Terraced House, 2 Bedrooms, 1 Bathroom, 2 Receptions, South Facing Garden £157,500

Is anyone looking for a 2 bed house in Southampton?!

See Tepilo for more information, photos, floor plans and to book a viewing.

It looks 2009 is the year for people I work with to start blogging, and they’re all on Twitter… coincidence? So if you’re looking for a good read, you might like to check them out. Starting with the newest blog…

October 2009

Ed’s World (@ejellard) Off to a flying start with some great home automation with arduino, Home Easy, MQTT and a helping of hackery.

Limboworld’s blog (@jaylimburn) Conducting a scientific experiment in to the value of blogging, so make sure you get as many people to read it as possible! Some good DIY posts to kick things off. (There would have been a few DIY posts here if I’d started this blog before fitting the kitchen!)

September 2009

The World Of Gavin (@gavinwillingham) Definite technology slant with an enjoyable hint of grumpy old man which I’m definitely hoping will continue!

April 2009

Cobweb (@techcobweb)

Some really varied arduino projects in addition to home automation and tweeting cats. While the only circuit I’ve cobbled together recently is sitting in an ice cream tub in the porch, Mike is a master at packaging projects- his scalextric race timer is a work of art!

May 2006 (so blogging way longer than the rest of us!)

Nigel’s blog (@planetf1)

Not as easy to sum up given the number of posts but a distinct focus on technology of various kinds. Probably need to run it through wordle to get a better idea!

The trouble with making lists like this is that I am bound to have missed a few! I’ll just sneakily add more if I have… which reminds me, I was going to make more of an effort with a blogroll at some point soon.

Finally completed one of my least favourite jobs for another year: buying insurance. It doesn’t seem to get any easier, even with the internet and all the price comparison sites. Now there are cash back sites to take in to account as well! Of course it’s only an issue because a competitive renewal quote is apparently too much to ask*. If an insurance company is going to make me haggle with them for a renewal, they’re going to have to do pretty well to overcome my sheer bloody mindedness to go elsewhere on principal. So goodbye Aviva then!

I phoned to encounter the usual menu system, only these days you get to speak the answer. Unsurprisingly the voice recognition didn’t do too well with my request to discuss car and home insurance, and I had to point out it was only a computer a few times before it gave up and put me through. I’d gone with Aviva last year because they had a discount for having both policies with them, but that doesn’t mean they can actually cope with discussing both at the same time. Must be on a whole different web page in the call centre! The first lady I spoke to could only handle home insurance, and give her credit, she did reduce the quote a bit before putting me through to the car insurance line… which was a complete waste of time. He seemed a bit surprised that I wasn’t just phoning up to pay and wouldn’t even contemplate the idea of reducing the price- well done, you just lost car and home insurance business!

The search for a new deal was all fairly standard stuff (web site designers please note, I’d much rather type a date than picking from a list of years as long as your arm!) however I do think companies are losing a lot of business with their unhelpful web sites. I filled in what seemed like an endless stream of almost identical (or in some cases only barely rebranded) forms and at various points just aborted because, basically, computers are dumb. It would be nice to fill in most of the details online but request a call to finalise the process; better than answering a ton of questions on the phone, but with the ability to have any questions answered and do a bit of haggling with a real person.

(* Until recently I’d been lucky enough to renew the same car insurance a few years in a row. That was until I had to make a small claim, whereupon their quote shot up which is just bonkers. Given the number of years I’d been paying insurance without making any claims, you’d thing they’d want to keep me to get some of that money back! Spreadsheet says no though, so someone else is getting the money they could have had.)

Well, married for almost two months but finally got round to posting something after the honeymoon, choosing photos, and post-wedding distractions! After much planning (largely by Jo of course!) the day was fantastic- it couldn’t have gone better. The main thing of course was that we did indeed get married… in Basingstoke. Admittedly not the obvious choice, but being a registry office helped the budget, and it was the nicest one we found:

It even had a park right next door, perfect for some wedding photos, for which we were very lucky to have a photographer in the family! The only slight downside to Basingstoke was where to go after getting married. By some amazing luck we finally stumbled on The Old House Hotel which wasn’t too bad a journey- we didn’t lose any of the guests at least, although I think there were a few sat nav inspired scenic routes along the way!

The next hop on our touring wedding was much shorter: just round the corner to the Meon Valley hotel, where I have very fond memories of an enormous chocolate cake. Special thanks to Jo’s sister’s boyfriend for suggesting ‘The Final Countdown’ as the last song, and Nick the DJ for actually playing it- that’ll teach us not to have a play list! (Well, no play list but Abba and Oasis were banned!)

