Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s a sort of status and control touch screen you mount on your wall (in-wall mount is probably coolest, more on that later). I’m going to mount the screen in my hallway so that when I’m about to leave from the house I can know what time it is, what the weather is like outside, my agenda for the day, switch off all the lights (and turn everything back on when I return) and check if my g/f has uploaded any new images to our Picasa Web Albums account.

Current features

• The current time and date
• Weather conditions
• Calendar agenda
• Weather forecast
• Full calendar view
• Lights/unit control (switch lights/appliances on/off using TellStick)
• Latest images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums
• Anything else I would like to display, e.g. my TODO list, access to Evernote etc

Some screenshots:

Home view (when the screen is idle it turns back to this view – current time, date, weather and calendar agenda)

Calendar (embedded, interactive Google Calendar)

Weather forecast (always updated, source: yr.no)

Lights/appliances control (using TellStick)

Photos (latest x photos from Picasa Web Albums)

Technical details

Mac Mini (web server, hosting the Home.Control web app), iPhone 2g (client + touch screen), Apache, php, Google data API, TellStick device (www.telldus.se), jQuery. All info Home.Control displays is updated regularly using AJAX. The TellStick device is plugged into the Mac Mini.

31th of March 2011: Proof of concept code available!

Next steps

• Optimize and refine code (it’s all chaotic now, proof-of-concept style)
• In-wall mount, I’m thinking something along the lines of what Arodsin Redningar did with his iPad:

#!/bin/bash
RET=`curl -u user@gmail.com:yourpwd –silent “https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom” | perl -ne ‘print “1″ if /<(fullcount)>[^0]<\/\1>/;’`
if [ "$RET" = "1" ] ; then
tdtool –on 6
else
tdtool –off 6
fi

Run crontab -e in a terminal and add this line to make the script run every 2 minutes:

*/2 * * * * ~/.scripts/checkEmail.sh &> /dev/null

Made a check script:

#!/bin/bash
foo=`screen -ls | grep -c autostart.screen`
if [ "$foo" -eq "0" ]; then
/usr/bin/screen -dmS autostart.screen /usr/bin/irssi -c freenode
fi

I named it checkIrssi.sh and made it executable with:

chmod 755 checkIrssi.sh

Then I put up a cron using “crontab -e” to run the script every hour:

* */1 * * * ~/path/to/checkIrssi.sh

And badabing!

Most people agree that the extra stress and potential failure a defragmentation inflicts on your iPod’s hard drive, is more harmful than the extra work your drive will have to do when playing back fragmented songs. Now, I’m a bit of a control freak and all though I’m in no actual control of how things are stored on the iPod, I tend to do a complete restore about every year, to clean up the iPod’s database and transfer my entire music collection in a contiguous manner to the iPod’s drive. Doing so will hopefully keep my iPod safe, longer lasting (battery wise) and fragmentation free.