smart homes

On the topic of "smart" rooms, smart homes seem to be the fashion these days thanks to improving wireless, broadband and demand for digital entertainment.
Here are links to some articles from the Far Eastern Economic Review on smart homes in the Asia-Pacific region.

• Home Automation
  
• Wired-Home Wish-List
  
• How to (Almost) Go Wireless At Home
  
• Robotic Vacuum Cleaner
  
• The joys of automation
  

On the top of my shopping cart this summer is a bluetooth dongle and some X10 receivers and transmitters. A short post on what X10 is and how it works and will fit into my smart room (which is now a smart home) project will follow later.

summer projects

While i wait twiddling my thumb, for my final year marks to appear, i thought of some really cool projects for this summer.
1. Design a new personal website. My uni account will soon be closed and my existing site at http://www.it.usyd.edu.au/~abrar1 won't be online for long. Besides it such a crappy site. And ofcourse i need to design my own blog along with an offline blogging tool.
2. Continue my foray into ubiquitous computing and design and implement my own "smart" room. The "smart" room will feature personalized tv, lighting and sound (carrying on from my .Home Media Center project) and i will look into having a "smart" assistant which would be responsible for the entire personalization and users would then interact with this assistant.
3. Continue my earlier work on a generic Kiosk Management System.

Given my track record, i'd consider it a very fruitful summer if i get started on even one of these projects