You'll learn how to use Linux, including Linux on Raspberry Pi, to control appliances and everything from kettles to curtains, including how to hack game consoles and even incorporate LEGO Mindstorms into your smart home schemes.

You'll discover the practicalities on wiring a house in terms of both and power and networking, along with the selection and placement of servers. There are also explanations on handling communication to (and from) your computer with speech, SMS, email, and web. Finally, you'll see how your automated appliances can collaborate to become a smart home.

Smart Home Automation with Linux was already an excellent resource for home automation, and in this second edition, Steven Goodwin will show you how a house can be fully controlled by its occupants, all using open source software and even open source hardware like Raspberry Pi and Arduino.

Additionally, each bookmark can be assigned an arbitrary number of metatags, so web sites that don't fit neatly into one category can be given both of them (e.g. geek, and humour), which also makes finding them easier.

Smitten differs from traditional media centres in three major ways:

1. It contains no media playback at all! This makes it very small (and suitable for porting to embedded systems) and quick to initialize.
2. It targets a TV display and interface. This means there's less information on any particular screen, and a much simpler control interface consisting of left, right, up, down, and select. No mouse required!
3. It is also highly skinnable, and cross-platform to most systems.

Essentially, Smitten provides an easy-to-use menu system that allows the user to navigate a hierarchy of files, and view them using an (external) tool.