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24 September 2005
Sat, 24 Sep 2005 23:52:24 GMT Million Dollar Home Pagevia Kjell Olsen2432 days agoAs much as I’m pissed that I didn’t come up with this, I’m glad I’m not such a whore for dollars.
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21 July 2005
Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:56:00 GMTDry Ice Fun
Dry ice is fun stuff to play with, but be careful. Wear gloves, and don’t be a dumbass, because there is the potential for substantial injury. You’ve been warned, now there are some real cool things you can do too. I probably don’t know the half of it.
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20 June 2005
Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:41:00 GMTThe Very Small Home
Azby Brown
Azby Brown details 18 beautifully designed compact Japanese homes. The mantra of constraints fostering creativity is beautifully reinforced in the book, with incredible solutions to space problems.
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13 May 2005
Fri, 13 May 2005 22:07:00 GMT Plutohome.comvia Kjell Olsen2566 days agoA real sweet looking framework to automate and monitor your house, really incredible looking. Mostly a wrapper for OSS projects (AsteriskPBX for telephony, Xine for media viewing etc), it ties everything together and even lets you control everything from your bluetooth symbian mobile device (!!). The software is open source, and they also sell hardware thats plug-n-play.
In many cases, a Pluto DCE device is just a thin wrapper for another open source project. The wrapper’s job is to launch the open source project with the right parameters, forward incoming commands to it, and fire DCE events in response to triggers within it. We added DCE wrappers for the projects Asterisk (pbx telephone switch), Xine (media player), Linphone (SIP software telephone) and Motion (surveillance video capture). In most cases, no modifications to the open source project were needed since the project already contained a mechanism for feeding it commands. cite
Wonder what kind of overhead it takes? POS out of the basement, or does it need top of the line… This just makes me drool:
By allowing these various projects to work together seamlessly, many new features and benefits are now possible. For example, if there’s a security breach in your house, the lights and TV’s in the house come on automatically using our home automation DCE device interfaces, and the security pn pad appears on all the Windows webpads and PDA’s. After 30 seconds a menacing video plays for the burglar using Xine, while the surveillance cameras monitored by Motion feed a live video to your mobile phone over GPRS. Hit ‘Talk’ on the phone and Xine suspends, passing control to Linphone which makes a call using Asterisk to your mobile phone with the audio piped through the stereo so you can shout at the intruder and let him know you’re watching him from a remote location and calling. To the end-user, it works seamlessly, like 1 cohesive whole, but in reality, what Pluto did is enable a bunch of existing applications to work together. cite
Pluto specifically decided to sacrifice revenues from software sales, focusing its sales efforts exclusively on embedded solutions, so that it could work more closely with the open source community and develop a general-purpose platform that makes it very easy for programmers to build upon. cite
Check out all these sweet looking modules, and the documentation home.
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Fri, 13 May 2005 21:18:52 GMT
MisterHousevia Kjell Olsen2566 days ago
A nice looking X10 interface in perl, which kind of sucks, but it’s cooler then a GUI based client.
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10 February 2005
Thu, 10 Feb 2005 13:19:58 GMT I Like Football (On Sunday Afternoon)via Kjell Olsen2658 days agoCoolest thing I’ve seen in a long time:
A lamp that you can play with as though it were a large beach ball, kicking and shooting it while it lights up the room. Feel like Rivaldo in your own home.
I play with soccer/footballs in my house all the time, at least until I get yelled at. I try not to break stuff – and how could you possibly with this lamp? And it’s supposed to get played with!
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30 June 2004
Wed, 30 Jun 2004 08:02:00 GMTFront Page, Home Page, what?
The front page of a website needs to put a face to the world which does a good job of describing itself and engaging it’s visitors, and I don’t think the average site these days does that.
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Also somewhat recently
