A testimonial and a realization

[Steve Hume]

Testimonial:

A couple of days ago my Powerbook disk drive started to make funny  
noises and the machine would freeze up with a sound of disk heads  
seeking. A hard reboot would work, so I quickly copied  a couple of  
folders that were excluded from my Time Machine backup to a firewire  
drive.  The machine continued this symptom till yesterday when I  
finally headed to Bestbuy to locate a replacement drive.

Following an online procedure, I replaced the drive and then followed  
the restore from Time machine procedure with my backup drive directly  
connected to the Powerbook (for speed);  3-4 hours later, I had a  
restored laptop. Actually saved me from a hard drive failure; first try!

Realization:

I finally had a realization of what I could do with my Switchlinc V1  
wall switches. They are too flaky to sell to anyone, but they could be  
used to control the outside lights around the house! I just have to  
audit them or turn them off periodically and they already have the  
built-in behavior of turning on to a nice dim level or full ON  
sometimes. Often all together. This would give a nice random lived in  
look. The lights would be outside and not likely to bother anyone  
while we were sleeping.

Does anyone have any suggestions of applications where random ON or  
Dim is useful?

Steve Hume