Since I missed the May Home Automation Month, I really need to make up for it somehow. So here’s a quick video of Remoat (http://remoat.com), a little utility I’ve been putting together in my spare time. It’s not really production-ready, but I’ll make the source available for the hackers out there.

Currently it needs/supports the following:

• Windows Media Player: Plays music from your library.
• MiCasaVerde Vera: Allows you to turn on binary devices, such as lights that you’ve got configured.
• mControl 2.X: There’s some old code in the package from when I was running mControl on my WHS box (which had sequential disk failures and in the end killed my RAID –> switched to a QNAP NAS). Unsupported.
• Windows Vista/7 speech recognition: This is required (part of the operating system anyway).
• Windows text-to-speech: You can specify which audio device is used for speech output. This lets you hook up a pair of speakers that are always on and have the PC hooked up to you’re a/V system for better quality playback. Part of the operating system.

So I upgraded to Creative Suite 5 and imported a Premiere Pro project I’d been working on. The preview for my Panasonic GH1 AVCHD 720p files was a bit messed up. It looked “jumpy”, i.e it pixilated and seemed to move up and to the left every second or so. After messing around with drivers, turning of Mercury GPU acceleration etc I ran into a tip on the DVSUser forums.

To fix the issue, right-click on the playback video, and select Playback Resolution/Full. It was set to 1/2 by default.

'Twas a nice trip to Castello di Amorosa in Napa Valley, California.

Castello di Amorosa from Tomi Blinnikka on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

NorCalChallengers @ San Juan Bautista from Tomi Blinnikka on Vimeo.

NorCalChallengers @ Blackhawk Auto Museum from Tomi Blinnikka on Vimeo.