Home Automation

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to write anything on my home automation set up or plans. This week I’ve been having a good think about the design. This was initially going to be a big article in order for me to document all of the different aspects of my desired system however I seem to start writing things and never actually get round to finishing anything off so I suspect it’ll probably be better to start in sections and build on it!

My first section will aim to cover a couple of points about media ripping.

Just installed Drupal 7 this evening which looks WAY slicker than when I last did anything on my site. Still got a few little problems to do with the quirky way in which I install and manage the files on my host public_html/drupal folder rather than everything in root. Whilst this worked like a treat with Drupal 6 it appears they've made some little tweaks to 7 and not everything works as expected - it appears that there are some errors with the AJAX which I suspect is down to my ReWrite rules.

I've been looking into the possibilities of setting up some home automation and sensing stuff on my home network, logging the outputs to PC. A friend of mine @markphelan uses a 1-wire based network to monitor temperatures and other bits and bobs so I thought I'd give it an investigate to see what it entails.

So far i've gathered that its hideously complicated and I probably need to do some more reading before I reach for the credit card and start ordering stuff.
Requirements so far:

Well since I've moved into the Microsoft business group at work, I thought it was appropriate to start doing some more "Microsofty" things with my network at home. To start off with I thought I ought to try the new Windows 7 RC. Since my home PC needed a rebuild anyway I figured I might as well stick the RC on that and then just rebuild when the RTM was released.

Hopefully crontabs are fixed now. The issues I was getting before seem to have gone away and i've configured the cron jobs to run every 45 minutes. This should mean that "stuff" is refreshed more often on the site (syndicated news etc). Coool!

I wish someone would invent a super drug that would enable one to feel fully refreshed after only minimal sleep!
I'm working ever longer hours, what with commuting, trains being late, systems falling over at work, delays to schedules and company internal work; I never seem to have enough hours in the day to do any of the things I need or would like to do.

Ok after last week's what I thought to be an abysmal effort I've realised that both Runkeeper and Google Maps were telling porkies about my distance!! I'd done the distance (a local circuit from my flat) and it'd given me a time of 16:43; one which I was disappointed by but resided to.

Recently I discovered a friend of mine @markphelan had his house hooked up to Twitter using a Current Cost electricity monitor. Being the avid geek that I am i've simply got to get this working for my house and get some Google Charts API involved to get some pretty graphs plotted on my current power consumption!

My list of jobs is starting to stack up now. I've just launched the HMS Ganges Association website which i've been developing for them and there are a few teething issues which i've got to implement....only relatively simple and small things but time consuming nonetheless.

Just installed Mollom on the site - more to see how it works so that I can set it up for a client site. It looks like a really good module and integrates nicely into Drupal, although when its co-created by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert you'd kinda expect that!