Mister House

I've been curious about home automation lately. Mainly, I want a system to automate the openning and closing of my HVAC vents, and the setting on my thermostat so that my bedroom will be warm at night (when I'm in there), and cool during the day (wouldn't want to waste heat on an empty room!)

Well, Mister House seems to do all I had hoped for and more. Check out this list of things it can do:

* Executes actions based on voice input, time of day, etc
* It has a web interface to allow control and feedback from any browser, either on a local intranet or on the internet.
* Reads/writes any data from any serial attached device.
* Speaks the speed, course, and position of vehicles, by interfacing to a ham radio modem (TNC).
* Shares a modem for caller ID and paging.
* Reads/writes internet mail, http, and ftp files unattended.
* Sends/receive instant messages using AIM, MSN, or Jabber
* Uses free internet TV web pages to allow for VCR programing and show reminders.
* Has an entertaining 'chatbox' web page that will listen to all your problems.

And a bunch more

Here is some example speech output:

* Turning furnace heat off after 20 minutes at 69.1 degrees
* Notice, the sun is bright at 32 percent, and it is cold outside at 24 degrees, so I am opening the curtains at 8:07 AM
* The van is traveling north at 58 mph 0.8 miles west of Walmart.
* The car is parked at Friedell School.
* Email account nick has 1 new email message from accountmanager.
* Notice, Nick has been on the computer for 2.1 hours today.
* The front door has been left open.
* Phone call from Mal and Beth Winter from Montana.
* Notice, there is 1 favorite show starting now: Dilbert on channel 8.
* 8:58 PM. VCR recording will be started in 2 minutes for Southpark on channel 47.
* Notice, there were 668 web hits from 74 clients in the last day.

OK, so I don't think I'm handy enough, or enough of a hacker to give it a try. But it sounds cool, and it's Open Source, so who knows... (thanks to Makezine for the link, and High Earth Orbit for telling me about Makezine)

Rigel Kentaurus

Rigel Kentaurus, from the Arabic Al Rijl al Kentaurus, "The Centaur's Foot" is better known as Alpha Centauri. Why have you heard of this star? Because it is one of the closest stars in the universe to Earth, and it is VERY similar to the sun. Want to find ET? Here's a good place to look (especially if you want to go there sometime soon).

Alpha Centauri is actually believed to be a trinary star... meaning there are three stars in orbit around each other. I suppose that means three sunrises every day for any planet in the system.

Anyway, Alpha Centaur A is almost identical to our Sun, and has great promise for hosting life-sustaining planets. Plus, at 4.35 light years from Earth (only 41,000,000,000,000km) it's just a hop, skip and jump away.

How will we find out if the star next door has planets? Well, according to this web page the Hubble Space Telescope is already looking for them, and "recently, at an experts meeting in Toledo/Spain, the chief of the NASA research program Mike Kaplan stated that '...we will discover extraterrestrial life in the next 25 years'."

Possibly he was talking about the next great space telescope: the James Webb Space Telescope, or perhaps one of the telescopes to follow: Terrestrial Planet Finder, one of the formation flying missions; or one of the huge orbiting telescopes that will require Human/robotic in-space assembly... a topic I am very interested in as a result of my recent involvement in the Hubble Robotic Servicing and Deorbit Mission.

Picture of the Year

I love this image of Saturn, and its moon Dione, taken by the Cassini spacecraft (story at SaturnToday.com.)

I would argue that the entire expense of sending Cassini to Saturn is justified even if all we get back are stunning images like this one, which seems to be leading the race at Time Magazine for picture of the year.

Days are getting later!

I play flag football with some friends at work every week, and we have been frustrated by increasingly shorter games as winter solstice approaches. We noticed lately that our games have been getting longer, even though we hadn't reached Dec. 21 (shortest day of the year) yet. I told my fellow flag-footballers that this is because the earliest sunset occurs before the shortest day of the year. I thought it had something to do with either Earth's orbit is not being circular (it is slightly elliptical), or the tilt, or obliquity of the Earth's poles with respect to its orbit around the sun.

Well, it turns out I was correct. This page describes how Earth's obliquity and Earth's eccentricity affect the shape of the analemma (the path the sun traces out on Earth over the course of a year).

So, in case you were wondering, the earliest sunset occurs on Dec. 7th. The latest sunrise occurs on January 4th.

Performancing for Firefox

Maybe this Firefox extension will make me blog? Seems pretty simple. Find a page you want to blog about? Just click on the Performancing button and blog away...

The first post...

OK, let's try blogging. This could be the last post...