Kitchen Farming and technology

I love the concept of harvesting your vegetables from your own backyard. Why I do not do that already? Well, one is you have to spend some time with the plants, water them, understand them better, prune them in some cases, feed them and generally tend to them. Isn't that fun? Yes it is. Will you be able to do it every day? I am right on the fence on that. Not that I want to ignore, but I can forget. I can be away, I am down right lazy.

You have to remember is I am not talking about doing farming as your primary source of Income or even any source of income. Its not even going to be your only source of food. Far from it. Its about having a basket full of vegetables and fruits freshly plucked from your garden sitting on your kitchen slab atleast once a week.

I am sure many are there in my league. Now what all these can technology  address?
To start with, first thing there are quite a few sites which talk about what can be planted and how and when. There are, if you are in India, agriculture offices across the country which can help you. Or you can ask the grandma or grandpa who had done it successfully!

You can get the seeds/saplings, plant them with a small spade or some sharp stuff if its handy. You can pour the first doze of water, and you are on the way.

Watering the plants is one major act. This has to happen regularly. The drip irrigation system  can reduce the amount of water you send into each sapling enhancing its absorption. You can set an alarm which can remind you to open or close the tap. Or you can have a gadget do this for you. There is a DIY version explained here. Or you can go for one from Parrot which is a bluetooth sensor which can read four parameters like humidity, fertilizer, sun and wind and report it back to you. It can cover a small bed of plants provided they all have comparable conditions.

There are also self contained techno green house solutions in the making like Niwa of which I have my own reservations:-)

There are many others which will make you feel gardening can be easy. But the fact remains that controlling the pests and caring for the plant is a lot more personal and that is what makes it fun.

SONOS, Will you listen to these others?

SONOS, I am so used to them  playing some audio around now. Its a great feeling to be able to just search a track and play it quickly. (Inspite of the Bridge being there, I still get some drops of signals. May be due to the Internet is dropping intermittently. Slightly larger tracks are not streaming at times)

I move them around once in a while, And it comes up on play quickly again. I like that flexibility and ease.

With a lot of home automation planned, I was checking out how easy it will be to automate SONOS. When I say automate SONOS, I do not mean just play and pause a track planned before. What I mean is play the alerts through SONOS if possible dipping the track voice. Being able to use my iOS mics to announce something across into some room of choice.

SONOS Voice is an app which caters to the second use case some what. So I will have a PA system with a small app loaded into all my iOS devices. Not sure how reliable the app is, but for the time, it will do.

For the first one, things are not that easy. There is no quick way to automate SONOS. I went all over the net and some sites have some promising options. But there are none which will immediately solve it and not meant for non programmers mostly.

There are Hubs which already built in automation of SONOS into their workflows, Ninja Sphere for one.

Apple and SONOS do not have a good working relation in the past, But I do hope when the Homekit takes off, SONOS will implement the required hooks for Homekit into their App. That will make a world of difference to people who are using SONOS.

Pick your friends and foes

When you are into Gadgets, you tend to buy all sorts of stuff. Like me, I have couple of Bluetooth headsets (Bluetooth never worked for me well) One projector, A Handy Doc Scanner, A Livescribe pen, a Belkin OBD adapter, and the list goes on. Most of these, I do not use anymore. Some, I am happy I picked up.

I picked many of these stuff for not just its geeky value. I picked because I had a plan. I had a plan to use them in a business when I decide to switch. But the challenge was, until then, they had hardly any use. And some of the products had some short comings.

The Projector from Axxa was a very handy one with LED projection technology. But the built quality was very poor and soon it started having issues with connectivity. The HDMI failed first. And the color did not come through well when I connected the iPad using their connector any more and soon it started gathering dust some place.

The bluetooths, one from Plantronics, the loop broke. So I ended up not using them, and the battery lost its life and it does not charge any more to any usable state. The same issue happened with my Jaybird over the head headset. Both these had Bluetooth and had charge retention  issues after a while. May be things are better now with the Bluetooth 4.0, but as of now, I am scared off from the bluetooth headsets:)

The Handy scanner was a neat stuff which says you can scan all sorts of stuff when you are on the move. It sucks in the doc from one end and spits it out from the other and in the process scans the document. It had issues soon after I got it. The scanning  head used to get dirty and the scanning used to be all patchy. And the software accompanied also did not give too good a result.

Livescribe pens I did use for some time. But like any device with chargeable battery, it died since I stopped using it for some time in between. The specialized refills were to blame as I had to get it from US and during that time, it just stayed in  the draw.

Now, I have changed my strategy a bit. When I make large investments, I pick a platform. It has its own merits. Evaluate your platform well, and pick a product which does one thing, and that one thing well. And also see how it is open for integration to the whole story if you need it to, later.

SONOS, Philips HUE, Apple, all fall into my plan thus. There is a bit of Microsoft as in XBOX and a bit of Google as in well, google:-)

I am looking to identify one platform for my Security cameras now. There are many out there but I am not convinced about any at the moment. iSmartAlarm is very  high in the list with their iKeepCamera, but as I said, yet to take the plunge. I have looked at other products too, like iSmartThings, DropCam, Canary, (all in paper, never tried hands on yet) some are still presenting their case and some have fallen short. (DropCam for the simple reason of the heavy netusage. I do not have a 50GB upload bandwidth to plan for just a camera. Not yet)