Automation Adventures

My wife posed this question to me about a week ago. She spilt some milk on her keyboard, and wondered what was the best way to handle it.
A little bit of Googling revealed the following steps:

UNPLUG your keyboard. No ifs buts or whatevers.
Try and get as much of the spilled beverage out of the keyboard.
If [...]

A nice weekend home automation project: the Emergency Party Button.
The Emergency Party Button turns an ordinary apartment into a full-blown disco, complete with laser, black lights and fog machine. The guts of the whole system is the X10 protocol, that is used to send a signal from the Big Red Button to a transceiver module, [...]

Ars Technica is presenting their latest installment of the Ars System Guide, discussing three setups for a DIY computer.
I’m still planning on building one, but with the new financial burden new baby, I’d have to go with the budget box.
Ars Technica’s Budget Box consists of the following components:

Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve tried keeping plants around, but they seem to die after a week or two. It took me a while to figure out that these green things need water. I always forget to water them, though, switching my attention to much more interesting things (i.e. geekier! :-))
What if your plants could [...]

Firing Squad has a break-down of a $500 gaming PC upgrade. Roughly the components are as follows:

Component
Suggestion
Price
Supplier
Notes

GPU
NVidia GeForce 8800 GT
$249.99
Zipzoomfly
Alternatives: Radeon X1950 Pro

CPU
Athlon 64 X2 4000+
$75.90
Zipzoomfly
Newegg has same price for X2 4000+ and X2 4800+, $99.99. Alternative: Intel Core 2 Duo E4300

Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
$79.99
Newegg
AMD-690 chipset, micro-ATX. Alternative: MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital (ATX).

Memory
OCZ PC2-6400 Paltinum Revision 2 Dual [...]