We've shared a lot of ways to automate the lights, doors, and furniture of your home, but DIY weblog Mad Science has one of the cheapest, simplest home automation projects yet: turn anything on or off from afar with an old cellphone and an Arduino.

All you need for this project is an old cellphone (with either Wi-Fi connectivity or a pay-as-you-go plan) and an Arduino (along with a few other assorted components for the Arduino). You'll need to know how to get up and running with an Arduino and someone else's code, of course, but the project is very simple: essentially, the Arduino has a light sensor attached that will detect when the cellphone lights up (like when it receives a phone call) and will perform an action in response, like turning on the lights. Throw the whole thing in a box, stick it in a corner, and you have a mini home automation project set up for anything you can think of. There are certainly more sophisticated ways to do something like this, but it's a great way to get started with projects in this realm, and it's very cheap if done right. Hit the link to check out the full how-to.

How to Trigger Anything from Anywhere with Just a Phone Call | Mad Science

So you've created a kickass, play-anything media center with XBMC, but it's a too hard for your less tech-savvy friends and family members to use. Here are a few ways to make your home theater PC so easy that your four year old could use it.

Get a New Skin

The default Confluence skin is pretty good-looking, and there are some even prettier ones out there if you look around. However, not all of them are exactly easy to navigate, especially for those unfamiliar with XBMC. For example, Confluence's horizontal menu is hard to see, and its Movie and TV show menus are in a cluttered submenu. Experiment with some other skins and see which ones are easier to navigate.

I personally really like "Transparency" for its easy-to-read vertical menu. You can see every menu item on the menu page (that is, you don't have to scroll to see any of them), and nothing is buried in a submenu. From the main menu, you can see the Movies, TV Shows, Play Disc, and other options and go straight there with a few taps. It's much easier for an XBMC newbie to navigate than something like Confluence, Aeon, or Alaska, and it's still pretty darn attractive. Of course, there may be others out there, so search around and see what else you can find.

Program Your Remote for Easy Navigation

Certain remotes work out of the box with XBMC, but sometimes getting a simpler remote and programming it yourself can be more user-friendly than a PC remote with a ton of buttons. Even then, take care to program buttons in a way that makes sense—I spent years with an unintuitive button layout because I just matched XBMC's functions to the buttons they sounded like, which wasn't ideal. Play around with your remote and see what layout makes the most sense. Watch out for the "back" and "menu" buttons, which I found the trickiest to assign to something intuitive. If you really want to see if you've done it correctly, hand it off to someone else that hasn't used XBMC and see if they can find their way around without help. If they can, you've found the ideal layout, and you should stick with it.

You might also try going with a remote designed specifically for XBMC, like one that works on iOS or Android. Not only will they have buttons assigned to specific XBMC features, but you can even browse your library right from your mobile device and get it to play on the TV. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Lastly, if you really want an easy-to-use remote, the Apple TV remote is about as simple as it gets. It takes no setup, anyone can use it, and it comes with the cheapest XBMC box you can create. This won't matter if you've already put together a non-Apple TV box, but if you have an Apple TV, consider using it as your XBMC box for some serious ease of use.

Clean Up Your Main Menu

Head on over to Settings > Skin Settings and search for the menu editing section. Take some time to remove all the things you don't use, like "Pictures", "Music", and "Weather". Make sure to clean up the submenus too, if your skin has them—things like "Recently Added", "Random", and "Browse by Genre" aren't exactly confusing, but they can create a lot of clutter, which makes the menu a lot harder to navigate. Some skins will even let you remove the submenus altogether. Remove the "Videos" option and replace it with separate "Movies" and "TV Shows" menu items. And, if "Play Disc" isn't enabled, make sure you turn it on for those occasional DVDs you rent or borrow from friends.

Put Add-Ons like Hulu, Netflix, and Blu-Ray on the Main Menu

Next, put some of your most used add-ons on the main page, so you don't have to go digging through other menus to find them. This takes a few steps, but is really quite easy:

1. Navigate to one of the add-ons you want on the main menu (say, XBMC Flicks—the Netflix add-on for XBMC). Bring up the context menu and choose "Add to Favorites". This step isn't necessary for all skins, but it is necessary for many—including Transparency.
2. Head to Settings > Skin and find the option for customizing the main menu (in Transparency, it's called "Menu"). You should see some "Custom" or "Favorites" slots, where you can add custom menu items. Enable these and choose the add-on you want from the favorites menu.
3. Repeat this process for all the add-ons you want on the front page, like Hulu, Free Cable, Blu-Ray, and others. They should all show up on your main menu for quick, easy, pain-free access.

If you've cleaned up your main menu as we described in the previous section, you should now have a menu that's incredibly easy to navigate and has movies, TV, streaming video, Blu-Ray, and everything else you could ever want.

