Sputnik Light

Originally uploaded by amyhabkap.

I got this at Domani Interiors in Vancouver for a ridiculously good price. Domani is in Yale Town. Highly recommended.

Natasha sitting on our new sofa, with our re-painted house and glass-wall in the background

I’m a bit worried here. We replaced fixtures in our upstairs bathrooms and I thought it’d improve water pressure through them, but it did not. Instead it reduced it to at trickle (from the sinks) and a tepid “bleh” from the showers. The laundry room and kitchen have full pressure, so the supply into the house is fine.

I’m thinking that the supply upstairs is not fine, but how do we fix it? Do we put a pressure pump somewhere? I do not want to do re-piping (and I think HOA has to do it). The thought of re-piping on top of our pant problems makes me want to cry.

Any advise?

This is a steal. Considering that 7″ touch screens go for double this (as they are targetted primarily at the automotive market), its even more so. You can get drivers for this devices at this site. Do note that the MacTel drivers are in beta, and only work on 10.4.7 OSX, not on 10.4.8 or 10.4.6. I had to do some digging on Apple.com to find it.

So what do you do with a 15″ touch screen, a Mac Mini, Indigo Home Automation software, Google Sketchup and Insteon devices as wall switches?

Simple, what all geeks should do: make a control panel for your home.

Right now its controlling lights. Soon, it will also use IRTRans to control the stereo, and also control the Sonos. Oh, and control iTunes if necessary. And also display any pertinent information, like missed calls.

I can’t think of anything else it should do. Any ideas? We are wall mounting it on the wall between the two entrances to our house (the door form the garage and the front door).

This weekend I installed three dimmers in our house, as well as the Indigo software on an extra iBook I have laying around. I put the ControlLInk behind the bed.

This is a first test and it was spectacular. The dimmers are very nice indeed, with custom ramp-rates and such. They are $40.00 bucks a piece though, so rapidly become expensive. However there are cheaper models for $20.00 available.

I also this weekend bought a MacMini for $299. Core Solo. And I found a place to get a touch-screen LCD for $165.00 bucks.

Today I’m going to try to diagram how I’m doing the system and I’ll post that.

UPDATE: The touch screen has Mac drivers that ONLY work with 10.4.7 on the mac, but work across PowerPC. E-mail them if you want Intel. I also managed to do some URL jangling and download 10.4.7 delta, so I can upgrade my new Mac Mini to only 10.4.7.

My biggest challenge right now with our new house is making a house that is technically supperb but with a high SAF (Spousal Approval Factor). Our house will be insanely complex technically, with multiple macs and sound systems in different rooms.

My wife has a few critera for anything technical:

1) They have to be “pretty.” Macs fit this nicely.
2) No wires

Item number 2 is a challenge. Last night we hooked up our DSL setup which consists of the DSL modem, a router, an Airport and a 8 port gigabit switch. With the cables and wall-warts all on our floor right now, its quite ugly. So I cam up with a solution.

from Ikea

I am going to hack this storage drawer into a “communications closet.” Basically all the hard gear inside it (ventilated through the back), and on top, will be the Airport Base Station and a Mac Mini. Out the back will only be three cables: power, DSL and a network port to the 8 port switch which I’ll mount under the desk.

Oh, and I got a Core Solo Mac Mini for $299 today. It’ll make a perfect home-automation server. Does anyone know if TrixBox runs well on a Mac?

Perceptive Automation :: View topic - Indigo 2.0 Beta 1 Released: Indigo, the home automation software that I will be using for our new house has gone into 2.0 beta. 2.0 is a client server app, which rocks as it allows you to run the server system (which controls the house) in the background, and have arbitrary clients on any machine control it.

On the home front, the floors in the master bedroom and office are nearly done, which means we’ll be moving in soon. It won’t be fully done for about two more weeks. At any rate, I’m going to do a Geek Plot of the house when I get a chance that outlines how I’m hooking everything up (including…. ) and go through how I want it all to work.