What is this blog for?
Ok, so clearly I (and you, the blessed reader) aren’t getting enough bang for my buck, blog-wise, so why on earth did I renew for another year, you might ask?
Well, besides blogging, I’ve hacked together a couple of useful server-side scripts over the years that I still find immensely useful, in my personal capacity, reader-be-damned. Here are a few of them:
- Screenscraping TVsite.co.za to get the day’s telly viewing on one page, one click from my bookmarks toolbar
- Sending Wake-on-Lan “magic packets” to my router, which passes them on to my desktop at home, so that I can boot up my PC from anywhere in the world to use VNC, with just a click of one of my (non-shared) del.ico.us bookmarks.
- Automatically emailing my gmail account when above happens, so I know my PC’s booted up properly (ok, this has nothing to do with my webhosting, but my ISP’s open mail server)
- Emails to a private account on my domain get forwarded through an SMS gateway to my number, so I can get booking confirmations etc sent straight to my phone.
A couple of these, particularly the Wake-on-Lan and email gateway story were a bit of a headache to get to work, so if people are interested, I may actually write some blog-entries with how-tos!
on June 13th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Ooooh yes - please post a howto for the WoL and the SMS gateway. That’d be fun to play with…
on June 13th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
me me me!! I would be very very interested in the WoL script, would dig to give that a whirl!
I’m assuming you need to open up certain ports for those pings to actually arrive at your PC?
on June 13th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
me+=1;