automation
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Rise and Shiny recap: Crystal Saga
There's a lot to be said for automation. Thanks to automated processes, our society hums along more nicely than it ever has. But should we include our playtime on the list of things we want to automate? Is it possible to enjoy something like an MMO if we really don't control it at all? If we assemble our army men and wind them up, is watching them go as much fun as controlling what they do? Ah, such deep questions stemming from such a simple game. Crystal Saga is a browser-based, free-to-play, Flash-based MMORPG (there's a mouthful) that allows players to do a lot of things, including fully automate the grinding process. I can hear the potential comments already, so click past the cut and let me explain it more.
Siemens shows off iPad-controlled homeConnect appliances
You use your mobile device for pretty much everything these days, right? So why not the kitchen? That was part of Siemens' pitch today at IFA -- the ability to control your cooking and dish washing from afar. The company debuted homeConnect, a "networked kitchen," which lets homeowners check on their energy consumption, shut down appliances remotely, receive notifications when the washing is done and view the contents of their fridges in real time -- with the help of internal cameras trained at the food. By downloading recipes from the internet, users can also import temperature and cooking times. This isn't the first time we've seen some kitchen-based connectivity, of course -- LG debuted the similar smartphone-based Thinq line at CES earlier this year. %Gallery-132133%
Switched On: Light music
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Last month, Switched On discussed two of the Android expansion initiatives announced at Google's I/O conference -- the relatively easy to execute Android Open Accessory program and the relatively difficult to execute Android@Home initiative. In support of the latter, which would seek to wedge a new home networking standard among wireless systems such as Zigbee, Z-Wave and Insteon. In making the case for Android@Home, Google showed off a new LED light bulb from Lighting Science Group that included the necessary data radio embedded in the bulb. The advantage versus traditional lighting controls is that it removes the requirement for an electrician (or at least advanced DIYer) to build the radio into the wall plate. NXP Semiconductors has also shown off both compact flourescent and LED bulbs that can be controlled wirelessly via smartphones and other devices. But in a quest to tackle two staples of the smart home in one flip of a switch,, speaker house Artison has teamed up with lighting company Sylvania. to create MusicLites. As its name suggests, MusicLites combines lighting controls and multi-zone distributed audio in in a single product, but is it an approach you'll buy into?
Apple camera patent could stop smartphone bootleggers in their tracks
Apple is always filing patents for strange and fantastic things that never seem to find their way into actual products. But an application published today details some interesting tech that we could actually see getting jammed into a future iPhone (for better or worse). By pairing an infrared sensor with the camera already on board, portable devices could receive data from transmitters placed, well, wherever. Beyond simply blasting out text and opening links like a glorified QR code, transmitters could disable certain features, such as the camera, to prevent recording at movie theaters and music venues. If completely shutting off the cam seems a bit heavy-handed, watermarks can also be applied to photos identifying businesses or copyrighted content. Some potential uses are a little less Big Brother, like museums beaming information about exhibits to a user's or launching an audio tour. Obviously third parties would have to get behind the IR push and there's no guarantee that Apple will put this in a future iProduct. Still, we're a little worried that the days of blurry YouTube concert videos may be coming to an end.
Industrial robots do Star Wars better than Lucas
At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai, industrial robot company Yasakawa equipped a couple of its manufacturing machines with lightsabers and choreographed a violent ballet for them to perform. The resulting battle is more exhilarating than the duel at the end of Phantom Menace and the performances are less lifeless than those in Attack of the Clones. Best of all -- Lucas can't add 30 minutes of new CGI scenes and re-release the video below in 3D.
HomeSeer HomeTroller-Mini home automation controller gets you one step closer to the bachelor pad of the future
The folks over at HomeSeer, maker of home automation devices, are set to debut the super small, super powerful HomeTroller-Mini at CES this week. The mini controller apparently fits in the palm of your hand, and is compatible with Apple and Android smart phones and tablets, allowing you to switch off the lights or set an alarm via text, e-mail, or text-to-speech. The SheevaPlug-alike sports a 1.0 GHz Linux platform, retails under $300, and can be linked to a number of other products to control your thermostat, appliances, lights, window shades -- you get the picture. All of this sounds great, but we're still waiting to see if it can get our circular bed spinning.
