Rob the Geek

Category: Connected Home

  • PAIN! (I’ve lost my interweb)

    Monday afternoon was painful. While I was at work, I’d received a notification that my community wireless point had gone offline – this hadn’t happened since I’d switched to my new router, but regardless, I wasn’t too concerned… until I got home. No interweb, then a call on my cellphone “I’ve been ringing and ringing […]

  • Weather Station is go!

    My son Max and I have finished installing our weather station on the roof and will hook it up to the interweb as soon as we are able. We went for a pole mount mainly for the WAF (Wife Approval Factor) and because it also allows us somewhere to hook up the outdoor Meraki WiFi […]

  • Wh EEE ! It’s here

    My ASUS EEE 701 arrived today and was delivered over a tasty lunch of chicken fried  rice (not that that has anything to do with the device, but it may go someway to explaining some of the out of box images I took while unpacking it at the lunch table 🙂 ).  Overall I’m impressed […]

  • Wahoo! Just ordered my ASUS EEE 701

    Sweeet… My ASUS EEE 701 sub notebook is on its way 🙂 Fortuantly (for me) I still had enough left in my ‘Technology Refresh’ budget to secure one of the first of these units to come into New Zealand and of course, big thanks go out to Tom for getting the wheels in motion to […]

  • From the Studio to the Home

    I’ve just finished giving a presentation at the Conferenz ‘Digital Media & Content Summit’ in Auckland. While it was a lot of work putting the presentation and supporting document together, I found it quite a rewarding experience to be able to capture my thinking on the subject of Digital Entertainment. The conference organisers are publishing […]

  • Has wireless come of age? Will 802.11n be the silver bullet?

    This post is sparked by an article on CNet which covers a recent Burton Group report comparing Gigabit Ethernet to 802.11n, the latest version of WiFi. So – will it happen? I’m still not convinced. It’s not because 802.11n isn’t a good technology, it’s because I don’t really like the idea of sharing, at least […]

  • Taking it to the street(s) – I’m providing an open WiFi node…

    Continuing on in the vein of community content, I’ve just started running an open wireless access point, segregated from my network and throttled to protect my cap from leechers, but open none the less. People joining the network are greeted by a splash page prior to continuing on to their content This is an experiment […]

  • 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 […]

  • Can the end-user be trusted?

    One of the undeniable truths of backups is you never really respect their worth, until you lose data that you value(d). Interestingly enough, as more homes become more digital centric, more forensic data recovery services are cropping up to save people from themselves and that accidential, click happy spree that we’ve all enjoyed (until the […]