www.oliverclarke.co.uk

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:

• Temperature sensing for tropical aquarium, office, lounge and bedroom.
• Integration with my parallel port relay (software yet to be written - I know i'm rubbish!) so that I can switch the lights on/off for both fish tanks.

All off the above can be nicely monitored using my already written monitoring application which I've got "tweeting" status updates to on @OliClarkeHome. I will eventually get round to opensourcing it but it needs some tidying up and I need to write some code to pull the configuration from an XML file instead of my (hacked) hard coded constants! (bad bad bad!).

The geek in me has been loving the following websites:

UK Rocket Man has loads of stuff on home automation using 1-wire networks and X-10 to control "stuff" (he's also well into his rockets and there is a load odf stuff on there too).
And now I've seen this site I want to build my own 19" rack!
Finally, for all those Geeks out there take a look at this reflection on the Apollo Guidance Computer and how much computing power it had. (If you're feeling particularly nerdy you could even build your own.

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!

Well unfortunately yes it is, but thats only because I need to put something on here! At least its only temporary whilst I get about sorting things out and desiging a better theme etc. for the site.