I have a similar situation for remote access, but my parents are 12 hours away.

I use Splashtop with the remote access feature (paid feature). No approval to access the machine is required.

I use Sophos UTM(next gen firewall, formerly Astaros(sp?)) for Web filtering, spam and anti-virus protection in my home as I was tired of trying to tie solutions together to make them work and SPAM was really starting to get bad. As you are doing this for personal use, you can get their Home use virtual license for free and run it on an old computer with esxi. Since it is a full fledged firewall you can also setup VPN connections if you want to. As you are covering multiple house holds you will need a user in each household to get a separate license for home use. Or you could purchase their appliances. With this you can create web filter rules with time based restriction, user based restrictions, ip address restrictions etc...

Splashtop Remote desktop solution:
http://www.splashtop.com/

Sophos UTM home use:
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-utm-home-edition.aspx

Get a 16 or 24 port managed switch that supports vlans (you need a port for each pump plus your laptop)
Put each pump in a separate vlan
Use a descent laptop with parallels or VMWare workstation
Run X number of machines to run the upgrade, each connected to a different vlan (trunk the vlans to the VMs through the laptop NIC (maybe use a USB nic)
Get a little fancy and see if you can script the running of the upgrade so when the VM starts it automatically starts the upgrade process.

Another option that could be wireless would be to use a device that supports multiple SSIDs like a Mikrotik router with wireless.
Each SSID would be a separate vlan/separate pump.
On the pump side use a similar mikrotik device to bridge the wireless and ethernet port. (you might be able to use something like a Raspberry Pi as this client device)

At the bottom of the article is a linked video to the robot manufacturer. The robots do indeed lift the cars by the wheels. This video is much more interesting than the animated one from the article.

I am also a T-Mobile customer. Wi-Fi calling, stupid cheap International voice roaming with free texting, caller ID with name - all on a no contract small business plan that costs $154 per month with 5 phones and a USB data modem. As other people mention, this isn't Sprint buying T-mobile. This is Softbank buying T-mobile to merge the two together. I hope they see how much more innovation is coming from T-Mobile than Sprint, and put the T-Mobile team in charge of the merged company.

If it is any consolation, the linked article is wrong. This took place in New Braunfels, not Austin. New Braunfels is in Comal County and is counted as part of the San Antonio metro area in the US census.

I like where you are going. The idea of an oven with Android isn't bad, but it should do a lot more than the oven in the article. I'd definitely add one thing to the wish list - a camera. At the very least it could give me a video feed of what is cooking that I could stream to my desktop or phone.

After the technology takes off, I then would like to get some photo recognition software going. My ideal oven will indicate when food is done by using color and pattern recognition that it downloaded from the Internet along with the recipe.

I don't think some of these replies understand the post. Of course you can buy metric sockets, but the square hole on the opposite side of the socket(the "drive") that fits the ratchet is called out in inches. So a 13mm socket might have a 3/8" or 1/4" drive.

I believe the German tool company Hazet actually engraves their 1/4 drive sockets as 6.3mm. However their catalog lists drive sizes in inches and metric.

AT&T didn't get any of the specturm during the FCC auction that Verizon uses for their LTE network. Remember AT&T is still using 3G data service, just at what they call 4G speeds...

Crashplan also has a service to allow you to seed your backup with a hard drive(s) It costs additional money, but helps keep that initial 8TB from taking years.. (Seeded Backup and Restore to Your Door)

I use them and although I don't have 8TB with them I do have over 150 GB and have been able to restore what I needed. I also provide my local resources as a backup target to other family members using Crashplan.

PS, I'm glad my ISP doesn't have a 300 GB cap.

Another option might be to use Crashplan with a neighbor that is within line of site and setup a private wireless network (ubiquiti Nanostation or similar product) and run crashplan between each other's houses. They get to backup their data to you, and you get to backup your data to them (however you will probably need to pay for the system since you have the lion share of the data). You could look at NAS devices that can also work with Crashplan directly. I use UnRaid with the Crashplan plugin.

Timing:
With the 64 GB every few days data feed, a 10 Mbps upload Internet connection should be able to upload that data in about 15 hours.

The more expensive profession/enterprise option: LTO 5 tapes, however you are talking sever thousand dollars just for the drive, and you may need to spend more to get software to run the drive, but for capacity and portability they work well. Just make sure you test restoring from them once in a while.

Good luck.

I have an HP 8560p. It has a 15.4" 1600 x 900 screen and numeric keypad. They keyboard is the chiclet style which I'm still getting used to but the build quality seems to be pretty sturdy.

As an added bonus, it has a 9pin serial port.

+1 For unRAID. Works perfectly with a mix of IDE and SATA (USB will mount and share as individual drives but will not be included in array). Mixing of drive sizes is OK, total space will be sum of all drives minus the biggest drive. Plenty of community plug-ins including various streaming apps. Also it powers down idle drives after a configurable timeout and only spins up drives as they are needed.

And what is an inkjet printer without ink?

I haven't found anything that is less than $200, but I have a product from http://www.wi-ex.com/

It is a simple device, that takes some work to get installed correctly, but works for me.

Even at $240, if you are going to be living there for over 2 years, it is less than $10 per month if you choose to look at it that way.

Just comes down to how important is better cell phone signal to you in your basement?