A little thingy that is plugged inline with your ethernet connection and that adds a location code for the ethernet outlet that you are using. A piece of software looking at the network interprets the code and tells network services where you are, physically, on the network.

Could be used to control room lights or other location specific stuff.

(This seems so obvious to me that maybe the X-10 folks already make something like this.)
-- bristolz, Mar 14 2005

a bit like this, but smaller Roughly_20Where_20Am_20I_20_3f
there's some useful links on this idea. [neilp, Mar 15 2005]

geourl http://www.geourl.org
a physical/theorerical location conversion thing. [neilp, Mar 15 2005]

I'm wondering what location-specific stuff you'd need only when plugged into the network. Perhaps if your laptop knew where you were then 1-button pizza delivery would be possible.
-- Worldgineer, Mar 14 2005


Mostly home automation-like things are what I am thinking about. Suppose that you wanted to automatically control TV volume in the room when you are placing VoIP calls or cause a movie to be displayed on the nearest TV or print a file on the nearest printer or, well, any number of things, really.
-- bristolz, Mar 14 2005


I don't know if this is true at all but I heard that in Bill Gates' house his family members have bracelets or something that wirelessly transmit information to the home so that when they walk into a room say, the lighting and temperature automatically adjusts to their pre-specified preferences. Don't know how it works if two of them walk into a room. Maybe there's a compromise setting.
-- ignorantimmigrant, Mar 14 2005


One of them gets the lighting and the other gets the heating ("Hey! It's dark and cold!").
-- hippo, Mar 14 2005


if it has IP address, and a webserver, it could use ICBM/geourl.
-- neilp, Mar 15 2005


Perhaps I’m misunderstanding: This sounds like a NMS description to me. A SNMP get request for SysLocation and/or port name should be sufficient. Non? This requires no additional hardware (assuming the existing hardware supports MIB 2).
-- Shz, Mar 15 2005


[Shz]: I haven't any idea whether or not you are misunderstanding as I haven't a clue as to what NMS is. How would the schemes you mention work in a household with a wired network?
-- bristolz, Mar 15 2005


[Shz] You're talking about the protocol used to retrieve the location information. Bris is talking about a piece of hardware that would PROVIDE the location information, even if you move around.

Think for instance of a laptop that you might carry around a house or office. How would the SysLocation variable get updated to reflect your current location?
-- krelnik, Mar 15 2005


I see - thanks [krelnik]. Bad habit I have - always looking out from the center of a network. SysLocation is normally used for the location of a hub/switch/router..., and probably isn’t useful within a house which likely has only one or two such devices covering all rooms. However, descriptive port names could work in this case, say ‘LivRm_1’. A NMS (Network Management System) configured for continuous discovery would see your connection (MAC address from ARP table) to ‘LivRm_1’, or elsewhere. Back-end software could map network services once you have been discovered. Service mapping doesn’t exist in this form as far as I know - Banyan VINES came close.

Anywho, I just made this incredibly expensive, but it does require a back-end of some sort, either way. As for the location encoder... proximity detection, or something similar to UB’s suggestion might be the way to go, just to keep the signaling out-of-band.
-- Shz, Mar 16 2005



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