An IBM engineer/inventor has added a number of wireless sensors to various appliances and can now be alerted via Twitter if anything isn’t quite right.

Dr Stanford-Clark’s Isle of Wight cottage now has sensors installed that can monitor power and water usage, taps, lighting, even whether mouse traps have been triggered.

He suggested that the systems would help to reduce his carbon footprint and energy bills, saying that costs had already fallen by one-third in the last year. read more

Digging through patent applications can bring up some interesting designs, such as this idea from IBM, filed last year and just now being talked about on blogs.

Realizing that there is still a degree of separation between mainstream home entertainment (TV) and mainstream blogging/social networking (Twitter/Facebook), IBM has come up with an idea to combine the two so that the everyday user can blog or tweet about something they’re watching on TV via a specially crafted remote control unit.

The geekier among you (me included) will probably roll their eyes and suggest that the separation needn’t matter — I can already tweet or blog from my laptop or iPhone while watching TV and it doesn’t matter to me that the devices are distinct. In fact, having tested out accessing basic web services from remote control units, I’d say it can be a pretty painful experience. read more