The project out of the box will allow you to use a pc connected Arduino board to turn on/off a remote control power adapter. I intend on using this to turn on/off my lounge room heater.
Why not just use a reasonably cheap timer power adapter I hear you say… well..
I want this device accessible via a web browser (pc, phone etc) over the internet.
I want it to not plug into a pc but instead be accessible over my home wireless network.
I want it to track ambient temperature of my lounge room so it can be graphed by munin or mrtg
Moving on from that I would like it to automatically turn on the heater on weekdays around an hour before I get home from work but to only do so if the temperature inside is under a certain threshold.
Given that this device would technically only be relevant for the winter months there is nothing really stopping me from altering the code to interact with an air conditioner during the summer
- Had a retard car driver do a u-turn in front of my motorbike, wrote off the bike and had some nasty bruises after sliding some distance and slamming into the gutter on the opposite side of the road.
- Insurance replaced my ‘07 Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade with a freakin’ sexy new 2009 model
- Promotion at work
- Played more paintball, figured I liked it enough to start getting my own gear but that involves getting a firearms permit.. joy..
- Burnt out doing hard core World of Warcraft progression raiding and stopped playing cold turkey for over a month.
- Transferred my WoW chars back to one of my original realms to play casually..
- Rolled a Resto Druid and am loving the healing thing
- Rolled a Rogue.. because I can ;P
- New furniture
- Currently have the flu and can’t seem to shake it.. *sigh*
- Got tickets to see Pearl Jam again wOO! ;P
- Got tickets to see Faith No More when they come to Sydney in February 2010 for Soundwave.. tho i really hope they do their own side show. Annoying ppl at those music festivals are annoying..
Went and saw Nine Inch Nails at the Hordern Pavilion last Tuesday. It was the first time I’ve seen Trent Reznor live and it was absolutely fucking awesome! The venue copped a 40 minute power outage mid set but the concert was that good I can easily overlook that
Didn’t get any photo’s but there are a few on the nin.com site. They played a bunch of new and old songs which was really cool. I grew up listening to NIN so it was fuckin’ great seeing them live.
So in a week and a half the guild has gone downhill again.. Our replacement GM handed over to someone else (who had themselves already left the guild and had made their own guild). I’m also not sure I agree with much of what the current GM has been saying in regards to the guild’s direction or even if its in line with what the guildies want. There has certainly been a lot of crap flinging across the guild forums and its just not making the game enjoyable at all. I don’t think I’ve even raided in a number of weeks! I don’t think there’s any real 25man end game raiding future in the guild for quite a long time which is certainly a shame.
I’ve instead decided to follow one of the good players across to another realm to a decent end game raiding guild so I’m really looking forward to it. I’m just trying to figure out how to say bye to people, not really one of my strengths ..
Its kinda hard to believe but my 4 weeks annual leave is almost over.. For the first time in a while I actually feel good so the extra time off has been worth it. Did lots of things and got lots of new goodies over the past few weeks which have kept me amused.
Guitar Hero World Tour – omg, the drum kit so rocks!
Shitloads of DVD’s.. I picked up the awesome Die Hard Quadrilogy on blueray. I must say DH1 & 4 were certainly the best.
3G iPhone – Thanks to Brett for shipping it to me from the UK and to yellowsn0w for the painless unlocking. My 1st Gen has since made its way into Sara’s hot little hands ;P
New Scalar Rider FM after the previous one got waterlogged and stopped working (silly me must have left the recharge jack unsealed and it got soaked in some rain). The new one is cool though cause I can now listen to FM radio while riding the bike.
Replacement Power Supply for my file server @ home due to the last one going out with a (rather large) bang! The one I picked up from the local computer joint is too loud so I have another arriving hopefully on Monday which should bring the noise back down in my computer room. We’ll see how that pans out.
New clothes – as always happens every Christmas, and probably the only time I actually bother with clothes shopping too hehe. I really don’t like clothes shopping shopping in general and 90% of the time I just wear shit that Sara has bought me… pathetic .. I know ;P.
Custom moulded earplugs – I have quite narrow ear canals which makes wearing normal foam ear plugs quite uncomfortable and annoying. As I hav erecently been doing a lot of long distance rides, and my motorbike not being exactly quiet these things are awesome. Extremely comfortable, blocks out all that wind and engine noise but allows me to hear things I need to hear like horns and/or approaching cars etc.
Motorbike – Did another couple of big motorcycle rides, the latter was the one that took out my old Scaler Rider bluetooth headset for my mobile/gps. I have also seen on this ride, for the first time, a no speed limit sign. I didn’t even know they existed in this state, or at least anywhere close to civilisation, however considering we did around 700kms that day it was possible that we weren’t at all. Furthermore that particular street seemed to disappear off my GPS map as well.
I still need to sort out the power cable for the GPS as I found that the internal battery seems to only last for about 6 hours before it goes completely flat. I did get the CBR1000RR in for its 12000km service too and was going to get the cable fitted however the day before putting it in for service I couldn’t find where I put the cable.. I think i put it in a ’safe place’ hehe
Fishing – I also got back into a bit of fishing, had a few days there where I went out with my sister and some friends for a bit of fishing, I actually broke my several year drought and actually caught something worth keeping! w00t! hehe. It was a rock cod or something, tasted pretty good.
