Macworld Expo attendees (and anyone else) flying to or within the United States will be affected by a new set of rules implemented recently by the U.S. Department of Transportation that limits how and where air travelers can carry spare lithium batteries for their electronic devices. Effective 01-Jan-08, the rules prohibit carrying spare batteries in checked luggage, and limit spare batteries brought aboard in carry-on luggage.

The DOT recommends carrying electronic devices with you (we do, too, considering how often our checked luggage has gone astray), but if you wish to pack an electronic device in your checked luggage, you may pack it with its battery installed - as long as the device is securely turned off. You must protect the terminals of spare batteries in your carry-on bags to avoid short-circuits; the DOT provides how-to tips for safely covering battery terminals, such as using the plastic slip-cover that may have come with the battery, or electrical tape over the terminals.

The battery guidelines specifically refer to cell phone and laptop spare batteries, but apply to all lithium and lithium metal batteries, also common in digital cameras and camcorders, portable DVD players and video games, etc. Check the DOT Web site for specific limits on the allowed lithium content per battery, which is especially important if you have an extended-life battery.

Concerns about Sony-made laptop batteries overheating, leading to battery recalls by Apple, Dell, and several other laptop manufacturers in 2006, make this the most rational and least arbitrary restriction on passenger baggage we've seen affecting air travelers in recent years. (For details on that recall, see "Apple Recalling 1.8 Million Laptop Batteries," 2006-08-26.)

I have hundreds of Gigs of information stored, and backed up, on multiple hard drives, as well as DVD’s. There are photos, documents, and a massive collection of Movies and TV shows that, until a few weeks ago, I was fairly certain were covered. My data was safe.

Then it dawned on me, as I read the news that HD-DVD was officially dead: formats change, constantly. HD-DVD is barely a few years old, but if I had backed up everything on HD-DVD (assuming there’d been commercially available burners) I would now be forced to migrate everything to another format to ensure future-compatibility. Ask anyone with a Beta tape of his or her kids birth, how difficult it can be to hunt down a Betamax player in 2008.

Nearly every format that I can back-up to today has absolutely zero guarantees of being readable in 10 years. This isn’t a problem if I’m constantly engaged with my data, if  it travels with me. I have photos that I originally took with a Sony Mavica in 1998 that used floppy discs, which now live happily on my 300gb external HD. But if I “found” one of those floppies today, I’d have to scramble to buy a usb floppy disc drive in order to access that data.  Somewhere, I still have an old 100mb ZIP disk with porn that is equally inaccessible.

In stark contrast, a recently unearthed family album, that sat abandoned in the house that belonged to my later grandmother, was perfectly accessible. It was in remarkably good shape and required no apparatus to interface with the information contained in each photograph, except my eyeballs. Whilst I’ve enjoyed the fact that paper is no longer wasted on things like manuals and bills, I have to voice my support for it as a magnificent future-proof backup.  Photos, Emails, Documents, Articles, Web Pages (to an extent) can all be archived on paper which you can stick in a safe deposit box and be fairly certain that you’re grandchildren will have no trouble accessing the information’s stored there.

Part One: The Ingredients

Have you ever gotten tired of someone around the house saying "Don't forget to turn off the light!"? Well, in this day and age, that's a job which can, and probably should, be handled by someone (or something rather) that is unable of forgetting to do it.

This was part of my inspiration towards home automation. Another part was the fact that my 100+ yr old house has maybe 5 light switches, in total. We have one issue with the old house: We must keep the modifications to the house itself to a minimum. No cutting into the walls and no adding switches or wiring in the walls. This has to be non-invasive.

Using X10 was surely going to be the way to go. X10 uses a technology called PLC (Power Line Carrier). PLC uses RF signals transmitted through the AC power lines of the house. These X10 devices include plug-in modules to control lamps and applicances with remote controls small enough to put on a keychain. You also can use something as elaborate as a touchscren controller.

We now have the basic backbone of the system. Consider these modules as the first ingredient.

1.) X10 Lamp Modules, Appliance Modules, Trancievers and Stick-on wall controllers

This gives us the basics. The ability to control lights and appliances from a stick-on wallpad, keychain or other X10 compatible remote control.

