Fun with Perl and Thinkpad Accelerometers

IBM recently posted two interesting articles (along with one from 2006) about using Perl with the accelerometers on a recent Thinkpad. I found them through PerlMonks Cool Uses for Perl section.

The one from 2006 tells about knock commands. They mention using it to lock or unlock your computer, which doesn't seem like that practical of an idea (can you say "denial of service via vibrations"?). I've also seen similar videos of this type of thing for Macbook Pros, termed "Smackbooks".

The next article (in order of how interesting it is) is from March 2008. It highlights using the accelerometers to control Google Maps and Google Street View. It focuses mainly on writing the program, unlike the first article.

The article from February 2008 is the most interesting of the three. It uses the accelerometers and wifi to make a map of wireless access points nearby. I imagine I can find some blueprints of buildings here to try this with, and there are a lot of access points here.

All of these articles require HDAPS enabled in the kernel. It doesn't seem that Fedora 8 has this enabled by default, since I don't have a /sys/devices/platform/hdaps/position file. I do intend to play with this after Fedora 9 is released and I get this working. It should be interesting.