Jealous of the Mac-freaks and all the cool tricks they can do with their Bluetooth cellphones, like locking their computer automatically when they walk away?

I spent a few minutes today hacking around and came up with a quick proof-of-concept script for something thats been bouncing around in my head for awhile:

!/bin/bash

DELAY=”20″ BD_ADDR=”FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF” LOCK_CMD=”xscreensaver-command -lock” while true; do (sudo l2ping -s 1 -c 1 $BD_ADDR > /dev/null 2>&1 ) || $LOCK_CMD sleep $DELAY done

It periodically pings your Bluetooth phone (replace BD_ADDR with the particular BD Address of your phone). When the ping fails (when you walk out of range), it can lock your screen, pause XMMS, etc. Not bad for 5 lines of Bash script.

Now I’ve just got to beef it up a bit, add some more options. If I’ve got the time, I’ll turn it into a Python Gnome applet so you can throw it in a toolbar.

Stop sending me requests for Gmail invites. I have no more invites, so no matter how many times you email me or how much you plead, I have none to give you.

Thank you.

James was the big winner in the name-my-cat sweepstakes with the suggestion of “Widget”. That one stuck. And even non-geeky girls think its cute.

On a side note, Widget has a nasty little kitten cold. You don’t understand the true joys of pet ownership until you have a kitten with a stuffed nose sniffling directly in your ear all night because she insists on sleeping on your pillow. Its time she got acquainted with her new vet…

Note: I promise not to become one of those bloggers who does nothing but blog about their cat, but I felt it was necessary to post the results of the kitten-naming.

Lately I’ve switched Linux music players from XMMS to the new upstart iTunes clone Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox has grown up a lot since the last time I tried it, and its finally stable and fairly feature-complete. And the Rhythmlet plugin for gDesklets simply kicks ass.

But nobody ever bothered to write a command line remote control for it. So I wrote my own in a few lines of Python. Hopefully somebody else will find it useful.

Be warned. Its my first ever Python app, has no error checking whatsoever, and will probably replace all your MP3’s with Prince albums. It also only recognzies three commands - “next”, “back” and “playPause”, mostly since those are the only three buttons Rhythmbox has in the first place.

Download: remote.py

James Byers, a sailing friend of mine who also happens to be quite the successful techie, tipped me off to his new startup project: WhoAt.

Yes… it is in fact YASNP (Yet-Another-Social-Networking-Project). But this one has an interesting twist that might make it pretty cool… it’s location aware.

So the theory is that when you hit the coffee shop with your PowerBook (or ThinkPad), you can let the network know where you are and it will alert you to possible new friends in your vicinity. You can then learn more about them or send them messages. You can also use the service from your mobile phone using SMS or a WAP browser (the phone interface is very simple, I was impressed).

Right now the service only covers NYC and San Francisco, but James said he’d be adding San Jose to the list within a week or so.

Update: Be sure to check out my profile, and if you for some reason want an invite (instead of signing up on your own), leave a comment.