My Blog writing has suffered lately and I apologize to any of my lurkers that have checked in on me and have been disappointed. I blame it at least partially of how fast the grass is growing. The only good thing about all the mowing I’ve been doing is that I have actually lost a few pounds!
I purchased an Amazon Echo (Alexa) for my wife for her Birthday last year. Becky has a iPhone and constantly laments about how poorly Siri performs in comparison to Google on my Droid. While the voice activation isn’t perfect on the phone, it’s pretty good. The Amazon Echo takes this to the next step and relies on voice activation completely. Overall, we’ve been pleased with the ease in set up, its ability to search from verbal commands and its ability to provide verbal responses. Probably most of all we’ve been impressed with its ability to pick out our voices from amongst background noise as well as the quality of the sound it achieves from the single point speaker system.
Portuguese Architects have designed rotating homes that follow the sun in much the way Sunflowers do. Not only do they rotate to maximize the time their solar panels are 90 degrees to the sun, but they also can reconfigure themselves internally to optimize the space for maximum solar gain. The Architects claim the homes can produce five times as much energy as they consume. Read the entire article 