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Smarthome 102 – Electrical
Following on from my article on Plumbing your smarthome here are my top tips for electrical work when you’re designing or remodeling a home. I’ve bought surprisingly featured homes designed with expansion and maintenance in mind, and also homes that though well built,were not built to be smart, maintainable or upgraded.
Don’t forget that most countries require permits for electrical additions, even if it’s just adding a new outlet so the more you plan ahead, the better use you can make of your electricians time.
1. Run Neutral wires to each switch location.
More common now than a decade ago, but still I see new homes with no neutral in switchboxes. This may seem obscure, but most modern smart switches need live and neutral to operate – but most lighting switches work on live only. Make sure your electrician runs neutral wires to all switch locations so you can add smart switches at some point in the future. Read more…
SmartHome 101 – Plumbing
Simon’s tips and tricks when you’re creating a smart home with a pencil, or hammer. Taking a moment to think about how your plumbing is going to be laid out, considering future upgrades and accessibility for repair and replacement will make things much easier for you.
For Electrical tips, see Smarthome 102
1. Don’t put a shower head or controls on an outside wall.
This one should be obvious – if you install your shower controls on an outside wall, there’s no way to EVER get behind them. This may not be something you’re worried about now, but what about in a few years when you want to replace the diverter valve with the newest technology?
If possible make sure that there’s an interior wall behind your shower controls, and best, a closet – because you can easily cut a hole in the closet drywall to get to the valve, and that won’t mean having to re-tile your shower. Read more…
One more thing you don’t want to know about bitlocker..
This week I found another item to add to my infamous “10 Things You Don’t Want to know about Bitlocker” post – research just published by Synopsys hacker Ian Hakan shows there’s been a trivial bypass for Bitlocker without pre-boot for a long time – seemingly since 2000!
So No. 11 – If you don’t use pre-boot Bitlocker can be easily bypassed by someone with a rogue domain server.
Thankfully Microsoft jumped in with a fix in MS15-122 security bulletin – but you have to wonder if this exploit has been known by certain parties for longer?
CIO Review IoT Special Edition, November 2015
CIO Review and I have collaborated a few times around the smart home security and IoT space. They kindly asked me to write something for the November IoT Special Edition, published this week.
You can find me at p47, but the whole edition is valuable reading.
Smart Home or Dumb Home/Smart Cloud?
At the end of my street, tucked between some bushes and a tree in someone else’s garden, is a weathered beige box. I’d never noticed it before this week, but it’s become very important to me, because that dirty, unloved box is responsible for whether my smart home automation works, or not.
Yes, that beige box in someone else’s garden is where my home cable connects to the community coax network.
I’ve come to the realization that my smart home is actually pretty dumb on its own – without a connection to internet services, a lot of my clever rules and technology simply fail to work. My doorbell camera doesn’t send me video, my IFTTT rules to work the Hue Lights fail, and I can’t even open my Wink-connected door locks.
Amazon’s Echo is another victim of connectivity – it seems so clever, but when you step back and think about it – it only understands two words/four syllables – Ah-Mah-Zon and for the alternate name, Ah-Lex–Ah. All the other language processing is done in the cloud, so you can “turn off” my home voice recognition just by unplugging the coax in that anonymous roadside box. Read more…
Who?
 | EVP Cyber Product Innovation for Mastercard. Formally the Chief Technology Officer for Intel Secure Home Gateways, CTO for McAfee Enterprise Endpoint, CTO McAfee Innovation team, and Founder/CTO SafeBoot Corp. |
Simon Says - Musings of a Technology CTO 
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