[Cyberspice] informs us she likes snakes. Hey, who doesn’t? She’ll soon be adopting a lovely ball python and wanted to keep close tabs on the sensitive creature’s environment. To that end she assembled a network-enabled vivarium monitoring system based on Adafruit’s Boarduino (a minimalist Arduino clone), a TMP36 analog temperature sensor, Saelig’s WIZ810MJ Ethernet interface, and a common LCD screen. The Arduino rig periodically issues updates to a web server, which can then generate informative graphs using a set of PHP scripts (what, no Python?).

Okay, so we could probably count on one hand the number of readers in need of fancy reptile monitoring and still have fingers left over. There are countless other applications where networked sensor monitoring of this sort is a frequent necessity, so the article could be a good starting point for your own projects. There’s lots of source code to work with, on both the Arduino and web server sides. And the parts list demonstrates serious frugality: the Boarduino, the generic LCD, and especially the Ethernet interface; even with the breadboard adapter, this unit is about half the cost of the usual Arduino Ethernet shield, leaving more funds available for the snake food budget!

Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O'Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.

Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.

[via Waxy]

[photo: nrkbeta]

Download Squad’s [Kristin Shoemaker] has just published part 2 of their guide to web development using Linux. This time around they’re installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. It’s a straight forward process under Ubuntu since you just need to select the few packages in Synaptic. Once installed, she shows you how to poke at Apache to verify that it’s running. They finish up by installing phpMyAdmin and the WordPress CMS.

Having a web server installed is useful for more than just development work. Many open source tools have a simple web based interface you’ll be able to access through your local web server.