Three recent incidents where burglars kicked in homeowners' doors have experts offering advice for ways to keep thieves out of your house.

Sunday, News4Jax shared the story of a man and woman whose home was burglarized while the couple was at the hospital, welcoming their first baby into the world.

The thieves got in by kicking in the door, stealing appliances, televisions and even baby clothes.

A city crime map of the couple's neighborhood showed there were 22 residential and commercial burglaries within a half-mile radius of the couple's home.

Experts say locking a door might seem like the common sense thing to do to keep people out, but oftentimes it's not enough.

"We always recommend a deadbolt above an existing knob lock," said Gary Seliger of Piner's Lock & Safe.

Seliger said adding a few extra things to a door can make a huge difference, starting with a door strike plate. It's designed to better protect the bolt from any friction, but according to Seliger, most doors come with a tiny strike plate with really small screws. For $11, homeowners can get a heavy duty strike plate with longer screws, and for $35 a door jamb reinforcer, which is even better.

"Kicking in the door, you'd have to take almost the door from here to here, frame kicked in, as opposed to just a couple of inches," Seliger said.

Seliger said it's also important to have a deadbolt that's made of steel and to be sure whoever installs it makes sure there's enough room for the deadbolt to fully extend into the door frame.

"(If the deadbolt isn't fully extended), if anyone gets a screwdriver and gets into your frame and gets the end of the bolt, they push it right back and they're into your house," Seliger warned.

Seliger said homeowners can also invest in a Medeco lock and key, which costs a little more than $200. A standard key's cuts are all the same with different heights, but a Medeco key has cuts that go left, right and straight across, making it nearly impossibly to pick.

Seliger's company offers free home security chek-ups that include checking doors, windows, locks and keys. For more information or to request a check-up, call 904-398-1646. The business is located at 3861 Hendricks Ave. in Jacksonville.

News4Jax crime and safety analyst Gil Smith said when going out of town, it's important not to make that public and to always have someone keep an eye on the house.

Security tips from Piner's Lock & Safe:

1. Crooks will look for the vulnerable home: one without deadbolts, one with an open door, a broken window, or one without a home security system.

2. It is not expensive to take the basic steps toward securing your home. Keep the main points of entry locked with deadbolt locks.

3. Remember who has copies of the keys to your home. Change locks if keys are lost or stolen. If you've recently moved in, change all door locks as soon as possible.

4. Be sure to draw the shades and leave a radio or television on when no one is home. Install lighting with timers. Ask a neighbor to park a car in your driveway.

5. Always request identification from service or utility workers. Potential thieves don't always look like "thugs."

6. At night, keep your garage and the path to your home well-lit. Trim the landscaping and make sure there are no areas for someone to easily hide.

7. To avoid being surprised, look around and make sure that no one followed you into the garage before stepping out of your car.

8. Get involved in Neighborhood Watch programs. They work! Get to know your neighbors. Report suspicious people to the police.

9. Make sure you have high-security locks on all exterior doors. Use high-security locks on desks and cabinets. Purchase a safe for keeping valuables, records and keepsakes.

10. Make sure no one can copy your house key(s) without your knowledge and permission.

Do you have people on your team who are so amazing, you wish you had an extra hour of their time every day? With technology you can have exactly that.

The following upgrades can save anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour EVERY SINGLE DAY. Even the smallest improvements, just a few seconds here and there, really add up when they are repeated over and over throughout the work week.

Some of these upgrades require you to spend money, but think about the benefits you'll see when your top people - including yourself - find all that extra time.

New computer

If your computer takes more than a few seconds to boot up every morning, it's time for a new one, or at least a tune-up. For best performance, replace desktop PCs every 3 to 4 years and laptops every 2 to 3 years. If a newer computer is slow, ask your IT team to check it for spyware. They may recommend wiping the entire hard drive and reloading everything, which will give you a fresh clean start. Just be sure they backup data and settings so nothing is lost during this process. With faster speeds, you'll gain time when you log in every morning and also throughout the day.

Manage email

It's common to receive dozens, if not hundreds, of emails daily. Saving a few seconds every time you check email is a big deal. To accomplish this, first make sure your spam filter is working well and customized to your needs. You should have very little spam, and your legitimate emails should nearly always make it through. If not, have your tech team fix it. Use Outlook rules to automatically filter email and move it to folders, so that you can easily find what you need. Make sure mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, sync email so that anything you read on your phone is already updated on your computer. Lastly, take an hour and go "unsubscribe." Most people receive email newsletters they never read. Click the unsubscribe links or block them with your spam filter, and then you never have to see these again!

