The concept of the ‘Smart House’ is nothing new, and the reality for some years now has been that if you throw enough at an electrician, he will install some flavour of a domesticated commercial system.

For somewhere north of $5,000 you have been able to get a new house wired and installed with a Clipsal C-Bus system, but dont expect it to do very much except have very funky looking switched with LED’s on them and diide the house into a few zones that you can control the lights from other areas.

But is this enough for today?

Read the rest of this entry »

Are you the kind of ‘early adopter’ that loves to have non-consumer grade kit in your house?
Do you have PC based devices in your house to perform chores that embedded devices usually do?

If you answered ‘yes’ to either of the questions above then you understand the pain that is in my household currently.

In a revious post I postulated the woes of losing a raid 5 array and the heartache that goes along with the sick to the stomach feeling that you have lost years worth of accumaleted entertainment data.

It has been two weeks now, and I am pretty much no closer to having my 4 hoe systems back together again.

Read the rest of this entry »

How do you monetise a website?

That is a good question, I am glad you asked.

No I dont have one that I prepared earlier, as I want to know the answer to this one too.

I have a menagerie of websites, none of them is properly monetised.

The issue isnt really that of getting enough traffic, really, it is all about finding the right advertisers. But to attract the right advertisers you have to have enough traffic.
Read the rest of this entry »