Pokemon Reality

The last two weeks have reminded me that I'm old and I blame Pokemon Go.  I'm a half-generation too old even to approach it as a nostalgia item.  Also, the MSD (Middle School Daughter, for those of you that had forgotten) is too tied up in UnderTale and listening to 8-bit soundtracks to care about Pikachu and friends.  No, my generation got Garbage Pail Kids and ain't no one making a phone game out of those.

(Source: Geekyrant.com)

So, I'm old because I don't want to go chasing around the southwestern american desert in the summer racking up data charges looking for virtual cockfighting contestants.  Instead, I want to look at the whole phenomenon as the first real use of Augmented Reality in a marketing campaign.

Qioto

Source

Today, I want to take a second to make a more personal post.  This will be less about the Internet of Things (however I choose to define it) and more about this blog and IoT information resources.  Fair warning.

Straight Outta Nowhere

A couple of months ago, I received direct message via twitter from some dude asking if I was interested in writing for his up and coming website.  After some back and forth, I decided that, yes, I have the time for this.  More importantly, as I learned more about what they were trying to do, I realized that I wanted to write for Qioto whether I had the time or not.  (Then I was employed, so time really was an issue.  Now I'm not traditionally employed and the actual writing is not much of an issue.)

Autonomous Morality

Ego Morality

Today's topic is how 'morality' will be programmed into autonomous vehicles.  There has been some recurring press on this issue over the last month and I've had some time to formulate my thoughts on this topic.  It is tough as, like most of first-world humanity, I think I'm moral but I've never faced the really tough life-and-death moral decisions that put that assertion to the test.  Most of my morality training has come from Star Trek, and that's not bad, but it is fairly basic and presumes that I'm sitting on the bridge of a star ship in orbit, debating the gray areas of the Prime Directive.  I hope I never have to even that.  Should it happen though, I'm pretty sure that if I have the time to think through the decision, I'll do the right thing.

But, that's the catch: 'if I have the time to think it through'.  The area where this is most likely to happen in my current life path is when I drive.  It is easily the most dangerous thing that I do on a daily/weekly/monthly basis (I ski and take some bigger risks there, but am only able to get in about twelve days a year).  Driving is a task that, when it goes south, will happen too quickly for my frontal lobe to override my learned motor skills and lizard brain reflexes.  Reflexes that have been fine tuned over hundreds of thousands of years to keep the individual alive.

Home Chain

Blockchain This

I've been doing a lot of thinking about Blockchain recently because there have been several articles about how it might be the answer to Internet of Things security concerns among many, many other things.  Companies with names like Microsoft, Intel and IBM have started whole divisions and more, betting big that Blockchain style distributed security is how the world will work.  It is the ultimate panacea that will save us all from ourselves.

That's (Smart) Entertainment, Part 2: Devices

Previously, On the Internet of Schmoid...

Last week, I blew through nearly seven hundred words to come to the inescapable conclusion that WiFi changed the world.  That Sonos was the first real example of how the Internet of Things was going to change the custom installation world.  And all of that was really earth shaking news to all of you.  But only if you haven't ventured out of your 1990's home theater watching endless loops of the Matrix in the last two decades.  So, um yeah.  Let's move on.

This week, I'm going to step out on a limb and make some actual hard core recommendations.  Two to be precise: Harmony and Chromecast.  Whether these are things that you should buy for yourself or not, that I leave up to you, but they should be part of the consideration set.  The reason I'm going to focus on these two devices in not because they offer the best picture or sound or are even best in their class.  What's more important it that they changed how people think about their entertainment control.

That's (Smart) Entertainment, Part 1: Services

That Old Thing?

Home entertainment is arguably the first category of consumer electronics to truly go 'smart' in the smart home sense.  People have been trying to automate the couch viewing experience for decades now with mixed results.  Companies like Crestron, Control4 and Kaleidescape have been working on signal distribution, control for as along as the content has become digital.  And while those companies and many more have done some incredible things, the world has changed in a few fundamental ways that have forced them, the component (TV, receiver) manufactures and the distribution companies themselves to re-evaluate the concept of 'Home Entertainment.'

Smart Power

Only As Smart As What It Eats

One of the basics of any Smart Home that is often just assumed is that all of our switches and bulbs and voice activated toilet brushes run on electricity.  To take it farther, most of them control electricity whether by turning a light on or off, activating an appliance or changing your home's temperature when a presence is detected.  All of these things are either starting or stopping the flow of electrons through out your home.  These electrons are the food that your house eats.

But Schmoid, I can hear you say, electrons are electrons.  There aren't some that are better for your home than others, right?  There aren't high protein electrons or gluten-free electrons.  There's just electrons and they don't change on any level whether they were generated by burning coal or exposing photo-voltaic panels to sunlight.  You are correct, I reply.  But electrons aren't the only aspect here.  There's also 'Smart'.