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Xmas Lights + X10 + Webcam = Fun
Clark Griswold writes "My brother has outdone himself this year, installing 22,000 Christmas Lights on the outside of his house alone. The real beauty is the X10-Webcam Combo that allows you to turn the lights ON and OFF and see the results of your handiwork. It only works between 6pm and 10pm MST, but it's pretty fun to turn the zones on and off (though I'm not so sure the neighbors like it!)."
OK, this is really cool, and makes me want to wire my house this way. My wife would kill me, though (although that would make for entertaining webcamming, that's for sure--live spousal beheadings).
Dude, where's my packet?
Oh, this will be useful and a productive use of time once the site gets slammed. Glad I hit it early.
Message for <withheld>: The lights are being switched ON and OFF off too fast - try again in a few minutes ...
There are two kinds of people: 1) those that need closure
So naturally, we posted it on Slashdot. Maybe a limit of switching the lights 3 times withing 5 minutes TOTAL FROM ALL USERS would have been better. Very cool though.
PS: Have we ever slashdotted a X10 system before?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
slashdotted already....and this is only the 10th or so reply!
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
The only way to create a fire-hazard from half-way around the world...Light ON, light OFF, Light ON, Light OFF, Light ON, Light OFF, Light BOOM! --Sparks everywhere...
Why not fork?
Only 8 comments and the poor guy's webcam site is already slashdotted.
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
This guy must hate his brother if he posted this here. Probably won't be able to see it till after Xmas now.
Suck it Trebeck! Suck it long and Suck it Hard.
We just slashdotted CHRISTMAS. What next, do the editors engineer a DDoS on GOD HIMSELF?
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Xmas Lights + X10 + Webcam + /. = Lights Out
has been thrown down.
Time to go wire up an 50 or so 7 segment display's
so I can scroll the latest slashdot headlines across my front front yard.
I'm dreaammming of geek christmas.
Gotta love the holidays.
ThunderBird. Nuff said.
Seriously, all these people trying to turn his lights on and off... Must look like a strobe-light.
Check the cache of the homepage, if you want to at least see the house. The image seems to be on another server.
THANK GOD FOR SLASHDOT! Now the lights are ALL out!
Not only did the server that runs them crash, it took all 22,000 lights with it.
WOOHOO!!!!
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
Is this some candid version of x-10 advertising on slashdot?
You Slashdotted the good, old-fashioned Griswold family Christmas!
I think the "brother" is really the neighbors trying to get a little revenge. Post the URL on /, wait for the server crash and go to sleep with no lights flickering. With people suing each other in my area for annoying light displays,I wouldn't be surprised.
Do you think the lights are ON or OFF? We will never know what the default was...
Lol. This guy's brother sold him out for the 5 karma points he got for getting his story posted...
At Drivemeinsane.com you can control christmas lights in his living room, turn on the sprinkler, office lights, and send mesages that are said with a text to speach program.
Hacker Media
A local house burned to the gound when its X10 camera system and 22,000 Christmas lights were Slashdotted.....
Since I'm sure this would qualify for uglychristmaslights.com
My computer said to me .... B.S.O.D. !!
I would really feel terrible if this guy has any epileptic neighbors!
I'd be more than glad to purchase their product, IF they did not have their marketing campaign that pops up on almost every site I go to.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
The lights are powered by the wind turbines! Oh man, your self-righteous enviromentalist rant just got SHUT DOWN!
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Proud of what I did,
Brother was envious and
slashdoted my lights
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
According to the site, they're wind powered.
-palp
... from the Apple "Switch" commercial. She saved Christmas from Windows last year, now she's gotta save it from Slashdot!
Stories about wiring up your house for Christmas -- I don't care how you go about doing it -- should not ever hit Slashdot unless it can be seen from space.
My
Limekiller
What did your brother do to deserve this?
"When all else fails, there's always delusion." -Conan O'Brien
You just made his house burst into flame.
"When all else fails, there's always delusion." -Conan O'Brien
I thought X10 gear was only for spying on pretty young women in tight clothes.
I guess those popups were misleading me...
Great going guys! You Slashdotted Christmas.
Any chance this brother was really an annoyed neighbor who knew the true power of the nerd? :)
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
stroboscope
...
poor neighboors, if they didn't like it before, I wonder how they like the crazy flashes of thousands of slashdotters playing around with the lights
theefer
This wouldn't happen. Russians can't afford the bandwidth.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Why not instead build some cool snow sculptures in the front yard next year?
Snow sculptures! You can't connect those to computers. Or can you . . .
Just a guy with an opinion
My brother got slashdotted for Christmas and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.
.. that all depends on how high up this post gets modded :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
great, now his bandwidth bill will equal his electric bill.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
will get more hits.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
No. I think a large portion of the tech community is working on finding work/better paying work.
As always perl is just not up to the task...
Got Code?
light in his house..he let us (people he knew on a message board) connect to it, and turn it on and off...I wanted to send him threatning messages in morse code..but it didn't switch on and off anywhere near fast enough to do that.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
...is Slashdotting your brother on Christmas Eve. Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good mug of your favorite brewski!
