Here’s a hack for Gnome (vaguely relevant to Android too) that I’ve been using for a little while. When I get up from a computer, I generally want to lock the screensaver. I also pick up my phone from a USB dock (not the Nexus One Desktop Dock; that doesn’t connect to a computer). So why not have the screensaver lock automatically when the phone disappears from USB?

A couple of recent Google offerings gave me an idea. First there was the demo of cloud-to-device messaging at Google I/O, with which I look forward to seeing the Android development community do great things, and to demonstrate it they used a Chrome extension, Chrome to Phone. Then yesterday, GoogleCL appeared, providing access to several Google services from the command-line.

These were written to be used with Locale, and will probably work with other apps that claim Locale compatibilty such as Tasker.