KanbanFlow is nice but it requires you to entrust your data to a "cloud" solution and many people reject that idea on principle.

There is a good Personal KanBan app out there that's 100% free and shows promise:

http://dmitryivanov.net/personal-kanban-app/

It's definitely not a new idea...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FInoU0wzgzY

Does he know about this guy?

http://jvde.us/

The history of Home Automation is littered with the bodies of business that have come in and then left when they realized it's a very difficult place to make money, unless you just carve out the high-end systems used by rich people. If you are building a McMansion type home there are always options available. If you are a middle class home owner looking for a good way to retrofit, no one wants to talk to you. So you end up going down the path of tried-and-true technologies like X10 that have spotty vendor support but a strong hobbyist community.

I'm not saying X10 is perfect, but it does let me control my sprinklers from a crontab file. Any system that can't do that is beneath my contempt. :)

Take a look over here, this is what the industry looks like...

http://www.cepro.com/

I find the author's lack of Star Wars knowledge disturbing...

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Droids:_Rebellion_3

This applies to people who read National Lampoon in the 70's.

http://thetrad.blogspot.com/2011/08/are-you-nurd.html

Of course, I never understood why the approximation of Pi was so far off. I assume it's because this was from the end of the slide-rule era.

Carl Sagan wrote a lot about the Oort cloud. It would be nice if we could get first-hand evidence of it. Unfortunately the nuclear power supply on Voyager will run out long before anything like that would be remotely possible.

I think the interesting question is, what would constitute evidence of the Oort cloud's actual existence? Every textbook and Wikipedia article I've read still describes it as a theoretical construct.

But yeah, it took us 40 years to get out to 130 AU, and astronomer's talk about comet dust being out as far as 50,000 AU. A humbling thought to be sure.

I'm sorry, when they taught me Earth Science they mentioned that stratification was caused by sedimentary rock, laid down by the action of water over millions of years.

How do you explain this without water?

http://i.space.com/images/i/20995/wS4/mount-sharp-1600.jpg?1346122345

I think the way it was re-written was much better. It's the only episode where McCoy got to kick ass, even if it was because of the Cordrazine. The original script was just a Redshirt dealing drugs, and Ellison even wrote in a cheesy 60's "trip scene" showing a drug hallucination from the crewman's perspective. Completely inappropriate for 60's prime time TV, when the Doors couldn't even sing the word "higher" on Ed Sullivan.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stockmarket/

Unfortunately you can't stream it anywhere.

But the BBC adapted it with re-recorded narration, and it's right over here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4auzn4bK1bM

Remember, this was all stuff we knew about in the late 90's.

The only interesting question is, did we fail to learn the lessons from LTCM, or did we learn the wrong ones?

Because he understood the nature of technology fetishism, and he wanted to channel that in the direction of things that would turn a profit for his company.

Move along, nothing to see here...

Is whether Apple will reconsider any of the things Jobs did that were clearly "dick moves". Not allowing Scratch on the iPad was a dick move.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/

I'm surprised no one's commented on the irony of the fact that, if someone were to submit an LCARS interface for the iPad, Apple would disallow it because they forbid developers from implementing desktop environments or any sort of alternate UI.

This is a pity, because that's probably the only reason I'd buy one.

Here, take a look... http://www.lcarsdeveloper.com/

This web site is interesting...

www.freaklabs.org

A quick look tells me that this is not hobbyist friendly at all. You have to buy a Raven USB stick, but there is no API support, you have to roll your own code to make sense of the 802.15.4 protocol stream before you can even begin to work on the level of devices or events.

Like I said, tell me how to turn my outside lights on at sunset in the Zigbee world. How to I address devices and send commands to them? How do I get status back. X-10 has a flaw in that it's hard to get command confirmation and device state back. So we learn to live with that. But I'm not seeing a compelling case for Zigbee being any better.

Bottom line is the people who write for CE Pro and similar magazines have their own slant on things. And it's a very different slant from Popular Electronics or BYTE or any of the publications that used to show you how to unravel things and make them work your way. And that's what makes HA fun for a lot of people.

The nice thing about X-10 is that the protocol is simple and there are lots of devices that work with it, most of which are relatively inexpensive. It's also friendly to the home hobbyist, and the hacker, since you can buy interfaces that will hook up to your PC via a serial port and write your own scripts, or download free software like Misterhouse.

If I can't turn my outside lights on at sunset via a script, then turn that script into a cron job, don't even talk to me about it. I'll write the interface myself, just give me a clean API I can code to.

We hate it when Microsoft or Apple take the attitude of "No, we won't open up our API and play nice with the open source crowd. At best we will make you join our developer program and sign an NDA. At worst we won't talk to you at all."

When the home automation vendors do it, they're no better. They don't deserve our respect or our help.