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."
"There's someone prettier than you walking up the driveway, preparing poisoned apple now..."
Task Mangler
Murray? Is that you?
Fellowship 9/11
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
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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
Although you know it doesn't run on linux. Knowing slashdot, if it ran on linux it would say so in the title of the article or at least in the description.
This being slashdot you're more likely to see: To run Windows you'll need a bigger mirror.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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."
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?
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!*
But every *serious* switch, router, bridge or other piece of networking gear does.
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.
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.
You can buy one from Philips:
Company website (UK).
Developed years ago. Nothing new.
This technology has been around for a few years for mirror/televisions. eg: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111100,0 0.asp
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?
I don't know why the interface was mentioned in TFA, but RS232 was not a bad choice.
RS232 (does anybody actually call it TIA232-F in conversation?) is robust, easily interfaced, well supported, commonly available, and cheap. RS232 is also quite fast enough for human-world device interfacing.
Many things have changed since RS-232-C was revised in 1969; there has been a name change and it is up to revision -F.
Already been done by some Greek dude about 22 centuries ago...
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