If you already automate everything in your home then X10 Freeze Sensor might be interesting for you to expand a little bit your system. It’s installed inside your freezer using X10 Powerflash interface and allows to monitor the temperature. So, with X10 Freeze Sensor you’ll able to know about some problems with the freezer before its contents will die.
The X10 Freeze Sensor is available on the Smarthome site at $49.99.
LinuxMCE development team has announced the release cycle. It’ll be 12 months starting from the version 0810. Peer Oliver Schmidt (“Possy”) will take up the role of release wrangler to try to keep developers on schedule and Zaerc is taking over the role of keeping the development build in good shape on a day-to-day basis.
LinuxMCE lost the servers and hosting that PlutoHome, Inc. had been providing for it the early part of this year. So, the big work was done to move the build servers, svn (back to the old charonmedia svn machine), forum, wiki and main website to the new location. But in spite of this the 0810-alpha0 is available for installation and testing. Good job!
If you’re interested to have 8 inputs and 8 outputs to your home automation system that are network addressable from your LAN then Aviosys IP Power 9212 is what you need. It’s supposed to be used together with devices like PIRs, door reed switches, toggles switches and Key fob receivers. The box’s equiped with RS232 port to communicate with PC and GPRS interface with Motorola V878/C550 and Sony Eriksson T630/K700i. Software features include SMTP Alerts, embedded web server, Dynamic DNS and wakeup by LAN support.
The Aviosys IP Power 9212 is available for £89.99.
[via AutomatedHome]
I left the LinuxMCE core/hybrid and didn’t assemble the new one yet. So, I use my laptop or old desktop to watch movies. With desktop is everything fine. It run Kubuntu 0804 and I installed there Boxee – nice looking, social media center software. But there is Fedora 9 on my laptop and Boxee doesn’t offer binaries for it. There is an only one way to install Boxee from the source.
I found nice tutorial which explains how to install XBMC on Fedora 9. Since Boxee is based on XBMC I tried to use it to build Boxee. But without luck. By some reason the xbmc.bin wasn’t created.
Then I tried to build XBMC using recommendations from that tutorial. Finally I did it. XBMC is run under Fedora 9 without any problems. Will try to build Boxee again as well. Maybe the second time will be successful.
UPDATE: Finally I built Boxee under Fedora 10 (for 9 should be the same). The trick is that. Instead of running make install after make finishes the script make-boxee.sh should be run. I didn’t adjust it for Fedora 10 and it gave me a lot of warnings. But as result I was able run Boxee successfully.
UPDATE2: There is a problem with Boxee under Fedora 10. Instead of playback I see the fast-forward. Also Boxee crashes with Segmentation Fault very often. Will try to build with the fresh sources tonight.
LinuxMCE development team decided to pass version 0804 and release 0810 to synchronize with Kubuntu releases. A few days ago was announced a 0810-alpha0. It can be installed on the Kubuntu 8.10 using installation script. That approach is good if you already setup Kubuntu Intrepid and fast Internet connection.
The brief instructions show to install 0810-alpha0 can be found in the wiki. You can ask help or post bug-report on that topic on the LinuxMCE forum.
I already installed LinuxMCE 0810-alpha0 on the VMWare to play a bit. The installation passed fine from the first try. I didn’t have a time to play with it. Will do it tomorrow.
