YWGAV

Friday night I was hanging out with my friend Trevor when we got to talking about game consoles, and gaming in general. I’m a (former) hardcore PC gamer. I grew up with PC’s being my gaming platform MOSTLY because my parents were smart and never let me have a game console. Instead of spending all of my time playing games on a console I spent all my time playing them on computers. In the process I taught myself a LOT about computing and computers, and so it’s no surprise that I’m a computer scientist now.

Anyway, back to Friday and the conversation with Trevor. I thought then, and still think now: wouldn’t it be nice if everything worked together, instead of the opposite?

So my Birthday back in January gave me some discretionary funds to play with. It turns out that’s my very favorite kind of funds, the discretionary kind.

I decided I would use some of the money to create a proof of concept for an easy way to control lights (particularly lamps) in my house. I decided to tackle one room at first and see how that went. I also decided to avoid anything that would require any wiring – I can’t do that right now. I intend for this system to work when I move into an apartment in the next few months.

So, I picked up some devices and software from SmartHome. I was directed there by my friend Jason who has a similar setup going in his place.

For a few months now I’ve been running OS X 10.5 Leopard Server on an older XServe I acquired. I’ve been using it as a gateway on my network, but also as an open directory, DNS and DHCP server as well. Initially, I was impressed – the setup seemed to go alright and it seemed to work well.

That is, until I tried to really do anything

On Monday, Apple finally released it’s much anticipated 10.5.2 update to OS X Leopard. While I ran the update on monday evening, I didn’t have a chance to put it through it’s paces until yesterday evening. Everything seemed to be going just fine until I fired up mail and found that, once I tried accessing any messages in my inbox, mail would crash. hard. A window popped up informing me that mail had crashed and allowing me to restart it, and/or file a report. I filed a crash report (the first few times) with Apple, then restarted mail. Same thing.

So this is perhaps old news, as it happened yesterday, but Apple finally released the updated AppleTV software. While I downloaded it and installed it yesterday, I hadn’t been able to really play around with it until earlier today. I can say that it seems better than the previous version. Movie rentals are now possible, as is purchasing tv shows directly from the TV. You can also view .mac and flickr photo streams – a nice added bonus – and it all sports a new shiny interface. But what’s it really like?

I have noticed over the past few months that, sometimes, when I post or edit posts on my blogs (powered by wordpress, if you couldn’t tell), all of my paragraph formatting disappears when I hit save. It has already happened a couple of times on this blog, and a whole lot of times on my other sites too. Thankfully, since this blog is new enough, I was able to figure out the common factor for when the tags disappear – Safari (or Firefox) on my mac. If I use another browser, such as the one I’m using right now (Flock), everything works perfectly fine.

Apparently, however, this isn’t just happening to me. There’s a few threads at the wordpress support forums about it. The consensus is that TinyMCE, the editor that comes with Wordpress, is the culprit. Here’s the meat and bones of what happens:

Ever since it came out, the iPhone has been making huge waves. Almost instantly it outsold all but the venerable Blackberry in the smartphone market. Having owned one now for many months, its easy to see why. It’s sleek and stylish, has a killer user interface and applications that work, and work well. It is, without a doubt the best phone I’ve ever owned.

But I don’t really foresee Apple releasing a 2nd generation iPhone (beyond the memory upgraded versions released recently), specifically the one purported to have 3G capability, for a couple of reasons.

So last night, aside from having my car half swallowed by a pot hole (and puncturing one of my tires – requiring me to get it replaced), I also had the good fortune to have my U-Verse DVR die a horrible death. Not too cool, considering I just got it on monday. Also not cool that there were recordings on there I had yet to watch (and was waiting for Ann to be available to watch with me). So I called up AT&T, and was met with mixed results.

I am one of the few who, last year, went out and bought an AppleTV. I’d experimented with several media center PC’s over the years, but honestly didn’t really want a bulky PC sitting there beside my entertainment center. It also didn’t really work all that great. I’m sure if I had put more effort into things I could have succeeded with that project, but I didn’t and I didn’t. Regardless, though, I still wanted the ability to do the things a media center could do, and AppleTV made it fairly easy to do. Music could be streamed seamlessly from inside it’s interface, movies and TV shows could be organized and watched as well. In short it did a lot of what I wanted it to do, even with it’s limitations.

I’ve been thinking about playing around with some home automation stuff, mostly just turning on lights remotely, dimmers and possibly timers. This has always been something that has interested me and there are a few methods available to allow me to do most of what I want without anything real fancy. A proof of concept demo’d to me by my friend Jason convinced me that I need to investigate this stuff further. Do any of you have any ideas on hardware and software to use for this? Ideally I’d like to have a way to remotely control some lights (for now) in my reading room. If I could do this from a web interface I could access on my iPhone, it’d be even sweeter. Oh yeah, and it needs to work on a Mac platform.