I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows yesterday and I think that it was an appropriate ending to the series. But that's not what I want to comment on. The NY Times decided to keep children's books off of it's bestseller list, opting to keep a separate children's books list for such things. Obviuosly this won't have too detrimental an impact on Harry Potter sales, but I'm questioning whether or not Harry Potter should be considered children's literature at all. I was at the midnight release party and I'd venture to say that the average age was probably close to 19. Maybe that was partly due to the fact that it was midnight and close to 1:45 in the AM before we left; I don't claim to be a parenting expert. But there were a decent number of younger kids there.

But I digress. The books started out being more for children than not, but the story matured greatly with each successive book. The case in point is what I'm going to label the profanity quotient. I assume that lots of parents are going to read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to their child. For a so-called children's book, I encounted quite a few damn's, bastard's, bitch's, and effing's. I don't know about you, but I can't recall any children's novel I've ever read that contained the line, "NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!" So my question is, do the more parents skip over these lines or leave it as the author intended and vehemently shout the line in their best Molly Weasley impersonation?

I'd like to think the latter.

My roommate and I are big fans of indirect lighting, especially in our living
room area. Glare is our arch-nemesis, so we work to keep it at bay as much as
possible. In our quest to seek the perfect lighting atmosphere, we came upon the
idea to use dimmers to create various scenes depending upon what you may be
doing. After we received all our requisite parts, we got our automated
web-enabled lighting system up and running in no time. I thought I’d write up a
little tutorial for those of you who, like us, are enthralled at using way too
much technology to do something simple. Suck it Ockham! The simplest solution
may be the best, but it certainly might not be the most awesome and flashy.

Before you can set all this up you’re gonna need a few
things. Basically the only part you’ll really need that you probably don’t have
around somewhere are the dimmers and controller. We picked up four INSTEON LampLinc Dimmers ($34.99 each) and one INSTEON PowerLinc USB
Controller ($69.99). We also are using a Cisco IP Phone to control the web
interface, but you can use anything from your Wii to your cell phone. Anything
that runs a web browser will work.

You’ll also need a couple pieces of software to control the dimmers. We are
using InCmdLine. It’s just a command line utility that executes the
Insteon commands. You’ll also need the Smarthome Device Manager to talk to the actual devices.

The only other thing you’ll need is a web server and a scripting language
(either PHP or ASP — we’re Abyss and PHP but I’ll
let you decide what to use and set those up yourself).

The first step is to plug in your dimmers and your lights (incandescents
only!!) where you want them and your USB controller to your computer.

NOTE: We had some crazy-go-nuts issues when using a computer power
supply that wasn’t very great. Our PLC (PowerLinc Controller) would only work
if we had enough flourescent lights on to cancel the interference created by the
not-awesome power supply. It took forever to figure out. So make sure you’ve
got the PLC plugged into a PC with a good quality PSU and not your 225 watt Wal-Mart PSU.

All these dimmers have what are essentially MAC addresses on them, you’re
going to want to make sure you’ve got those written down.

Basically what we’re going to do is just use the web server to shell out to
run the InCmdLine exe with the options we want to set the lights for our scene.
An easy way to accomplish this is to just use .bat files that basically equate
to macros to set up your scene.

So you’d have something like this to set up a movie scene:

:: —– Begin movie.bat —–

InCmdLine.exe 0A.8D.D7 d50, 0A.82.E2 d25, 0A.8F.BB on

:: —– End movie.bat —–

This just tells the first dimmer to dim to 50%, the second one to dim to 25%,
and the last one to be 100% on. So make your bat files and stick them in the
same directory as your web scripts for the lights.

So, I’d recommend putting InCmdLine.exe in your Windows directory or
something (something in %PATH%) so you can execute it from anywhere. You also
need to make sure that the SmarthomeDeviceManager is running before any of these
things will work.

So, now that you’ve got the hard part done, we just need a simple script that
will let you run your scene batch files from a web browser.

Here’s some really simple php that’ll give you the basic idea with this batch
file model. I have two files, an index.html file that is going to serve as a
barebones interface and then a setMode.php file that will do the work.

The index.html file will just have links to setMode.php?mode=movie where mode
is the filename of your batch file minus the .bat part. We’ll do it this way
for simplicity’s sake.

Here’s the php:

<?php
$mode = trim($_GET['mode']);
exec($mode .
‘.bat’);
header(‘Location: index.php’);
?>

That’s it! I went more complicated with an XML config file and stuff, but
this gets the point across. Just point your web browser at your page and see if
your lights change. Now you can come up with some crazy awesome way to control
your lights. We personally opted for a Cisco IP phone on an end table. Maybe
you could do what we did, or an internet device, or even voice recognition.

Good luck!

Delicious Library is my new favorite application for OS X.  It helps you organize your library of books, movies, games, and cd's.  If you know me, you know I love to keep my media cataloged and organized.  This app kills at doing that.  It let's you just scan in a bar code on your book or movie with your iSight and it automatically goes and looks up all the information on Amazon.com for you.  If you like to keep tabs on your media and who borrows it, this is the best thing evar.  It's only for OS X, so if you've only got Windows, buy a Mac.