After quite a lot of effort, with my new Dremel, I've created a nice box for the VIOM. This means we have computer control of a set of curtains now - one relay does the open signal and one for the close signal. Once the cables are fitted to the board - which is quite fiddly - it should be a simple matter of cabling with RJ11 connectors.

I've been looking into controllable coloured lighting for a while. I'd like to be able to have coloured lighting and be able to control the colour programmatically. (No disco lighting effects! Just a gentle colour wash for mood lighting.)

I discovered the DMX standard which is used for stage and disco lighting and also increasingly for architectural lighting. Trouble is, much of it is quite pricy. Pulsar do a nice range of LED lighting - the Chroma Range. This includes some very nice looking medium-sized lights and some small MR16 lights. You need to buy an external controller for DMX which makes it pretty expensive. The main thing that puts me off is that there's no low cost way of trying this out, just to run a single MR16 fixture I need a controller costing several hundred pounds. The MR16 bulbs are controlled by 0-10v for each colour so there might be a way of controlling them directly, but that sounds like a lot of trouble.

There are some cheapish remote control LED MR16 lights, but we're mostly avoiding IR for control and it's pretty hard to do central control in a reliable way.

There's also the Mirage LED light from NJD which has built-in DMX. This has a built-in fan which might make a bit of noise (though NJD say it's pretty quiet). This is reasonably priced, but it's quite a big fixture. We might look at this in the future.

Recently, I saw some reasonably priced LED PAR 36 lights (these are small DJ/stage lights) on eBay. This lead me to investigate a bit more and I found similar Showtec LED PAR 36 lights for 50 GBP + vat. They look slightly industrial, but come in chrome and shouldn't look out of place in our house (we don't exactly go it for country cottage style). These have DMX built-in, so no need for an expensive controller.

I'd already looked in to how to control DMX lighting from a computer. Milford Instruments do controller boards, that allow you to send DMX commands through a serial port.

DMX lights are connected in a daisy chain. DMX has 512 channels and each fixture responds only to the commands on its channels. Each fixture may have a number of channels for controlling different colours and other features such as pan and tilt. This approach means that you can control a large number of lights from a single control board. (DMX does support multiple 'universes' if you need more that 512 channels, but I don't think we're likely to get there ;-)

We've ordered one of the lights plus a DMX cable and the DMX control board. The board turned up yesterday and we're waiting (impatiently) for the light.

We like clocks in our house. Sadly though we are rubbish at changing them so half of them are usual on GMT even in the summer. However, we've come up with a solution.

Most of the clocks have the same small mechanism on the back. A while back we brought some of these Radio Controlled Clocks from TLC Direct. The mechanisms looked very similar.

So we took one apart and converted our cool "man" clock in to a radio controlled clock.

I should point out that we've since discovered that you can get even cheaper radio clocks from Argos though I've not checked to see if the mechanism is similar. And anyway, Tracy wants to use the left over silver frames for some pictures.

My first real attempt to build a temperature sensor that would be suitable to mount on the wall was not a success. The telephone coupler from a diy store was just to fiddly to fit the bits inside.

However, I still liked the idea so I tried these Junction Boxes from ScrewFix. I paid 4 pounds for five on the off chance they might be okay.

Well, they were better than okay. They were perfect. I cut a couple of small notches in the metal contacts running across the box and bent the legs of the DS19S20 sensors under and it worked - no soldering needed.

To finish them off I just drilled a couple of small holes in the cover. (Hint: drill from the inside out - it leaves a better finish.)

We started having trouble with our Harmony dimmer a couple of days ago. It was working fine from the switch and but not responding to X10 commands. We tried resetting it, but no change. Then we noticed that the kettle wasn't responding as reliably as usual, and the curtains also seemed to be a bit slow to respond. Not good when we're planning to add more X10 devices.

Today we decided to try unplugging the electrical items that we had recently added to the house and see if any of those made a difference. We unplugged lots of things one at a time and nothing made a difference. Then we unplugged the remaining items upstairs - and everything started working again. We plugged the items back in one by one, and everything still worked. We're none the wiser as to what was causing the problem.

When it next happens, which we're pretty sure it will, we'll make sure we unplug devices one at a time. If we can identify the culprit then an X10 plug-in filter might help.

At least we know it's not a problem with the Harmony module.