Since my last article on Quiggles.net in 2021, the technological landscape has undergone significant transformations. This overview captures the major developments and trends that have emerged, reflecting on their implications and future directions. I wanted to write a post to explore advancements in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity, hardware innovations, and software development, offering a perspective on the state of technology today.
1. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI in Everyday Life
Artificial intelligence has seen remarkable progress, becoming more integrated into everyday applications. Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri have become more sophisticated, understanding context better and performing more complex tasks. These AI systems have improved in natural language processing (NLP), making interactions more intuitive and human-like.
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- Category: Musings
Read more: Overview of Technological Advancements Since 2021
Clearly I don't blog as often as I perhaps should but hey is anyone reading any of this anyway? 🤷♂️😆
I thought I'd do a quick review of some of the articles and see where they stood in late 2021. So here we go...
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- Category: Musings
Vic Drover from Watchful published Joomlashacks curated list of free web design tools that will make building Joomla sites faster and less tedious. He organized the tools in four categories: design, performance, development, and more.- https://watchful.net/blog/tools-for-web-designers/
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- Category: Web
Microsoft have just announced the release date for Windows 11, and that date will be October the 5th 2021. Further details on the latest version of Windows are available at https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/08/31/windows-11-available-on-october-5/.
I have been playing around with it for last couple of months in virtualised environments, and it does seem to be little more than a reskin of Windows 10, but I guess time will tell.
The free upgrade to Windows 11 apparently starts on October 5 and will be a phased introduction, but new eligible devices will be offered the upgrade first. However you can bump your place in the "rollout list" by joining the insiders program now.
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- Category: Windows
So after many years of development, on August 17 2021 Joomla 4 has finally been made available.
More details are available at the Joomla website which you can find here.
For those of you that already have Joomla 3.x websites, be warned that although it appears to be a one click upgrade process; it most definitely is not! A number of the extensions that you might use are likely not to be compatible just yet, so take some time to consider your upgrade process.
Indeed I decided to start from scratch with this site, but using some SQL skills I have ported all my previous articles across, (for what it's actually worth!). In time I'm sure that someone will write an extension to make the process far simpler.
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Since August of last year I have had a Ring Pro Doorbell which I bought from Amazon, (Ring are in fact owned by Amazon), - https://amzn.to/2IbmBZN. And currently this is priced at about £200, but with Amazon it always seems to pay to watch an item for a while and wait for price fluctuations. I say this because I managed to get this for about £60 cheaper - it always pays to be a little price savvy. There are also other models available, but the Pro was the only one that would fit where I wanted it.
It was easy to install, and if you do need assistance there are loads of helpful guides on YouTube that will help you with the process.
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- Category: Gadgets
In October of 2015 I released my Electricity OWL Intuition-E Monitor program, and have done a few updates since. However I no longer use the program myself, and won't be maintaining the code so I have decided to end of life the program. I will allow it to be downloaded until the end of January 2017, but after that I will remove it from the site.
There have been a steady number of downloads, and I may consider releasing the code on GitHub if anybody thinks it's of interest.
Instead of using that program I now run Domoticz with a RFXTRX unit and that records the daily electricity usage, and can trigger events if needed. Hopefully I'll find a moment soon to write up some thoughts on that system.
But in the meantime, it's time to say goodbye to my monitor program. 😢
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- Category: Programming
I've updated my Electricity OWL Inuition-E Monitor to version 1.4.
I say "I", but I was contacted by a chap by the name of Nick Wallbridge who had also been looking in to the Electricity OWL. As it turned out Nick is a developer in his own right and had some great ideas about what to add to the monitor program. So I gave him access to the code and he has very kindly added some alerts to the existing IFTTT maker capabilities of the program. I really appreciate the time and intellectual contribution that Nick gave to me to add these extra capabilities.
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Read more: Electricity OWL Intuition-E Monitor updated to 1.4
So I'm a big fan of IoT, (Internet of Things), and over the last couple of years have done various things to my house to enhance my living environment. The main things been introduction of Tado controls to the central heating and hot water system so I can control that remotely and the addition of a few Belkin WeMo electrical sockets and their movement sensor. I have also added a LIFX wireless bulb for the front of the house that is remotely controllable.
The big advantage of most of these things is that they can be connected together using the IFTTT service so there's a certain amount of logic that can be controlled when each device is used.
However the biggest problem with the whole IOT environment currently is that there is no universal "glue". A certain amount of things can be done outside the appointed IFTTT channels by using their maker channel which sends a web hook off into the cloud and you can invoke another service, just by using this more freehand way of doing stuff. However the big issue is that currently there is no central home hub that somehow pulls all of the stuff together. If there is an API available, with a number of these devices I have also created proprietary Windows apps in C# to make them do stuff that is of more use to me.
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- Category: Gadgets