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BoomZilla writes ""Speedy" Shayne Barr races Nitro RS4 remote controlled Racecars competitively. These cars are nitro fueled, 1/10 scale, and they can go as fast as fifty miles per hour. To make his racing more interesting, he has hooked up an XCam2 to his racecar so that not only can he race the car, he can also view the race from the car's viewpoint after the race is over. Speedy's posted a number of videos on his website where he describes the construction process. The vid where his car winds up on its roof is most entertaining. Go Speed(y) Racer!"

bje2 writes "Privacy advocates will undoubtedly be up in arms about a ruling by the Washington State Supreme court which decided that such privacy violating technology as 'up the skirt cams' are not illegal in public places (like a mall)... CNet has the story here."

kevinvee asks: "I am trying to find a suitable wireless web camera for broadcasting video streams from various sites around the university where I work, including buildings currently under construction which can be far from both network and electrical outlets. Besides the x10 packages, however, my search is coming up rather empty. Things we have to consider are the maximum distance from transmitter to receiver; power source, and if battery-powered, the average battery life; video quality; additional necessary hardware and software; outdoor/indoor capabilities; and weather resistance. I'm sure there are also other things to consider which we haven't thought of yet. Has anyone else tackled similar projects? What hardware did you attempt to use and what experiences did you have with it?"

dustinc20 asks: "I dont know if this is the right area, but being as this is a geek site I'd ask my fellow geeks if anyone knows a way to build a battery pack for one of those X-10 cameras. It has a frequency encoder(?) in the power supply and this makes it more complicated than just supplying 12vDC."

JCMay writes: "FoxNews is reporting that more and more people are growing tired of so-called "pop-under" ads. Most fascinating I think is the comparison between these ads and gangland street violence: "They?'re like drive-by shootings," said Kipp Cheng, interactive news editor at Adweek. "Consumers will not put up with that." To FoxNews' credit, they even mention ways people can control pop-up ads, including a link to one of the worst offenders, offering a way to shut up those X-10 ads, even if for only a month." Fortunately, Konqueror allows you to disable popups with a single checkbox.

Over the past few months, several questions regarding wiring home LANs have been submitted to the Ask Slashdot bin. These questions cover just about every aspect a person might be faced with when trying to wire a home, so I thought it was best to just collect them all in one go. I figure there are a number of people out there who have done this (I just got finished wiring mine, for that matter), and that there are many more out there who have been searching around for assistance. So if you've ever been interested in building a home LAN from the ground up, or if you have already done so and would like to comment on your experiences, please pull up a chair and share what's on your mind.

Wired, or Wireless? RickMuller asks: "I have a cable modem feeding into an ethernet hub in my house, of off which I string anywhere from 2-5 different computers. Currently these are all clustered near the cable modem itself. I would like to be able to spread the computers through my house, and particularly to be able to bring my laptop to other parts of the house and still be able to work online. I'm considering either hiring an electrician to wire the walls, or finding some wireless format. Wireless is definitely cooler, but I'm a little bit scared off by the 'tower of babel' of different formats. Plus the expense is a consideration. Can anyone else offer an opinion on wireless vs. wired at home, and if wireless, which wireless format?"

Sticking with the open solution is always the best, so I would go with an IEEE 802.11 based network for the wireless segment. Are there any wireless cards that do not grok 802.11? If so, then I'd stay well away from these unless the cost savings are really huge, which I doubt.

Building the Home of the 21st Century! Cactii submits: "My wife and I are thinkng about buying a home soon. We both have our own ideas about what the place is going to be like and the immediate improvements we will make to the existing structure of the house. My ideas involve electronic interfaces to different areas of the house. Wiring the house for a network and using the computer for almost everything that it can be used for.

First off - I'm going to wire the living room or family room into a total entertainment center. It'll have the usual stereo, TV, DVD, VCR, etc... However there'll also be a computer connected to a proxy server that allows instant internet access. The computer will allow us to surf the net and download MP3's to be played right off the computer hard drive through the stereo and other things as well.

I've been looking around for other 'Wired Home' solutions and all I've found were some programs and electronic gizmos that offer only a piece of the solution. X10.com is about as close to a solution as anything but I don't want all these little boxes hanging off of the wall plugs.

Has anybody found anything more integral? More of a total solution?"

Wiring A Home With an Eye on the Future? Oroborus asks: "My parents are building a new house from ground up, and want to try to be as 'forward compatible' as possible. They've asked for my help in incorporating as much technology as possible, and in preparing it for any future technology that we can forsee. The problem is that though they're excited by technology, they're not all that conversant with it, and anything they include will have to be extremely user friendly. My initial thought is to wire the house with shielded ethernet cable with all the drops in the basement, to be wired to a hub/router later. But they've got high hopes for a 'smart home', how else can they prepare for the future?"

A tough job, but maybe with a bit of thought, such things can be prepared for. How would you wire a home with an eye on making it so that future capabilities can be added in without painful construction bills?

