As a recent father of new baby twins (Saskia and Sam – 7 weeks), I have had occasion to give broadband and babies a lot of recent thought. Babies are earthy and real. Broadband is geeky and virtual. Yet they actually do overlap.
One of the first issues we faced after the birth was how to reliably and cost effectively listen to our new tots around the home. There were several so-called “baby monitors” on the market in Australia, but all of these seemed to have difficulty delivering a clear audio signal when confronted by the high ceilings, thick walls and, in particular, the 802.11n wi-fi signal pumping imperiously from our Apple AirPort Extreme network router. It was initially eerie and eventually downright annoying to hear our beloved, but often wailing tots, through a thick acoustic haze of white noise and clicks.
That’s when the Philips Avent SCD 589 Digital Baby Monitor (with – woohoo!- “Zero Interference DECT Technology”) came to my attention. This device purports to “guarantee” a crystal clear acoustic connection with zero interference between the baby’s monitor and the parent unit due to Philips’s patented “Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunication”
The technology has had glowing reviews at certain authoritative blogs (www.boingboing.net) but sadly it will set you back almost AU$350 once shipping and handling have been factored into the purchase price. It seems Philips doesn’t deem Australia sufficiently advanced to need such kit, so it doesn’t distribute the model here. I finally had to buy it via Amazon.com from an outfit called the 16th Avenue Pharmacy Inc (for which no physical address seems available, but presumably an American business). I will report back on how well the SCD 589 actually works in Australian conditions (assuming it arrives), in due course.
While waiting however, it occurred to me that Skype could be used for the same purpose. This was because I had already established Totcam! – a password protected, Apple iSight (en.wikipedia.org) camera-driven Web site to which I was beaming live 24/7 vision of the twins. The camera was mounted on a SightFlex flexible firewire stand (www.mac-pro.com), the video was being transmitted by Imagecaster software from Econ Technologies (www.econtechnologies.com) and the site was being hosted by Apple .mac. This was all very well for vision, but with a computer running near the twins upstairs, as well as in the kitchen downstairs, the microphone built into the camera could also be used as a baby monitor by routing their noises from one room to another. Skype has an ability to use the Bonjour system built into Apple OSX so the bandwidth passes across the domestic LAN rather than over the Internet, and thus does not use up a household’s monthly Internet access quota in the course of a long audio session.
It was useful to introduce these technologies to keep our family, friends and colleagues appraised of the latest twin action. But my favourite innovation from the viewpoint of someone delivering frequent late-night milk feeds is a new kind of Internet information appliance called a Chumby (www.chumby.com). This is a small video touch-screen about the size of a softball which reads and displays RSS feeds in widgets. It is about $300 for the device plus delivery (www.international-orders.com).
The owner can select the feeds they like, arranging them in customised channels. These can be taken from sources as diverse as you can imagine, such as the world’s international newspaper publications (eg The New York Times), your favourite photo feeds on Flickr, your social networking friend updates and so on. It’s a long list. Information scrolls down the Chumby’s screen automatically so your hands never need to leave your baby’s head and the bottle. Now that’s broadband at its very best.