From the man page smartctl is a "Control and Monitor Utility for SMART Disks". The "-A" option tells it to print the vendor specific SMART attribute. It's best to run this on an optical drive rather than your main hard disk because if you run it on the hard disk your disk will end up getting thrashed for the next 45 minutes, making your system noticeably unresponsive. If you run it on an optical drive instead though it only takes a few minutes (on my relatively recent system; you may need to decrease the number of iterations), during which time the system still remains responsive, but your load average gets huge. I got it up to 870 load average over one minute. This means that by the traditional equation (utilization in percent = load average / number of cores * 100) my dual core system was running at about 43,500% utilization. So now I can say that Linux is still responsive at over forty thousand percent system load. ;-)

This is a simple script I wrote to notify me whenever my battery is running low on power. Basically to use it you just create a new shell script with the following in it and then run it using bash ~/bin/battery_monitor.sh & in your .xinitrc script. This should then check your battery status every minute and if it's below ten minutes remaining it will produce a warning message, after generating a warning it will wait five minutes before checking again to make sure it doesn't get really annoying.

#!/bin/bash
# Selects a random jpeg file in the ~/backgrounds/ directory (or it's
# sub-directories) and makes it the background image.
file_list=$(find ~/backgrounds/ -name "*.jpg")
num_files=$(echo $file_list | wc -w)
ran_line_number=$(($RANDOM%$num_files+1))
selected_file=$(echo $file_list | tr " " "\n" | sed -n ${ran_line_number}p)
fbsetbg $selected_file

On most light-weight window managers, like Blackbox, simply copy any images you want to use as backgrounds into ~/backgrounds/ and you're good to go. Some other Window Managers/Desktop environments look after the desktop background themselves so you would have to disable that in their configuration first. If you wanted to run this every half hour or something you could put it in your crontab, or else you can just set it up so it runs when you start your window manager.

-- Edit 09/05/2009 --

I've modified the code very slightly, to fix a bug which either didn't exist when run with the older version of bash/find I was have been using when I wrote this. I've also cleaned up the code a little.

First we have seamonkey-start:

#!/bin/bash
# Simple start script for seamonkey
# Tries to open a new window with an already running instance, if it can't do
# that it starts a new seamonkey instance.
if [ $# == 0 ]; then
    if ! seamonkey -remote "xfeDoCommand(openBrowser)"; then
        seamonkey -splash;
    fi
else
    if ! seamonkey -remote "openURL($1, new-window)"; then
        seamonkey $1;
    fi
fi

And next up the kazehakase-start:

#!/bin/bash
# Simple start script for Kazehakase
# Checks for an already running instance, if so opens a new window, else starts
# Kazehakase.
if [[ `ps -e | grep kazehakase | grep -v kazehakase-star` != "" ]]; then
    kazehakase --action "KzWindow/NewWindow";
else
    kazehakase $1;
fi

I'm placing both scripts in the public domain so your welcome to do what ever you like with them. If you want to use them on your own computer just copy and paste.