It came to me today that my ideas on a Multimedia PC really falls under Home Automation. I think a lot of things I want to do with this PC are directly related to Home Automation and the media player portion of the tasks are a subset of the Home Automation device. So I am going to change the Namespace on my Wiki from Multimedia to HomeAutomation once I get a chance. This will make the wiki a little broader in it's content. I Think I will also change the Multimedia Blog category to Home Automation.
Dad and I hiked part of the Ford Canyon trail at the
White Tank Mountains Regional Park. We started at the #9 Area on Ford Canyon road and hiked in 2.5 miles. We ended up short of the Abondoned Dam but it was real pretty. The trail started to get tough at about 2.0 miles in where you start getting into the canyon. Take a look at the
Hiking gallery for a couple pictures.
I have an old PC that isn't really doing anything so I decided to make it into a multimedia PC for my home entertainment center. I looked around a little bit to see if there are any freeware applications that will handle this application. I found Freevo and MythTV. Both of these applications are Linux based which is ok for some people but I am a .Net developer so I wanted a Windows .Net solution. I haven't found anything that is written in C# so I decided to start my own for now to see how far I could take it.
Here are some things I want to do
- Play MP3
- Play My Home Videos
- Slideshow pictures
- X10 Home control
- Speech and Voice recognition
- Record TV Shows
- Monitor Home Security
- Get News feed with speech
- Weather reports
- RSS Aggregator
- Internet Radio
- Home Wiki
- Audio/Text Message center
- Allarm clock
- Play Games
I started a Home Automation Wiki Wiki to keep notes on my progress.