We all know my love of data visualization and the quantified self. Brad Feld has a post detailing his quest for a Personal Dashboard. I’ve thought about this for a while now myself and have had visions of a few items all digested in different formats.

In the morning, I want my TV to turn on right as my alarm (iPhone) goes off. On the TV I want a few widgets to be there: news headlines, weather, my days appointments, and my media player. Think something similar to Jeff Jarvis’ Konfeedulator.

Then, as I switch to my computer (tablet PC preferably) I will have a dashboard populated with information (based on the date) that I need to see. It could be financial statements, research to read based on a meeting later in the day, emails, etc. It’s all curated for my day and coming days.

Lots of the prep work will be based on tags and what type of information I put in my calendar. This is fine with me as on the back-end of this system will be a highly customizable “information pot” where I put all the sources with search terms, etc to filter to my dashboard. I believe this will be the hardest part to do, but I think there are ways to make this easier. To track and report on my health, I can take pictures of food bar codes, for example.

Lots of jumbled thoughts here, I guess I should just start trying some of this stuff to see what works. Add to it to help me figure this out.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about how to make my home more smarter. Meaning, how can I implement technology into my almost 100 year home? My first thought is that of the kitchen. Not really having a good place to start from, I’ll just dive into what I think should happen (not that I’m implementing this into my house), and I’ll break it out into sections: Inventory, Planning, Meals.

Inventory
A database of what you have in your refridgerator and cupboards will be required. So, for starters, you’ll need to enter that you have 4.5lbs of four, 2 grapefruit, and 4oz of pepper (EVERYTHING will need to be entered). This database will connect with a web interface that is the “homepage” of your house; it will be a private login and this portion will be your “food” section.

Now that we’ve covered what you already have, how do we track what you purchase? Grocist has created something along those lines that uses a barcode scanner. So, when you bring home your groceries, you scan what you bought as you’re putting it away to keep your inventory fresh (pun intended). The database will have a very rudimentary “best if used by date” function that will notify you via email when certain goods are getting close to going bad; we don’t want to waste food!

Planning
Tied into the Inventory Database will be a Recipe Database. The house homepage will recommend what recipes you should use based on ingredients on hand and expiration dates. Additionally, when a recipe is selected to be cooked, the Inventory Database will subtract the amount of ingredients used in that recipe to reflect a precise amount of the ingredients left (e.g. Broccoli and Cheese Recipe requires 2lbs of broccoli and 4oz of cheese, the Inventory Database will subtract the 2lbs and 4oz from the ingredients to show how much – if any – is left).

If a recipe is selected where not all the ingredients are available, the ingredients are jotted down on a grocery list. The grocery list is available for printing or emailing.

Meals
Tied into the house homepage will be a calendar. Not to get too far ahead of myself, but the house calendar will have everyone’s schedule. It will also be a place to plan out meals. By entering the coming week’s meals into the grocery list can be generated. Additionally, a query against the local grocery store sale ads could be added to get the best value out of the shopping.

As new groceries are purchased, scan them in and repeat the process.