The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
How may plug-ins do you have in your house? If your home is like mine, you find that nearly every set of plugs in your house is growing power bars so that you can have access to power when you need it. This is true for most homes across North America. Houses built 20 or 30 years ago typically had two or three sets of plugs in a room. New houses on the other hand average a set of plugs every five feet to make up for the bloom of electrical gadgets in our homes. Five years from now, a number of companies are hoping to have this model changed. Research is advancing into batteries which last enormous amounts of time and home networking systems will change the way we deal with appliances in our homes. Research is currently ongoing that will let machines like laptops run a full day first of all, extending to a week in the near future on a single charge. When appliances only need recharging once a week, it gives us a lot more freedom in how we use them. An even better idea would be the ability to recharge items wirelessly, with an electrical current being fed into a machine where it sits. A lap for example would simply "call" a recharging station and it could top the battery up no matter where it is in your home. This brings us to the second part of the scheme, a networked home filled with gadgets which talk to each other. I saw a refrigerator a few years ago that had a computer screen built into the front of it. The fridge could be connected to a phone line allowing you to search for recipes, retrieve information about products in your fridge, or keep a running inventory of the items inside. The next step would be for appliances like this to be able to either compile a grocery list for you based on what was in your fridge and isn't any more, or even place an order for you through one of the many stores which already offer online grocery shopping services. Networked homes could allow you to move from one room of your house to the next, the pay-per-view football game following you from one television set to the next. Networked appliances such as cell phones, Palm Pilots, laptop computers, and even gadgets such as watches, or necklaces could all talk to each other, sharing information stored on them such as addresses, appointment books, vital medical records, or photos. A few changes like these could drastically effect how we use the technology we surround ourselves with. If we don't need to think about electrical gadgets much, if they maintain themselves, recharge themselves, and talk to each other, they quickly become a vital part of our lives. Access to information no matter where we are is becoming vital for many people and research like this will see it happen in only a few years time.
