They say darkness is the friend of thieves, but the Perl daemon in this month’s column illuminates dastardly deeds, exposing hidden activities and alerting the admin when things seem to be going awry.

In this month’s Perl column, we will introduce a system to water your plants while you are away from home. With a little help from Perl, a friendly, Linux-based irrigation system waters your plants twice a day.

My low-budget router has just crashed, and there is no way to reset the beast remotely via a network. Never fear – an X10 module, controlled by a web GUI with an Ajax interface, can actuate the mains switch.

SecurID tokens use an authentication system by RSA Security to give the user a valid key for logging onto the target system. A home-grown optical character recognition tool in Perl monitors the key generator.

An uninterruptible power supply can help get you through a short power outage without losing data or damaging hardware. A Nagios script written in Perl checks UPS health and initiates a controlled powerdown if the unit exhausts its battery capacity.

When foreign characters occur in program code or data, Perl programmers need a solution that avoids the tribulations of Babel.

Are you interested in storing, organizing, and searching instant messaging conversations on your IMAP server? The Perl script in this month’s column can help you do just that.

Today’s digital multimeters can do more than measure current and voltage. Multimeters also measure capacity and temperature. An inexpensive multimeter can talk to your PC via the serial port, and simple Perl scripts let you read and visualize data in neat charts.

When tackling something complex, such as a foreign language or Vim commands, digesting small bits of knowledge might be more effective than consuming a super-sized meal of information. This month’s Perl column gives you a method of serving up knowledge snippets by email.

Computer game programmers apply physical formulas and special tricks to create realistic animations. Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), which is available as a Perl wrapper, provides a powerful framework for creating simple 2D worlds with just a couple of lines of code.