With this episode, we kick off a new theme - Everyday Tech and home automation is a natural choice for a first episode. The earliest reference to a smart home we found was a short story by Ray Bradbury in 1950 called “There Will Come Soft Rains”. It was about a smart house going about its daily routine in the year 2026. It wakes the family, cooks a perfect breakfast, cleans the tables, and so on. The story does have a morbid undertone - but more of that later. From fiction to nerdiness. Intended for residential networks only, UPnP is a set of networking protocols that allows devices to discover each other and work together without active manual configuration. Sounds a bit like the United Nations of networking 😉. We also dig into the psyche of burglars and their nemesis - modern alarm systems. Hope you enjoy the episode. Do record or write in to tell us what you think of this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices