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)

Microsoft HoloLens

The latest and greatest from Microsoft is out and its a 3D Glass to create an Augmented reality interface for you to interact with a system to best of my knowledge.

The first impression I got is, its a good Gaming interface. The Kinect and XBox together makes a good gaming environment to me as I hate having to carry wands in my hand. Imagine now the TV also removed from the mix and the objects all hang around you, With the aptly lighted room, you can probably have a much better experience with may be part of the image on the screen and the rest of the strip spread out infront of you in virtual reality. Much more live experience. And possibility for accessories like Boots and gloves to give you feedback on contact with  other objects! The experience can be good, geek worthy, atleast!

In a real world, where do I use it? I can think of designers, Scientists, using it, with imaginary objects flying all around us as in Iron Man Design room. Again, pretty snazzy at that! e-Commerce also has a potential use.

Will I be thrilled to have a normal computer screen and windows floating around me in virtual field when I want to use it to say send a mail or deal with files like in Mission impossible or Minority Report? May be not. Again, for a social interaction scenario like Skype call or facetime call, it may be interesting. Not so much for facebook!

I understand these interfaces also can change if we have new methods to interact with the ether world. At this point, I do not fancy myself having to wear some dorky glass and acting crazy trying to grab or nudge invisible objects!

Another reason I am not betting with this is that, Microsoft do not have a history of making something like these a success. XBox was a pleasant surprise to me. And they have a very bad history of stretching their timelines beyond reason.

Google glass has come and withdrawn for the time. Not sure if it will resurface. Only time can tell where these products will lead us. If not Microsoft, lets hope that this will kindle some ideas elsewhere where it will come out as a usable product!

Wake up in a brief!

Voice Brief is an app that can read out some of the things you otherwise will be skimming through in your morning routines. I had downloaded this earlier and stopped using since I am no CEO and did not fancy my mails and facebook posts read out loud to every one around.

But that does not take away anything from the app and the idea itself. You cannot discount the easiness with which you can have the stuff read out to you when you take a bath with out having to touch your iOS device with your soapy wet hands often!

It does not give the full feel of seeing the video or image spilled all over in the social carpet, but nonetheless its an easy and quick way if you are in a hurry.

Now that I have committed myself to a SONOS for my whole home audio, I wanted to check if I can get this audio coming out of the SONOS speakers. (Even before that,  Can I have a SONOS speaker in the bathroom. I was not all in for having a speaker in the bathroom, but sometimes, it may prove to be useful, especially if you plan to have a whole house announcement system or if you do not want to miss out on any of your audio programs or would like to listen to Music in bathroom)

Straight answer is since I have a work around to airplay, I can. And Play 1 is designed to be Humidity resistant. And I understand SONOS trying to keep their service focus clearly defined.

Given all this one clean solution I would look for is to have a service which can stream audio to SONOS with this capability so that choosing that channel will give a clean solution.

I am yet to come across with such a channel, and not sure how to create one if I require to. Anyone got any ideas?

Update: I found the following two sites which gives some possible approach to this. One which tells me how to add a streaming URL to the SONOS and one which tells which is a free Streaming server. Hmm, now its about how to build a stream from your sources to read out. Will Mac have a work flow to read out all my latest mails and facebook posts and stuffs like that?

Phew! Now I have the Hue!

I was just wishful thinking about the Hue from Philips and inquired with my Co-Bro(Who has links to Philips) if we can source Hue from Singapore as it is not available in India. (Sourcing from US had its own challenges as the voltage will not match-Update: I came across some post which said Philips Hue Bulbs are 110-240 Compatible. Not sure.) He said that its not easy. I left it there as I was not fully into buying it anyways.

Then a few days later, I was told to travel to Singapore on an official matter! Hue was again getting some traction and I went and did some research. The price was double that in US as with many stuffs in Singapore is, But then I decided to take the plunge and got the starter kit!

Back in India, I connected and tried it. The kit comes with three bulbs and one connector hub which is a mandatory requirement for you to control the light except for on and off. (Was not aware of it before, But Luckily I went for the starter pack and the decision paid off) The Hub need to be connected via Ethernet port and you have to have it plugged into the power. I am not sure if this will end up having some issue if I distribute the bulbs now in the house as the individual bulbs I am not hooking explicitly to the WiFi. Some research is required to find out. Will update if I have some info on this, later/

The device worked as promised. I could turn it on and off at will, change colors using the app! A nice touch is that there is widget available to put the functionality on to the Widget screen of iPhone! I tried one of the music driven app from the app store but that did not seem to work. I might have missed out some thing so once again, will need some research on it. If it does work, it will be great if we plan any party! Disco music lights! 

Play Bar and Play Five

When I decided to go with SONOS for my distributed music, I had a long list of Speakers added to my wishlist in Amazon and I used to look back at it and wonder if I will ever get them. Now, few months down the timeline, I have most of them and they have helped me to improve my music listening practice much!

The Play1s I got first was joined by the 2 Play 5s and one Play bar recently. I connected the Play Bar to the TV and the voice was not coming:-( Then the SONOS told me to check if the Digital Audio on the TV was on. Changed the Digital Audio from Auto to PC and the audio started coming out of the Power Bar! What a relief!

Then I realized I can channel the audio from the TV to any room I want! So if I want to just push the audio when the news is playing to another room or when a song is going into yet another, it was all possible! That was an interesting feature!

I did not have the SONOS Base as I was not fully convinced of the need. Now having seen all the speakers, may be I will get one of those too some day!

Mean time, I had some challenge with the network in a room upstairs as the repeater there was dropping the connection intermittently. And I had exhausted the budget with all the other components. So I dropped a note to the Sales Head and promptly came the replay that they can ship me a Bridge free of cost! And that gift came in last week! (Thanks a lot, folks, your service is also as good as your products!) Now the network issue is kind of gone, (Unless the stream itself is slow due to my network capacity limitation)

Overall, a wonderful experience! I am so happy I went the SONOS way!