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A comment on I wish my web server were in the corner of my room. Parent comment

Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by fullstop on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @03:50PM (#33168374)
In 2001 I had an account set up for my girlfriend, now wife, so that she could telnet (openssh wasn't really widespread then!) to my desktop and it would play a sound and blink a light as part of the login procedure.

The light was controlled by an X10 "firecracker" module. Neat stuff, for the time.

Anyway, she would do that to get my attention if I wasn't by the PC and she wanted to chat via ICQ.

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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by EvanAnderson on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @07:52PM (#33170825)
I still use one of those firecracker modules to toggle a set of Christmas-type lights from the command line. I've gotten a ton of fun out of that little module in the 20ish years I've owned it.
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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by fullstop on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @08:06PM (#33170955)
Did you get it as part of a promotional deal for about $5 in the late 90s?
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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by EvanAnderson on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @08:35PM (#33171176)
Yep! Money well spent.
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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by fullstop on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @08:45PM (#33171256)
Nice. If I remember correctly it was their "Powerhouse" deal and you just paid for shipping.

I still have the modules around here somewhere!

No native serial ports, though, and the restriction of things needing to be on the same circuit kind of puts a damper on things. In my college dorms everything in my room was on the same circuit.

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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by EvanAnderson on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @09:07PM (#33171434)
Yeah-- that was the one. I've found additional modules here and there in thrift stores and garage sales. The stuff was always just flaky enough that I never wanted to trust it with anything serious. Turning on lamps and strings of xmas lights was fine because the occasional "freak out" that the modules inevitably would fall victim to, requiring a power-cycle to overcome, never caused any major inconvenience. Their hard-wired more "serious" brethren, though, scared the heck out of me. I can't imagine they were at all reliable over the long haul.

re: the serial ports - If I remember correctly the signaling to the module was done on handshake pings (because serial data could "pass thru" the module). They'd probably be pretty easy to bit-bang from any 5V logic source.

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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by hnfong on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @06:37AM (#33175053)
Have a similar story around the same time, probably ~2002. Cell phones weren't that popular yet either.

As a high school student I helped my school do some sys admin stuff, and one day I was stuck in a server(?) room while the guy who had keys etc. was away in another room and floor. So I ssh-ed into the machine he was likely working on and ejected the CD ROM back and forth until I caught his attention :D

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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by avip3d on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @07:12AM (#33175278)
Free cup-holder!
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Re:I wish my web server were in the corner of my room by zeendo on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @08:04AM (#33175720)
In the early 2000s I had a program on my girlfriend's, now ex-wife's, family computer that would kill the AOL process when sent a specific string over a TCP port so that I could call her when her sister was using the computer. That combined with a DynDNS client let me call anytime.

Her sister caught on but couldn't prove it.

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