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...
- Joomla - Still going strong and indeed now recently moved up to version 4. It's still a CMS I like to use but as a project there seems to be lot's of infighting in the Joomla world, so I'm actually surprised it's still around and a completely viable tool!
- Ring Doorbell - I still use the Ring products and did in fact write a program to download the videos locally, so perhaps I should tidy that up and make it publicly available?
- Electricity OWL Intuition-E Monitor - I wrote a program to monitor this tool, but really lost interest when that company started charging an annual subscription to get data from the device. It was never sold as a device that needed a subscription, so was pretty annoying when they started to do so. Instead I now use a Shelly EM, which reports into my Home Assistant home automation software. This has now fully replaced Domoticz which I used previously.
- Kibbi/Lila - What an unmitigated disaster this was... After a couple of stabs at crowdfunding the project, Kibbi was launched and started shipping to customers. I was "lucky" as I actually got the kit, but soon realised that the sensors battery life only lasted a few days. Fixes were promised but then the company just disappeared, and my kit is now in the bin. What a waste of energy that was... I am keeping an eye out for the company founders to pop up elsewhere, because as far as I am concerned they owe me money and an explanation.
- Microsoft Hyperlapse - This was an interesting technology to smooth out videos, but appears to be something that Microsoft has given up since about 2016.
- Microsoft Band - One of the early fitness tracking devices that survived a few iterations, but the hardware was so easily breakable that Microsoft themselves canned it after a few years.
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking - As mentioned elsewhere I used to work for Nuance Communications which was they company that made this speech recognition software. I loved being the technical face of it in the UK, but after 13 years in the job I was made redundant because of a large company reshuffle. The desktop software is still available but hasn't been updated in about 4 years now. The company really have moved their focus to cloud based versions of the software. Microsoft are now in the process of buying Nuance, (the deal is likely to conclude in December 2021), primarily for the healthcare speech recognition technologies. But I wouldn't be surprised if more "Dragon" technology got incorporated into their existing Windows speech recognition. If you didn't know Windows had speech recognition, then just press the Windows key + H now!
- Plinth Tablet Stand - Still a lovely little tablet stand but the creator of it is now trying to sell the company.
- Microsoft Project Siena - Another Microsoft project that disappeared without trace!
- WeMo Switch - I used these for a while but they were quite unreliable. They still exist and am sure they work better now, but I have moved over to WiFi and Zigbee switches allied to my Home Assistant setup.
- BitCoin price - AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH! I was moaning I missed the boat when bitcoin hit £90.... As of October 2021 they are worth about £35,000 each... Fortunately I do have a little bit of a bitcoin and a small amount of other crypto but wow that was a boat missed!
- Leap Motion - Another hype gadget, never really did what it promised! More info on Wikipedia.
- The Pebble - The first real smart watch, but ultimately got bought by Fitbit. More info on Wikipedia.
- BitTorrent Sync and AeroFS - both didn't really take off and got subsumed into other technologies and companies. For a long while the biggest read article on this blog was my story about these technologies, so clearly there was interest out there!
- WHS (Windows Home Server) - Another technology left behind by Microsoft!
So there you go, a quick look about some of the subjects covered on this site. If anything it proves that technology moves on rapidly and either gets absorbed into later ideas or just dies.
It'll be interesting to see what I choose to write about in the future, but I suspect that Joomla and Home Assistant will start to take the focus.