Blinds and curtains... lets face it... are pretty annoying. They are annoying to put up, they get dirty, they take up space and they get unfashionable in time. If you can be bothered you waste your time everyday when you pull or draw them. 

It's also pretty difficult to automate them as every blind is different. You need an electrical supply as well as a motor configured to draw and pull the blinds.

Our children will look back and laugh at us. How we wasted time, energy and effort on these strange contraptions which only purpose is to block light. They'll all have windows which, at a click of a button, can change the opacity of a window.

Fortunately for us... the technology has now arrived!

For a few years its been possible to make glass with the ability to make itself opaque however its only recently manufacturers have started to sell smart film which allows an existing window to be retrospectively fitted with the technology. Check out the video from Smart Tint showing the windows in action.

More information can be found at their website, SmartTint.com

Bad luck tends to follow me.

Between doing up houses I decided to sofa crash for a few weeks whilst my house purchase was going through. My friend was going away and so I looked after their cats and house whilst they were away. On day three I was sitting working on the laptop when I suddenly heard a running water. It took me a few moments to find that - for some reason - water was gushing out of their upstairs bathroom cabinet under the sink... fast. We're talking mains pressure, tap fully on, water spraying in multiple directions. 

Throwing myself down the stairs I located the internal water stop (which was broken) and then ran to the road to find that I needed a spanner to stop the outside water stop! Running back into the kitchen to find the key for the shed where the tools were kept I was already walking into a waterfall as water had started coming through the ceiling. 

After fight with the water stop a few minutes later I had the water off. The problem was that a flexible hose had burst. When any tap in the house was turned on or off fast a vibration if often sent through the pipes. This was causing the hose to rub and deteriorate. After less than 10 minutes of water the leaking the house was a mess. The kitchen ceiling had to have new plasterboards and the walls all needed repainting. It took 2 days just to clean up all the mud that had run from the ceiling over their new kitchen.

My friends (after over coming the shock) realised their luck at having a property developer chilling out next to the leak as it happened.

Whilst at the time we viewed the incident as almost entirely unavoidable since working with home automation it has become apparent that it easily was. A water leak detector in the sink area could have wirelessly sent a message to electronic water stop valve stopping the water seconds after the leak occurred.