Over the last few days I have started to play with MisterHouse. It's a home automation program (really it's a collection of perl scripts) whereby you can automate your house mainly using X10 technology. I installed it a couple of days ago (not that straightforward) and so far I have the sitting room light coming on at sunrise and then off at 8am. Then it goes on again at 2 hours before sunset. Obviously the sunset time will change throughout the year so the software needs your longitude and latitude to calculate this. MisterHouse has got a cool web interface and has spurred me on to learning how to program in perl. All this home automation is controlled by the computer. If I get hold of a couple of motion sensors I can make the lights come on when someone enters the room. I also have the sounds of Big Ben sounding on the quarter hour - luckily though you can mute it! It also makes extensive use of a text to speech program called festival. This means that you can get it to say what it is doing, eg "It is now sunset so the sitting room lights have been turned on."This morning we all went to the library and I came away with two perl programming books. It looks fairly simple, because there are a lot of existing examples within MisterHouse.  
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