Revolv home automation

Once you start automating your home with electronic locks, lights, switches, and other components, the number of apps on your phone can multiply very quickly. Worse, it seems like you should be able to easily link their behavior together yet can’t. 

After all, if you want the lights to turn off when you leave the house, shouldn’t the thermostat also turn down? The Revolv home automation system and associated smart phone app aim to simplify things with one centralized control hub that promises easy setup, no additional support fees, and an evolving lineup of supported devices and features.

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Using Revolv is designed to be simple. Once plugged into a central location for optimal Wi-Fi coverage, the unit automatically adds supported devices from the home network, while others need to be added manually via a walkthrough on the Revolv app.

The unit boasts seven wireless radios supporting ten different wireless protocols, with Insteon, Wi-Fi, and Z-Wave currently covered, and more including ZigBee to be rolled out later. What it doesn’t require is an Ethernet connection, creating an account, or monthly fees, with the system registering your phone simply by using the phone’s flash. Only iOS devices are currently supported, but Android, Windows Phone and others will follow.

Once devices are enabled, the fun begins. You can design different home "scenarios," such as coming home, vacation, relaxation, movie night, or bedtime, with rules being triggered by the phone’s proximity, motion sensors, or based on time. Currently the GeoSense proximity trigger is only enabled for one phone, though this will be updated early next year. However, multiple phones can control a Revolv system.

The company is also working on more complex conditional rules, as might apply in households where not everyone has a smartphone. Also planned is a feature that recognizes when people are still at home, despite the GeoSense-linked user leaving the house with their phone.

Belkin WeMo light switches and electrical outlets, Philips Hue and Insteonlightbulbs, Kwikset and Yale locks, and wireless speakers from Sonos are just a few of the devices currently supported, with a full list that is being regularly updated found on Revolv’s website.

The Revolv system is currently available for US$299.

If you’ve started to automate your home, what would you do with Revolv? Let us know in the comments.

Below is Revolv’s video pitching the “sexiness” of home automation.

Source: Revolv

Printer pencil

So you don’t want to join  pencil stubs and make a long pencil. No worries, we have another alternative, how about using them to print on paper. Yes, like a printer that uses pencil to print your documents. Traditional don’t you think? I feel the concept gets even more radical because it proposes the use of eraser to erase off mistakes! Do I hear my office scream in delight; no more cartridge woes!

Designers: Hoyoung Lee

Windows 8 - "Picture Password"

Windows 8 includes a feature called picture passwords that allow you to login to your account by using gestures on an image with your finger or your mouse. This is especially useful for tablets where you want to avoid typing if you can. Instead of typing in a password, you select a picture and then create three gestures on it to act as your password. When you create the picture password you can use gestures that consist of taps, circles, or lines. Once the picture password is created you can then login to your Windows accounts by performing these gestures in the same direction as when you created them. That means if you circled an object counterclockwise you would need to circle it counterclockwise to login. Circling it clockwise would not count as a successful gesture. This method allows for tremendous variation in possible passwords on a given picture and allows you to avoid having to use the virtual keyboard.

To enable picture passwords, type picture password at the Windows 8 Start Screen and then click on the Settings category as shown below.

When the search results appear, click on the Create or change picture password option to open the User Settings screen.

On the above screen click on the Create a picture password option. Windows 8 will now prompt you for your password to confirm that you are the owner of the account we are adding a picture password to.

Type your password and then click on the OK button. You will now be shown a screen that gives a brief explanation on picture passwords.

To start the process of creating your picture password, click on the Choose picture button. A window will open that shows all the pictures in your library so that you can select a picture you wish to use for your picture password.

Select a picture you would like to use and then click on the Open button. Windows 8 will now show how your selected picture will look and ask if you would like to use it or select another one.

If you are happy with the picture click on the Use this picture, otherwise click on the Choose new picture to pick a different once. Once you select a picture you will be shown a screen where you need to create three gestures that will act as your password.

When creating these gestures, you can make circles, straight lines, or tap in the picture. Please note that when you use these picture passwords the order in which you make the gesture and their direction matters. So each gesture must be followed in the same order and in the same direction when you use it to login. In this tutorial, I am going to create three easy gestures of circling two of the cars and then drawing a line from the truck to the minivan.

