Since I bought the SmartThings hub and several switches and sensors I was thinking which scenarios I exactly want to work. So far I have been fooling around and I found out if you want a complete working set of scenarios without me using the app all the time to set my house in a state I want, I need to think it through and build all the scenarios from the beginning.

As I mentioned earlier, I bought a SmartThings hub and want to connect a couple of sensors and devices. One of the devices I bought is an energy meter. Since I drive an electric car I wanted to get some more insights in how much energy I use charging my car (and also what I use in the house). I found the Aeon Labs energy meter on Amazon for $35.00. Aeon Labs does have a newer version (V2) but I could not figure out why that would be a better deal for me.

Last week I got myself a SmartThings hub. I was already looking for some time to get into to home automation. I have a NEST thermostat, some Philips Hue lights but wanted something more. These are the scenarios I want to try to solve: I would love it when I come downstairs in the morning the lights come up (but only when it is still dark) and Sonos starts playing my music.

It’s been a long while since I blogged here. After we moved to the US keeping up with our family blog, work and starting a new life here in the US, blogging here wasn’t a high priority. Since we are more or less settled down and I have a little bit more time doing some technical stuff it might be a good time start blogging again. As you can see the blog moved from www.

This is one of the funny April fools jokes I found today. Most jokes aren’t that funny. But this one is subtle. Go to http://www.bing.com/ Search for google. This will be the result. Michael Kroll, Principal UX Manager from Bing explains the ‘Introduction Bing Basic’ in his blogpost 🙂 Oh and if you check the bing.com page the statues smile once in a while 🙂

My daughter watches a lot of videos on the iPad (youtube and some local stored videos) today she wanted to watch the videos on the pink iPad (our Surface RT with pink touchcover). I have an SD card with videos inserted in the Surface but they don’t show up in the videos library. When you try to add the SD card to the videos library Windows complains it can’t do that because it’s removable media.

A month ago I purchased my Roomba 780. At home we have a dog (German Sheppard) and we had to vacuum at least once a day (ok my wife did that :)) I thought; let me help a little in our household so I bought this device. At nights it automatically cleans the floor and when we leave the house we can manually start it as well by hitting the clean button or using the remote.

Ok I know I am a nerd but this is just funny 🙂 open a command prompt and run this command: tracert –h 100 obiwan.scrye.net it will result in this:

We get a lot of questions from people they see less apps in the Windows 8 store than their friends and are wondering what’s going on. It’s pretty simple. By default the Windows 8 store only shows the apps which support your Windows Language preferences. So if you install a Dutch version of Windows the store only displays apps which support the Dutch language. There are 2 ways you can show more apps.

Many people use the Mediaelement to play soundfiles in their apps. For my liitle app this wasn’t good enough. I build an app where I want to be able to press a button very fast and everytime a sound should be played. Mediaelement didn’t handle the soundplaying fast enough for me. On Windows Phone I could use XNA but that’s not available on Windows 8. The alternative is DirectX, since I don’t want to write any C++ code anymore I needed to find something else.