Home Automation with Asterisk and FreePBX

To control my house’s lights and AV equipment, I’m using a very simple Asterisk IVR, mine controls my lights and turns on/off my TV and Reciever by quereying a URL on my Mi Casa Verde Vera. The IVR answers automatically, is completely silent, and hangs up once it recieves a command. This means to launch an action, I simple hit a speed dial button on the phone next to my couch, then hit a number, and my equipment turns on or off.

For creating the IVR and extension for the IVR I’m using FreePBX; if you’re using bare asterisk, check the Asterisk documentation on how to setup a basic IVR.
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Home Automation With XBMC

At my home, I use a Mi Casa Verde Vera 3 home automation controller to control lights in my house, and I wanted a way to have XBMC automatically control lights for me. By adding a couple Python scripts to XBMC, whenever I start playing a video the lights in my living room turn off, if I pause the video the lights in my living room, kitchen, hallway, and bathroom go to 25% brightness, and when video stops playing, the lights in the living room turn on to full brightness. It also turns on and off my deck lights – no need to waste power when I’m inside watching something. You could modify the script to do the same thing with X10 or INSTEON, pause or resume your torrent or SABnzbd downloads, set a status on your Twitter or Facebook that you’re watching something, set your Google Voice account to Do Not Disturb, or anything else you can think of.
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Image Positioning in Markdown

With Markdown, an exclamation mark preceding a link, such as ![Example](/example.jpg) will insert an image into your body of text. Unfortunately, Markdown’s syntax doesn’t support positioning images, for that you’ll need to fall back on HTML.
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Essential iPhone 4 Accessories

After having owned an iPhone 4 for more than a year, I’ve found a few accessores that I consider essential.
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BASH Profile

Do you spend a lot of time in the terminal? Do you use BASH? Did you know you could change your default BASH prompt easily?

This is my prompt:

As you can see, it has the current time, the username, the computer name, and the current working directory. If you’d like to use this prompt, you can download my bash_profile here and start using it by renaming it .bash_profile and putting it in your home directory. Running mv bash_profile ~/.bash_profile will do it.

Recalibraing Your Roomba Battery

If you’ve owned a Roomba for more then a year you have no doubt noticed that the battery life is drastically reduced from when you bought it. Recalibrating, also known as reconditioning, your battery is a simple procedure that may help you reclaim some of that life. Read the rest of this post »