Gareth Jones

I’ve recently changed my broadband provider and wondered how reliable they’d be. I figured I needed a way for my house to let me know whenever the connection had dropped and for how long for etc. Remembering my post a little while ago about
publishing to Twitter about local Bluetooth devices, I thought I could do something similar. So now I’ve written a little script (twitter-netcheck) that notices whenever my internet connection is dropped and then publishes to Twitter whenever it comes back. It also sends me a direct message so I get alerted by SMS or IM immediately. Quite handy I think - try it out for yourself

Andy Stanford-Clark recently got a few people together to talk about blogjects and tweetjects after getting his house to tweet about the various goings-on there. That inspired me to think about what I could do with Twitter and remembered a while ago I’d created a little script that polled for nearby Bluetooth devices and published them via MQTT. So as a good distraction from work I thought I might integrate this with Twitter and so we now have a little python script that lets my laptop publish details of any bluetooth devices it sees appear and disappear. So what’s the use of this then? Probably very little but it might be interesting to hook it up in my flat and see who goes in and out of there…

[Update]
I failed to find the time to set this up as a proper project somewhere but here’s the scripts in case anyone wanted to make use of the application:

• scanner.py
• twitooth.py