"But how's the light going to turn off automatically?" you say. This brings us to ingredient 2, the PC. This is the heart of the system.

2.) Windows 2000/XP/Vista PC machine running Homeseer automation control software.

This PC also has a couple of "accessories" attached to it as part of the automation system. For example, I'm using an ACT TI103 X10 controller. This controller sends and receives X10 signals from the power line. It connects to the PC via a serial port (not the fastest interface, but fast enough for this). The PC also has an IR controller attached which allows for remote control by the PC of any IR capable device you wish to use (TV, VCR... VCR?? hehe, DVD player, MS Media Center, whatever you want to control). We'll call these extra attachments ingredient 3.

3.) ACT TI103 X10 PLC controller and SmartHome IRLinc 1623

You still want to know "How the hell is it going to turn off the lights for me?". Okay, we'll go this far. I've built a tracking system using the "secret ingredient". Shhhh.... motion sensors. X10 has a line of compatible motion sensors that send commands similar to the wallpad and keychain remotes. Using the remotes and some VBScripting, I managed to design a simple "tracking system". This system, using Homeseer virtual devices as data holders, can track my movement around the house. Of course, since the PC can send PLC signals to X10 modules, it can turn on and off lights. So the tracking system knows when I'm in a room or have left a room. Hence, when I'm done in the bathroom and come back to the computer room, the system knows it's supposed to turn on the computer room lights and turn off the bathroom lights!

Now you know how to turn off the lights!

Be sure to come back soon for Part Two: Cooking it Up. I'll be covering advanced controls souch as touchscreens, ASP and Flash control interfaces.

"Geek Pad - Recipie for the Automated Home" is an informational series of articles exclusive to GeekGirlsOnline.com. Artstein is an IT professional at an Indianapolis publishing company and has been working with home automation for 5 years. If this article, whole or in-part, is being used on any other site, please notify the author using the email address in the byline.

Events can be triggered by many different conditions. A recieved X10 command can trigger an event (most common trigger method). You can also trigger events based on daytime or nighttime conditions or just about any other condition you can

HomeSeer Web Control

imagine.

Touch Screen Interface

Homeseer Setup

Here's an example of a quick script that would turn on a lamp module assigned to "B1", given a certain condition...

sub main()
if hs.devicestatus("A1") = "2" then
hs.execx10 "B1","on"
else
end if
end sub

Now, see how simple that is? Well, okay, maybe not simple, it looks greek right? Let's break it down line-by-line:

line 1.) if hs.devicestatus("A1") = "2" then <- This basically says "if the device with the code A1 is off, then carry out the following command".

line 2.) hs.execx10 "B1","on" <- This is telling the system to execute an X10 command of "on" to device code B1. Pretty straight-forward right?
Okay, so that's basic scripting with Homeseer (very basic). So now we know how simple it's going to be to use this control system and we move on to device setup. Bear in-mind that Homeseer can also be used "out-of-the-box" and what I am describing is customization of how you would interface with the system.

I've found that grouping like device types with housecodes works really well. You can keep the number of trancievers down and save some confusion when trying to remember what device is what. For example, all of my security cameras are on house code "C". and I numbered the device codes from the front of the house ot the back. For example, the camera that watches the front yard is "C1", the one that's in the detatched garage is "C6". X10 cameras are fun too, but we'll cover that in another installment.

Now that we know a bit about the programming and how we want to plan our device layout, we can start actually setting them up in Homeseer. This is very simple and easy to do. The Homeseer authors have created a very user-friendly interface for getting it up and running quickly. I'll leave the details on that to the manufacturers.

Now we connect all of our "peripherals" or controllers. In my case, as I mentioned in part one, an ACT TI-103 X10 controller, and a SmartHome IRLinc 1623. Both of these devices require a serial port, so make sure if you want to use them, that you have said ports available, or go out and buy a serial port PCI card. Now simply set them up with Homeseer in the setup section. Now you have the ability to send and recieve X10 signals to devices and send IR signals.

