Category: Devices

  • House thermostat died. Suggestions for replacements that don’t spy on me?

    There are a lot of projects — like the well-publicized “Build an Open-source Nest in a Day” — that have built open-source thermostats. But those are “projects”. Are there any #IndieIoT thermostat products ready to go that I can buy? Or do I have to build my own? I’m looking for suggestions. P.S.: I’m using […]

  • 2014 — The Year of Technology Backlash?

    This past year, we learned that just about every device we own can be, or already has been rooted by others, and just about anything we do on-line is being recorded and kept around for years. Our movements are recorded, and our (intentional or accidential) fellow travelers. And something as simple as visiting a website […]

  • Personal data is difficult even when baking Christmas cookies

    When talking about personal data, usually it all sounds very noble and sophisticated. The use cases are advanced and complex. But the problem definitely is real and difficult to solve for even the most mundane situations. Case in point: baking Christmas cookies. We have a new recipe we found on-line for Lemon Cookies. Let’s say […]

  • Global war in your pocket

    Imagine you are the Chinese government, and you read the various Snowden stories this summer. What are you going to do? For argument’s sake, let’s pretend that the Chinese government was perfectly innocent and totally oblivious to any of this before. I cannot imagine that they would do anything other than immediately start a crash […]

  • Comparing Raspberry PI, BeagleBone, Mirabox and Wandboard

    Came across this post about using the Unix command-line calculator as a quick way to do a CPU benchmark. So I ran it to calculate Pi to 500 digits on various devices I had lying around the house. Take the results with several grains of salt, this was a one-off, and not very scientific at […]