New "Smart Device" Reviews Just in Time for the Holiday Shopping Season!

I have decided to start posting articles about different types of technology devices and other hardware that I have obtained, with an emphasis on my own personal experiences and opinions, and providing a review of the device's performance and specific purposes, such as home automation and other computer controlled tools to make life a little easier, and help make us a little more lazy, LOL~!

With the holiday shopping season in full bloom, I am sure many of you are looking for information, and even advice, on what is a good buy, and worth it's purchase cost, and what devices are not what they were supposed to be, and not worth your time or money!

With the emergence of the IoT - the "Internet of Things", we are starting to see many "Smart" devices everywhere, with WiFi built into everything from light switches, to being able to remotely control almost anything you can imagine, such as being able to control a remote camera in your house from your cell phone, even making it pan left and right, and up and down, so you can watch your dog and cat wherever they happen to be in any room of your house.

Personally, I am currently shopping for voice controlled devices that stream all kinds of media, information, and just about any other function you can think of.  I am in the process of researching and comparing the features and capabilities of "Smart" devices such as the Amazon Echo, Tap and Dot, having gone in with my brother and sisters to buy an Echo for our mother on her 75th birthday last July, and being VERY impressed with it's ability to interpret voice commands given as natural speech!  The last time I played with voice controlled software and hardware was in the early 90's, and with the computing power of that time, software interpretation was very limited, and commands had to be spoken exactly and in perfect English, without any accents or other voice inflections.

With today's HUGE, no GIGANTIC, increase in computing power, and specifically the processors, aka the CPU's, which are the "brains" of any computer or computer enabled/enhanced/controlled device such as smart phones, voice control has drastically improved to the point where normal spoken language is understood by these devices, with very few, if any, mistakes!

So, with my research just beginning on these "Smart" devices I am going to purchase for gifts this holiday season, I will try to post updates and reviews with my own personal opinions on these and other voice controlled devices here, and/or possibly post this on my blog here on my website, accessible via the menu link at the far right of your screen.

Please check back in often to see updates to my research on the IoT~!!!  And thanks for taking the time to read this brief introductory to my new website features~!

Older Posts:

The Dawgland.com website and related sites are all now being hosted on my new Linux based VM Server, running Fedora 20 for the base OS host server, and using Oracle's VirtualBox VM Server to host my guest OS's!  Using FC20 for the host OS and VirtualBox for the VM server guests has turned out the be the best decision I ever made concerning my home servers, as it is working far better than I ever expected! :-)

My new server is a Lenovo TS140 Quad-Core Xeon based server with 16GB of RAM and two 2-TB Western Digital "RED" NAS hard drives configured in a RAID1 Mirror set-up to provide drive storage redundancy, which is also working better than I ever expected!!

More info to come as time permits and I recover from my recent herniated disk removal surgery...

Jamie

Older stuff:

There is a lot of information about the Linux operating system, as well as other computer related tips and tricks I've learned over the 35 years I've been working on computer hardware and software.  It's available here in my Wiki available via the link in the menu at the right of your screen.  I add new information often, so check it out whenever you get a chance!

There's also a new forum for computer enthusiasts to share information about anything and everything to do with computers!  If you are interested in sharing, please register for an account in the forums in the right menu and request access and I will authorize your account.  I had to set it up this way due to the millions of people who just want to take advantage of an online forum to post spam and other junk.

I've also started up a couple of new websites, RCModelHelis.com and SandisRecipes.com, in the menu at the right.

One of my long time passions has been flight, and specifically helicopters.  I've been building, collecting and flying radio controlled helicopters for about 15 years and currently have 9 helis, including a quad rotor AR.Done2 running it's own Linux on board OS with high definition cams.  My RCModelHelis.com website is very new, and as such very basic, but has lot's of pictures and even some videos from my drone.

Also very new, and with not much there, is SandisRecipes.com, a site I made in honour of my mom's great food recipes!  I will add some of her famous recipes as I have the time, so check it out often!

Click here to E-Mail Jamie: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

This website is always undergoing updates and upgrades!

© 2001 - 2016 Jamie D. Rubinstein - Dawgland.com - J.R. Computers. All rights reserved.