Shoehorned a High Efficiency PS into the kitchen PC

I picked up the smaller SPI180LE power supply for this PC. It doesn't fit nicely into the chassis so I dremeled and drilled and wedged it in pretty good. Now it runs about 35 watts in idle. Not as great a savings as I expected but in the long run, it'll add up.

I'm also working on some long delayed integration of our 3Com Audreys. They've been nice touch screen control panels for the various ASP scripts on our HA server, but I've added some of the more common HA fixes: being able to set the LEDs remotely, pushing WAV files to them, MP3 playing capability and the ability to mount Windows shares.

The Audrey's blinking LEDs will now signify there is a voicemail in HAL. I added this code to the starCOMUltra hosted script to run a script to blink all the Audrey's LEDs when there are new messages:

function HALVM() {
    HalNewMsgCountOld = HalNewMsgCount;
    HalMsg = HAL.Phone.Mailboxes.ItemByName("Main").Messages;
    HalMsgCount = HalMsg.Count;
    HalNewMsgCount=0;
    for (i=HalMsgCount;i<=HalMsgCount;i++) {
        if (HalMsg.Item(i).IsNew) {
            HalNewMsgCount++;
        }
    }
    if (HalNewMsgCountOld!=HalNewMsgCount) {
        if (HalNewMsgCount>0) {
            ShellCmd.Run("perl site/scripts/audrey_light.pl 1",7);
        } else {
            ShellCmd.Run("perl site/scripts/audrey_light.pl 0",7);
        }
    }
}

The Perl script just accesses the Audreys' internal web server to toggle the lights:

`wget "http://xx.yy.zz.1/cgi-bin/SetLEDState?$ARGV[0]" -t 1 -O c:/ftp/audrey_light.out`;
`wget "http://xx.yy.zz.2/cgi-bin/SetLEDState?$ARGV[0]" -t 1 -O c:/ftp/audrey_light.out`;
`wget "http://xx.yy.zz.3/cgi-bin/SetLEDState?$ARGV[0]" -t 1 -O c:/ftp/audrey_light.out`;

I still need to figure out how to take advantage of the WAV pushing feature...

GTalk Babble Bot

Ok, this is not HA related but we use Google Talk as our primary chat too. They've just announced that they've created bots that can translate conversations on the fly. VERY COOL. Check it out!

D201GLY2 Kitchen PC built

I've got the kitchen PC built and running Win2k although text is kinda crappy on the Vizio 20" TV. I tried all sorts of drivers and even loaded up XP to see if it would make a difference. Doesn't appear to. Native resolution of the TV is 1366x768 and I can't get the card to do that - best I get is 1280x720. It's OK for now.

Anyway, it's running with a 160GB HD and 1 GB RAM. I'm leaving the DVD out to save some power. It peaks around 55 watts and idles around 48 watts. I'm hoping to pick up a high efficiency power supply like the SPI220LE to see if I can get the power down even further.

HA Server Rebuild...again

Rebuilt the HA server yet again. There were some issues I had with Win2k and the hardware combination (E6420 Core2 and ECS PT890T-A mobo). Anyway, with XP it's perfect and all the compatibility issues I was having are gone.

The kitchen PC is moving forward. I found a good deal on a D201GLY2 board at Cost Central. Free shipping and $5 off with Google Checkout. Beats Buy.com which doesn't have it in stock and has raised the price about $2/week for the past several weeks. I guess they were noticing lots of page views for the D201GLY2 and even though they didn't have it in stock, they raised their price anyway. Lame. Anyway, I need to get a gig of cheap PC2 4200 memory and I'm all set. I got a nice cheap uATX case here with free local pickup. Total cost should be about $100 less the TV/display as I'm reusing a hard drive and CD. Not bad.