Okay, so where do we go now? (sounds like a song, LOL)
Now we dig deep into the realm of web programming and Flash. Well, we're not going to dig too deeply, since part three is going to be all about the interface baby! But we will go as far as mentioning that the level of complexity in the design of the interfaces is pretty high. Since I have you wondering, I will give you a sneak-peek at the touchscreen interface I built.

Walking around the Harajuko district in Tokyo* one is amazed at the sheer number of ways people choose to express themselves through, at times questionable, fashion choices. But frankly who can blame them, with 6 billion people it's getting harder to feel like that special snow flake your parents told you you were when you were six.

I won’t pretend to dispense advice on hair coloring or limited edition Vans. However, I can give you a quick how to on the different ways that you can customize your Mac. (note to all you early adopters some things do not apply yet when it comes to Leopard)

Phase I: wallpapers, wallpapers, wallpapers...

Whether you play around with Apple’s built in desktop backgrounds or have a cute image of your kids, (or dog, cat, wife, gf, iguana, etc), what you choose to stare at while you use your mac says a lot about who you are. Most people don’t go beyond grabbing a picture and slapping it as a background but the truth is most of us are mediocre photographers at best and our snapshots while wonderful reminders, are best left for a photo slideshow screensaver.

I suggest taking a look at some of the work that other people create specifically to adorn your desktop. www.mandolux.com, and pixelgirlpresents.com are two wonderful resources chock full of very beautiful desktop images. Or if you have the time do a flickr search by themes it will usually lead to interesting results since flickr automatically ranks searches by “interestingness”

If you do insist on combing through your iphoto library for wallpapers keep in mind that the best backgrounds make use of neutral space and are easy on the eyes.

Step 1

Phase II: icons, icons, icons

There’s very few things that breathe new life into a desktop like a new icon.

Getting into changing your icons not only adds a new layer of personalization to your mac but it also can make things much, much easier to identify (it's also mildly addictive, don't be surprised if you change icons once a week or more).

Step 2

Changing icons on your mac is a simple procedure. When you download an icon or set of icons you get a folder with those icons showing up as individual files. Select the icon you want*.

From the File menu, choose Get Info or press Command (apple) + I to open the Info window.

Click the icon in the upper-left corner of the Info window to select it.

Step 3

Select the volume, application, folder, or file whose icon you want to replace.

Step 4

From the File menu, choose Get Info or press Command (apple) + I

Click the icon in the upper-left corner.

From the Edit menu, choose Paste or press Command (apple) + V to replace the icon.

* to replace the hard drives icon make sure you’ve given your user read + write permission in the info screen at the bottom.

Step 6

Two great places to find icons are iconfactory.com and pixelgirlpresents.com . For those willing to dig a little deeper macthemes2.net has forums where some very talented people post links to their icons. (full disclosure: I also write for macthemes )

Try replacing the tired generic folder icons that liter your desktop or the icons of the apps that you keep on your dock with icons that are more a reflection of who you are. I personally have a desktop littered with moleskin and Battlestar Galatica icons

And for those who want to replace more than a single icon a wonderful option is Candybar 3 which lets you change everything from your Trash icon to what icons are used for External Drives, CD's, etc. It's $29 but well worth the money if you plan on doing any heavy icon swapping.

Step 7

Phase III

Amora

the final bit of mac tricking out you can get into requires a bit more effort and money but doing so allows you to change the look and feel of the actual operating system by adding a theme/skin. (Leopard users you’ll have to sit tight as the application required for this has not been updated for Leopard compatibility.)

First you’ll need to download and buy Unsanity’s Shapeshifter application, which can be had from their website unsanity.com for 20 bucks. Once the application is installed you can either browse the download tab thats built into its system preferance pane or go to macthemes2.net and find a wealth of themes. One personal favorite of mine is Amora, a beautiful white and red theme that comes with its own suite of icons.

That covers the three pilars of mac customizing, by combining the three you can create your own “ecosytem” of personalized wallpapers, icons, and themes to make your mac less apple and more you.

Extra: pimpmylaptop.com makes really nice vinyl stickers to cover your laptop with.

* I've never been to Japan, Tokyo, or any of its districts let alone the Harajuko one, but i've seen pictures, and a very nice Phaidon book.