IMPORTANT: You need Windows PowerShell to run this command - in your Windows Command Prompt, type powershell Uses sajb to start a PowerShell background job that pings an IP host every 10 seconds. Any changes in the host's Up/Down state is time-stamped and logged to a file. Date/time stamps are logged in two formats: Unix and human-readable. A while(1) loop repeats the test every 10 seconds by using the sleep command. See the Sample Output for more detail. I use this command to log Up/Down events of my Motorola SB6141 cable modem (192.168.100.1). To end the logging, close the PowerShell window or use the "exit" command. Show Sample Output

IMPORTANT: You need Windows PowerShell to run this command - in your Windows Command Prompt, type powershell Create a log file of your Motorola Surfboard SB6141 downstream signal strengths. Uses the built-in curl to request signal strength data from your SB6141 cable modem. HTML page 192.168.100.1/cmSignalData.htm has the signal strength numbers for the 8 downstreams. Some HTML/DOM processing parses out the 8 values from the above page. The eight extracted signal strengths are then logged to a file. A small while-loop watches the clock & repeats the process every 10 seconds. Show Sample Output

An old USB A/B cable is all you need to make your own Smart Home hardware! Cut off and discard the B-portion of the USB cable. On the A side, connect the RED (+) and WHITE (D-) wires via a 1 kiloohm resistor. Picture: http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU Now plug the cable into a USB port on your Linux computer. Your hardware is ready! Run the above command after changing variable mysms to your personal email-to-SMS gateway info as required by your cellular service provider. The command uses the amazing usbmon tool (see link below) to detect the cable. For the curious, to view the raw usbmon output, run this command: (Also see the sample output) usbmon -i usb0 How does it work? When the red and white wires are connected (via the 1 kiloohm resistor) the USB hardwere is tricked into thinking that a new USB device is trying to start up. We then use the usbmon utility to capture the host USB events as it tries to talk to the cable. The expect utility watches the usbmon stream and waits for the disconnect text "-2:128" before sending the SMS message. Finally, the sendmail tool is used to email the SMS message to your smartphone via your cellular provider's SMS-to-email gateway. As a result, when the electrical connection between the red and white wire is interrupted, or the USB cable is unplugged from your computer, you get an SMS notification of the disconnect event on your smartphone. Could this be the cheapest smart home gadget ever? What are YOU going to sense with it? Please let me know in the comments and please don't forget to click it up! Links: http://www.linuxcertif.com/man/8/usbmon/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#Pinouts http://imgur.com/dJGVlAU Show Sample Output

Uses the lm-sensors package in Linux to display fan speed. Grep RPM is used to discover lines containing the text RPM, and sed is used to edit out everything but the RPM number. The watch utility is used to update the display every 10 seconds and -d highlights any changes from the previous value. The eval function of Bash is used to execute the command enclosed in the ".." string. Show Sample Output

Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it! Show Sample Output