It's here!

Phrank's Theme Saver lets you save the following to a file, and restore it all with one click!
Saves: Icon, Mouse, GTK, Metacity themes - Splash and Background images - Panel Settings

Here's the idea - Have a dedicated computer/kiosk that displays the latest home automation notifications.
It's pretty simple - Use a full screen webbrowser for display - write a .cgi script that updates each time it's run.

Coming soon - A bootable CD to backup/restore entire disks an image over the network.

PKImage will be:
* GUI only - No need for command line
* Beautiful - GTK2
* Simple to use

Will Support:
* Disk to image and image to disk (NOT partition to image)
* Mount Windows Shares, SSH Shares and USBKeys to restore/save to
* NTFS, FAT, EXT file systems
* Boot via CD or PXE/Network

Requires / Uses:
Req: xorg, zenity, partimage, ntfsclone, dd, sfdisk, fdisk, sshfs, smbfs
Uses: icewm, gtk-theme-switch, mingetty, oxygen-cursor-theme

I've been using Bonjour chat for Home automation updates - When someone calls, a chat box will appear with the caller id info.
But Bonjour chat isn't working in Ubuntu 9.04 - It crashes Pidgin.

So why not use the slick new notification system?

Awhile back I wrote a tutorial for setting up a LAN instant messaging system.
It works quite well for in-home stuff, like sending links and small files to other people in the household.

I've wanted to send IMs via the command line - My servers could update me with stats and the like.
And here's how to do it in Ubuntu 8.04 (May work in others, haven't tested)

We'll need a few programs - mzclient to broadcast our presence to other IM clients, and telnet to send IMs (telnet _should_ already be installed!)

When things finally click in the brain and work on the machine, happy things happen!

I keep adding to my home automation server. This time I got an old ISA modem. Found it in the piles of cards in my chicken coop (which I use for computer storage now). And I got caller ID working on it.

Setting Up the Modem

If your modem already works, skip this!
Had to get the modem detected and IRQs all set right. Yup, it's that old! Found a free IRQ by running

See it at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardMega

54 digital I/O pins. What would you do with that many pins!?! Or, more appropriately, what couldn't you do? ;-P

I want one!

PXE Network booting allows you to boot a computer over the network.
This means I can install an OS, or run a live cd on a computer that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive or Hard drive.
I can also install Ubuntu without needing to burn a CD every time.

It's pretty sweet.

I'm using Ubuntu Server 8.04 for my PXE server.
A PXE server consists of two things (Same for Windows based OSs):
* A DHCP server that hands out the correct info (In Windows DHCP management it's options 066 & 067)
* A TFTP server that shares the bootable files over the network.

I've tried _ALL_ of the command line webcam apps that Ubuntu has.... To no avail!!!!
Messages like "No supported palette found," etc, were common.
The webcam works great in Cheese and other GUI apps, but I want to use the camera on my server.

But then I stumbled upon 'streamer' - It didn't show up when I apt-cache searched for webcam - I'm not sure why :(

Anyhow - I can now grab images (or video) from the command line now-

Yay!