Add a monitor

Adding a monitor is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get more done in less time. Studies show varying results depending on the type of work you do, but one thing is crystal clear: dual monitors are a huge productivity booster. This can gain you a full day a week, if not more, and there's almost no training time required. Keep email open in one screen, and whatever you are working on in another; compare spreadsheets or documents side by side; copy information from one software package to another; keep your main system front and center while browsing the Internet for research on the other monitor. It sounds simple, but that's the beauty of it. It IS simple, and it really makes a difference.

Remote access

Make it easy for people to work anytime, anywhere, and give them the flexibility they need to do just that. Switch from a desktop to a laptop, buy them an iPad or Droid tablet, or give your staff a data plan that lets them connect to the Internet anywhere they might be. It's not just the workaholics who will love you. Your hardworking staff who struggle to balance work and life will be especially appreciative. When they have the right technology to work remotely, along with flexible work schedules and your trust, you are likely to see them put in not only more hours, but also more productive hours because they have their home life better under control.

Upgrade Internet

Do you use cloud-based services? Spend a lot of time online? Check out faster Internet connections for increased speed throughout your day. High speed business-class cable Internet is one of the best values today. Fiber Internet connections cost more but provide fast speeds with extremely high reliability and very few outages.

Easier access

Information overload is a huge issue and time-waster. Employees spend hours every day searching for what they need, reformatting what they have, transferring information from one system to another and re-creating information they can't find. At minimum, clean up and reorganize your company's shared data drives. Communicate the new structure to your team, and challenge your managers to enforce the new structure. If you want to take it further, investigate document management systems. These provide greater structure and security to company information and include advanced search capabilities to make finding data as easy as possible.

Instant messaging

Instant messaging is a quick and easy way to communicate with others inside the company. It's more immediate and interactive than email, but less disruptive than a phone call. It's a very efficient way to communicate and yet another way to save a few minutes here and there throughout the day.

Reorganize desktop

Take a page from Lean manufacturing, and have everyone on your team reorganize their workspace to make it more efficient: make everything you do on a regular basis accessible within one to two mouse clicks.

Start with the applications you use daily. Add shortcuts to your desktop or taskbar for each of these, and clean up any that you don't currently use. Also add shortcuts to the folders you access most. Create bookmarks for the websites you visit most often, and rearrange your browser toolbars so that you can get to those websites with a single click. Is there a feature in Office that you use constantly but it's hidden in the ribbon so you have to hunt for it every time? You can add that command to the very top of the window in the "Quick Access Toolbar." Google for instructions on how to do this in your version of Office.

Ready for more?

There are always more ways technology can make your team more productive, and it's never "one size fits all." The key is to be clear about what you expect and what the value will be. Then you can choose the very best technology tools for your business.

The best smart-home systems are modular, letting you add sensors and devices to meet your home’s exact needs, and they should be easy to install too. Piper, a home security camera with additional sensors and Z-Wave support, meets those two requirements. But I didn’t find it reliable enough to justify its $199 price tag.

When it works, it’s great—the camera’s wide angle can see an entire room at once, and Piper’s app is well designed and easy to use. In fact, the app was what let me know the camera was losing its network connection pretty much every day, usually just for a few minutes, but sometimes for hours.

Great for renters

Piper is super easy to set up. You can mount it to a wall, but it’s even easier to just attach the sturdy metal stand and place the Piper unit on a shelf or a mantle. It does need to be plugged in to power, but three AA batteries provide backup if your power goes out, and let you move the camera to a new spot without taking it offline. On the flip side, on a few occasions when I wanted to power-cycle my Piper, I had to unplug it and pull out one of the batteries to get it to turn off, but most users won’t have occasion to power-cycle their Piper as often as I did during testing.

Piper’s easy installation makes it great for renters, along with the fact that the camera unit also has built-in sensors for temperature, motion, and ambinet light, and a microphone to detect sound. So you can get more detail about your home without having to buy and install extra sensors.

But Piper is also a Z-Wave hub, so if you do want extra sensors, you can add those—I tested it with a basic door/window sensor as well as a plug-in module to turn a lamp on and off. Piper’s site claims it’s compatible with “hundreds of Z-Wave automation accessories: wall switches, door/window sensors, freeze sensors, and the line will expand to include even more.” But the online store only offers four Z-Wave products, and the site lacks a comprehensive list of what’s supported right now.

