Here's an interesting note about an industry drive to make our homes "smart."
I wrote an article fifteen years ago about this, which I've posted in a separate item. The IT industry is drving the smart home phenomenon in part because it's "cool," and in part because it will increase profits. A very small part of smart home stuff will actually make things more convenient, but I remain skeptical.
If you buy into the smart home concept, it means replacing virtually every powered device in your home--coffe makers, washers, driers, refrigerators, stereos, and so on. A lot of money. And for what? So you can turn on your coffee maker by sending a Bluetooth signal from your Palm Pilot while you are still in bed? And then worry constantly you are going to turn the coffeemaker on by accident and burn the house down. No thanks.
I've had some ABus equipment for several years, but have never quite gotten around to installing it, because of the complexity of designing and installing the wiring and room controls. ABus is an industry standard for being able to distribute music from a single source to a bunch of different rooms in the house. You can control the volume in each room separately, and can even use your remote controls to change radio channels or switch to a different CD if you have a multi-CD player.
But it always seems like an enormous effort to get it all working, compared to just sticking one of the now very small stereos on a shelf in the room and forgetting about it.