Enable Kiosk Mode

One of the most confusing parts about XBMC can be when you accidentally enter the "View" menu while scrolling through your movies or TV shows (the one that's hidden behind the right edge of the screen). Once you've got everything set up the way you want, you can turn on "kiosk mode" to lock your chosen views and get rid of this hidden menu. That way, when someone's browsing through your videos, they don't accidentally stumble on this menu or change your view mode by accident. In Transparency, you'll find kiosk mode under Settings > Skin Settings > General > Enable Kiosk mode. Check your skin's documentation for more info on whether it has kiosk mode and where to find it.

XBMC has come a long way, but it's still not the most user-friendly program on the planet. Hopefully, with these simple tweaks, you can get just about anyone using your XBMC box in no time. Got any of your own suggestions for making XBMC easier to use? Be sure to share them in the comments below.

Photo remixed from Tanberin.

The problem with remote controls is that they're often never in your hand when you need to operate them. This hack will really let you control your devices from afar. It's like the clapper only it uses whistled commands.

Posted on the Befinitiv blog, the project involves a microphone to capture the audio, which is transformed by a FFT (Fast Fourier transform), and Linux code to detect the unique whistle sounds that control his different devices. So you can have a whistle for your lamp and one for your printer and so on. If you're a good enough whistler, that is.

The code is provided on his blog, so you may be able to adapt this project to your needs and start whistling at your electronics shortly.

Control your devices by whistling | Befinitiv via Hack A Day

So you're out of the house for the weekend, and you've brought your trusty laptop with you, but you need something from your home machine. Here are a ton of different ways you can get to your home computer from anywhere, whether you just need a few files or full, unfettered access.

Access Your Computer's Screen with Remote Desktop Tools

No matter what you need from your home computer, you can get it by sharing your computer's screen with a remote desktop tool. We've shown you how to do this with TightVNC (and even secure it with Hamachi), though there are a ton of great tools out there, from the dead simple TeamViewer to Windows' built-in Remote Desktop tool. If you want access from your phone or tablet, you can use one of our favorite mobile VNC clients as well, like PocketCloud for Android or Screens for iOS. It isn't always the most efficient way to access your computer from afar (say, if you just need to grab one file), but it's easily the most versatile.

Access Your Home Network with a VPN

If you don't need direct access to your computer, but want to act as if your laptop is still connected to your home network, you can do so by creating a VPN with LogMeIn Hamachi. This will let you listen to shared iTunes libraries, access shared folders, or do anything else you could do from inside your network. If you add the free Privoxy application to the mix, you can even use that VPN to secure and encrypt all your web browsing, so no one on that sketchy coffee shop Wi-Fi can see what you're doing. LogMeIn Hamachi is our personal favorite VPN, but there are some other great ones out there, including your guys' favorite, OpenVPN. Of course, Windows has a built-in VPN tool too, for you Windows-only folks.

Stream Media to All Your Devices From Home

If all you're looking for is access to your music and videos, VPNs and VNC can seem like overkill. Instead, you could just use an app like Air Video (for iPhone users), StreamToMe (for Mac and iPhone users), or Plex (for all users) to live convert and stream your videos to your computers and mobile devices. If it's music you want, Audiogalaxy and Subsonic both provide pretty neat services that let you access your tunes from the web or from your phone—no need to deal with a long, arduous upload process like you would with Google Music (though we do still love Google Music).

Access Your Important Files On-The-Go

If it's just regular old files you need, there are a ton of ways to do that. While you could, of course, just sync your important files to Dropbox (even if they're outside your Dropbox folder), setting up a file sharing server can give you access to all the files you want, without dealing with Dropbox's size limitations. We're currently fans of the Pogoplug software, which makes sharing your files super easy—though with a bit of work, you can roll your own awesome, drag-and-drop enabled web sharing service, too.

Print, Torrent, and More Using Simple Remote Tools

You can get a remote access app designed for nearly any task these days. Apart from the basics above, you can also shut down your Windows computer from anywhere with a simple app, or print documents at home with Google Cloud Print, or, if you're anti-Google, this Dropbox trick for both Windows and Mac.

If it's torrenting you're into, both of our favorite BitTorrent clients for Windows and OS X have remote UIs built-in. With just a bit of setup, you can monitor your torrents, add new ones, and even download the resulting files to your laptop or smartphone. You can also add new torrents with Dropbox, though you won't be able to monitor them (if that matters to you).

These are just a few of the things you can do from afar, but they should get you almost anything you need with minimal setup. If you prefer to have your home computer go to sleep while you're away, you can even set up wake-on-LAN to turn it back on from afar. Got any other remote access tricks we didn't mention? Share them with us in the comments below.