I came up with a fantastic idea for an iPhone app last night.  The main problem is, I suspect people would want to use it in the car -- in fact, I would say it's most fun in the car.

I am fairly confident that if I were to write and sell this application, people would sure get themselves killed by trying to play it while driving their cars.

So should I make the app or not?  It is quite the ethical dilemma.  On the one hand, some might say I'm indirectly responsible for the death of those that played my app while driving (just writing this blog post puts me more at risk of litigation).  On the other hand, one would assume that people can take of themselves and they should know when and when not to play a game on your iPhone (here's a hint, not while you're driving).

I always get stucks with thoughts and questions of what causes what.  There are some answers I know, some I have to look up, some I have to test and research myself, and some things that I don't think have a clear answer.  Air conditioning and heating has been an interest of mine, but not in the sense of becoming a mechanical engineer studying HVAC in buildings.  Though I could see the research into the effects and efficiency of HVAC systems being cool (literally), but the design and implementation/installation of HVAC systems strikes me as boring.

I'm more interested in the climate control of my own house.  I really, really want to know what affects what.  How much improvement does keeping the windows open do?  Was it worth it to sweat for a few extra days with the windows open rather than turn on the air conditioner?  What rooms are the least efficient in my house?  What change would I see in changing certain variables in the house?  I'm getting excited just thinking about answering any of these questions.

One question that I can't answer now that I wish I could, is how much difference are my new windows making?  I replaced 14 windows for about $3800.  The old windows were total crap, but how much different do the new windows make?

My grand scheme is that I want to purchase many wireless temperature sensors, and then put them all around my house.  At least one in every room, but hopefully several in each room (within fiscal means, of course), and then they all report back to some module or something.  The data can run either to my HTPC or preferably to my low-power backup server.

So I want to monitor the temperature everywhere inside and outside my house, and also monitor when the AC/heater is on, what the thermastat is set to, if my temperature-controller, attic vent fan is running or if the roof attic turbine is spinning.  I would love to have sensors on all of the windows and doors to tell if they're open or not (maybe that could even be a sort of house monitoring system?).

I'll finally be able to see exactly the effect of opening a window, walking out the front door, changing the thermastat by a degree, etc...

I could probably make a machine learning agent (neural network, hidden markov model, etc...) that could determine the best time to turn on my air condition dependent on all of the other factors of the house.  If it could also control the vents and everything too... <pleasure center overload>

I've used windows for quite some time, I still run it on my main PC at home and run XP Tablet Edition on my laptop (tablet pc).  I also am quite familiar with Linux and have been using it for several years.

Suprisingly, I haven't really used a Mac until now.  Though its built on unix, it is still quite a change.  The whole mindset between Ubuntu (now my favorite distribution of Linux) and OS-X is different.  Although Ubuntu has brought a lot of simplicity to Linux by trying to unify many parts of Linux that previously did not work well together, it is not simplified as much as Mac OS-X.  I can see that being a blessing and a curse.  I think it's clear to see how a simplifying interfaces and applications helps the user out by not showing them too many screens that they don't know about.

Ok, but for a so called "power user" like myself, this is not the best for me.  Ubuntu (Gnome, etc...) has tons of possibilities for customization.  Everything seems to be "clickable" and has a menu to go with it.  Clicking any icon or panel will activate something and right clicking anything will activate a context menu which will allow customizations or settings.  Although some things take some work to get them running, sometimes finding the right program takes some work.

I'm going to give an example that spans across Windows, OS-X, and Ubuntu.  This is something a "power user" would do to customize their computing experience with a Logitech MX Revolution mouse:

Windows XP: Installed the drivers to set up the mouse.  I realized it didn't have a middle mouse button by default, but it does have a useless (to me) search button.  I knew I wanted to remap that to a middle mouse button.  That took some google searching but eventually I found that I could edit an xml file somewhere in the user Application Data folder (well buried).  The auto-switching between regular scrolling and hyper scrolling is well supported by the Logitech drivers, so that just worked fine.

Ubuntu: Mouse works on installation, but only two or three buttons are really working.  I have to do more google searching to finally find a program called Btnx.  This program basically allows me to capture all my mouse key inputs (it's written to capture and set up any mouse you want).  I can then set any button to do anything I want.  It's the epitome of customization.  I could also set up the hyper-scrolling here and set up how it works just as well as the Logitech drivers in windows, but in the end, I'd rather use Btnx than the Logitech drivers.

Mac OS-X: Mouse works out the gate, but doesn't have the forward/back buttons working how I want them to.  I downloaded the Logitech drivers for Mac, but they are quite inferior compared to the windows drivers.  I could not customize the buttons how I wanted to and I was still without a middle mouse button.  I finally found a program called SteerMouse which allows me to map all of my buttons (it doesn't have to do the capturing part of Btnx).  It does not allow me to do much customization for the hyperscrolling, but it does support some.  Also the mouse speed I was never able to get quite perfect.  OS-X doesn't allow you to turn off or adjust mouse acceleration (only speed) by itself, so I found another small program to do that called iMouseFix.

Conclusion: Logitech supports windows, so I would expect the drivers to work well there, but often customizations in windows involve finding a custom program or find an obscure registry entry or xml file (like this time).  Ubuntu will let you customize the crap out of anything, but unfortunately how do you find a program called "Btnx".  That program is so poorly named.  Also it could definitely be confusing to use.  As for OS-X, they don't give me nearly the amount of customization I need by itself, but then I was able to find a program that provided a decent amount of customization, but here's the problem, the program costs $15.  In Ubuntu, nearly everything is free (as in beer; gratis) and a large amount of that is free (as in speech; libre).  There's another example I have of OS-X where the right program for the job is not a free one.

I bought an Infiniti G35 with the Tech, Nav, and Premium packages.  It's blue slate (dark blue) with a wheat (tan) interior.  Roughly everything about it is awesome--navigation, bluetooth phone, xenon lights, heated seats, backup camera, adaptive cruise control, etc...  Main low points are the voice command list has been shortened since 2007 models, it doesn't have a blind spot sensor like Volvos, and the main low point is probably paying for it.

I set up the BackupPC server about at least a week ago and it's working smoothly.

I even put up instructions on the dns323 wiki: http://wiki.dns323.info/howto:backuppc

The backup server also serves as a media server.  Well, I have Mp3's on it, and I have an FTP connection to it, but it's not really streaming the Mp3's.  I suppose it could if I set it up to mount remotely or something.  But I think the real plan is to put SqueezeBox on there one of these days.