Beyond a bit of tinsel, some Christmas cards and a seasonal tie, there aren't too many ways to make an office festive. That is, unless you're Microsoft employee Andrej Kyselica, who managed to hack his Christmas lights to show the status of his contacts on his work instant messaging client.
According to his forum post (via istartedsomething, since the site is down at the time of writing), Kyselica wrote a device driver for a FEZ .NET Micro Framework embedded controller which allowed him to control a set of GE-35 LED Christmas lights. Using the Microsoft Lync SDK, it was then possible to assign each contact to a blub, and since each LED could show a range of colours, they could be set to display the contacts's status. The end result was a string of Christmas lights glowing green for available, yellow for away, red for busy and purple for out-of-the-office or unlit for offline.
While it might not be the most functional way to check who's online, it's certainly a creative hack, and a great way to make a boring office seem a little bit more Christmassy. And if that can't help get you in a festive mood, we're not sure what can.
