The students @ UAT wrote in with their Xmas tree hackery… -
” A few students at The University of Advancing Technology got into the Christmas hacking spirit this weekend and surprised the campus attendants on Monday morning with a TCP/IP enabled Christmas tree. The tree has been the centerpiece of holiday decorations at the university for the past few years, casting a static white glow across the commons late into the night. Static no more, the tree now hosts a web page from an embedded PINK Ethernet module. The page allows access to a Basic Stamp microcontroller preprogrammed with switching patterns for a set of solid state relays connected to the lights. The sectional nature of artificial trees made controlling the lights as simple as plugging in each level of the tree to a relay.” – Link.
Related:
Along the same lines, a friend of mine lets you control his whole house lights from his web page.