Mon Dec 3 20:28:07 PST 2001

I finally got my plan working through planwatch.org (yea!). It turns out that somehow my URL to pooh.asric.com was getting stored in the database incorrectly, anyway !jwdavidson! got it fixed and also corrected some issues with the way it was dealing with newlines as well.

So Sunday night I dug out a pile of X10 gear including the little firecracker RS-232 controller that I got a couple of years ago. I seem to be missing a number of the parts that I had, but I had enough to get what I need to get done. The linux drivers were a bit of an issue, but a quick trip over to sourceforge revealed that the original bottlerocket code was gone (site down) but they also had flipit, another command line utility which compiled easily enough.

Why use some X10? Christmas lights! Thanks to a couple of devices, the computer interface and a pair of lines in my crontab the lights come on shortly after dark and stay on until just before 11:00 at night. I’m a bit nervous about using X10 controlers for anything else. Considering that anyone with a $10 remote controler can control anything that you’ve put on X10, I’m disinclined to put anything important on it. Maybe I’m be overly paranoid, but allowing anybody in a passing car to turn on or off my bedroom lights seems like asking for trouble.