[the] Code Girl

I have a decent sized setup of X10 devices around the house. It all started with the desire to have the light out front on when I got home from work. I had experience with X10 already, as my dad had used it for years to turn lights on and off at dusk and dawn, and to control the xmas lights around the house (old style Radio shack modules).

I changed out the wall switch with this. That was about it. I used HeyU to upload a macro to the CM11A with instructions to turn the light on at dawn and off at ‘bedtime’. As of right now I have 2 wall switch modules, three lamp modules, 2 appliance modules, a wireless wall switch and a few motion sensors.

I have lights on the outside and the inside of the house turn on at dusk/off at dawn [ determined by heyU, based on my lat/long]. When I really should be getting to bed, one of the living room lights turns off and the other dims down to give me just enough light to see so that I wont trip over something. That’s my cue. I ignore it half the time and use a little web interface [to heyu] that I wrote to brighten the light enough so I can still see the keyboard on my laptop :-D

I also have an XCam2, with a receiver that is connected to a linux server. I’m thinking of setting this up so that the front motion sensor being triggered will make the server turn on the xcam and record until motion is no longer sensed.

Geek Item #1The script I created to keep an eye on my net connection was useful in proving that Adelphia service was down starting
at 6:30am this morning. It didn’t come back up until 5:30pm. Freaking ridiculous. I would have backup DSL if it were
possible, but lucky me has “Fiber to the Curb”.

Anyway, my script uses a serial device to talk to an X10 appliance module that I have my cable modem plugged into,
so when the script detects that we are no longer on line, it reboots the cable modem (using a great command-line X10
program called HEYU and restarts dhcpcd to re-aquire an IP. This script has saved me many
times in the middle of the night when I couldve been down for hours (until I noticed and power cycled the modem myself).

Geek item #2: I have a “movie” and a “sewing” (started a crosstitch project, need lots of light to tell colors of thread apart)
X10 lighting macro setup. When we want to watch a movie, we use the X10 remote and do “X10–>2–>on” and the living
room lights go off. When the movie is over, we do “2–>off”, and the lights come on at the same level they usually do at dusk
every evening. When I want to sew, I do “X10–>3–>on”, and I get the lights brighter than usual which makes it much easier
to tell what thread is what color (when you have 50 different shades of brown, this sort of thing matters). Around 11p, the “bedtime”
macro gets run which turns off all but one light, and dims that so it’s just enough light to see without tripping over anything.
As soon as anyone approaches my front door, a wireless X10 motion sensor tells the front porch light to turn on (great when
you are struggling with lots of crap and need to see the lock on the door. When anyone approaches my back door (uses another
wireless X10 motion sensor), they get a nice 100 watt light in their eyes for the next 20-30 minutes. The cool thing about this
setup is that I replaced the light switches for the front and back lights with X10 controllable ones. No need for giant flood lights or
anything that ugly and obtrusive.

Geek item #3: I use a super-cool PHP app called Tasks to organize all sorts of work and home “ToDo” items. I just
created a little perl script that can log into the mysql backend of Tasks and insert a todo item, including notes and a relevant URL.
This way I can create other scripts that use this script to generate new tasks. I just created one for Gentoo that scans
the /var/log/esync.log file and checks for updated versions of packages I have installed. It then creates new tasks for me
(one for each package) so I know what to upgrade. No more checking the file just when I remember to. I like to stay on
the bleeding edge of available versions of software.