Tag: homeautomation

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Komar.org Let the Internet Control 25,000 Christmas Lights

For more than a decade, random people on the Internet could visit a house in Colorado and start turning its Christmas decorations on and off.

Visit Komar.org

Alek Komarnitsky’s personal website is already a classic old-web junk drawer: travel stories, wildlife cameras, home projects, photography tests, sysadmin material, family pages, solar panels, BBQ experiments, and enough links to make a modern UX consultant quietly leave the room.

Then there were the Christmas lights.

Twenty-five thousand lights and a web control panel

The archived 2014 Christmas page describes three live webcams and more than 20,000 controllable lights. Visitors could switch zones on and off and inflate or deflate decorations including Elmo, Frosty, Santa, and Homer Simpson.

The electrical table gets even better.

Komarnitsky documented 22 circuits, 76.2 amps, and a total of 25,000 lights. He calculated the full display at roughly 9.1 kilowatts and estimated the operating cost based on Colorado electricity prices. The page also logged setup dates, snow, equipment, webcam changes, and the final shutdown of the display.

This was not an Internet-of-Things startup.

It was a guy wiring his house into the web because that sounded funny.

The project also pointed visitors toward celiac-disease research rather than asking them to pay for the spectacle. The page says Komarnitsky ended the long-running controllable display after the 2014 season and later sold the equipment.

What survives is a perfect artifact of an era when a personal website could become temporarily famous because someone built a ridiculous technical thing and exposed the controls to strangers.

Komar.org itself is still active, with material extending from the late 1990s into 2026. That continuity makes the old Christmas project even better: it remains embedded inside the same personal homepage ecosystem that produced it.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of sites where the web was treated as a workshop rather than a publishing platform.

Komar.org is what happens when the workshop reaches the breaker panel.

Return to Komar.org

Posted on by

Ancient Web: DriveMeInsane Has Let Strangers Control the Lights Since 1997

In August 1997, Paul Mathis put a webcam online and gave strangers the ability to mess with his lights.

Visit DriveMeInsane

The site’s FAQ says the project began under the name Spy on Paul Mathis. Visitors could watch a live camera, turn lamps on and off, and observe the result in real time. Over the years it accumulated more cameras, controllable devices, messages, chat, audio, and other features.

The site still describes itself with refreshing accuracy: an amusing hobby with no real purpose, financial or otherwise.

Home automation as public nuisance

The current interface exposes controllable lamps and other devices directly beside the camera feed. Visitors can switch hardware, send a message to a marquee, and in some configurations hear text read by voice synthesis.

The FAQ explains that the controlled lamps use X10 and other home-automation technologies. It also addresses the obvious question: doesn’t it get irritating to have strangers turning the lights on and off?

Apparently you get used to it.

The site’s later name came from a 2002 radio appearance. During a description of the project, a DJ sarcastically asked something like, “What is this, Drive Me Insane dot com?” Mathis did not yet have a working domain for the site, so he registered it.

That origin fits perfectly.

DriveMeInsane belongs to the same early-web tradition as coffee-pot cameras and other projects where connecting an ordinary physical object to the Internet was itself enough reason to build something.

Today remote switches, cameras, smart bulbs, voice control, and web-connected appliances are mundane consumer products. In 1997, making the web visibly affect a lamp in somebody’s room felt like a demonstration of what the network could become.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many experiments like this because they preserve the moment when ordinary household objects first became Internet-accessible toys.

Most smart-home demos are boring now.

Letting strangers annoy you with yours remains funny.

Return to DriveMeInsane