Wiring Hostile Home Environments? Old Man Kensey issues the following query: "I've been annoying my roommate by populating every possible room in our apartment with a terminal of some kind (X over the Ethernet, null-modem PPP, or serial). There are two rooms I have not yet found suitable equipment for, though -- the kitchen and the bathroom. The bathroom has the obvious hazards, besides being pretty small, but the kitchen is even more hostile an environment. Besides water, you have various kinds of food and food-related goo, microwave radiation, heat, high humidity, and general cramped space.

Has anybody out there found cheap, readily-available equipment (serial terminals, etc.) that will withstand the worst hazards of a typical American home? How about cheap modifications like enclosures that fit in small spaces and might protect, say, a PowerBook-Duo-size laptop? I'm willing to deal with having to power up and down, but I'd like to have something that doesn't compromise the actual operation of the equipment (enclosures that block cooling fan vents, for example)."

You Can Wire in More Than a LAN, You Know... Cosimo Leipold asks: "I've recently purchased a house that is still under construction. The developer asked me what I wanted wired. Has anyone expiremented with what you can wire in a home sucesfully? The developer has no 'computer experience' of course, so beyond RJ-45 he didn't know what was feasible. He tells me that the cost of wiring is pretty minimal since the house has little more than the frame up at this point. I'm looking to the slashdot community for cool ideas as to what I can wire. (RJ-45, sound, s-video, intercom, etc). I'm thinking this might be a great chance to get X10 in. Ideas?"

It seems that a lot of people have discovered X10 for home automation, but is that the only game in town? Sure, it might be the most affordable, but for those people with larger pocket books, are there other alternatives that might offer more features for a larger pricetag?

...and Along the Same Vein, Why Not Wire for Sound? Last, but most certainly not least, wiremonkey puts this question on the table: "I hear a lot of talk about wiring homes, but very few people are thinking about anything except network/telephone wiring. I'm interested in how fellow geeks have wired their houses for audio. Right now, I have a system built around a Samson 24 channel mixer and two amplifiers. My audio sources include computers, CD players, ham radios, a tape deck, DVD, VCR, and TV. The current system lets me listen to different things in two 'zones' - the computer room vs. the rest of the house (I like my computers to beep in the computer room, but not the bedroom - yet I like my CD player to play music in both rooms). Note that I always have one compter's audio playing throughout the house, as it announces my telephone calls.

I'm looking at ways of distributing the control of the audio 'mix' to two locations (right now, you have to be at the main mixer to adjust something). I would locate the video equipment and an additional CD player in the living room, while I would locate the computer equipment and auxilary audio gear (tape deck, ham radio, another CD player) in the computer room. I'd like to be able to hear any audio source from any room. I'm a serious listener, and I hate 60hz hum (the current unbalanced audio lines I use cause nothing but problems with hum)! In addition, I live in a high RF environment, with HF, VHF, and UHF transmitters and 100 watts of power per band. I get sick of hearing my automated packet station while listening to Bach! At the same time, I would prefer not to run 20+ balanced lines between the two locations. What have you done in your house? What were the 'professional touches' that you added? What did you wish you did differently?

(Yes, I know there are turn-key systems that do this - however, I don't feel like spending $2000+ for a system which won't let me listen to my computer and CDs at the same time!)"

phutureboy writes: "Thought the gadget freaks and toy hackers out there would be interested in this badass video camera for kids. It transmits at 900MHz to a base station which has audio/video RCA outs you can connect to a TV or VCR. I bought one at Wal-Mart for $75, and have been fairly impressed with it so far even though it's sort of cheap and plasticky. Got me to wondering what other applications the Slashdot crowd could come up with for it, or whether anyone knew of other inexpensive video cameras suitable for experimentation." CT:You can get an x10 one too. Video quality kinda sucks tho.

Gleb sent us an IETF draft for electricity over IP (yeah it's old, but it's funny). dbcooper noticed that New Scientist mentioned a kit spaceship for $500k. Oh, and here's some (warning! Over 18 and over!) Odd Javascript that I can't even begin to describe, but it's so odd that I just had to share it. l@ps@n pointed out some Star Wars Origami that is actually pretty sweet. Mr. Fusion urges us to fry that Voodoo3 with two neon sign transformers and watch the fireworks. Phrogman noted that SpaceRef has posted some amazing time-lapse movies assembled from the Hubble space telescope showing stars blowing gas (insert joke here). zenray notd that this month's SC Magazine does a market survey about tools needed to do a forensics-quality copy of disk drives. Basically the requirement is to be an exact byte-for-byte copy; 'dd' gets their BEST BUY award. Congrats! mommydearest wrote in to plug that Ultimate Chaos is hosting the Ultimate AOL CD Invention contest here (grand prize is an IDE RAID controller!). Best I ever came up with was wallpaper (during my cubist period I filled up a wall). An anonymous reader found the x10-men which ain't exactly X10, and it ain't exactly X-Men, but it is truly frightening. And finally, what with election coming up and all, it's a good thing that LafinJack wrote in to let us know that Joe Leiberman and Dick Cheney have joined the ranks of political quake 3 skins available. Taunt and kill them before doing so becomes treason!

