Wake Up Call

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So, another meaningless month is coming to its end. And guess what, there is absolutely nothing interesting I could write about. It’s just the usual mortal coil that bothers me day by day.
This and Fate’s enduring, merciless efforts to torment me, of course!
The latter starts with simple things like that she let other people take “MY FUCKING PARKING LOT!!!!!” right before my eyes, to disguised digs like messing with gravity, injuring my lovely dog or making all birds in a vicinity of 100 kilometers crap on my car. Twice.
Well, the day of my revenge will come. Seriously. And then you’ll learn a painful lesson about how it is to be number two on my “most hated” list. (Mitch, the aspy prick is #1, of course!)

Anyway, until then I try to stick to rule #32 and spend some time customizing my home automatization. Doing so, last week I re-discovered the Google translation API, which in the meanwhile became a respectable speech synthesis application. Even for German language! Playing with the API for no specific reason, I suddenly got a brain boner how to make use of it.
Since my brave ATOM server – ZAPHOD – collects tons of data every day, from all kind of sources, providing them in text form via several information services I set up, I immediately felt a frantic urge to vocalize all this stuff. Of course it would be preposterous to just add a voice output to all service pages. Foremost because I don’t need to hear something I already see. Actually, this would be rather stupid.
But I wouldn’t be considered to be a smart guy (at least my mother does) if I couldn’t put one and one together.
And so, I came up with the idea to make my mighty internet-radio-alarm-clock (Logitech Squeezebox BOOM) a “tons-of-data-speaking” alarm clock. Well, it took me a couple of hours and some 10kb PHP-code. But now I most certainly have one of the nerdiest and most awesome alarm-clocks around!
Every morning at 0733 hours, my Squeezebox initializes its build-in alarm-clock, firing a PHP-script that gathers several data, formats and sends them to the google.translation API, writes the results to local MP3 files, generates a M3U playlist that reflects the generated files and finally hands this playlist back over to the Squeezebox, which instantly starts to stream the news right into my bedroom.
It briefs me on current date and time, stock values, recent BOINC credits, in- and outdoor climate, it warns me in case of system failures or interruptions of BVG services (only those that might affect me, of course)…
Just listen for yourself! (Use Winamp or VLC. Mediaplayer sucks ass)

Eerie Future

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We’re in the year 2012.
The German freemail provider WEB.DE apparently stumbled upon the rocket-since-like technology, that enables common plain-text emails to contain or carry HTML code and/or so called “attachments“.
Using this marvelous technology to exchange their latest lowres, cga porn pics they soon realized, that the 12 MB of mailbox space would become too small real soon. So they decided to make the incredible investment and offer each and every user a mind-blowing upgrade to the outstanding amount of 500 MB!

Now we can send 40 times as much pics as before! And even those huge vga-res pics with 256 colors! It’s insane!

No, it’s not. At least not the cool way…
Sorry WEB.DE, but this is retarded! You’re 10 years late!

It’s All Auto

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Over the last couple of – really cold – weeks I had to realize, that the guys who live right below me, are pretty penny-pinching when it comes to heating.
Unfortunately those people are pretty unpleasant fellows, which I prefer to avoid meeting or even speaking to. So I faced the facts and started heating the place myself.
But then something occurred, that wasn’t planed this way. Namely, for some unknown reason, my mighty brain started to occasionally relocated the “Heater ON/OFF” data record from the “keep in mind” table to some underperfused brain regions that usually store prime numbers greater e^16 or toothpaste prices in Ankara.
That of course led to some dubious surprises when I came home from work finding my flat at heat levels, yet only known possible from the suns very surface.
All because I forgot to turn off the heater when I left the house in the morning.
And yes, no question! It is the fault of those unpleasant neighbors!!

However. Right after failing to find an unsuspicious way how to viciously murder the menace from below with a radiator and dodge the legal consequences, I bought me a HomeMatic starter-set, to bridge my memory flaw with technology.
And so: Hurray for me!
Today I accomplished the initial setup of my home automatization, which currently controls the heating in two of my rooms (this is about to change soon) as a function of different parameters including the weather conditions outside – measured by an external sensor on the balcony.
Of course – just automate a heater – isn’t a challenge at all. Especially when using professional products from the HomeMatic line. Actually it was as easy as gluing a room thermostat to the wall, screwing on a battery powered valve controller and getting both in sync. Then I programmed the thermostats with a day by day heating sequence and that’s pretty much it.
Having this setup running for a few days, I realized, that there has to be more! Much more!
I mean, sure it’s a relief to know that my radiators won’t blow out my precious money any more, since they will follow their preset heating profiles.
But, ‘knowing’ it is OK, ‘controlling’ it is BETTER!
So, I tinkered a bit with the HomeMatic central and built me a web-based (PHP-powered) remote control for my home, that I can control from wherever I am via my mobile phone.
As you can see in the screenshot above, I can see all kind of relevant data from, and around my dwelling – plus according cacti graphs.
On the balcony for example, I gather temperature and humidity. Combined with additional weather data from www.wunderground.com, I use them to calculate windchill and the window-temperatures, which of course are necessary to come up with a reliable dew-point alert. You might now think that I’m completely insane to do that, but I have to dry me clothes within my livingroom (mostly there), which often causes dew on my windows whenever the humidity is too high and/or the temperature is too low. And, as everyone know, dew is not acceptable indoors. Unless it’s Tullamore Dew. So, I setup a program, that keeps my room temperatures well above any dew-critical values (at least until I’ve found a way to distill Tullamore Dew right from my windows).

Besides this web control, I’m also considering a wall-mounted tablet-optimized approach. Maybe something like this:


Whatever is about to come on the software side, I surely buy some more sensors/actors. But not just to complete the heating control!
The vast variety of different devices that can control or sensor things has already give me some sweet ideas of what else (more or less witty) I could do/automate. Just think of an email alert whenever my washing machine finishes, or an email invitation to my pre-heated bed! There are dimmers, switches, motion-, water-, inclination-sensors,… The possibilities to do meaningless things are almost endless!