Slashdot Mirror
Talking Mirror, Pirate Skull Security System
junger writes "Themeaddicts, owned by a Hollywood animatronics guru famous for doing the T-rex in Jurassic Park, has created a home security system with a talking mirror (complete with floating head), talking pirate skull, and talking toucan. It informs the homeowner of things like a car coming up the driveway or the jacuzzi reaching the right temperature, and it turns into a surveillance camera."
Now, alot of articles on /. have been kinda lame lately... this one REALLY sucks! WTF.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
"There's someone prettier than you walking up the driveway, preparing poisoned apple now..."
Task Mangler
Murray? Is that you?
Fellowship 9/11
LCD 16:9 or alike, semitransparent mirror...
with no light (from the backlight) you only have the mirror...
with the light, you can see throught (like those observation mirror)
But does it run on Linux?
...now...but will hit the stores and then be as hip as that mounted dancing fish.
Mirror, mirror am I stoned?
Your image is now goatse.cx guy,
My home security must be pwn3d
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That reminds me of James Earl Jones, in "Field of Dreams"
"Oh, my God, you're from the Sixties! Out! Back to the Sixties! Get back! There's no place for you here in the future! Get back while you still can!"
Tell me that mirror is not drug inspired.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
It turns into a surveillance camera as the jacuzzi reaches the right temperature?.. o, I want that! Can I take screen caps?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/1640/1jq5.png
http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/1937/2yv7.png
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/3663/3fj4.png
http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/3041/4ty1.png
I'd like to see one with the Half-Life 2 G-man's face.
"Intruder in the driveway. The catapult is standing by. It's time to choose..."
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
...you see the headline "Talking Mirror, Pirate Skull Security System" and immediately think it's about a filesharing mirror site that talks.
I don't know how many times I've wondered what temperature my jacuzzi was, and wanted a parrot to deliver the news!
Unfortunately, the thing fails to notify you of slashdotting...unless it screams in pain O_o
Master, you site has been linked on slashdooooAAAAAAAAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHH KIIILLL MEEE AAAAAARRRRRGGGGGHHH OH THE PAIIINN
...quick hide ye movies, the dreaded RIAA have pulled up broadside!
Yes yes yes, shiny gadgetry to do little of import.
On the other hand, it is "kewl", and could evolve into some genuinely useful stuff.
For example, a friend came home last weekend to find his live-in elderly mother, already incapacitated by a stroke, had been lying on the floor for 3 hours after a bad fall. If a house system had been able to identify someone was unmoving in a non-stationary part of the house it could have informed him, supplied images to his cellphone, tied into his intercom system to communicate with her.
(Yes, there are all sorts of other things to be done for his mother, and he has, including an emergency-call amulet - she didn't use it. The point is these technologies could move into these areas improving them)
For another example, an former boyfriend of mine has a condo in a resort area several hours from his primary residence. Setting up a webcam to monitor it visually was an obvious step towards maintaining the home, but a "smart" system that could make limited 'decisions' such as thresholds for activity before alerting him, monitoring temperature or water levels, etc. would be quite valuable. Yes one can really geek out now and do it with X-10 etc. gadgets but he's not, he's just an average fella willing to spend a few bucks on some easy to install/use package for his vacation home.
Then there's the partner-factor. If the significant other isn't comfortable having it in the home, using it, then it's a no-go. If putting a friendly interface on it makes it that much more usable then that is, as Martha would decree, "a good thing".
Personally I'd love a front door "window" that would direct package deliveries to my always-home neighbor, display to religious proselytizers an animated rendition of them (complete with inserted photos of their faces) dropping into the pits of hell, and inviting everyone else to record a video message that will be relayed to me. Allowing me to respond with unlocking the door or lawn sprinklers as appropriate would be a cherished upgrade!
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
It'll be interesting, though, to see this in mass production. All of the sudden, Joe Average and his generic home alarm will be rocketed forward into the 21st century. Suddenly, the "Home of the Future" will have a toe-hold with the Late Adopter market segment.
