Roku
About fifteen years ago one of my children worked at Blockbuster. One day I told him that Bockbuster would be history because people would be downloading their movies from the Internet. Yeah, right Dad. Ok, I was a bit ahead of my time. In the intervening years there have been numerous companies started to offer […]
WiFi Update No. 15
JiWire is now listing 202,894 WiFi hotspots in 135 countries. Where is Wifi headed? I don’t claim to have a crystal ball but I believe the evolution continues to look very much like what we have seen before with the Internet and the World Wide Web. There was a long list of reasons fifteen years […]
New Home for patrickWeb
It was time for patrickWeb to get a new home. The original site — ibm.com/patrick — was setup in 1995 and IBM has been kind enough to continue to maintain the link. Then, after e-tirement at the end of 2001, I setup patrickWeb. For the first year I rented some server space in New York […]
Home Automation – Part 3 (System Design)
The overall system design for home automation offers many choices. The two extremes are highly decentralized and highly centralized. The decentralized is to have a subsystems for each functional area — security, audio distribution, solar shades, irrigation, etc. The centralized approach would utilize a central control computer to interconnect and supervise all activities and functions, […]
Home Automation – Part 2 (Planning)
The most important step in home automation is planning. You can spend more than all of your money in addition to getting very frustrated if you don’t have a good plan. The great thing about home automation is that you can do almost anything. That can also be the greatest pitfall and turn into a […]