Verizon to demo Home Monitoring and Control system at CES, launch pilot in Jersey next month
Looks like home automation may finally be taking baby steps towards the mainstream -- Verizon's just announced that it'll be demoing that long-rumored Home Monitoring and Control system at CES 2011, with a planned beta rollout in New Jersey to follow. The system will allow users to remotely view security cameras, lock doors, and control lights, thermostats, and appliances through their smartphones or FiOS TV boxes -- the same capabilities most other automation systems offer, but with the added benefit of being integrated and installed by Verizon. The pilot homes in Jersey will receive an energy reader, smart appliance switches and thermostats, door and window locks, a power strip, motion sensors, an indoor pan-and-tilt camera, and a fixed indoor / outdoor camera when the system launches next month, but Verizon says that's just the beginning. We're told the system will use Z-Wave wireless control units and WiFi security cameras, so we're guessing there'll be a central box that integrates everything -- and we've got a feeling this whole thing is based on 4Home (pictured above), which was just acquired by Motorola Mobility. We'll find out more at CES -- stay tuned.
Gold Capped News: Critical AH addons broken by patch 4.0.1
Welcome to a special edition of Gold Capped. Every week, this column (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday (or whenever there's breaking news). Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! If you were to install the PTR right now and try to post a batch of auctions for sale with your favorite addon, there's a good chance it wouldn't work. Blizzard has changed the way that addons can interact with the auction house so that it's no longer possible to queue up a large volume of auctions and let them post while you read my columns. Both Auctioneer and Quickauctions 3 have been hit hard, obviously. These are the most commonly used addons for queuing up a bunch of auctions. The rule previously seemed to be that we're not allowed to buy in batches, but we are allowed to sell in batches. Well, it looks like Blizzard has decided that we can no longer sell in batches, either. In addition, QA3 has lost its ability to automatically cancel auctions that have been undercut. The new patch requires a hardware event per action, and this has not (at the time of publishing) been written into these addons. So what is a batch? Since you can queue up multiple stacks of the same item using the default UI, that seems to be allowed still. What is no longer allowed is putting together a list of different types of items that you want to sell at the same time. Take heart, dear reader: There is a workaround!
Savant stuffs iPod touch into multifunctional Touch Remote, includes VoIP and FaceTime promises
That's no render we're looking at, Savant assures us, it's the most recent photograph of the company's Touch Remote prototype. This crazy do-it-all peripheral comes with an embedded fourth-gen iPod touch -- no word on whether you'll be able to remove it, though it looks unlikely -- and mirrors the abilities of Savant's iPad home control and automation app. That means that once you get your lights, climate control, network cameras, and home cinema hooked up to Savant's control hub, you'll have yourself a neatly streamlined remote to save you doing anything yourself again. Or so goes the theory, anyhow. Savant augments the offering with promises of VoIP and FaceTime integration by the time the Touch Remote ships to retailers in the first quarter of next year. MSRP is set at $399, which may or may not be feasible given that the iPod touch by itself costs at least $229. We shall see. For now, you can see the prototype device on video after the break.
Gold Capped: Quick Auctions Poster does the undercutting for you
Every week, Gold Capped (from Basil "Euripides" Berntsen) aims to educate players about how to make money on the auction house. For the inside line on crafting for disenchanting, transmutation, cross-faction arbitrage and more, check in every Wednesday. Also, feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! Quick Auctions Poster is here, and it's going to change your life. It was written by one of the auctioneers who inhabit the Just My Two Copper forums, and here's the description of what it does, straight from the download page: This addon is a plugin for Quick Auctions that adds a checkbox to the auction house posting frame with which you can toggle continuous scanning and posting of Quick Auctions. It saves you the effort of hitting the post button whenever a scan has finished. Sadly, because this Quick Auctions button doesn't have a name and its function is private, this action can't be macroed, but this addon manages to obtain the correct button and simulates a click on it. In essence, you can fill your bags up with stock, and instead of using QA3 to post a single batch, it will keep refreshing your scan for you while you wander off to do something else. It will keep automatically undercutting everyone until you run out of stock.
