Automation Adventures

Last Saturday my iPod froze up. After applying the reset (Hold on, Hold off, press and hold Menu and Select at the same time), the screen displayed the Sad iPod Icon. Fearing my podcast and audio book listening days were not over but put on indefinite hiatus, I drove home and entered the URL the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]