In part one of this series, I outlined LinuxMCE and how amazing it was providing Home Cinema, VoIP Telephony, CCTV and home automation in one system for the price of a download and a few hours work. This article will help those who, like me, live in rented accomodation or cannot ask their local electrician to come and channel cabling ducts into the walls for some other reason, yet need to have a solid network cable running throughout the house.
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Posted in Home Automation, Home Cinema, Life, Linux, networking
I’ve been playing around with Home Automation and trying to get my audio/video around the house without honey-combing the walls for the last few years with varying degrees of luck and in this time I’ve looked at a number of solutions including proprietary hardware (too expensive!!), Microsoft Windows Media Centre Edition (expensive and it runs on Windows…) and MythTV/Music Player Daemon (free, but not always the easiest to get it working!
Two years ago, I found Pluto Home – a commercial solution that had an open-source base and ran on Debian. I played with it for a bit as the feature set was amazing (TV, Video, Audio and CCTV anywhere in the house as well as integrated VoIP telephony and some really cool stuff) but I ran out of spare time to explore it further. I’ve started to look into Home Automation and Media again and this time, instead of using Pluto Home, I’ve decided to settle for LinuxMCE. It’s based on pluto home and Ubuntu and there’s been a lot of development since I was using Pluto…
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Posted in Home Automation, Home Cinema, Life, Linux, Open-Source
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/19/ukgov_uber_database/ has details of a possible “data silo” that contains all of our data.
This blog-post is meant to be a list of potential sites that will enable british citizens to escape the police state that we are rapidly becoming by moving their data outside teritorial waters.
For those of you who honestly believe “those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear”, please add a comment listing your bank account and PIN numbers, full address and contact details including every email address, mobile phone and landline number that you have and details of where you work. If you could also send me a copy of your front door key so I can come and visit you and watch your TV or sleep in your bed whenever I want, that would also be good. If you’re not going to do this, then you’ve got something to hide, haven’t you???
Please add to the list of datacentres using the comments section below. I’ll turn this into a proper database at somepoint (and publish the schema here for openess!) and link to it from here.
PF.
Posted in Computer Security, Life, Linux, Microsoft, Open-Source, Stuff
I just had an idea for the perfect email plug-in for all email clients.
It would monitor the number of posts in a thread and, when it reached a given threshold, automatically invoke Godwin’s Law and post to the appropriate list.
/me searches for the “Claws development manual”…
Posted in Life, Linux, Open-Source, Stuff
Diane Abbott’s 42-days speech
The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP’s speech last night was hailed by the Tory who followed her, David Davies, as ‘one of the finest speeches I have heard since being elected to the House of Commons’.
David Davies has since resigned over the same issue.
Diane Abbott’s speech can be found here and Davies’ speech here.
The thing that struck me most about these speeches was that we live in an era where the general population loves to watch Big Brother on TV and yet the same population is happy to live in blissful ignorance as our civil liberties are eroded one by one.
meh… 
(
Posted in Life, Stuff
"Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support
it for the rest of your life". (Michael Sinz)
Posted in Computer Security, Life, Linux, Open-Source, Stuff
Well, it had to be done, here is the first post. Now that you’ve read it, I can get on with adding useful stuff to my blog.
Jog on…
Posted in Life