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A simple blog about all things in the world that is ridikulouse.

Technological steps, are man kinds greatest achievements

Not a Fighter, but a lover of Tech.

Love of the internet

The Internet is the final frontier for open connected networks, it promotes speech and advances knowledge for any mere person. The internet is fast becoming a need rather a want, and it is recognised by the UN as a necessity for the modern person.

Photography

Photography is more than just Art and expression, it is the manipulation of the light and provokes emotion and memories.

Have a look around

The articles on this blog represent my thoughts and views at the time of writing, I can always change my views through further education...please don't hold me against my views. Some of the articles have been written to assist anyone else with similar issues - it also helps me to remember. Hope you get something out of this.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Home Automation

The connected home and home automation is starting to gain some traction, and I'm deadly interested in being able to automate my home. On the one hand I dream of the days where our lives will be like the Jetsons, and on the other hand I'm running out of time in my life to do the small things.

There's a lot of definitions around the connected home, and I don't know whether they would all apply to me. I like to think of Home Automation as something that will give you more time in your life by automating some of the common things that you would do during a day at home.

I previously tried to do some home automation but there was a lot of fiddling around. And, the interface to control many of the devices around your home was not as user friendly. And, in a home where you are trying to convince your better half that it will make their lives easier, a simple thing such as a remote or a computer really is a hard sell.

But now, it is 2017. We now have access to a wide variety of methods to use to interface with Home Automation tools. My favorite is the Google Home or the Amazon Echo, they provide not only the voice commands to interact with a various number of devices but also enable me to interface with a wide variety of devices. This, I believe, is fundamental in having a connected home. The voice is something that many people have - and it is not something that you have to fumble around like a remote or your phone. Its quick and responsive.

Secondly, it 2017. We all would have accumulated a wide variety of smart phones over the years. Some people may have ended up selling their smartphones, trading it in, or handing it away. However, in my case I have managed to save about 5-6 smart phones (one of which is an iPhone, which I'm only using as a music player for a dock). However, these smartphones are fundamentally a computer in your pocket with a phone feature. Many of these devices are also very powerful, more powerful for what they at times needed to be. My goal is to look to re-purpose these phones as touch interfaces that I can mount to the wall etc... And to do this, I want to get rid of the exterior of phone and build out a common cohesive casing that I can place the inside components and only showing the touch interface - one that can be mounted to a wall and still look aesthetically pleasing.

Finally, it is 2017. The start ups have increased over the years. With sites such as Kickstarter and Indigogo there are many startups being able to show their ideas and also crowd source funding to launch their products. 

This series of blog posts will be dedicated towards Home Automation, I'll talk through which area that I'm looking to automate and also my thought process on the type of products.

I hope this will help others in venturing into the Connected Home/Home Automation area.

Stay Tuned.


Private Internet Access (PIA) client on Ubuntu

One of my VPN services that I regularly use is Private Internet Access. I've use it on a number of devices time to time, and I recently updated one of my laptops to Ubuntu 17.x only to find that the PIA client would freeze during connection.

After digging through a number of forums, I ran into an obscure comment where someone had a similar problem (not specifically freezing, but that it just didn't work).

The comment said that they didn't have ifconfig installed. I ran out of ideas, and thought why not give it a try. So I fired up my terminal and punched in ifconfig to see the results.

Sure enough I was told that ifconfig did not exist.

So the next step was to try and install it, I punched in

sudo apt install net-tools

Once it installed 194Kb, I tried PIA again.. and SUCCESS! it worked.

Just wished that this was mentioned in the PIA help documents.