World of Warcraft – Contrary to speculation, I haven’t actually played much WoW over my holidays. Sure I have played it a bit, but there was a little over a week where I didn’t even log on. Of course this was over christmas, new years etc where I just had too much other shit going on. Was probably the longest time I’ve had away from it in a long time. There were certainly withdrawal symptoms happening though One thing is for sure though, the current content is just too freakin boring… the whole Naxxramas 10 man and 25 man is pathetic, no incentive to do 25’s when you can just do 10’s and get almost the same quality gear. the content is also WAY too easy, we’re burning through this content like a hot knife through butter.. I understand that they want the average joe to be able to experience end game content, but those hard core raiders who play specifically for end game progression have been slapped with a wet fish… On top of this a lot of classes are also in a bad shape after the expansion which has also resulted in a number of ppl leaving the game which has directly impacted our end game raiding To make matters worse our best raid leader has transferred and our guild master has decided to step down. I’m not too sure where this is going to leave the guild or if they are going to be able to recover. I guess I’m back into the same boat I was 7-8 months ago , looking for a decently progressed end game raiding guild that needs a Warlock
I’m sure there’s plenty of other crap thats happened that I’ve missed. I really should update this more often – but not as often as those wacky kids and their twitters ;P Yes I’m lookin at you both Daveg & Skywalka!
Went and saw The Butterfly Effect on Thursday night and they absolutely rocked! The two support bands were good, but in particular I really liked the performance by the opening band Sleep Parade.
If you get a chance to see TBE on their current tour, do it!
We got Lady Vashj down last night which was a guild first for my new guild. While this isn’t my first kill of her it was good to re-experience the learning curves a guild must endure with the encounter and being able to overcome various issues to get her down. We had been trying for about 3 days in total but some of those nights was spent clearing the bosses before her so the attempts weren’t really all that solid. Last night we went in with an abnormal strategy which actually worked quite well. In particular it was the Strider Kiting strat that was thrown out the window and instead we had the striders tanked in one spot. Striders went down very quickly, organization was superb, communication over vent was excellent. The attempt that netted us the kill was really quite impressive.
As I had suspected that we would down Vashj I was busy recording each attempt using the built in recording that is available in the native World of Warcraft Mac client. As a bit of a stuff around I thought I’d whip something up in iMovie which I conveniently have installed on my Macbook Pro. In no time at all I had a video put together. This is my very first attempt at an in game video so it is really dodgy but I enjoyed making it and will probably do more down the track to get my experience up and obviously try to get better at them. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware of how severe the video and audio degradation is when something is uploaded to youtube so the resulting youtube vid is really *really* shit when compared with the movie file that I uploaded.
Its amusing that my last post was about the Battlemaster’s Audacity because I haven’t used that sucker in yonks.. oh wait, its been yonks since I last posted! *oops* Turns out that a lot has gone on in that time, my gear has improved a *LOT* over the past few months. Now I’ve replaced all my Frozen Shadoweave gear with several T5 items, a majority of T6 equivalent BoJ reward items, most recently Hood of Hexing and one of the best DPS caster trinkets in the game, Hex Shrunken Head, to go alongside my Darkmoon Card: Crusade!.
I’ve also switched guilds, pretty much due to the fact that the previous one were only really caring about gearing up IRL friends and ex-raiders from previous alliance guilds who were rerolling horde characters on Nagrand. There was was no real push for progression, and it showed considering we went from 3rd highest progressed horde guild on the realm to something like 7th.. At the end of the day, I got tired of helping others get new gear when the officers of the guild refused to do content that allowed me to gear up. Considering I had an almost flawless attendance and pretty much always topped the damage meters I embarked on the search for another guild. As events unfolded over the past few weeks, I ended up moving into a new guild along with the Main Tank from my old guild.
Its only been a few days so far now but these guys are certainly serious about end game content with raid stats analysed after each raid and raid members expected to explain why performance was low and how they are to improve as appropriate etc. While most would consider this really anal, I actually do like it as we don’t have people slacking off like I had in the previous guild. I recall a number of people who used to AFK on trash pulls and only put in *some* effort on boss attempts and even then it was a really half assed effort. It was then up to the hard working raiders to take up the slack and it was getting a littel too taxing over time. I’m however pretty happy with the new guild so far, and I do expect to be meeting Illidan Stormrage in the not too distant future.
Back to the gear topic, I now have a full Tier 6 content ready shadow destruction set, an affliction counterpart (not that I’ll actually go back to affliction I don’t think) and what is starting to turn into a nice little PvP set, with almost 400 resilience too. The ~400 resilience on my PvP set is rather nice as I don’t seem to be dying as quick as I used to, but death is really inevitable considering I’m just a little clothie after all.. As one can guess from my previous comment, I’ve made the switch from affliction to the classic 0/21/40 destruction spec now that I have sufficient +hit rating and I must say its been really *really* cool. The only drawback I found is the lack of mobility that I’ve been so used to with affliction spec, but I can live with that, I just need to start working on my +haste stats. I’m exceeding my expectations on the damage meters, and able to pwn some serious ass in PvP on those wacky nights where I feel the need to do battlegrounds, or grind honor for that matter for silly PvP items needed for PvE encounters (oh why Blizzard, why?!) such as the Medallion of the Horde trinket needed for the Archimonde fight.
I’m rambling now.. forgive me ;P
On another slightly wow related topic, I love this song, but in particular the machinima movies this dude makes which include WoW models & scenery along with other games like Unreal Tournament. Enjoy.
I finally managed to get the last of the 75(!) Heroic Badges required for my Battlemaster’s Audacity trinket last night. Started in ZA then moved on to a Heroic SH which I hadn’t actually done before. I find that no one really wants to run Heroic SH, even tho I died for stupid reasons, the run was actually rather painless. Even did the timed event with ease. It was a guild group and we were pretty well geared so this probably had something to do with it
Sara and I were up in the Hunter Valley for the past couple of days and had a really good time. I do, however, think we got a little carried away as this is what we brought back.
Filed under: arduino, m.o
