pod bay door management with ZigBee

It's a few years since I attended a conference in Westminster about energy management, smart metering and the like. The sessions included a selection of technology suppliers as well as a few politicians but relatively few 'end users' of what was then still an emerging technology.

The discussions included the catchily-named IEEE 802.15.4, which is a kind of wi-fi for homes, operating at very low power levels.

Nowadays there is a kind of Betamax/VHS war going on with various suppliers each wanting to use their preferred technologies in order to become king of the home castle.

Z-wave, ZigBee, Bluetooth 4, ye olde X10 are a few examples. Google, Apple, Samsung and a slew of currently less well-known companies are pitching to get control of the home hub.

Imagine Siri, Cortana and 'OK Google' on the wall...

"Open the pod bay doors, Hal"


It is still a bit fiddly to connect everything together and not everyone has a home 24-way gigabit ethernet switch to hook up the multitude of mini-hubs.

If I count my own example of the little extra pack-of-playing-card sized hubs requiring connection into the network, there's the one for the recently installed thermostat (Google Nest), one for the smart meter analytics (Efergy Engage), one for the lighting (Phillips Hue) one for the HDMI switching and upscaling to the telly (Denon) and one for a domestic remote control (Logitech Harmony).

Oh yes, the bathroom scales use Wi-Fi and my bikes still use ANT+ via Bluetooth 4. Come to think of it the loudspeakers using Airplay are quite passé in this mix.

Surprisingly, it all works and the various units generally commune with one another endearingly well. For me, it's all something of an experiment, so if one piece or another temporarily breaks there's always another more manual way to make whatever it is work.

An obvious question is whether we need all this stuff, but in the way of the march of smartphones, the automated home is increasingly a marketing target.

how now brown saddle

I have a slight sense of disquiet as I notice that google adverts are targeting me with 15-25% discounts on bicycle chainrings as I browse haphazardly around sites. Not just one cog, but a whole series of “offers”.

I should probably clean out my browser cache or reset the cookies to get back to more mainstream offers. I can only think the sensitivity is based upon my recent postings about cycling, but it’s uncannily close to the mark.

Either that or its just the subjective thing, like the way that an iPod Shuffle will sometimes play ten or twenty songs that are just right for the mood. But come to think of it, I remember a recent car journey where we seemed to be surviving on bangin’ club tunes however many times we hit the ‘next’ button.

Today I’ve been throwing stuff away again. It's a chain reaction. I was handed some discarded stuff to check before disposal and it created a yearning for some further rationalisation around the place. I can best measure it in wheely bins and let’s just say we’re full plus an eclectic selection of items for a charity shop or two.

There’s too much to take away on the bike, though, so maybe mentioning ‘car’ a few times will change the advertising.

Update: as a footnote, after this and the above post, I'm getting adverts for Laboratory Waste Disposal.

iPad arcade cabinets in Topeka and Cadie

A tough decision to decide the best of the April pranks for 2010, but I decided I quite liked this one, the iPad Arcade Cabinet, provided amongst a whole collection of ideas from ThinkGeek.

The also produced the star-trek breakfast cereal (Tribbles and Bits), the screaming kitchen knife (your choice of 50 sounds) and even the child friendly "tell me your secrets" bear featuring a digital recorder. The toy 2001 monolith action figure with no moving parts was accurately portrayed with its squared primes ratios of 1:4:9.

None of this could be googled yesterday afternoon though, because Google.com had renamed itself as Topeka, after the Kansas capital which renamed itself 'Google' for a while to try to persuade Google to run some development there.

And finally, a brief hat tip to one of last year's best, the Cadie Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed Intelligence Entity.

This was artificial intelligence based upon the brain of a 12 year old Japanese girl.

Note the groovy music, rainbow colours and pandas on the website. Click the icon for an explanation and to marvel at the gmail autoresponse generator.

who needs google streets when you can do this?

simulated commute ;-) Nr 1 in a Series....

maximum exposure

I was reading Maximum Bob's adventures after he added a snake picture to his site which created a stir of extra hits a couple of days ago.

"Johanna Cardona!", I thought, "I'd better Skype a few myspace and facebook friends in case they've had similar experiences on google when talking about Ron Paul, Galilea Montijo from Big Brother in Mexico or any UK soccer WAG scandals and gossip.

I suppose my previous posts about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and even the occasional references I make to YouTube inadvertantly add to search hits of dreamhost viewers everywhere. But then I noticed the "skype down" message and as I don't have an iPhone, blogging about it became the solution.

tags technorati : noelia eviction scandal video snake facebook youtube ron paul johanna cardona galilea montijo utube gerry skype down technorati google microsoft apple paris hilton myspace britney spears dreamhost iphone