Tuesday 19 July 2011

5 Things All Future Smart Appliances Should Do

So after my post about pointless smart home appliances, I thought I'd come up with some ideas on how all future homes and smart appliances could be better. So rather than adding cool but useless features, finding poor excuses to connect something to the internet, we should have good reasons and focus on costing less to run not more, in a financial sense and a ecological one.

  1. Use Less Energy (and any other resource)!
    The most practical thing any new appliance can do is save you money over your current one! But most of the smart appliances look like they'll just put our bills up even more.

Wednesday 13 July 2011

3 Pointless Smart Kitchen Appliances and How They Could Be Improved

Robo-Fridge

During every tech show there's always a bit where some company will show off their latest inventions for 'smart home' technology. Sounds brilliant, but why are they always such pointless products.

Take for instance the LG appliances from this  BBC Click video  Smart kitchen appliances connected to the Web. So what's LG's vision of the future kitchen.

Thursday 7 July 2011

[SOLVED] How To Stop XSL Outputting Unwanted Namespaces


Unwanted namespace in transformed XML
I'm using XSL quite a lot now and several times I've had an issue with namespaces in the output XML/XHTML. In particular if you're using xpath-functions then you might have the xmlns:fn namespace finding it's way into your output. I've finally found the solution and though I'd better post it before  I forget it.

Lets see some an example of the problem.

Wednesday 6 July 2011

A Note On HP Setup Ink Cartridges

Just installed a new printer cartridge and getting the "Incompatible Cartridge" message?

It may not be obvious, but when you buy an HP printer (and likely other brands) the cartidges you get in the box are SETUP ones. These are not the same as the standard size ones you'd buy from a shop. Apparently they have about the same amount of ink (although I'd question that), but the key thing is you have to use them the first time you use the printer and you can never use them again.