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Okay, THAT is an awesome hack. Taking a simple, straightforward system and, with a little bit of hardware geekery, conscripting it into service as a botanical monitering/reminder service. I am much impressed.

If I had plants, I'd be all over this.

Good reason to get plants?
It well might be. Maybe my testing bench could use a little color . . .
I'd like to see most everything that you own be able to do this. Then, there'd be an aggregator of your stuff that you can get a 10,000 level overview of. How old is most of my stuff? How fashionable is most of my stuff? How much of my stuff do I really use? How much is my stuff worth? Which of my stuff have I been neglecting? That way, we can learn to live with less stuff. (or if that's not your goal, live with stuff that other people envy)

EDIT: This reminded me of: http://www.360voice.com/

It's something to let your xbox360 blog about you. Its entries are like:

"Cormyre seemed really excited to play yesterday. Our current gamerscore is 32,936 . That is a boost of 60 points over last time! He rocked out to Burnout Paradise, Devil May Cry 4, LEGO Star Wars II, Aegis Wing, Tomb Raider: Anniv. gaining 1 achievement, and I think there was some random Live Marketplace browsing, but I wasn't paying attention."

"Cormyre must have heard my calling... I was practically startled when his greasy finger pounded my power button. I mean come on... be a little gentle... I am fragile. Just some helpful advice for someone with a 32,876 gamerscore. That is a profit of 650 points over last time! He rallied Guitar Hero III, Tomb Raider: Anniv. adding an amazing 20 achievements, and then he had to stop because we both couldn't take it anymore... we were spent."

This project uses two really nice bits of kit:

1. Arduino (which is a cheap, open source design, microcontroller board)

2. XPort (a system-on-a-chip ethernet connector which contains a web server and a serial interface inside an ethernet socket).