@jeremy Could you tell us some more about your smart home setup?
I am also thinking of making my home smarter. E.g. automatically close sun shades when it is sunny and getting too warm in the room, and opening them up in the evening and controlling radiator valves.
However, I also try to be conscious about my privacy, as I you seem to be as well. So what kind of things have you bought and how did you connect them up? Bonus points if the things are easy enough that also non technical people, like my wife, can use it, because that is her main concern. That I would be able to make the house do whatever I want, but that all will fail for her. (and she might have a point 
)
I, for example, have been looking into domoticz.com to be able to control everything, this would at least allow me to be in full control. So just curious what your experience is.
If I were just starting out now, I’d be looking at OpenHAB, Domoticz or HomeGenie (and that’s likely the direction I’ll head at some point). As I started years ago, I have a mix of semi-walled garden ecosystems. Note that you can use a devices like a Vera or SmartThings 2.0 to tie these together in a user friendly way, if you prefer something a little more polished.
–jeremy
I do think this home automation stuff is very interesting. I don’t see it being practical for me personally (other than maybe the thermostats), but I can see it being very useful for many. I can’t help thinking of it being voice activated, and when I walk in the door, to activate the system, saying “Honey, I’m home.” 
That made me think of a short story I read some time back, that a woman’s husband was working on a home system AI, and he wanted her to test it. Short story even shorter, she fell in love with the thing, literally! Guess the possibilities are endless.
I didn’t know about them, is why. And it seems good, or dare I say better than gliffy? I particularly like the load and save stuff. Nice work jgraph (are they neighbours of mine?)
Thank you for the pointers. I will be starting out, so I prefer no “walls” in my setup.
I will check those out and then see which products I could use with those. That is a big downside though, it is not trivial at all to find something that will work (easily) with the open technologies.
Well, they are in London so they might not be next door but they’re certainly closer to you than they are to me.
They might be an interesting interview in terms of where richer web apps are going, supplanting what was traditionally installed locally, and some of the new features coming out in browsers to support more intense graphics.
Also, they seem to support the Own Your Data or Bring Your Own Storage philosophy, so that might be interesting to explore with them - whether it was purely a business decision or if there was more to it.
The ‘Endless Computer’ - endless rip-off more like it! How will they market these, obviously the target market are people who don’t buy online, and the chances of these being for sale at the local market = 0. No. The only customers will be NGO’s/charities or even governments themselves to ‘distribute’ to these worthy supposed ‘middle class’ people (unless I missed something there). Work with whatever TV that happens to be in the customers home?? Doubt that!How many of you have tried plugging your TV into your laptop/device only to find screen display wrong if works at all!. Unless these devices are intended to be on sale at the local cheapo tech market and people choose to buy these, it’s a swizz! the idea that people in dev. nations have no access to computers is nonsense, even when explorers discover lost peoples in remote locations, they have mobile phones there, and even if they aren’t internet ready phones yet, they certainly will be very soon! The idea that a computer needs a big display in order to teach you how to get water from the ground is idiocy! This is why these projects fail, ideas born out of the mistaken beliefs that ‘these poor people have no toilets’ and the solution is to offer them an overpriced bespoke computer that is disconnected from all the main global OS communities.
Booo! from me I’m afraid! Buy them cheap (sub $50) 4G Android phones with data SIM would have far greater positive impact than any expensive bespoke computer unit.
I’m surprise you didn’t check out draw.io from jgraph.com - they’re neighbours of yours!
wow and super wow thanks for sharing this!
Flowchart Maker & Online Diagram Software sure appears to beat Google Draw for diagramming, (albeit appears to be without the collaboration features of Draw)!
Guys of the show - thanks for another great show. Please do more on mycroft if you have not. I have missed a few shows recently , and now need to go back and make sure you have not already done a mycroft segment.
Also would like to hear more discussions on data privacy on what corporations actually do with the data mining they do. Specifics. We all want our data privacy, some of us have given up on privacy. Anyhow, always enjoy hearing each of your perspectives.
On the Endless Computer. Seem very expensive for what it delivers.
I get they have made it easier to use and improved the interface, but at those prices the market I expect would be very small.
Khan Academy is a free resource with learning content in multiple areas.
There is a version for the Raspberry Pi that can be set up with a local wired/wireless router so the one Raspberry Pi can deliver the content to any device that can run a browser and play video. Any of the $50 tablets would work.
http://pi.mujica.org/
There is also another project called Rachel that takes it a step further and includes the hardware as well to create the route. Demo: http://rachelfriends.org/previews/rachelpi_64EN/
It’s definitely not as polished as Endless is promising but for the need the Khan Academy or Rachel may provide a more cost effective solution for schools and communities.
As for providing computers for developing areas, why not donate older equipment? There are charities that support such endeavors.
Is it just me who hears Jono pronouncing that Microsoft guy’s name as “Nutella”?
Gerv
It is not just you 
Yeah but charities don’t invite you for lunch and give you one of their product! 
Re the Morse code: I think it was a warning. It translates as, “Warning. This podcast will make you happy. We have FUN. We hope you have fun also”. At least I think that’s what it decoded to, my Morse is a bit rusty
It would be great if they did serve Chicken à la Normande! 
On Microsoft Friend or Foe I saw this article. https://www.aeyoun.com/technote/word-document-formats-office-16tp.html
Short version. For Word docs Microsoft is requiring older .doc and .docx files to be upgraded.
Even for blank files is giving a warning when saving as ODT file. No way to suppress the warning.
For the upgrade it’s using a cloud service rather than local, even though Wordpad can do the upgrade locally in most cases.
So, looks like Microsoft is getting better at working with Open Source at the code level and has shifted to trying to own the defacto document format instead. With the ability to continue to embrace, extend, extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish.
Looks like Khan Academy have released their resources for Android and iOS.
So, Endless Computer are losing a big chunk of their market.
I tweeted this @sil but I’ll just stick it here too: I use yEd for most of my diagramming on Linux. I actually started using it on Windows, preferring it over Visio.
Free as in beer, Java desktop application but surprisingly good despite that
Just to provide some feedback after a while.
I eventually went for z-wave, since I want to control radiator valves, and there are no zigbee radiator valves (yet).
I also looked into openhab2 (since it seems to be the future of openhab and because it uses Eclipse SmartHome), but I found that openhab2 is not ready yet. So I switched to Domoticz using a Docker container and was able to get it up and running very quickly.
My setup is currently the following:
- one Fibaro relay switch to know the status of a switch in the wall. (had to be installed at the light point that was controlled by the switch)
- Fibaro wall plug (that is linked to the switch) (we could turn the lights of the Christmas tree on and off with the wall switch
) - 2 Fibaro smoke detectors
- 3 StellaZ Radiator Valves
The radiator valves are now opened and closed (using the set point) based on the temperature measured by the smoke detectors, time and status of the wall switch.
Best of all, the WAF is very high, she really likes the way it works.