You make the rules

Once you get Piper plugged in, the companion app for iOS and Android helps you add it to your Wi-Fi network, and then you’ll use the same app to set up rules for its behavior in the Rules tab. You can have separate rules for when you’re home, away, or on vacation, as well as Notify Only rules that happen all the time, regardless of where you are. But like the name says, you’re only notified—these rules can’t trigger video recordings, or Piper’s ear-meltingly loud built-in siren. It should also be noted that you set your own status (home, away, vacation, or off) in the app; it doesn’t automatically change based on your phone’s location or anything like that.

As easy as it is to set up rules in the Rules tab, I was disappointed by some of the results. A few times I popped open the app and saw an alert like a loud noise or motion detected—but I hadn’t gotten the push notification I’d requested.

Disposable video

The app’s Live Video tab lets you peek in on what your Piper’s ultra-wide-angle camera is seeing—and it can see a lot. With practically a 180-degree angle, the camera even showed me objects on the same mantleplace as my Piper. The camera lens is fixed, but within the app you can pan and zoom around inside that fixed field of view. There’s even a four-up view that lets you set four different views from the same camera. Pressing the microphone button lets you send your voice to the Piper’s speaker, for two-way communication, in case you want to yell at your kids to stop hitting each other or tell the dog to get off the couch.

The Rules tab offers to record video when the Piper detects motion or hears a loud sound, but you can’t save those videos, nor can you capture the video in the Live Video tab. Dropcam, in contrast, can be set to record video all the time, but it’s saved to the cloud, so you pay cloud-storage fees. Piper has no monthly fees at all, but that also means your video is more or less disposable. 

Piper’s video quality isn’t as good as Dropcam’s either, and it has no night vision. So don’t try to use it as a baby monitor, or expect to be able to share a clip with friends if Piper catches your dog doing something funny.

Vitals tab doesn’t live up to its name

The Vitals tab is just a graph showing the data from the Piper’s built-in sensors: It shows the temperature outside your house (which it gets from weather data at your location), the temperature inside your house, the humidity, the amount of ambient light, the noise level, and the amount of motion that was detected. You can see about two days’ worth of data in the graphs, but you can’t isolate one section, or scroll the graph at all. I guess it could be useful in some cases—if you want to schedule your robot vacuum for times when no one’s home, maybe?—but I didn’t get much utility from it.

Vitals could give you ideas for new rules, though. For example, if you happen to notice in Vitals that your house gets really warm in the mid-afternoon, you could plug a fan into a Z-Wave module, add that module to Piper using the Controls tab, and then set a rule that when the home’s temperature rises over 80, the fan should turn on, and your pets will be just a little bit cooler. If you’d rather schedule that fan, you can do that in the Controls tab too.

Speaking of pets, Piper’s settings has a “pet at home” switch that is meant to adjust the sensitivity of the motion sensor so you don’t get a notification every time your pet moves. I have no pets, so I wasn’t able to test that.

Bottom line

My main issues with Piper were how the notifications didn’t always show up as push notifications, even though they appeared in the app, and the fact that it dropped its network connection at least once a day. That might be my entire network going down (I have Comcast, after all), since the Piper and my router are close enough to each other that range shouldn’t be a problem.

The app could be more helpful with troubleshooting, too. I had to resort to the support site for more details about setting up the Z-Wave plug-in modules and door sensor, for example, since the bare-bones instructions in the app didn’t fully explain what to do. I’d also like an easier way to dismiss alarms inside the Piper app. I’d get a vague message that “an alarm is active, tap here for dashboard,” and I would, and I’d see that everything was fine, but I couldn’t figure out how to tell Piper that, other than turning the rule in question off entirely, or switching to Home and then back to Away.

Still, the easy installation, flexible rules, and Z-Wave compatibility make Piper an intriguing option for people just starting to dabble with connected home products. Parent company iControl offers a 30-day return window (just for Piper, not for the Z-Wave accessories), so you can take it for a spin at your own house with minimal risk.

 

 

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Three decades after the first cellphone went on sale - the $4,000 Motorola DynaTAC 8000X "Brick" - half the world remains unconnected. For some it costs too much, but up to a fifth of the population, or some 1.4 billion people, live where "the basic network infrastructure has yet to be built," according to a Facebook white paper last month.

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Corliss Expert Group in Home Security consists of dedicated experts working and doing research in home security to provide consumers with efficient security systems that help them save time and money.

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