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
...but I make it a point to never buy from a company that advertises with half-naked popup ads.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:7RoAhQeSahQC:w ww.komar.org/xmas/
C :w ww.komar.org/xmas/2001/
C :w ww.komar.org/xmas/2002/power.html
;)
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:sVe6bz6mGQo
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:MnEhsQDlHFI
just wait a few mins for the pix to load
Talk about a bad case of trying to keep up with the Jones family. It must feel like a kick in the face to the neighbors who have the typical string around the roof display. If nothing else, it might get sickening after a while.
I think I just saw that house at Foreclosure.com
Table-ized A.I.
I got you a Slashdotting ...
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
I'll buy from whatever company advertises the least expensively.
that allows you to turn the lights ON and OFF and see the results of your handiwork
Damn! Mr. Goatse just sent his Ascii art. SouthWest passengers are in for a real "treat".
Table-ized A.I.
Never buy and X10 cam, that will only encourge them to make more annoying pop-ups!
Well, we can make that two. This guy has a similar setup in his house, but it's all indoor action. Lights on, Lights off etc. It shouldn't be too hard to kill this guy's server either.
Oh, i see that the site that was trying to load while i was looking at the threads was on the same domain. heh heh umm errr...
"temporarily dismisal from one's work or responsibilities to engage in vast feasting, sexual orgies, and general immorality."
Sounds a lot more fun than "seeking communion with fellow people to honor Jesus through prayer, praise, and joyful feasting"
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Saturnalia is celebrated over a week or two in Rome by temporarily dismisal from one's work or responsibilities to engage in vast feasting, sexual orgies, and general immorality.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
I think I'll convert to Roman!
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
a slashdotted server. That bastard!
The parent post (by an AC) is truly bizarre. You have to wonder what kind of twisted thoughts were running through his head when he composed that. I thought the *BSD-is-dying guy was wacko, but this one takes the cake.
Nice and all, but the concept has been around for years. Check XMAS4ALL, the XS4ALL christmastree which has remote controllable lights and has been online every christmas for the last four years or so. And this works every day :)
When you turn on the light display, do ten other light displays pop on under it?
Control all the lights in this guy's house at http://www.drivemeinsane.com/
mogorific carpentry experiments
X10 is the name of the protocol. It's just unfortunate that the domain was bought by a fairly evil marketing company.
As demonstrated by the presence ofn gery/kingery13.htm#digital%20stuff
http://www.x10.org
http://www.x10.com/technology1.htm
http://www.hometoys.com/htinews/feb99/articles/ki
If you like Christmas lights, and live in the NJ area you should definitely take a trip to this guy's house. He's been doing it for about 30 years and every year it gets bigger and better. Cars line up and wait up to an hour to drive around the streets near his house. It's not X10, but it's damn cool for a Christmas Lights display.
Merry Christmas to those that celebrate it.
See what happens when you buy from a company that uses obnoxious popup ads?
Server.. toast..
OK, this is really cool, and makes me want to wire my house this way.
And they looked like such a *normal* family.
How are you supposed to know that your neighbors won't do something equally disruptive, if you can't spot the wackos?
Even just 1kW of lights must make it daylight in the living room of the house across the street. Never mind arbitrary blinking, multiple colors, TV crews and tourists driving by...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Maybe I should drive over and watch the action first hand, I don't too far from that house... ;]
You get what you get, and if you don't like it, you go someplace else. If a person's interactive christmas-light-display can't handle thousands of people accessing it at the same time, then most of those people won't get to see it. If slashdot doesn't post the article, then none (or very very very few) of these people will get to see it.
So to answer the question you thought was rhetorical, the point of posting the story was to show as many people as possible what this project was, then to open the topic up for discussion. Enough with this slashdot-owes-me-fast-links crap. Grow up.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Interesting question, and an interesting post. I have no idea what Jesus Christ would do, but I'm pretty damn sure he wouldn't do it on a keyboard.
"What would Jesus Christ do?" Short answer is, pretty much exactly as he pleased, which is what got Him in so much trouble in the first place. And trouble or not, maybe more of us should be a bit more like Him.
Huh? "Santa Clause" is not Saint Nicholas. "Santa Clause" is created by anti-Christians that tricked people into "Christmas Shopping" and generally not celebrating Jesus' birthday as Jesus would have enjoyed. Actually, christians created Christmas to trick the pagans into not celebrating winter solstice. They stole the pagan traditions and created this commercial holiday monstrosity.
are you retarded? the site was offline because of being slammed with so many hits from slashdot. i wasn't complaining about speed.
Thanks for the link!!
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Yes, I am quite obviously retarded. Thank you for the well thought-out response. I especially appreciate your disregard for capitalization; it does wonders to the strength of your (already impressive) rebuttal.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Worthless.
-- Sir George Bidell Airy, KCB, MA, LLD, DCL, FRS, FRAS
(Astronomer Royal of Great Britain), estimating for the
Chancellor of the Exchequer the potential value of the
"analytical engine" invented by Charles Babbage, September
15, 1842.
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