My recollection for Halloween is toffee apples, costumes, carving pumpkins (or in our family swedes because they were much cheaper), parties and ducking for apples - what was wrong with that? OK, I can't really take offence at a few tots dressing up and being escorted round knocking on doors in the hope of a handful of sweets. But more usually it's a gang of teenagers demanding money with menaces, the "tricks" being thinly disguised vandalism and any offer of sweets as treats being turned down with a sneer. 

So thank God for Siberia, or more particularly Siberian winds, because that seems to have done the trick and I've not been treated to any unwelcome visitors tonight.

Update: Oh Dear.

Now that I have an increasingly automated home, it makes more and more sense to me, since it is much easier to localise a visible light transmission to a single room than an RF transmission. The downside is that such a transmission can also be blocked by clothes and other obstacles. However, I think this could be a viable solution to certain problems with presence detection and identity that some people have been trying to solve with RFID or even Bluetooth sensing.

And there is also the converse possibility. Imagine a configurable remote control device, some kind of portable touch screen or web tablet. Have each room have an IR beacon that transmits the room ID and the tablet receive and process it. The presented interface can now be very easily made appropriate to the room the control device is residing in. I can think of ways of mocking this up now.

I already have an IR TX/RX infrastructure provided by my ceiling mounted Idratek modules. This was obviously conceived for RC4/5 remote control purposes, but my devious mind is busy thinking up some other uses. One of the advantages of the Idratek system is that it is not a passive IR distribution system like, for example, Xantech stuff, but actually attempts to recognise frames and can process them. It can also forward unrecognised frames to Cortex. I'm not sure whether I am constrained to RC4/5 frames, at least with the current firmware, but even within that limitation some interesting possibilities spring to mind ...

... must read up some more on RC4/5 and IrDA, and find out whether the Idratek modules can do IrDA ...

 

But Thunderbird is doing a poorer and poorer job at spam filtering (or the spammers are getting cleverer) and it's starting to get a bit irritating. In addition, mail access from my mobile device is even worse since it doesn't get the benefit of Thunderbird's filtering. Even though I have flat rate data, filtering out 100's of spam a day on a mobile screen was too much, so I stopped using it. But one of my friend's showed my his iPhone, generating instant gadget envy and I decided I really ought to mobilise my life a bit more - even without an iPhone. So some kind of server-side spam filtering was clearly needed.