Thingiverse

I've previously blogged about the IoT - Internet of Things, and realise it has more or less embedded itself into the house now, with even the morning coffee and the garden lights being IFTTT controlled.

The outside lights are an interesting example where I can set them to switch on at 'sunset' and off at a particular time. Even unplugging them and then later replugging them doesn't affect the performance.

I suppose some folk would worry that the house will get hijacked by a Chinese or Russian web-crawler, but I suppose they have more interesting things to do with their hacking into politicians accounts and various governmental systems.

The vacuum cleaner has been given the house name of George (for Alexa purposes) and automatically fires up at an alarming 2am to sweep quietly around the house. Of course, it suffers from the first-generation Dalek problem in that it can't deal with stairs -although it is pretty good at getting back to a charging base concealed underneath a sofa.

Latterly I've also been playing around with webhooks to link web-side applications together. The keys for such services are quite lengthy and I notice that not all webhook services are compatible with one another.

Some of this is symptomatic of everyone having an interest in whether particular interfaces can be monetised, like cats' eyes on a road or those wire coathangers that laundry is returned upon.

It becomes a kind of jigsaw puzzle, to find the most efficient and effective ways to join pieces together, using as few components as possible.

It is still too complicated for the layman, but presumably it will become packaged and the services will then become 'just make it so'. Just like I discovered when I issued asked Alexa "turn off the garden lights" and to my slight astonishment, they turned off, and George the vacuum cleaner will send phone notifications if it really gets stuck. Fortunately, they are fairly infrequent.