Well, it's "fancy" because I tried to make it a "sealed" door that swung both directions. There's an outer frame which is hinged, and then the inner panel. Of course it hasn't worked quite right. The outer frame won't close by itself. I tried adding a rubberband but it doesn't seem to help much. Why is there no window? Because a 1/8th inch thick sheet of acrylic just big enough was $35!! For that I might as well buy a dog door. All I spent on this was...

Ok, this is sort of old but I just started this blog and thought this was still interesting. A while ago I built an automated phone answering system that runs on Linux and uses a standard modem. The software supports caller ID and can email messages that are recorded. But what's really cool is it is Tcl based. That means I can make it do just about anything I want. One of the things I set up is Auto-blacklisting. In the old days whenever a telemarketer called and I got sick of them I had...

I got Tcl macros added this morning. Now I push one button and it knows the state of the receiver and magically does the right thing! All those extra remotes all over the table can be put somewhere else.

I got the input control working on the receiver and managed to come up with a coding system that matches the X10 MouseRemote enough that when I push the buttons while it's in PC mode I get different codes. Reprogrammed my TiVo remote so it sends a power code for a brand I don't own. Now I have 2 macros in my daemon so when I push Power on the TiVo remote, the receiver and the TV turn on and the input changes to the TiVo. When I push power on the X10 remote, it does the same thing except...

Well that was pretty easy. I used my web interface hack to display a message as the basis, and hacked up a little shell script that my answer system can call. Simple! So now my TV will display the number via the OSD of the receiver, and the cable box will scroll the number by (for when the TV isn't on). Awesome!