Fake.app makes powerful Web automation easy
Todd Ditchendorf (Celestial Teapot Software) is probably best known for creating Fluid, a Site-Specific Browser app that we love to talk about. While Fluid was a great and well-executed idea, Todd's latest app, Fake, is truly inspired. The easiest way to describe Fake is to say it's Automator for the Web. It may not have the mass appeal that Fluid does, but its target audience (Web designers and developers, as well as Web power users) will have no trouble appreciating its capabilities. Fake, like Automator, offers an Actions library and allows you to create drag-and-drop workflows with Web-specific capabilities. Fill a form, click a button, follow links ... basically, you can automate anything that deals with HTML and DOM elements. You can even inject CSS and JavaScript into pages, which opens doors to extensive security testing, among other things. Sound intriguing? Read on ...
Geocron lets Latitude automate your life, or at least your wife
Our pockets and camera bags are stuffed with locationally aware devices, yet for some reason we find ourselves still having to do stuff manually when we get somewhere. Shouldn't our thermostat click on the AC when we head home? Shouldn't our house lock itself when we embark on our morning commute? Shouldn't our car come and rescue us, even if it entails turbo boosting through a brick wall? We tend to think so, and Sunlight Foundation's geocron is a simple way to start that kind of automation. Born out of a desire for one of the app's developers to avoid having to manually send his wife a text to pick him up at the train station, geocron tracks your location in Google Latitude and automatically e-mails, text messages, or pings a web page when you reach a certain location. You can set up windows of time for each activity and, while using this service does have the somewhat disconcerting requirement of perpetual access to your current location, the source code is available so you can run your own, private instance. Or, you could just give your wife a call -- regular conversation is generally considered an important part of a healthy relationship.
Robots to invade Scottish hospital, pose as 'workers'
A new £300 million ($445 million) hospital is set to open up soon in Stirlingshire, Scotland. Why would you care about that? Maybe because laser-guided robots will play a fundamental role in the facility's daily running, including the disposal of waste, delivery of meals, cleaning of operating theaters, and (gulp!) drug dispensation. We're told they'll have their own underground lair corridors and dedicated lifts, with humanoid employees able to call them up via a PDA. It's believed that using robots to perform the dirty work will be more sanitary than current methods, but we have to question the sanity of anyone who believes this isn't the first step toward the robot rebellion. Well, it's been nice knowing you guys.
NTT DoCoMo shows off automatic email generator for mobiles (video)
Demonstrated at the Wireless Technology Park 2010 exhibition last week, this automatic email generator from NTT DoCoMo promises to take just three words' worth of input, whether spoken or typed in, and convert them into a fully fleshed out, anatomically correct email. An anthropomorphic genie creature serves as your guide on this journey into gimmick world, although some rather nice sophistication is also on the cards. The carrier's rep informs us that the composition of the missive will be dependent on the sort of person that you are and your relationship to the recipient. Thus, an email from a teenager to his parents will read quite differently to one from an employee to her boss, even if both believe they're writing to their draconian overlords. Check it out on video after the break.
Festo's strong and agile robot arm is based on the elephant's trunk, scares the bejesus out of us (video)
Festo's unveiled some pretty impressive tech over the years, from fluidic muscles to robotic flying penguins, but this next one has us a bit worried. The Bionic Handling Assistant is ostensibly patterned after the elephant's trunk, designed to be both agile and delicate... but have you seen the thing? We're pretty sure that it was patterned after the tentacles of Doctor Octopus, and that it will crush you and everyone you care about without a second thought. But if you're the trusting type, the company assures you that this is just the thing for all those delicate processes you've been meaning to automate but haven't been able to in the past: everything from handling fruit to animal husbandry is a cinch with this "hierarchically arranged system of muscles and evolutionary optimized movement patterns"! But don't take our word for it: peep the video after the break.
