IBM Happenings: January 2007
The month of January at IBM was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I was particularly proud to see IBM surpass its own record and earn more U.S. patents than any other company for the fourteenth consecutive year. Many useful products and services will come from those […]
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 […]
Home Automation Hobby
Home automation has been one of my hobbies for more than twenty-five years. In the early days it was mostly lighting control using X10 technology. There was a PC program written by a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center that calculated the precise time of the daily sunset and at that time signal went across […]
Visa 2000
The upcoming trip to China requires a visa and the visa application requires a passport photo. The instructions were clear that it should not be a “home photo”. I was anxious to get the application in the mail and was confident that the processor of the application would not reject my photo printed from the […]