Potential disaster adverted

Yesterday, I got a call from my father-in-law. He said that the alarm on our washing machine was going off. This is the alarm on the Washing Machine Valve Shut-Off Kit. It appears that our washing machine had leaked some water onto the floor. This device potentiallly saved us from some major damage. When the kit senses water, it cuts off water supply to the washing machine. (The reason that we bought this is becuase our old washing machine leaked and caused about $2000 of damage).

Denon DVD-1910

Home Theater Blog has a review of the Denon DVD-1910. This is a DVD player that has a lot of high end features:

• HDCP compliant DVI output
• Faroudja FLI2301 DCDI deinterlacer
• 3:2 pull down detection
• HDCD playback
• 480p, 720p and 1080i up scaling

All of this is available for a retail price tag of $269

New addition to our family

My wife gave birth to our daughter yesterday. Kaya Mae was born at 2:39 on 9/8. She is a healthy 9lbs 6oz and 20.5" long.

Outlet with nightlight

Smarthome has a pretty cool outlet that has a built-in nightlight. I am thinking of buying two of these, one for our son's room, and one for his bathroom vanity.

Building Linux PVR for $635

/. has a post that links to instructions on creating a Linux based PVR running MythTV. The screen shots for MythTV look great. If I didn't have our TiVos, I would thinking about building one.

Munin server stat graphing tool

My friend Todd (blog) pointed me to a cool piece of software. Munin is a piece of software that wll show information about a computer in a graphical format. One of the interesting things that I like about this is that the software is broken into two pieces. A node that gathers information on a machine, and a server that connects to different nodes, and graphs this information. So I have one machine running the server, while it is gathering this statistical information from all of my servers.

Site monitoring

Yesterday, I noticed that one of my TiVo boxes were not successfully
making calls on my Vonage phone line, so I decided to switch the phone
cable to the jack that has our second phone line (the one with the
DSL). I then went to work. I got a call from my wife
stating that our Vonage phone line was not working. When I looked
into it, I noticed that our dsl was down.

I was able to fix the problem, just by switching the phone cable back
to the Vonage phone line (I could have also just added a DSL
filter). But this made me want to find a way to at least be
notified when our dsl is down.