Remotely Possible

Despite the fact that some (many—okay, most) people tell me I’m an idiot, I’m not. As proof, I can point to a variety of complicated tasks that I’ve managed to complete without requiring an inordinate amount of outside help. I’ve built a chicken coop; installed and programmed a Lutron RadioRA 2 lighting control system; raised three children; assembled two bicycles at 3 AM one Christmas morning; and founded a multi-billion dollar non-profit foundation dedicated to making it easy and understandable to install and use a high-speed wireless router in your home. Yeah, well, that last one? Not so much. In fact, if there’s anything in this world that makes me feel like more of an idiot than I really am, it’s dealing with wireless routers. And that’s why I’ve been smitten of late with Synology’s newest introduction, the Synology Router RT1900ac.

We lost a pioneer of the modern loudspeaker industry with the passing of William (Bill) Hecht earlier this year on September 12th at age 89. I was only five years old (and I imagine many of you reading this weren’t even born yet) in 1967 when Bill Hecht patented his signature contribution to the audio world, the soft-dome tweeter, arguably the most widely used speaker driver worldwide for the last 30 years. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Hecht once during my career. In this age of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the endless onslaught of 24/7 self-promotion, Bill Hecht was a quiet, self-effacing man who seemed most comfortable behind the scenes. Indeed, throughout his career, Hecht and his company, United Speaker Systems, was known for making the speakers that made other speaker companies famous.

By now, even the most ecologically minded person has probably had their fill of Earth Day articles and blog posts. Bear with me, though, because this post is only tangentially related to Earth Day and eco-sensibilities. Instead, it's more about getting your hands dirty with the innards of an electronic gadget or component after you've removed or cut the "WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL BROKEN OR REMOVED" sticker on the device's outer casing. I've done it plenty of times before...

Even the best smart homes today aren’t much more than a cool collection of dumb gadgets managed by a controller with a good memory. Few, if any, of them aren’t intelligent enough yet to figure out when to do tasks on their own. Programming what actions should happen when and under what varying conditions or triggers is a large part of why home automation has been confined to the posh multi-thousand square foot homes of the rich and powerful or the often not-so-posh and much smaller homes of the electronic tinkerers and makers. (Of course, the cost of controllers, sensors, devices, and installation doesn’t help put home automation in the “mass market” category yet, either.)

Despite its relatively high price ($250 - or $3.2 billion, if you’re Google), the Nest thermostat is very popular (I saw one on the wall in a local Subway restaurant a couple of days ago) because - in addition to its Applish-elegance design - it “programs itself so you don’t have to.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out that there are a lot of people out there who absolutely hate programming a thermostat; and hate it enough, apparently, that they’re willing to spend four-to-five times more $ on a “learning thermostat” than they would on an average 5-2 day programmable thermostat. So any smart home automation company looking to break into the big time needs to take note of this fact. Does anyone really believe that these same folks want to spend the time and effort to program an entire home of automated gadgets? “It programs itself so you don’t have to” needs to be the smart home mantra.

Recently a couple of smart home systems caught my attention because of their learning capabilities...

On April 18th, Quirky Wink HUB owners got an up-close and a little too personal look at the perils of putting control of your smart home into even the most well-intentioned hands over the internet. According to Wink:

Triad Speakers (a division of home automation and entertainment company, Control4) announced today the speaker company’s first foray into the amplifier market with the introduction of the Triad One Streaming Amplifier. The new Triad One is a single-zone, high-resolution, wired and wireless streaming amplifier with two channels of amplification of 100-watts each. Designed to function as a component within Control4 whole-house automation and entertainment system, offers a simple way to add an additional zone without having to pay for amplifier channels that won’t be used in a multichannel amp.

The company says that the Triad One is...