Fun Geek Stuff

roswald

So I'm kind of curious what geeky technology other people are using - either just for fun, or as a productive tool.

For example:

I have a Logitech Harmony remote control that I use to control my A/V equipment and lights. When I press the DVD button, I've got x10 modules that make the lights dim, the TV and stereo switch to the right input, and the DVD player opens.

Or ...

I have a SSH client on my phone (blackberry) - doesn't work all that well, but it's cool to say that I have console access to a server from my phone.

I'd like to spend some time on a nice lab setup for my house - and be able to port forward access to a bunch of virtualized servers and dynamips for cisco. It would be great for testing stuff at a client site, but I just haven't gotten around to it. Anyone doing this and have any pointers or tips?

With the ever evolving smart phones, and constantly-connected access, the sky is the limit for some of this stuff.

What cool geeky technology do you use?

royal

roswald wrote:

I'd like to spend some time on a nice lab setup for my house - and be able to port forward access to a bunch of virtualized servers and dynamips for cisco. It would be great for testing stuff at a client site, but I just haven't gotten around to it. Anyone doing this and have any pointers or tips?

Just posted this in another thread for what I do:
I am running a home lab server with Server 2008 x64 Enterprise running Hyper-V and SCVMM, 8GB of memory, RAID, and all that other good stuff. I have SSH running on port 443 on it so when I'm at clients I can SSH in (who blocks 443?) and then RDP to localhost:3391 (custom port) which then gets tunneled over SSH.

Maybe I'll create a quick tutorial on doing this for my blog.

tiersten

Clipsal C-Bus to control lights and appliances.

VMware ESX cluster for testing software and for when I was preparing for my VCP.

Pretty well equipped electronics lab for embedded development.

HeroPsycho

Home theater with a 50" Sony Grand Wega screen, Kef speakers all the way around with dipole surrounds and a 12" Kef subwoofer

Also have a PC plugged into the home theater running Windows Media Center within Vista, and an HDHomeRun for QAM HDTV tuning, and an Extender in the bedroom

Kawai digital piano plugged into a rebuilt Dell PC for MIDI sequencing with Rosegarden running on Ubuntu linux