Next Steps

So, I have recently relocated to Johannesburg, which is the heart and financial hub of Gauteng province and South Africa, but it is also unfortunately the home of Gangsters. List25 lists Johannesburg as the 10th most dangerous city in the world.

You may wonder why I would move from a peaceful small town to a big crime ridden city. Well the answer is quite simple, that my business travel was taking me up to Johannesburg all the time, and I preferred to have a more settled life than flying up and down all the time. And… one of the more motivating factors, is that my girlfriend lives there.

So to get back to the point of my article. Living in Johannesburg is pretty crime ridden, and after living here for about 5 months and have already been exposed to 2 incidents of crime.

The first is that my car number plate has been cloned. So to start this story off, I had decided that I would be a good and obedient resident of Johannesburg and register for the controversial E-Toll program. It is controversial as many resident refuse to register or pay the E-Toll which have been dumped upon the Gauteng residents, which there is an on going battle to get E-Tolls scrapped and pay for the upgraded roads through another channel, perhaps an increase on the fuel levy.

After being in the new city a few months, my car license expired, so I had to either drive back 600km to my home town to pay the license fee, or register here in Johannesburg.  So I go along to the Randburg licensing department and get my new GP license registration. After a few weeks I managed to get the new license plates  made and installed. But before updating my license registration details with E-Tolls I drove up to Centurion which of course I took the  N1 and went through a couple of the E-Toll gantries. At that point I got an email from E-Tolls stating that my number plate and Etag were out of sync.  So that weekend I went along to one of the E-Toll service centers to update the registration details. On completing the registration details, I inquired about my E-Toll account balance, and I was told I had some transactions outside of the 7 day grace period, which I told them was impossible as I had only drive to Centurion which was 6 days ago, and should be inside the 7 day grace period. On closer inspection the service consultant showed me a picture of a car… When I had a look at the car, I asked her what make of car it was, and she told me it was a Nissan NP200!! Now thats not my car, my car is a Subaru Forrester, and I had the papers right there, and could show her my car parked outside. So my number plate has been cloned, and someone else is driving around Gauteng running up E-Tolls for me on my account.  The matter has been raised with JMPD and it’s just a matter of time before the offending owner is arrested.

The second incident is that I was mugged in the center of Johannesburg city after leaving one of the banks where I was working on a Friday afternoon. The traffic was very heavy as I was leaving the bank, so I decided to take an alternate route. This was probably one of the first mistakes that I made. I had my cell phone on the handfree cradle which is mounted on the dashboard. I was stopped in the traffic behind some cars, and then a kind man indicated that I had a flat tyre. At which point my country bumpkin naiveness kicked in, and I opened my window to have a look. At that moment, four arms came in through my window and I was not able to close the window.  The hands were going for my keys. At which point I started to kick at the hands. I am not sure how I manged to get my feet up to that height and kick, all I know is that is what I did.  Thank God that they did not get my keys, and then they lost interest in the keys when they saw my cellphone on the dash. They started grabbing the cellphone, and I could not fight off hands getting my keys and the cellphone. I could not stop them getting the phone, so they ran off with the phone, and I tried to chase them, but I realised that it was hopeless as they were already on the other side of the street, and if I chased them they would be able to lead me into a trap. So I got into my car and proceeded to drive home.  I have now learnt not to trust anyone on the streets, and to drive with windows closed and aircon on, and not to open the windows for anyone.

So that is my experience of the great city Johannesburg. And yes I still enjoy living in the city, and have not been put off, I guess it’s one of those things that happen. Just it also seems that Vodacom profits off mugging, as I went in to replace my handset, and the consultant said I can be thankful to the robbers that I now get to have an early upgrade. Well, no thanks at all as I am still short one cell phone which I would have had, and I have to pay in a penalty for the early upgrade.

Regarding the cloned number plate, I now have extra admin each month to make sure that E-Tolls credits me for the transactions made by the cloned number plates. At least that have been helpful enough to credit me.  I am now waiting for the offender to be arrested.

On the side note of this story, I have made great progress with my Ardunio lights project where I can control my lights through my cellphone, and I will write another blog post on that in the near future.

Thats all from me for now…

So I have recently begun playing with Ardunio circuits. If you don’t know what Ardunio is have a look at this page http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction for an introduction. Basically said it is a way one can interact with the physical world more than one can with their desktop computer.

In the first experiment I did which you can watch by going to my article here I made a small project which got some LED’s to light up when a button was pressed. The amazing thing was that the LED’s were not controlled by the button itself, but the button was an input into the program and turning the LED’s on and off were an output. What this means is that a computer program was actually controlling the way that the LED’s were lighting up, pressing the button caused the program running on the Ardunio chip to execute different instructions which caused different lights to light up.

Then the other experiment I did I did not yet managed to create a blog write up for it, but it’s on YouTube, and yes I have noticed that there is vertical syndrome on my videos. This was because I was using my cellphone to record the videos, and this will be corrected in any future recordings I do. You can view the video at this link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vmm0aY1lNiU.

So I was thinking what are some real life applications of this kind of technology? One of the things that sprung to my mind are to control things in ones home. I had these crazy ideas flying through my mind, like locking and unlocking the door to the house. Turning on your coffee to brew in the morning, then you can wake up to the smell of the coffee brewing. Other ideas like controlling the lights in your house by turning them on and off at specified times, you could even program the lights to behave in a certain way, so that when you go on holiday your home lights still come on to make it as if you are still around.

Then a friend of mine showed me to a website called Control 4 (http://www.control4.com/) which implements controls to ones house. These systems really look fancy, and include being able to control when your fountain turns on or off. Control your CCTV camera, unlock doors, monitor when a child returns home (the child must unlock the door with their PIN code). The list of uses is endless. These are the types of projects I am thinking about, automating your home.

It brings me back to a vision I had when I was at school, that was of a huge house, or call it a mansion if you will, which had this lounge, and there was a control where when activated it would move the lounge couches to the edge of the room and uncover the pool in the middle of the room.

What ideas do you have of things you would like to automate around your home?