Gleb sent us an IETF draft for electricity over IP (yeah it's old, but it's funny). dbcooper noticed that New Scientist mentioned a kit spaceship for $500k. Oh, and here's some (warning! Over 18 and over!) Odd Javascript that I can't even begin to describe, but it's so odd that I just had to share it. l@ps@n pointed out some Star Wars Origami that is actually pretty sweet. Mr. Fusion urges us to fry that Voodoo3 with two neon sign transformers and watch the fireworks. Phrogman noted that SpaceRef has posted some amazing time-lapse movies assembled from the Hubble space telescope showing stars blowing gas (insert joke here). zenray notd that this month's SC Magazine does a market survey about tools needed to do a forensics-quality copy of disk drives. Basically the requirement is to be an exact byte-for-byte copy; 'dd' gets their BEST BUY award. Congrats! mommydearest wrote in to plug that Ultimate Chaos is hosting the Ultimate AOL CD Invention contest here (grand prize is an IDE RAID controller!). Best I ever came up with was wallpaper (during my cubist period I filled up a wall). An anonymous reader found the x10-men which ain't exactly X10, and it ain't exactly X-Men, but it is truly frightening. And finally, what with election coming up and all, it's a good thing that LafinJack wrote in to let us know that Joe Leiberman and Dick Cheney have joined the ranks of political quake 3 skins available. Taunt and kill them before doing so becomes treason!

heller asks: "I'm wondering about ideas for different methods intefacing with the computer for the physically handicapped. I've got a family friend that has very limited motor control, and while he can peck away at a computer, it really is hard and time consuming. Plus, he can't control almost anything else around his house, TV, front door, phone, microwave. My current thoughts are that if we can get him to interface with the computer, we can make it so he can control everything else he needs to." We have basic voice recognition, and technologies like X10: could these technologies and others help make living for the handicapped any easier without costing lots of money? (Read on...)

"Pete, a long time family friend and founder of Pedal with Pete, was born with cerebral palsy (check the Web site for more information). This greatly inhibits his motor control. He enjoys bike riding but last June, was in serious bike accident (once again, more info on the Web site) and this only reduced his motor control. The man has incredible spirit and wants to live on his own, though he has to have home care nurses stop by every day to help him perform most of his daily activities.

He used to do lots of work on his computer pecking away with sticks strapped to both hands. Since his accident he has virtually lost control of one side of his body and has seriously reduced control on the other side, so this is no longer possible.

My current line of thinking is that if we can get him to be able to control a computer, we might be able to automate many of the other parts of his life so he doesn't have to rely on so much help from other people. While I definitely have several ideas on how to go about this, I'ld really like some other input. Does anyone have any ideas or new products they can point me to?"

We've already had a discussion about Voice Recognition in one of the first Ask Slashdots but that article is from '98 and I expect there has been a lot more progress in this areas since then. I may have to run a follow-up post to this if folks are interested.

ChrisGoodwin sent us linkage to a pretty excellent one. Its a Wired Story about a new toy called MP3 Anywhere from X10. It allows you to play MP3s wirelessly on your home stereo by transmitting them over a 2.4ghz connection from your PC. The downside is that it looks like it uses a winamp plugin, so there isn't Linux support yet, but it definitely shows promise. The same device can be used to broadcast video the same way.

ChrisGoodwin sent us linkage to a pretty excellent one. Its a Wired Story about a new toy called MP3 Anywhere from X10. It allows you to play MP3s wirelessly on your home stereo by transmitting them over a 2.4ghz connection from your PC. The downside is that it looks like it uses a winamp plugin, so there isn't Linux support yet, but it definitely shows promise. The same device can be used to broadcast video the same way.

On Monday, we had a story about X10 offering up copies of Firecracker, their home automation kit for 5.90$, the cost of shipping. A bunch of you did get some, but they called to say that after a while, the server crashed. They've updated the page, and have more availible but only for the next twenty-four hours. If you look at the page the bottom right side has the links for the Linux material with it-much fun to be had.

mamadrum writes "Firecracker is giving (today only) away a starter kit of PC controlled home automation relays and software. It uses a wireless connection between the PC serial port and an outlet, then modulates control signals on the house AC wiring. Seems to be an example of "give away the razors and charge for the blades" since you only get one relay. Still, adding relays is cheaper than opening up my walls to put in 10baseT. Old tech but decent price. "It's 5.90 for the shipping. Anyone played with this before?

Urgoll asks : "Is there any software/hardware availlable for Linux (preferably) or Windows to control your home environment? I'm takling about being able to control the home temperature , various lights, water heater, etc from your PC, and hopefully with a dial-in interface, so that you can control your house when away from home... Imagine... Coming back from a vacation, and calling your house form the airport to raise the temperature, so you won't freeze when going to bed!" Most people in the know would say *X10!*, but I figured that this was cool enough to run for the folks who AREN'T and wish to do something like this.