

Use an Old Linux Computer to Put your Baby to Sleep - noaharc
http://www.labnol.org/software/old-linux-computer-for-baby/10420/

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jlc
That'll work for a while. Then the kid's going to be up half the night
recompiling his kernel.

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esila
I can't find the link, but I remember reading an article a while back about
utilizing the opening/closing of the CD drive to manually push the reset
button on a server.

It was a sysadmin's story of how one of the servers needed a manual reboot
every so often and it could only be done with someone physically being there
to push the reset button. He set an old computer up with the CD drive directly
facing the server's reset button. From there, he set up a cron job to send the
"eject/close" command remotely whenever something went wrong with the other
server.

Story ends saying that they no longer use that server, however that other
computer just sits in the corner, faithfully ejecting/closing its CD drive to
this day. Hopefully someone here can provide the link :)

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tetsuo13
That was a lesson from The Daily WTF:

<http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/ITAPPMONROBOT.aspx>

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anApple
He probably has to buy a new cdrom drive every second day.

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ananthrk
instead of two eject commands (eject and eject -t, as prescribed in the link),
you can also use eject -T (this will toggle between open and close) :)

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dryicerx
aah the baby rocker one lined

    
    
        while true; do eject -T; done;

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rbanffy
Just to set the record straight, it could be done with any *nix-ish OS such as
BSD or OSX.

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jrockway
Very clever hack :)

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aw3c2
What a waste of power.

~~~
noonespecial
Nonsense. Anyone who's ever experienced a cranky child and a wind-up rocker
would gladly sacrifice a few kwh's for some peace and quiet! The fans in that
old beast probably provide some nice soothing white noise as well.

I myself collect usb cdroms that no longer read correctly for use as impromptu
servos. You just never know when you're gonna need your linux box to pull a
latch or give something a nudge.

Edit: Oh... Or this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868523>

Psst don't tell Arrington. The "crunch-monitor" would be more than I could
handle.

