Some Android apps.
To see which apps I have just take a look below.
With Appz.im you can easily share which apps you have with people. It’s quick and easy to set up.
What makes the situation in Cairo so interesting is the number of media outlets that you can use as sources. From 24 hour news channels like France 24, Al Jazeera, BBC World and others to individual people with mobile phones. For France 24 you have three languages to chose from, with Al Jazeera to you have three languages to chose from. With Sky News you have the choice between Standard definition and High definition.
You have live cameras looking into the square. There is no lag time between the acquisition and distribution of images. There is the challenge of aquiring images from the ground though. Journalists have been attacked, as reported on twitter, and through interviews once they arrive in their home countries.
Tweets have told us of arrests of certain individuals, of attacks on certain media offices etc. It means that whilst those within the country may not have access to this information we on the outside see it.
One of the aspects that is so interesting is the way in which people have been able to organise themselves. Facebook, twitter and other social websites have been important, like Bambuser and flickr. Mainstream as well.
I am looking forward to the literature that will come out from this event, especially if it successful. Imagine comparing a situation like that of Tomas in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” to this situation, especially if the end result is greater freedom.
Today with Tomtom Go you pay 20CHF per year for the maps and traffic information. When I first bought the TomTom Europe apps for iOS and Android they cost about 170CHF an operating system. If my memory serves me well traffic information would cost an additional 100 CHF per year.
As a result of the high cost for traffic information I was in the habit of using Waze. As long as you have a data connection you get maps and traffic information for free. It would save you 270 CHF initially.
When you live in the french speaking part of Switzerland you are just minutes from France and within hours you can be in Germany, Austria and Italy. As a result having maps pre-loaded in to your navigation is useful. That’s where Tomtom at 20CHF per year becomes interesting. The maps available are for individual countries, for Western, Europe, Eastern Europe, the whole of Europe, The Caribbean, North America and South America. Each of these maps can be downloaded ahead of a trip and used.
This means that once you’ve paid your 20 CHF you have maps for the world, not just for your daily commute.
I am so convinced by Tomtom’s new philosophy that I have uninstalled Waze and will now use Tomtom primarily and Google maps as a backup.
For a long time I wasn’t tempted to play with Home Assistant or the Apple Home app. I don’t have smart light bulbs, or a smart fridge, or a thermostat that I can control remotely. I don’t have solar panels that are feeding a battery. In essence I thought that if I played with Home Assistant I would not be able to do anything. Now I see that this idea was wrong.
With home assistant you can track your phone. You can see graphs of floors climbed and descended, battery level, storage, average active pace, the distance you’ve walked, whether the phone is charging, whether you have one or two sims in the phone, connection type and more. I have only run home assistant for a few hours so I will get a better idea of what home assistant is capable of telling me about my iphone activity. For every device that has the app installed you will get information about location and battery status.
I get pressure, temperature, Co2 readings and humidity. I suspect that with the history function on Home assistant I will be able to see history over a period of weeks or months, rather than days.
By default Home assistant will provide you with weather based on your location from a centralised source according to the location you give it.
Netatmo is easy to connect to. Within two clicks you have access to Netatmo weather data. If you have just one weather system then this works very well. It’s easy to see weather info for the indoor and outdoor weather modules from the dashboard.
If family or friends are sharing their weather stations with you then you need to figure out which ones are yours, and which are those of others. I had to guess which devices were mine, and create different rooms for the devices of other people. I then made my devices visible and order was restored.
It is easy to turn it off and on again but aside from this there is no control. I couldn’t see how to change channels or apps, or do anything interesting. Turning it on is good, but usually you want to do more than turn on a tv device.
in the settings tab you have the option of using Home Assistant as network attached storage. You have the primary disk on which Home Assistant runs but you also have the option of adding an NFS or Samba disk (CIFS) storage option.
Google Map, iCloud, Suunto, Apple, Garmin and others track your location, either for sports, or for other reasons. If you have family sharing enabled on iCloud you can follow people as they move from one location to another. You don’t need to ask “where are you?” because you can check with ease. Of course this works for a person or three, depending on the size of your “family” group.
traccar is an open source alternative that allows you to track people using your own personal computer, rather than cloud services. While you’re out for a walk it will buffer the data locally, and when you get to your home wifi network it will allow you to see where you’ve been, as well as tracks, and more. I will spend more time experimenting with this.
If you would like to see what integrations are possible with Home Assistant so far follow the link and you will be able to search for devices and how well they interact with Home Assistant. In some cases it’s a matter of simply logging in to Netatmo for example, after clicking a button. In other cases, such as with traccar you install the app, and use it as a secondary app on the Home Assistant server.
Home Assistant provides us with a different user interface for Aranet devices. Instead of having to look at the app we can easily check for information in browser. In theory we could setup a Pi with an Aranet nearby to provide real time co2 monitoring for an office building or other.
One of the key benefits of the Home Assistant App is that once you add Netatmo, traccar, your mobile devices, Aranet and more you have one app available for plenty of information. Instead of having to open the Aranet app or the Netatmo app you can check within seconds. If you want to look at your walking or other history you can also use the same app.
Initially I thought it would be a waste of time for me to experiment with Home Assistant but now that I have I see that there are a number of interesting features to continue experimenting with.
Computing is mobile and as I sit in the garden to type this post someone else is currently streaming some lions live from his mobile phone. It’s not about you sitting at a desk and typing, now it’s about going out, having a nice day and sharing it with others as they enjoy their day.