My Web 2.0 Refrigerator DoorMy Web 2.0 Refrigerator Door

If you are like me, you not only enjoy learning about new collaborative technologies while at work but occasionally apply them at home. During the holidays I usually have a few vacation days left that must be taken by the end of the year.  So, I often have time to work on a small project during the holiday break. I thought it would be fun to share the outcome of a couple of my past home projects (well, at least the successful ones).

Perhaps the most useful project has been the family information station. To the right is a screen capture from a computer display that sits in a busy part of our house. You can see a regional weather map (this is also animated, showing the movement of any weather disturbance), the current temperature, a brief forecast for the week, phase of the moon (it's in Waning Crescent, almost entirely dark), an analog clock, and a list of upcoming events on our family calendar. The goal is to provide this daily information in a format that allows anyone to quickly glance at it as they walk past. However, I think it would be much better if this information were on the front door of a refrigerator. So think of this as a prototype refrigerator door display for the Web 2.0 family.

The technology behind this is an old computer running Windows 2000 Professional and a few Yahoo Widgets. The regional weather map is from Weather Underground (which, without a doubt, is the best weather information site on the Internet) and is displayed using a simple HTML page rendered in an Active Desktop. The rest of the items are Yahoo Widgets. The list of upcoming events is a widget called "RSS Reader" from Brent Johnson. Recall that I blogged about how my wife and I are using Airset to manage our family calendar earlier this year. Airset provides a list of upcoming calendar events in an RSS feed which is use by this widget. The weather forecast, phase of the moon (called the "Werewolf Monitor"), and analog clocks are all standard widgets from Yahoo.

Another successful home project was establishing a method for helping my Mom use her computer. The challenge was to help and teach someone to use a computer who is a long distance away (we live about two hours apart from each other).

My Mom surprised us a little over a year ago when she said she would like to try using their computer to go online. A computer has been in my parents' house for a number of years (and largely has gone unused except as a fancy typewriter) so we were caught off guard when, one day during a visit, she pulled out a promotional AOL disk and said she would like to try it. To make a long story short she now spends several hours a day reading news online, exchanging email, and sending the occasional instant message. This has enriched her life tremendously now that my parents are somewhat limited in their mobility.

The one tool that helped me help my Mom more than anything is UltraVNC. This is an Open Source screen sharing tool that is based on the VNC protocol. Although everything is operating well now there were a number of months where, while talking on the telephone, I would remotely connect to Mom's computer, take control of the keyboard and mouse and "drive" while she sat in front of it and watched. We did this to answer any questions, provide demonstrations on how to do something, and to check for software updates.

I have UltraVNC configured to be quite secure. A connection to my Mom's computer requires a 128-bit shared key, an acknowledgement from someone sitting at the computer (preferably Mom), and a 20+ character password (there is now a lightweight version called UltraVNC SingleClick you can use to help someone on demand with no pre-installed software required). The last remaining pieces of this project were configuring port forwarding on her firewall/router and determining the IP address. This was taken care of by DynDNS and their updater client (DynDNS is a fantastic service).

So tell me about some of your home projects. How do you manage your neighborhood sports league, share family photos or videos, or any of the other collaborative computing home projects that have solved problems for you?