To do this, I would use my finger or drag my mouse to draw a circle around two of the cars and then create a line between the truck and the minivan. Each time I create a gesture it will briefly show on the screen like in the images below. You can see the three gestures that were created in the series of images below.

Gesture 1: Circle a car in a clockwise motion

Gesture 2: Circle the second car in a counterclockwise motion

Gesture 3: Line from the truck to the car

When you are done creating your three gestures, Windows 8 will then prompt you to confirm all three gestures again to make sure you remember it.

At the above screen you need to perform the gestures just like you previously made them. If you wish to create new gestures, please click on the Start over button. Once you complete all three properly, you will be presented with a screen that states you have successfully created a picture password.

You can then click the Finish button to get out of this setup wizard.

Now when you login to your account you will be shown your selected picture where you need to perform the exact gestures that you setup previously.

Once you complete all three gestures in the proper direction, Windows will log you into your account. If at any time you forget your gestures or are having problems, you can click on the Switch to password button to go back to using your normal text password.

To disable the picture password feature, you simply need to back into the Users settings and click on the Remove button as shown in the image below.

What is CAPTCHA and How it Works?

CAPTCHA or Captcha (pronounced as cap-ch-uh) which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” is a type of challenge-response test to ensure that the response is only generated by humans and not by a computer. In simple words, CAPTCHA is the word verification test that you will come across the end of a sign-up form while signing up for Gmail or Yahoo account. The following image shows the typical samples of CAPTCHA.

Almost every Internet user will have an experience of CAPTCHA in their daily Internet usage, but only a few are aware of what it is and why they are used. So in this post you will find a detailed information on how CAPTCHA works and why they are used.

 

What Purpose does CAPTCHA Exactly Serve?

CAPTCPA is mainly used to prevent automated software (bots) from performing actions on behalf of actual humans. For example while signing up for a new email account, you will come across a CAPTCHA at the end of the sign-up form so as to ensure that the form is filled out only by a legitimate human and not by any of the automated software or a computer bot. The main goal of CAPTCHA is to put forth a test which is simple and straight forward for any human to answer but for a computer, it is almost impossible to solve.

 

What is the Need to Create a Test that Can Tell Computers and Humans Apart?

For many the CAPTCHA may seem to be silly and annoying, but in fact it has the ability to protect systems from malicious attacks where people try to game the system. Attackers can make use of automated softwares to generate a huge quantity of requests thereby causing a high load on the target server which would degrade the quality of service of a given system, whether due to abuse or resource expenditure. This can affect millions of legitimate users and their requests. CAPTCHAs can be deployed to protect systems that are vulnerable to email spam, such as the services from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.

 

Who Uses CAPTCHA?

CAPTCHAs are mainly used by websites that offer services like online polls and registration forms. For example, Web-based email services like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail offer free email accounts for their users. However upon each sign-up process, CAPTCHAs are used to prevent spammers from using a bot to generate hundreds of spam mail accounts.

 

Designing a CAPTCHA System

CAPTCHAs are designed on the fact that computers lack the ability that human beings have when it comes to processing visual data. It is more easily possible for humans to look at an image and pick out the patterns than a computer. This is because computers lack the real intelligence that humans have by default. CAPTCHAs are implemented by presenting users with an image which contains distorted or randomly stretched characters which only humans should be able to identify. Sometimes characters are striked out or presented with a noisy background to make it even more harder for computers to figure out the patterns.

Most, but not all, CAPTCHAs rely on a visual test. Some Websites implement a totally different CAPTCHA system to tell humans and computers apart. For example, a user is presented with 4 images in which 3 contains picture of animals and one contain a flower. The user is asked to select only those images which contain animals in them. This Turing test can easily be solved by any human, but almost impossible for a computer. 

 

Breaking the CAPTCHA

The challenge in breaking the CAPTCHA lies in real hard task of teaching a computer how to process information in a way similar to how humans think. Algorithms with artificial intelligence (AI) will have to be designed in order to make the computer think like humans when it comes to recognizing the patterns in images. However there is no universal algorithm that could pass through and break any CAPTCHA system and hence each CAPTCHA algorithm must have to be tackled individually. It might not work 100 percent of the time, but it can work often enough to be worthwhile to spammers.