802.11 baby monitor

Our next door neighbors just had a baby.  Since they brought him home, we have been noticing interference on our baby monitor.  We either here static or sound from their baby monitor transmitter.  It seems that they have either the same model baby monitor, or one that transmits over the same frequencies.

It got me thinking, that we have a relatively robust wireless signals going around our house.  Our 802.11g network is very robust, even though there are several other networks nearby.  Since 802.11 chips are pretty cheap, it would be great if someone would come out with baby monitors that use 802.11 as the transmission protocol.  All that it would have to do is broadcast the audio stream on the subnet. 

Climatouch C3

One of my friends just bought one of these thermostats, and they look very cool.  The Climatouch C3 is a touch-screen thermostat, that is supposed to work with any heating an cooling system.  It looks like it has some interesting features that allow you to same money.

One cool thing that this does is allows you to connect a remote sensor, so you can see outside temperature.  Unfortunately, it doesn't look like you can use can use it to monitor the indoor temperature of a different room.  Ideally you would be able to configure it so that the air conditioner would come on if either the upstairs or downstairs gets warmer than a certain temperature.

AppleScript frustrations (cont.)

Since the code that I wanted to write to determine if a track has been added to iTunes was not working, this is the code that I have found that works the best.  It seems that the only way to determine if a track is already added to iTunes is to add it, and then if iTunes throws an exception, then the track was already added.

tell application "iTunes"

with timeout of 300 seconds

-- The easiest way to figure out if this track is already in the library is to

-- add it.  If the number of tracks increases, then the track was not in there

--

-- Ideally this would be able to call something like:

-- (exists (get some track of library playlist 1 whose location is theFile))

set this_track to {}

set fAddedFile to false

set gotException to false

try

set initialCount to get count of every file track of library playlist 1

set this_track to (add theFile)

set countAfter to get count of every file track of library playlist 1

if countAfter > initialCount then

set fAddedFile to true

end if

on error

-- This is where we catch the error if the track has already been added to the library:

end try

end timeout

end tell


It is pretty bad that iTune's AppleScript dictionary is not better.

Technorati Tags: AppleScript

Reprogramming X10 light switch

For some reason, our KeypadLinc X-10 light switch got reset to the default settings, so I decided to reprogram it with some buttons that would be easier to use.  Since it has 6 buttons on it, and I only need to control 3 lights, I decided to configure it so that each light would have two buttons to control it, one to dim and one to brighten. 

This works fine for the light that is directly connected to the switch, but it doesn't work as I expect for the remote lights.  I wanted to program the buttons so that pressing and holding the buttons would continue to send the dim/brighten commands.  But it looks like for remote lights, if you use the non-toggle mode to send a bright or dim, the commands do not repeat.

AppleScript frustrations

I spent a lot of time this past weekend trying to improve the AppleScript that I mentioned before.  I want to uses this script to automatically move all tracks that were added to iTunes, from Shrook, into a single playlist.

Since Shrook downloads all of the podcast tracks to ~/Library/Application Support/Shrook2/Attachments, all that would been needed to is to find all of the tracks in the iTunes library that are in that directory, and then make sure they were in the playlist.


The AppleScript that I wrote before does this job, but it takes a long time if the iTunes Library has a lot of tracks, as it had to iterate over each of them.  So I wanted too change the script to iterate over the files that Shrook had downloaded, and then check each one to see if it has been added.


This script sample should work:

tell application "iTunes"

if (exists (get some file track of library playlist 1 whose location is theFile)) then

set this_track to (get some file track of library playlist 1 whose location is (theFile as alias))

set dbid to this_track's database ID

if not (exists (some track of playlist podcastPlaylist whose database ID is dbid)) then

duplicate this_track to playlist podcastPlaylist

end if

end if

end tell

Applescript to create Shrook podcast playlist

I have been getting frustrated that the podcasts that were being put into iTunes from Shrook were not being put into a single playlist.  So I have been looking for some solutions.  I first tried to create a smart playlist, but you can not create rules based upon the location of the files.

I have been working on an AppleScript that would automatically copy the tracks from Shrook into a playlist.  Below is what I have come up with so far.

The problem with this implementation is that it iterates over every item in the iTunes Library, so it takes a long time.  I am going to change it so it only iterates over the files that have been downloaded by Shrook

What happens with old car designs?

What do car companies do with the designs of older model cars. I imagne that a car company could get extra money for licensing a design for a popular older car. I also imagine that for a car company that doesn't have a large R&D budget this would be a cheap way to get a good design for a car.

I actually think that this is happening already. Take a look at the 1999 Isuzu Oasis and the 1995 Honda Odyssey.

These look almost identical. If Honda did license the plans, I think that is is a great move on their part.