Thanks to everyone who came to celebrate with us, making it such a wonderful day.

As it says on the box…

…the cards for the Information On Demand 2009 conference arrived today! Hopefully they should help people pick out the best sessions for their agenda, and get more people to join other MDM Workbench developers at our developerWorks space.

I’ve been meaning to post a follow-up to ‘Cheap low power home server options‘ for a while; partly for my own curiosity (I wonder what server I’d choose if I was looking now), and partly because more and more people seem to be looking for one (based on the highly scientific hit count for the original post, which is almost twice as popular as the second place post).

Rich is considering a SheevaPlug for example, some neat looking machines crop up on the Smart Home Blog now and then, and of course there’s the hugely popular (in Hursley at least!) Viglen MPC-L, which appeared just after I got my Netvoyager (still very pleased with my choice- up for 425 days and counting!)

The question is, what server are you using? And would you recommend it?! It’d be great to hear some experiences, whether you’re happy fighting something as small as a NSLU2, decided on a server anyone could use, counted the pennies, or splashed out on something more expensive.

Reentry from honeymoon to real life was softened a bit by this…

…which was waiting for us when we got home this morning.  Looks like the cake fairy got in while we were away! And the milk fairy had restocked the fridge so we could start making up for missed tea without any shopping delays!

It’s been a fantastic September so far, but it’s not over yet. The rest of the month I will mostly be:

• Married!
• Unpacking
• Going back to work tomorrow- urg!
• Catching up (what’s been happing the last few weeks? Anything interesting?)
• Writing lots of thank you letters
• Looking at wedding photos
• Looking at honeymoon photos
• Finding out why @jthouse is frozen
• Working on my second CurrentCost development board circuit (this time sensing pipe temperature- any clues?!) inspired by the homecamp blog
• Taking things apart
• Going to another wedding!
• Other stuff I’ll find out about when I risk looking at my inbox in the morning

But first, of course, I’ll be eating cake! (And sleeping!)

I recently discovered that someone has created a useful looking Home Easy Hacking Wiki to pull together what information there currently is about hacking a range or related home automation hardware. Unfortunately it doesn’t yet answer Jerd’s question about the automatic protocol, so if you’ve got something working, it would be fantastic if you could add a few more details to the wiki.

Hoping to get back to finishing off a Freeduino Home Easy controller before too much longer- I didn’t even get as far as unwrapping the transmitter last time! I’m currently wondering if the Finite State Machine library that Mike used in his latest project would be useful to handle transmitting and receiving from the same controller.

If you’ve done anything like this before, any tips would be most welcome!

Update: maybe the Southampton Hack Day (via Benjie) would be a suitable opportunity to work on this. (4 Sept 2009)

Update: Thanks to Paul’s post I’ve just discovered another page documenting various 433 MHz AM signals, including devices using PT2262/PT2272 encoder/decoder chips, which klik-aan klik-uit uses apparently. (24 Sept 2009)

And there’s more:

Must get round to finishing this off myself sometime soon! Here are a couple more people who have Home Easy working with the Arduino:

• AM Transmitters Arrived
• BBSB Meets Arduino (Part 3) Home Easy to BBSB Repeater

(29 Oct 2009)

Another random selection of MDM related links, this time all turning up in my inbox at about the same time. The first one is from a five part series on SearchSOA.com which reminded me of earlier musings on the relationship between MDM and SOA:

• SOA with MDM prevents messaging confusion

The definition of MDM still seems to me to be quite subjective, with subtle differences depending on who you talk to. (Someone I know rather unkindly suggests it’s just a glorified database!) The next two links both have something to say about what problems MDM is trying to address:

• Is smart DM an alternative to MDM?
• Can you “do” MDM without data quality?

What’s the best definition/example of MDM you’ve seen?

And finally, now seems like a good time to mention the Information on Demand conference. As well as meeting people with real world experience of this kind of thing, there are technical sessions for the MDM Workbench which is what I actually work on.

I was only in B&Q to buy some paint, but spotted this on a slightly scenic route to the paint aisle…

I almost had enough will power not to buy it but it was too tempting. It’s just too perfect for some hacking; 1 arduino + 1 B&Q LED disco lamp = 3 ambient orbs I’m thinking. The back even has four screws for easy access… which I’m not going to touch until after painting the bathroom, getting married and having a honeymoon!