Phylix

I'm fascinated with automating repetitive tasks and using my computer when I'm not in front of it and I was wondering what, if any, computer setups some of you may have to make your life easier so that I may "borrow" your ideas. I'm thinking of stuff like just a simple remote control for your computer, automatically downloading your favorite podcasts/television shows, using VNC with a domain name, or anything else that just makes life easier for someone with a computer on all day. Here's what I've done so far, and I'm sure many others have done this too: -Use Girder to map buttons on a remote to do whatever I want from my bed. -Use RSS feeds and BitTorrent to download podcasts and television shows -Set up a domain to point to my dynamic IP address through ZoneEdit and use it for VNC, hosting games, and other stuff. -Create an alarm that plays music in the morning that slowly increases the volume up to a point so I can wake up more comfortably. Now that I look at it, it really isn't very impressive... What I'd like to do is make a phone call to connect to my computer and have it wait for a key combination to run a program or invoke an event for a program like Girder to handle. And since the phone is already there, allow it to do stuff like schedule calls, text message, and whatever other fun stuff I can't think of right now. I know this can be done with most phones already, but I'm cheap and don't want to have to pay for a data plan. Eventually, when I build my own house, I'd like to have one computer in a hidden room to be my home's control center to automate whatever I can, create logs, and control things with voice commands or a small remote. Yeah... That little X10 device from season one really got me into this. So, if any of you would share what you've done or ideas, that'd be great.

This was how I was picturing it: -I lose my USB drive and someone else picks it up, but doesn't return it. -I immediately upload a file on my website: http://www.phylix.com/1.txt -The next time someone plugs in my USB drive, it will check to see if 1.txt exists, otherwise 404. -If 1.txt exists set it to do one/some of these (Maybe by reading what is inside 1.txt?): -Delete my files. -Encrypt my files. -Upload/E-Mail sensitive files from person's computer. -Run Switchblade. -Execute DOS commands. -Download and run a file. -Anything else I can't think of right now. -If 404 error, do nothing.

Yeah... I've looked at wget for Windows and cURL. I've gone through the documentation and they don't seem to have anything that would allow me to do an easy check for a file on a website. But I've been thinking, and I guess I could just have it always check to see if a file exists and download it to the USB drive and always check if that file has been downloaded first. The only problem is that if the partition is formatted or all my files are simply deleted, a suspicious file will always be downloaded, so keeping it all on the CD drive partition would just seem more elegant.

Just over the weekend, I went through the horrible ordeal of losing my USB drive. For those few days, I felt. . . incomplete. Of course, I had backed up my data, but it was a few months old. I work at a school as a technician and I had looked through the semester's course schedule to see one professor who may have retrieved it. After asking him today and discovering he did not have anyone turn a drive in, I was quite disappointed. I suspected a student had found it after taking out one of the computers for what I assume was for a computer building class and had simply kept it. I felt pretty helpless. So I made a vow to myself to never let this happen again. I've been following Hak. 5 since early first season and the Switchblade was one of my favorite tools from the show. I spent most of the morning catching up on its progress and an idea hit me after seeing a feature in Leapo's Pocket-Knife payload that would simply not run the payload if a specific file existed on the hard drive. So I searched and I searched, but I couldn't find any information on creating a payload that checks a web page for a specific file before continuing to run or not. I've tried searching for command line programs that would download files, but that's all they did. . . Download a file. I know I could probably have it download the file and then read it off the USB drive, but that would seem to make the process much slower. I'm not experienced with batch files, so does anyone know a way to quickly retrieve data from a website and maybe use an IF statement with it? And also execute DOS commands retrieved from the same place? I know the Switchblade has E-Mail capabilities, but I don't feel like it's enough. Oh, and I did get my USB drive back. The other technician I work with found it, but didn't know it was mine. Unfortunately, it just broke two hours ago. . . So I'll still have to buy a new one.