Task: Lego inventory tracker

This one's actually underway, a Christmas present for my son. I'll write it up separately somewhere - perhaps on the Vivtek site itself! (A blast from the past - I haven't written anything new there since probably 2009; Blogger has been so much more convenient.)

Task: News scraper/tracker

I want to scrape the Reuters news feeds (later, others) into a database for various analytical purposes [eg]. That's going to consist of a daemon on my fileserver that checks the feeds on a period basis and loads things into a database. Then we'll do other analysis on that database. I'm most interested in linking stories and identifying trends.

Yeah, OK, I know this isn't groundbreaking research. It's new for me, though. And it will be a good microcosm of scraping tasks for declaratization as well as a valuable component for all kinds of things. So ... it's a task.

DD-WRT

... is the open-source firmware for my new router. I want to do per-MAC bandwidth tracking, and here are some leads.

• From the dd-wrt forum.
• Refers to Google code here.
• Possibly upgraded here.

Probably my best bet is to assume a control panel on the local PC (which is the situation I've got) manipulating a remote "sensor head" on the router. The router doesn't have a huge amount of resources, after all.