This one primarily caught my interest because it's here in Colorado. A few weeks ago, there were articles in several places about a guy out here, Alek Komarnitsky, who had hooked his Xmas lights up to the internet, and made a web site where people could control them remotely. Turns out that what he actually did we take a series of photos of his house at various times during the day, with the various "controllable" lights turned on and off, and serve up those pictures based on what the user would expect to see. He was found out when a reporter went to his house to interview him. Funny thing is, it probably would have been easier to just make the lights really controllable.
(via Slashdot)
While the basic concept I showed is quite doable, it would be a real challenge for the individual homeowner to do to the degree I demonstrated, especially the speed of pan/zoomability and image quality - see my notes at http://www.komar.org/xmas/hoax/#real
- among other things, I have good neighbors wouldn't want to subject them to 17,000 christmas lights changing thousands of times an hour! ;-)