Rob the Geek

Technology, Open Thinking, Community & Education…

Browsing Posts in Connected Home

Barcamp Auckland is an annual gathering of developers, designers, start-ups and social-media types. It’s a full day event held in an ‘unconference’ like style, where the attendee (see my attendee & interested folks list on Twitter) set the schedule – and people turn up to discuss topics which interest them. The following are the session [...]

To celebrate the introduction of the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS*) in New Zealand today (1 July 2010), I thought I’d publish the following article on what I’m doing in terms of residential Power Monitoring. Read on for: The Back Story The Unboxing Installing the Device Configuring the Software Results The Back Story A few years [...]

Okay – after a bit of fnarkling, we’re back with Temperature, Humidity as well as that ever useful Wind and Rain data. Not only are we transmitting in elegant Flash interactivity, we’re also on Twitter – should that be your thing (note, this is currently set to tweet every 15 minutes). So – there we [...]

..well, mostly. Over the last week I’ve managed to run some power to a nearby cupboard where the La Crosse WS2300 LCD has been sitting and I’ve now got a PC in there gathering the data, and spitting it out to the Weather Page via a very slow WiFi link. The biggest stinker about this [...]

…it probably is.” It’s an old, well-worn saying for sure, but it holds as true today as it did way back whenever the anonymous, cynical, amateur philosopher came up with it. Recently in New Zealand, there have been an increase in phishing attempts trying to get people to open email attachments which then deploy malware [...]

So, since we’ve moved into the new place, I’ve been wanting to consolidate my technology somewhat and make things a lot easier to administer. To this end (and forgetting for a moment the lack of structured home cabling – which I’m still working on) I’ve decided to resurrect one of my lower powered (in wattage, [...]

Well, it’s taken a week – but the initial plans (PDF 268K) are now drawn up for the cabling required in the house. The plans are pretty close to the minimum we’ll require to get things up and running again, and only the difficult access areas have received anything over and above what is immediately [...]

So – we’ve now moved in, the boxes are (mostly) unpacked – I’ve even managed to organise the garage enough to fit the HondaBus into it (who knows, maybe being an internal garage with light, heat and power may see the Carputer get installed finally?). So – with the vitals out of the way (and [...]

I’m on the move… the last few weeks have been a steady extraction of the technology which is running here, and last nights victim was the Weather station

Sorry about the headline, the 2.0 tag is getting waaay too much air time of late – that aside, I was reading an interesting article on some of the technology advances in the realms of health monitoring. A few years ago I was researching some of the advances within medical monitoring and how the devices [...]