Rob the Geek

Category: Home Automation

  • Notes from Barcamp Auckland 2010

    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 […]

  • Profiling my Power

    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 […]

  • Health Monitoring 2.0?

    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 […]

  • Home Networking – the Why (not the How or What)

    The first of what may become a series of presentations covering the home networking space. This presentation covers WHY you may want a home network, and what considerations need to be top of mind during planning.

  • Spending time with my digital memories

    I spent the last 3 days at home looking after our youngest son William who had the chicken pox and during that time I did a little bit of a tidy up of our digital photos and, during that time I reminded myself, yet again that we have HEAPS of photos, but finding any particular […]

  • Getting a Weather Station?

    I’ve always (well, not ALWAYS, but for quite awhile) enjoyed Weather information and, around 3 or 4 years ago I started thinking about putting together a weather station at my place, so I could prove to those nay sayers that Auckland weather isn’t really as bad as people may think. Initially I looked into the […]

  • Home Storage

    Today (17/07/2006) we received a couple of Buffalo TeraStation Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. These devices came kitted out with 1Tb of disk (each) and will be used within ETS to centrally store our media (MP3 music, WMV VoD files, DVR-MS MCE Recordings). This entry will cover the unpacking and installation of one of the […]

  • Viewing multiple video streams using Linksys WVC54G

    We’ve got a couple of Linksys WVC54G IP cameras lying around the office from a previous project, so I was thinking “How hard would it be to create a page I could navigate to from my home PC (or media center) to view live video streams from these cameras?” Apparently, it’s a bit harder than one would think…

  • MCE 2005 – Why Media Center will change the way I’m entertained.

    I’ve been playing with home theater applications on and off for a few years, I dabbled with MythTV and the ShowShifter type apps, but I’m now a firm believer in Microsoft Media Center 2005 so this entry will serve as a staging point for me to babble on about it…

  • My Media Center Setup

    I’m currently running a Silverstone ST-LC10B (with the iMon VFD software in conjunction with FrontView for MCE it’s sweet!) Full specs are: Mainboard: ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (with a Zalman ZM-NB47J) Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Skt 939) Memory: 1x 512MB Kingmax DDR400 Graphics: GeCube Radeon X700 (SilentCool) Tuners: 2x Hauppauge 150MCE (Though, I’d probably go […]