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.

Related posts:

• Epox Bluetooth Mouse and Linux
• AT&T, I bid thee goodbye.
• Easy ACPI under Linux with “Hibernate”
• Interplanetary Networking
• Quick Hack: “Duh!” Simple Text Preprocessing