think it's the most fun thing ever to walk into my house and have my smart lights immediately pull up some colourful scene — not to mention all the absurd configurations I can create that changes their colours and brightness when certain things happen, ranging from "I got a tweet" to "It's midnight why are you still awake go to bed."

Pervasive as Facebook is, not everyone uses the social service. Maybe they hate social networking, or they're frustrated with Facebook's continual privacy "oopsies," or they're not technologically savvy. How can you share content outside of Facebook's (somewhat) walled garden?

If This Then That is great for everything from managing your savings to hacking your Gmail, but did you know you can also use it to find free video games?

There are dozens of applets (IFTTT's name for any combination of triggers and actions used through the service) designed to help you track gaming giveaways.

When we rounded up our staff's Weekly Upgrades last Saturday, our editors were introducing more plant life into our environments, cracking the code to Instagram-worthy Halloween costumes, quitting coffee, and clearing out browser clutter.

If you think back to your high school geometry class, you might remember that "If/Then" statements were used in solving mathematical proofs. But even if maths wasn't your thing, you actually use If/Then statements every day: "If it's raining outside, then I will bring an umbrella." Or, "If I eat this doughnut, then I will be very guilt- um, happy."

Ever get epic ideas while you're in the car? If so, you've probably struggled to figure out how to jot down those ideas without swerving into oncoming traffic. It can be a distraction for sure, but one Redditor has a useful suggestion that involves one of our favourite tools: IFTTT.

iOS: If This Then That (IFTTT), one of our favourite automation services, introduced support for both the iOS Calendar and App Store today.

Earlier this month, IFTTT (If This Then That) changed its automation platform into a more sophisticated tool. Rather than using one-dimensional "recipes" that trigger actions when certain conditions are met, the company launched something entirely new called "applets." The new applets allow users to create multiple actions from a single condition and filter conditions. In short, it makes it easier to create complicated conditional statements.

If This Then That, one of the best automation tools out there, is getting a big overhaul today that changes some of the fundamental ways the service works. The biggest change comes in rebranding its recipe system so it now allows one trigger to connect to multiple services.

Android/iOS/Web: Microsoft's IFTTT competitor Flow has been in beta for the better part of 2016, but it wasn't quite fully-baked yet. Now, the company is ready to release it to the world and it's starting to look good.

The idea of a machine that talks to you intelligently might be a ways off still, but Instructables user MisterM wanted to make a radio that would announce general details throughout the day. To do this, he wired up a Raspberry Pi Zero to a text-to-speech engine, then tossed in a dose of If This Then That.

Fitbits alone won't make you healthy, but the more you see the data, the better understanding you can have of what you need to do. Over at Initial State, they made a guide that creates a big dashboard of all your Fitbit data so you can easily see it visualised.