DIY Life

This is a fairly simple project to make customized luggage tags. Recycling part of a circuit board into a one-of-a-kind identifier for your bag. You probably have orphaned remote controls from electronics that were adopted by a universal remote. The nice thing about many of these small circuit boards is that they do not have many components soldered on and they have large flat areas with circuitry so you probably won't even need to do any soldering to make these!

That iPhone or iPod touch is the coolest and neatest gadget you've seen, right? For owners of one or the other (or oddly, both), the WiFi-ness of having wireless internet access, MP3 and iTunes tracks and other multi-touch goodness at your fingertips probably has you thinking life is good. What if you could turn that button-less gadget into a home automation center with lighting control, security control and more?

Software such as Cinemar's Mainlobby will let the iPhone or iPod Touch's built-in AJAX-compliant web browser to tap into Cinemar's web server (called "MLServer") to control all that home theater gear, lighting and more from that precious, WiFi-equipped iPhone or iPod Touch.

We doubt you'll wall mount your baby on the wall, but making cell calls, browsing the web in its full glory and controlling all that remote-controlled gear in your home from a single touch screen device sounds like a dream come true for those that like devices that can take over tasks from a slew of other devices.

If you have a personal computer running Windows XP Media Center Edition and have all your TV shows sitting on your PC's hard drive (assuming you have a tuner card), wouldn't it be nice to have a remote control to that PC -- especially if it is hooked up to a living room television where you do most of your viewing?

Newer Media Center desktop and laptop PCs come with a standard remote control, but if yours did not and you're running Windows XP Media Center Edition of Windows Vista Home Premium, how about making an infrared receiver yourself and using any universal remote control to send commands to that PC?

For those of us who built our own PCs or who just don't have a remote control to our systems, this is the answer. You'll need a working understanding of basic electronics plus computer communication protocols (specifically, RS-232), but all in all this is a pretty easy hack. Check it out here. And, don't worry -- this can work with that newer PC without a working serial port with a USB-to-Serial converter.