Ice Pick: the Wired House

You find the coolest things when you’re looking for something else. Just this morning, I was doing some online research about ice picks (no: I won’t tell you why just yet). And I came across a house in the Netherlands that has been completely wired since 1998. (“Someone is watching us.”)

Since 12-Sep-1998 the toilet has been flushed 29756 times. An average flush lasted for 1.25 seconds.
The highest temperature ever in the toilet was at 26-Jul-2006 - 16:53:01 with 31.0 C/ 87.8F.
The lowest temperature ever measured was 4.5 C/ 40.1F on 06-Feb-2005 - 10:20:02

(How do you get the toilet water elevated to 31 C? Never mind. I'm not sure I wanna know.)

The cat tracker monitors the poor kitty’s activities and, as I write this post, Sparkey the cat has eaten 23721 since November 29, 1998. (That’s a lot of Cat Chow!)

Incoming analog phone calls are monitored, as are computer activities (“18:05:17 Alexis PC switched on”), the computer keeps track of how many times the refrigerator door is opened and for how long, it tracks doorbell ringing activity and even checks who’s delivering the mail:

When mail is thrown into our mailbox a picture will be taken of the person delivering the mail (we use the same webcam for this as we do with the doorbell). The duration shows the time that the mailbox was open. Sometimes (newspapers!) get stuck in the mailbox... that's why it might show these long durations sometimes.

Wow, you know. Just... wow. Ice Pick is here.