Anticipating demands / calendars

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  • chris_j_hunter
    Automated Home Legend
    • Dec 2007
    • 1713

    Anticipating demands / calendars

    despite Palms & iPhones, SWMBO still has a calendar on the wall that she writes on ... it's the household calendar, whereas those on the devices are personal ('though iPhone can have several calendars, each usable individually, and all together, as well as being synchronised between iPhones & iPods & desktops & laptops, this is somehow not convenient enough ** ) ... so a thought :

    if Cortex had access to the household calendar & could interpret it, it could know about events coming-up & could activate things accordingly - eg: visitors expected on such & such a date, so need to get this & that rooms up to temperature before they arrive; eg: one or other, or all, are going on holiday, returning on such & such, so need to ... etc; eg: people expected to-dinner, so ... there must be loads of exampes !

    even better, of course, if a Cortex-based household calendar could be instantly available on the wall ... or if I could persuade SWMBO to move hers to her iPhone & Cortex could link with it through the Mac network ...

    ** just as the timer that's on the iPhone isn't convenient enough, meaning the old-fashioned clockwork one on the window-ledge is still used - even though iPhone is pretty much always to-hand, instant visibility & accessibility is often important, multi-function screens & icon-driven, let-alone menu-driven, approaches are too much of a distraction !
    Our self-build - going further with HA...
  • RichardC
    Automated Home Jr Member
    • Mar 2009
    • 29

    #2
    It's an interesting idea,

    I use google calendar to sync between my office outlook, blackberry and the calendar that I setup for my other half to use.

    The paper calendar still has precidance....

    I do wonder about putting a web terminal in the kitchen to assist with the conversion to electronic. I don't think I will be using the tactic of "you can store recipes on it" for this!

    At least we will prevent double booking.

    If the Idratek software can then pick up on the calendar entries, parse the description. I can see a few pitfalls with this, with the english language being so varied. If one used keywords that it can pick up on and say for example bring the heating on early from the fallback setpoint. But having a stand alone calender which can't sync with google or outlook wouldn't be so useful.

    IMHO of course!

    Rich

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    • chris_j_hunter
      Automated Home Legend
      • Dec 2007
      • 1713

      #3
      >if the Idratek software can then pick up on the calendar entries, parse the description ... pitfalls ... english language ... keywords ...

      another way might be to have small tick & dialogue boxes that could be ticked - eg: each day on the calender would have a tick box, which we would tick if we wanted Cortex to do anything particular that day, it might then respond with a list of further tick-boxes (eg: heating, alarm, reminder ... ), and again, and again ... to elicit the information it needs with as little hassle as possible ... that way it might be rather like contacting somebody to arrange things, which maybe happens often in the life of the calendar already ! ?

      maybe ...
      Last edited by chris_j_hunter; 7 March 2009, 05:36 PM.
      Our self-build - going further with HA...

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