How cool would it be when AI technology progresses to a point to interface with something like this? All of the sudden, the kid-sitting industry will taper off. Of course, we'll need to avoid any HAL like behavior.
Husband: "Open the car-bay door, HAL."
HAL: "I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that..."
Wife: "I told you not to hire that cheap garage door repairman... And stop calling it a car-bay."
Husband: "I'll go get the Yellow Pages."
Call me back when it involves a ninja
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I'd rather it talk to someone who breaks in. I mean if I walked into some guy's house looking for something to gank and all of a sudden the mirror was like "What are you doing here?" I think I'd be gone FAST.
For video and audio clips of the mirror, you can go straight to the company's website
that is much more impressive.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
For "very expensive" costs who would actually go an install this toy like system in their home? I mean I can imagine people doing it just for laughs but how much of this can you take day after day. Long after "the wow effect" wears off wouldn't you rather have an attractive blond animatronic over some bonehead?
from TFA: The devices communicate via RS-232. Even mice dont us rs232 commonly any more. Seems like the author just wanted to include some techno-babble to impress the average joe reader. It loses its effect on the average joe slashdotter. In other news, The Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) releases the newest revision to the RS232 standard; RS-232-C... Ah wait that was 1969!!
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
Not only is it cool, Basil's voice is Tony Jay! Freaking Megabyte from Reboot!
(or at least that's how it sounds)
Sry for the fanboy thing, just... so freakign cool, now if only they had Megs as the avatar too, he was always trying to take over mainframe, taking over a house isn't a bad start. Make the Mirror look like a vid-window too, heh.
Does it turn into a surveillance camera only after the jacuzzi is at the right temperature? That filthy, filthy man!
I have a friend that lost her black polydactyl cat when some nuts thought it was a witch cat and killed it. A talking mirror might just make people like that try to burn your house down with you in it.
I would love to have one, I would just not show it to unstable nut cases. It kind of reminds me of the technomages from Babylon 5.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Watch the videos. Also, why is there no more pictures of the technology? I have never seen any screen that looked like a perfect mirror while it was "off". It seems that this alone could be worth selling.
Mirror mirror on the wall, whos the geekiest of them all?
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
Is this really what people in general think of as 'great' and desirable? A house where you hardly have to move to achieve anything, with loads of electric and electronic gadgets that can do it all for you? To me it seems like what I call stupid luxury: luxurious things that you don't need, which will in the end make you less able to function on your own.
Take a thing like the microwave oven and the ready-made meals: A great thing because now you can try out a huge range of dishes that you would never ever be able to cook yourself. But the price is that you forget how to actually cook a decent meal; or if you are young, you never even learn it in the first place. And meanwhile the food companies do their utmost to find cheaper ways of producing things, mostly by replacing good ingredients with crap and additives - this is called product development and advertised as 'new, improved recipe'.
No, to me a really nice, luxurious and cool home would be something entirely different. It would a have nice, but not overworked garden, there would be floors and walls of natural stone or wood, the kitchen would be simple, with just the things you actually need. There would be no TV; there would be a good computer and good network connection. And that's it, no stupid automation, no stupid crap that tries to think and live for you so you don't have to yourself.
The other standard that comes to mind for this purpose is GPIB, but getting a GPIB card for your computer is a little more expensive than a frickin' serial port. Why add unnecessary cost?
How would you have done it?
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
...does it run emacs?
Where's the holographic floating head?
...what you do with the sedated body i have no idea
you have to have one of those in your house
or at least a holographic Robert Picardo
that way when your life sized t-rex maimed somebody the EMH could sedate them
that way the trespassers/victim couldn't sue
Mirror, mirror, why?
You are goatse guy,
My home has been pwn3d.
DYWYPI?
Was it in return of the Jedi where Luke talks to the Droid Eye at the entry door of Jabba's palace? Now that I have a house I'm really tempted to do that. A cheap USB webcam, some servo motors, a speaker... Will be fun to mess with unwelcome visitors.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!
You can buy one from Philips:
Company website (UK).