Savant: iPad to "Redefine home automation"
Automating one's home with a Mac isn't new. Indigo has been around for a while, as has XTension. Heck, you can even feed your dog remotely. The folks at Savant offer a way to control your home or office's entertainment system, climate, security cameras, lighting and more with an iPhone or iPod touch. To say that they're excited about the iPad would be an understatement. In an interview with Electronic House, Savant president Jim Carroll called the device's release a "...watershed moment." He also confirmed that his company is working on an iPad app, including some "pretty cool" plans for the device's large screen. For now, home automation can be expensive, but Carroll believes that the iPad will change that. With a device that starts at US$499 (and should only get cheaper) and runs App Store apps, more and more people will be able to take advantage of this technology. Of course, that doesn't mean your home will be as cool as Daniel Graystone's overnight, but it's progress. At the very least, imagine a beefed-up version of Apple's Remote app that went beyond Apple TV and iTunes sharing. We're living in the future!
Sikuli can automate any UI by taking screenshots
This is pretty impressive --of course there are already lots of ways to automate actions on your Mac, and odds are that you may have messed around with scripting or Automator more than once before. But Sikuli is a new app that makes automating as simple as taking screenshots. Instead of programming actions, all you have to do is put screenshots of the particular UI items that you want to automate in a list, and then the app will use visual cues to do whatever you want it to do. Not only does it make things much easier when actually writing scripts, but it also gives you countless options in terms of automation -- the app can automate any app that has a graphical user interface, because all it has to do is recognize that GUI on your screen. That includes web apps, too -- like I said, the possibilities are endless. And since it's developed with Jython, you Python experts can insert any Python code that you like in the scripts as well. The whole thing is an MIT project, so it's available for free across all platforms, including OS X, Windows, and Linux. If you've been looking for an automator that'll do any rote task for you, give Sikuli a try. [via LifeHacker]
Kawada NEXTAGE humanoid robot just wants to help out (video)
In a world where the Headtime scalp massager not only exists but presumably even sells, is it any wonder that assistant robots like this here fella are cropping up? While keeping the design somewhat generic in order to be able to adapt the bot to the particular circumstances where it is employed, the designers at Kawada Industries are keen to promote the NEXTAGE as a step toward humans and machines co-existing and working together in harmony. Sounds peachy, doesn't it? Of course, some meatsack will have to be made redundant to make way for the machines, but humans were always going to be sacrificed for the greater robotic good. That was the plan all along. See the video demo after the break.
Video: ABB FlexPicker replaces human pancake pickers with amazing effect
Mmm, pancakes. While moms might be responsible for giving us our first taste, it's the humble robot that makes these golden-brown discs of battered splendor available for mass market binging. A promotional video from ABB Robotics shows how its FlexPicker robots installed at a HoneyTop foods facility can accelerate production while simultaneously improving hygienic conditions. Four gigabit Ethernet cameras are mounted in front of each robot to locate the pancakes running down the conveyor belt. Software allows the bots to recognize and grab overlapping pancakes and then stack the 'cakes for easy packing. A software reconfig allows for quick production changes from pancakes to pretty much anything the robot can grasp including Soylent Green ration wafers. The video starts slow, but delivers with an impressive 400 pancakes per minute sorting routine -- see it after the break.[Via Make:]
TweetMyMac: Remote control of your Mac via Twitter
Important safety tip: Please read the instructions for TweetMyMac carefully, especially the part about creating a separate Twitter account for your Mac -- do not use your regular Twitter account, or anyone you follow will be able to control your machine. We have previously covered some of the ways in which it is possible to remotely control a Mac at home or in the office. Most of our suggestions have required the use of Mail in order to process some rule and kick off a script or Automator action. Alex P over at TheMacBox aims to change all of that. Enter TweetMyMac, the little program that lets you get screenshots, iSight snapshots, or launch a program through the use of Twitter. While the list of commands available is not currently as comprehensive as what your imagination can create with a little AppleScript or Automator whizzbangery, it is a good list and growing as well. An obvious benefit of this approach is the ease of getting everything set up. In the past it took an AppleScript to call another Automator action or some other kludgey-at-best method to get things working. With TweetMyMac there is very little effort required for setup. Another neat feature is that TweetMyMac will run a shell command. With a little scripting you can create your own custom commands. And using the previously-covered technique of sending tweets via the command line you can have your custom commands send information back to you as well.
