Smart watches have always fascinated me since I was a little kid. Dick Tracy's communicator watch fascinated me and I was always hoping that such a device would be invented. Well, it appears that we're starting to see that reality slowly come into focus.

A few months ago, I kickstartered the Digispark - a tiny USB Arduino platform. These $10 tiny usb enabled Arduino "stamps" are perfect for me. They'll help me reduce the cost and physical footprint of the Plantduino, plant watering system. What's great about these is they come with headers for attaching Grove stems so I can control the pump via a Grove SSR.

Chili Technologies LLC home automation portal is online at http://home.chilitechno.com. Data acquisition and reporting for various Arduino enabled home automation devices.

I'm pleased to announce that cloudsyncr is now available in cake form, yes, the cake is not a lie. In addition to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Picasa, Flickr, Dropbox, and Amazon S3, cloudsyncr now syncs delicious photos directly to my stomach. My amazingly creative and talented friend, Marissa, over at 52cakes.com baked this awesome salted caramel cake. The shape of the cake, and the fact it would be ensconced in a fondant cloudsyncr logo was quite a welcome surprise.

Here at Chili Technologies, we follow new trends in technology and product launches pretty closely. Given that was are actively involved in iOS development, it's natural that we'd follow Apple launches, particularly iPad and iPhone launches, particularly closely. We're also early adopters here at Chili and after the first iPad (v1) was launched in 2010, we picked up a 3G version a few weeks after launch. There is some debate as to whether the new iPad (3rd gen) is a worthy upgrade, or rather, worth the premium to upgrade to the Retina display, faster processor, and LTE. I would argue, and my own experience is testimony to this fact, that an upgrade from the original iPad to the new iPad is warranted, but an upgrade from the iPad 2 is not.

Following up to my previous blog post, I've managed to complete v1 of the plantduino system. It's pretty basic, but it gets the job done. I've outlined the existing functionality, as well as any future revisions I hope to make. Also attached is the current Arduino 1.0 sketch I'm using.

I don't have what you would call a green thumb. Often the plants I have around the house die because of forgetfulness and irregularities of watering schedule, or not having the right touch in watering just the right amount. Needless to say I love having plants in my apartment, I just lack the right touch to water them on a constant automated basis.

I'm a big fan of home automation, as it lets us delegate the mundane tasks of managing appliances and other home-related tasks to computers and custom electronics. So when I heard about the Nest - the internet connected learning thermostat, I was pretty excited. Nest hit the nail on the proverbial head when they said that current generation of digital thermostats are hard to use and hard to program.

After a few false starts, I finally have started down the road of N900 application development, by learning yet another language: PyQt. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and the fact that there is no foursquare app for Maemo, is one of the driving factors for me to develop an app (to fill that void). I'm planning on doing development using Python and the Qt framework (PyQt) for fast development. I'm not a C++ programmer, and I never will be.

I just installed the latest beta of Fennec, Mozilla Firefox's little brother which is targeted for lightweight and memory constrained (though they recommend a minimum of 128MB memory) devices such as smart phones. My goal was to see how it compares to the built-in "MicroB" browser, which is also based on the Gecko rendering engine present in both Firefox 3.6 and Fennec, but has a more streamlined feature set profile adapter for the Maemo Internet Tablet (NXXX series) devices.