Developed years ago. Nothing new.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I want one of 3PO telling me what the odds of me poking my eye out when trying to open a can of beans.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
I can't help but to post about a haunted house my friends and i have been building for years, using speakers, a printer port, some motion detectors, some pneumatic valves, a java proggy to listen to the printer port fed by xml, and some optoisolated triacs.
if you want to check it out, its here
http://www.bapudi.com/yabbse/index.php?board=7
the only thing I can't figure out is how they'd integrate PAL into the screen, anyone?
Would it be possible to do this yourself using a "2 way" type mirror with an lcd monitor behind it?
When the lcd backlight is turned on,the image is visable, otherwise you would see your own reflection. Could it be that simple?
I'll get one of these when it can show Holly from Red Dwarf's floating head.
Holly: Alright, dude.
Me: What is it? I'm busy.
Holly: I can't remember now, I've gone blank.
(A few seconds pass...)
*KABLAMMO*
Holly: Oh yeah, that was it. Brace yourself, a meteor's about to hit the house.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
How does "You are goatse guy" constitute 7 syllables?
I keep remembering a local incident where an alarm in a bar/club went off at 0500 on a Sunday, well after closing time. Some deputy sheriffs showed up and found a door open so they searched the building. As one of them came around a corner he encountered a wooden indian statue, complete with raised tomahawk, and promptly shot it twice (good grouping too right in the chest).
The other thought that comes to mind is when I installed my own alarm system at home. Everything was wired and worked OK, then the voice module that was on backorder showed up. I installed that without a hitch and went to test the system. The response came out: "fuego! fuego! feugo!" for the fire alarm and something about "la policia" on the burglar portions. I spent the next hour trying all the jumper settings one by one since that page wasn't in the manual....of course english was all pins open, the last one I tried.
I always thought the basic white box with an angled glass cover were rather boring....
If I were to have security cameras in my house, I'd go for the cameras used in the
Bond movie Live_and_Let_Die.
Having a rotating skull with top hat seems much more fun.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Mekka lekka hi, mekka hiney you're under arrest.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
This is marketing suicide. Bloody fools are missing the whole Walmart demog here.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Can I get a talking parrot that says "Jesus is watching you"?
Already been done by some Greek dude about 22 centuries ago...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Forget how well the security system works. What homeowners want to know is: "Is it skinnable?"
Step 3. Profit.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
"Sir, are you really going out in public wearing that?!" says the floating head
While this might be very expensive for you and I....you gotta remember, there are a LOT of people out there that make a LOT of money, and that $19K is basically pocket change to them.
And I gotta say..if I was in that category, I'd have one of these on order right now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I bet it helps prepare food and tells you when that food is ready. Unfortunately, it's extremely unhelpful, saying only "follow your nose!"
"Just because you're eloquent doesn't mean you aren't a fucking crackpot." -Wavebreak
This security system doesn't need a talking pirate skull.
I propose displaying a severed head in front of the house.
Nothing says "Do not enter" like a head on a spike. And it's easily understood in any language.
I'm going to karma-whore by posting a funny bit from Family Guy.
Peter: This is worse then that time when I was Kevin Federline's magic mirror.
(Flash to Kevin's apartment)
Kevin Federline: Magic mirror, how can I look like a douchebag today?
Peter: Well, Kevin, um, first of all, I would say don't shave and don't shower.
Kevin: Okay, I won't.
Peter: And you just got out of bed, right?
Kevin: Yeah.
Peter: Uh, I would say just go ahead and wear that tank top all day.
Kevin: Um... okay Peter: So let's see, we covered the hygiene, no collared shirts... um... oh! Don't forget to walk around with an undeserved sense of accomplishment.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Because when a pirate skull appears in the mirror and informs me that the jacuzzi is ready, I know I want to jump right in.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
I believe that the implied gagging must count as a couple syllables.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
I for one welcome our (Magic Mirror / Pirate Skull / Parrot) talking / peeping tom overlords
If you are forced to have a houseguest you aren't too keen on, don't tell them about it. Just let them encounter the talking face in the mirror when they get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom!