thebaldgeek

Most of you would know that I am addicted to Kickstarter.
It’s a good thing my budget is more limited that my desires, or else I would be swamped by amazing Kickstarter projects.

Every now and then, a project comes along that fits me like a glove and I can’t say no……
A home automation centric router is one such project.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2037429657/almond-80211ac-touchscreen-wifi-router-smart-home

I backed it. I wanted it soooooo bad……

You see we had been using the same router for the past, oh, about 9 years…. I had been using it in Australia before we left…. and it was dying. Big time.
We were all used to power cycling it every week or less. It was the only way to get ‘the internet’ back up and running.
Not only but it was a little slow. We were barely getting our rated 25/25mB/s up/down speed. (yeah yeah BA, cry me a virtual reality river).

We will talk about it more in this blog, but we run a bit of home automation stuff at home, surprisingly, not all of it is Opto gear and so I was looking for two things, a faster router and a way to tie all my home automation hardware and software together.
That Kickstarter router seemed to offer both.

One of the cool things about Kickstarter is that you get to get your hands on stuff before it’s ready for prime time.
One of the bad things about Kickstarter is that you get to get your hands on stuff before it’s ready for prime time.

Most of the time, this is more cool than bad because if the hardware is good, the rest can be fixed with updates.
Most of my Kickstarter projects are late because the hardware takes longer than they expect to deliver.
The router was on time.
The software was not ready.
They flat out said, ‘we are going to ship a non-functional router’. By then it’s too late to pull out, they have my money…….

Long story blogged, it sat on my shelf for a few months before they ‘shipped’ some ‘working’ software (called firmware, but don’t judge me – I’m blogging to a wide tech range of readers).
Only, it was not working.

I spent hours and hours trying to get it working thinking they would not ship something that flat out does not work.
Posted on their forums my issues, within an hour or so, they posted; ‘yeah, we know it’s broken, but it mostly works’.
I was stunned.
And I was very annoyed that I spent around 5 solid hours trying to get it going (and on top of that, my whole website / home network was down for that 5 hours and I had to call Verizon twice to get the router onto their network – I hate talking on the phone!).

So, I let it sit.
Another update was shipped. I read the forums first, it was also wonky, so I let it slide.
Another update was shipped…..It sounded good.
We are now a solid year since I have had the hardware, a year of weekly, biweekly rebooting my router and putting up with slow(ish) Internet – I am not happy…. I have paid good money and for some crappy software development team, I should have my project…. I mean it’s been a year!!!! How hard can it be to write some router software in Linux?
Another update shipped.
I called Verizon, swapped out the router and spent a few more hours trying to get it going……
Yeah, well, since it’s been a year, and they have totally failed to deliver, they are getting better at not telling the exact truth on their forums……..
So, I have had it.
Enough.
We have got ourselves a paper weight home automation router.
I am soooooo very annoyed.
We just don’t have the money to throw at these guys and not have them deliver something so basic.
I also do NOT have the time to waste trying to get something working that they know full well is not working, but shipped as if it is.

I will never (ever) buy or back another Securifi product again.

Last week we bought an Asus router.
It works a treat.
(I will figure out a different way of binding my home automation gear together).

Ok, I think I am done with blogging 100% about IoT.

I have been blogging about iot and only iot like a mad man…..
We came up for air last a few weeks back while in Denver and thought ‘What am I doing with this blog?’.

Going back to October 2014, I found the blog post that started it all (just after my trip back home to Australia);
https://thebaldgeek.net/index.php/2014/10/19/australia-2014/
Back then I said;

With regard to this blog, I had a chat to my mates over there and they all gave me a bit of a different view on the blog with one common thread…….. They all said they enjoy reading what I am up to.
So, with that in mind, I will be blogging (well, plan to blog) a little more free and lose…. Rather than ‘waiting’ till I have a structured blog in mind and take some time to get it together, I am going to try and just blog stuff as it happens. Less structured, less formatted, more of a live brain dump.
The conciseness among my mates is that you all like different aspects of what we are up to and you are more than happy to do the censoring, long or short, tech or lifestyle, whatever I blog, you guys assure me you will sift it and pick the bits that interest you, but you want the tap opened a bit more.

I guess that’s what I have been doing, but it seems to have turned away from what I am doing, to what I am interested in doing.
They are not really the same thing.

In fact, I think the blog, like IoT, has become rather noisy. Me shouting into a vacuum, just another noisy news aggregate. A guy with an opinion and an internet connection.
When I Googled opinion, I found this; “a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty”.

That’s me right there. I do not have complete certainty on any of this IoT stuff, so why am I screaming about it?
Who am I screaming to? What action do I want them to take as a result of my screaming?
See to me, it’s one thing to talk about IoT, and another to have the tone of doing something about it. I don’t think I was either.

So, 6 months latter, now what?

(Only 4?).

Short version: I am running into problems 1 and 4.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/the-internet-of-things-has-four-big-data-problems.html

The Internet of Things (IoT) has a data problem. Well, four data problems. Walking the halls of CES in Las Vegas last week, it’s abundantly clear that the IoT is hot. Everyone is claiming to be the world’s smartest something. But that sprawl of devices, lacking context, with fragmented user groups, is a huge challenge for the burgeoning industry.

What the IoT needs is data. Big data and the IoT are two sides of the same coin. The IoT collects data from myriad sensors; that data is classified, organized, and used to make automated decisions; and the IoT, in turn, acts on it. It’s precisely this ever-accelerating feedback loop that makes the coin as a whole so compelling.

Nowhere are the IoT’s data problems more obvious than with that darling of the connected tomorrow known as the wearable. Yet, few people seem to want to discuss these problems:

Long version: For the link following adverse, here is problem 1;

Problem one: Nobody will wear 50 devices

If there’s one lesson today’s IoT start-ups have learned from their failed science project predecessors, it’s that things need to be simple and turnkey. As a result, devices are designed to do one thing really well. A corollary of this is that there’s far too much specialization happening — a device specifically, narrowly designed to measure sleep, or eating speed, or knee health.

Unfortunately, nobody’s going to charge, manage, and wear 50 devices, looking like a demented garage-sale cyborg.

I’m running out of wrists….. I have three devices and only two hands.
Thankfully, one of the devices (due next month from Kickstarter) is to be glued to my body under my rib cage… No, I’m not kidding. It comes with a years supply of special conductive patches that last around a week (or longer if I don’t shower).
Yes, photos will follow its arrival. Oh, and thats enough out of you Gary.
The other device is a wrist mounted ‘watch’. It will track my activity like nothing else (or so Kickstarter promise).

Point is, I totally agree. I am already charging too many devices as it is and now I just added two more into the mix.
This then flows only too nicely into problem number 4.

Problem four: Context is everything

If data doesn’t change your behavior, why bother collecting it? Perhaps the biggest data problem the IoT faces is correlating the data it collects with actions you can take. Consider V1bes, which calls itself a “mind app.” It measures stress levels and brain activity. Sociometric Solutions does the same thing by listening to the tone of my voice, and can predict my stress levels accurately.

That sounds useful: it’d be great to see how stressed I was at a particular time, or when my brain was most active. But unless I can see the person to whom I was talking, or hear the words I was thinking about, at that time, it’s hard to do anything about it. The data tells me I’m stressed; it doesn’t tell me who’s triggering my chronic depression or who makes my eyes light up.

This is so spot on. The rib sensor got my money for two reasons, Firstly, its going to give me accurate heart rate, but equally important, it is one of the few devices that promises to measure my stress level.
But, problem 4 then raises its head… Ok, rib sensor tells me I had a stressful day, but why? It measures, and equally important to me, quantifies that stress (ie, on a scale of 1 to 10, how stressed was I?), but it offers zero reasons why.

Then we are back to problem 1. I now have 3 devices, 4 if you count the body analyzer in the bathroom that I stand on every morning.
One guess how many apps I have….. Yup. 4. And none of them know about the other. None of them share or offer joint insights to my life.
It has (will) placed an even greater burden on me to keep track of all this data and figure out what it all means.
I did all this to gain greater insight to my life and to get answers, not to be stressed out over the data I am collecting on myself!

Big Data and IoT has a lot of work to do…….

Technical, but important.

Containers are the new VM.

This is a great intro and overview to a (the next) new wave of deploying computer operating systems.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/01/what-containers-can-do-for-you.html

The industry standard today is to use Virtual Machines (VMs) to run software applications. VMs run applications inside a guest Operating System, which runs on virtual hardware powered by the server’s host OS.

VMs are great at providing full process isolation for applications: there are very few ways a problem in the host operating system can affect the software running in the guest operating system, and vice-versa. But this isolation comes at great cost — the computational overhead spent virtualizing hardware for a guest OS to use is substantial.

Containers take a different approach: by leveraging the low-level mechanics of the host operating system, containers provide most of the isolation of virtual machines at a fraction of the computing power.

What we are talking about is running a computer on a computer…. Well, sort of… In fact, we are running part of a computer on a full computer…. No, that’s not really any better is it?
Ok, we have a full blown computer which needs an operating system, its there and running, but then you run a program (a container) that is another computer.
So yeah, the program is another instance of a computer. So in the end, you have two computers running on the one computer. Double your fun for one instance of hardware…. Oh, and of course you can run more than one container on a computer.

This is a really big deal.

Gary, you will be pleased to know;

Containers are still Linux-only for now, but Microsoft is hard at work on its own implementation, called Windows Server Containers.

Everyone will get in on this. Not Joe Public, but most computer guys will end up running this at some point in their life I suspect. Sooner rather than latter.

Just how light weight is a container?
Here is a nice how-to for running one on a Raspberry Pi.
https://resin.io/blog/docker-on-raspberry-pi-in-4-simple-steps/

Yeah, two computers running on a Pi. Thats impressive.

Now, if I could just trade my hard drive for another life so I had time to mess with this stuff……