Posts by algol60forever

Amazon has repackaged surveillance capitalism as reality TV

Re: Wildlife Camera

It seems that Amazon acquired Blink in 2017...oops.

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

Re: Only just started with Home Automation

I wrestled with HA and OpenHab but settled on Domoticz. It seems to have just enough smarts without reaching for a forum or manual immediately. It will operate very nicely with your Zigbee kit and it has a LUA scripting setup for event management and a mobile app.

Den Automation raised millions to 'reinvent' the light switch. Now it's lights out for startup

Useful home automation

Following a burglary (200 others taken into consideration when they caught him) we had an alarm fitted. You pay £25/month for not a lot that eventually failed - 'it must have been a moth, sir'. Threw them out but kept the dummy wall box. I got a Homewizard (now bought by Smartwares) and added a door switch, PIR, a smoke alarm and a couple of plug switches. The app also allowed third party devices like cameras to be integrated. You can program the system to take daylight hours into account and set the system to 'holiday' when you're out. It paid for itself in about 12 months. The app has seen a few updates and the SMS messaging works fine and I use Tasker on the mobile to monitor email and SMS for high-priority messages. I definitely would repeat the process if the company failed and I certainly wouldn't recommend a standard alarm service.

We have a winner! Fresh Linux Mint 17.1 – hands down the best

XP users start here...

I'm reasonably sure that any XP users will not be able to upgrade to a later win OS simply because their equipment will not pass the hardware check. I tried it on my AMD64 HP desktop about 18 months ago - it failed miserably. Now, I have Mint 17 on this, Debian+XFCE on my server and Xubuntu on my even older Acer laptop. Now, if I could just decide on a replacement toolkit for a Access-based app my wife uses....

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Upgrading XP to 8 - that'll be a new computer, then.

This is the reason I've moved my hardware over to Linux. I can't upgrade XP, even if I wanted to, since 8 will not install - despite having business-class machines with 64bit processors and plenty of ram. Linux has proven incredibly stable, responsive and easy to manage. My laptop now boots in 45sec and shuts down in 15sec (Xubuntu). I suspect the majority of users are put off by the plethora of distributions and don't realise how simple the installation and migration (to other distributions) has become.