Web content filtering

Part of my HA setup includes running the Squid proxy/cache. I also run Adzapper in conjunction with Squid to remove annoying ads, popups, tracking bugs and scripts. Lately, there's been a huge uproar over Facebook's Beacon program, which has been found to be very intrusive spying on your web surfing habits. This article looks at the various options to block Beacon and finds that blocking a certain URL pattern will work. So I've added this line to my Adzapper config file:

AD http://(**.|).facebook.com/beacon**

Now we're safe from their prying eyes, until they change their URL pattern...

Black Friday Aftermath

Is everyone enjoying their Black Friday goodies? I picked up a "Black Saturday" deal on a 20" Vizio LCD TV. The TV is going into the kitchen. We don't actually have a cable jack in there but we do have Slingbox. We're going to replace our kitchen Audrey with a PC. I'm just waiting for the the D201GLY2 to become more widely available. It's a very low power, micro ATX, passively cooled Celeron based CPU/mobo combo. It'll be perfect for this type of application.

Acronis True Image $19.99 Shipped Free @ Newegg

I use the free version of ATI that comes with Maxtor/Seagate drives. It is a lifesaver and comes in especially handy when I'm building/re-building my HA server which seems to be occurring more frequently right now. The free versions have limited functionality (no incremental backups for example), but the full retail version is a deal for $19.99.

Get it here

Language searching in GMail

Lately, I've been getting a bunch of Ukranian or Russian spam in my GMail account. Apparently, there is now a method of searching your email based on language. In the search box, just put lang:Russian or to make a filter, put that in the Has the words field

Costco still has TONS of $1.49 ten packs of 13W CF bulbs

See thread on Cocoontech

New Toy - GPS Receiver for 700WX

I picked up an IBlue 737 GPS receiver from buy gps now. The receiver is very compact, about the size of a pager and it is very sensitive - it doesn't need to be left on the dash - it works very well in a cup holder or the door handle. It communicates to the 700WX via bluetooth and we use it with Google Maps Mobile and our unlimited data plan. It doesn't have all the extras of a dedicated GPS (like text-to-speech, etc.) - it just tracks your location. However, any place we can Google, we can get turn by turn directions to it from where we are at the moment. Also, since it's so small, there's no large device to tote around or leave in your car baking in 120 degree temps, hoping nobody steals it.

Using VOIP for VR

We haven't been using microphone VR with HAL - just telephone VR - until now. I loaded up Teamspeak on one of our laptops. Teamspeak is software that gamers use to talk to each other across a network. I installed the Teamspeak server on the HA server and the client on both the laptop and the server. This allows us to talk VOIP style from the laptop to the HA server. I added a USB SoundBlaster to the HA server and set the HA Teamspeak client to output to the SoundBlaster. The lineout from the SoundBlaster got connected to the Mic input of the HA server - that input is used by HAL for its microphone VR. Now, if we talk into the laptop microphone, the audio gets sent across the network to the HA server to HAL's VR engine. This client can be added to all pcs around the house so there's no need for distributed microphones.

More AJAX and all that good stuff

For the past month, I've been working on a UI based on the house floorplan. It's integrating all the stuff I've learned with AJAX, PHP and MySQL to show the state of the house at a glance. I'm using DHTML to create layers of stuff that can be made visible (like lighting control) and then hidden when not needed. That way it's not cluttered all the time. Right now, it reflects the following info: motion in each room and how long it's been since there was motion, temperatures and if they're rising or falling, lighting control and status, which cars are home, if mail was delivered, weather/air quality/uv, audio controls and what's playing in each zone, Google calendar items for today, the lottery ;), surveillance camera popups and the past 6 events recorded, security system status, server cpu & drive temps and a little icon that shows that our craigslist bot found something we're looking for. It's a long list but I still want to add MORE while keeping it nice and neat looking.

I'd like to post a video of it in operation at some point, but I'm very pleased with it so far. I wouldn't mind doing this kind of coding for a job. I'm getting tired of designing chips. This seems like a lot more fun to me.