Windows only: WakeupOnStandBy, a free automation and timing tool for Windows systems, can be put to seriously helpful use by anyone who regularly puts their computer to sleep/suspend or hibernate for a quicker start instead of shutting down. The utility lets you set a schedule for waking up your system, having it run whatever apps or system processes you want upon waking, but also controlling how those things run. Whatever your power-up or shutdown needs are, WakeupOnStandBy can accomodate—have your laptop wake up and play a certain MP3 every morning as a backup alarm clock, have it sleep at 7 p.m. every day when you're done with work, but only if you're actually idle, and so on. WakeUpOnStandBy is a free download for Windows systems only; if you're a fan, tell us your most productive/clever uses in the comments.

Cat-lover Alan couldn't stand the stink of the litter box in the garage, so he built in a bathroom fan that vents out the side of the house. To smarten up the system, his Mac mini automates the whole business so it's not running continuously:

In front of the litter box sits a motion detector. When the detector "sees" the cat, it tells the computer to start a timer. After 5 minutes (hopefully enough time for the cat, unless he's reading), the fan kicks on and vents the box for 15 minutes. That's just about enough time to take care of any major business that occurred.

Out of respect for the neighbours, he added a dryer sheet on the vent to mitigate the outgoing fumes. How do you automate litter box stink management? Let us know in the comments.

Windows only: Just when you thought a simple shutdown button was all you needed to turn off your computer, Slawdog's free Smart Shutdown utility offers so many more useful options. If you're always forgetting to turn off the old PC before you wander off to do other things, Smart Shutdown can automatically hibernate, restart, lock, or shut down your PC after a set amount of idle time (like 30 minutes), with options to kill open applications, empty the Recycle Bin, and eject removable drives when it does. Smart Shutdown also adds a Shutdown button to your system tray with one-click access to several actions, like logoff, hibernate, reboot, standby, and for those of you still rockin' a dial-up internet connection, hang up. Here's a look at Smart Shutdown's options dialog.

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Windows only: The Giveaway of the Day web site is offering the normally $120 RoboTask 3.1 software as a free download and registration for today only. If you're forced to perform perfunctory file operations or software actions regularly, like renaming and zipping up a folder of files or uploading a regularly-updated file to an FTP server, RoboTask might be perfect for you. The open-source scripting tool AutoHotkey is always free, but if you prefer a click-and-choose interface to learning AutoHotkey scripts, RoboTask is a fairly straightforward way of making your computer do the menial work. RoboTask is free at the Giveaway of the Day web site for the next 19 hours only, and is for Windows systems only.

The Digital Inspiration blog details a relatively simple method for creating your own interactive instant messenger "bot" that will take action once it receives an IM. Creating the bot requires an invitation from the IMified service, as well as some web space to host a bot script. Once you're set up, you've got an online presence that can reply with custom messages to chatters, send out group emails based on what you type to your secret IM contact, and much more. Hit the link below for a tutorial and example Google search script.

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You've seen how the built-in scheduler for Linux/Unix systems, Cron, can help you automate tasks to make things like auto-switching wallpaper easy and simple. Incron, a scheduling tool available in most Linux repositories, works on the same principles, but from a different starting point—it watches files and folders for changes, then launches actions when they do. Linux.com's guide shows how you could have a sound play every time a file is created in a certain directory, or have files be auto-deleted when other files are created, or do pretty much anything your imagination can dream up. The scheduling app is limited to command line functions, but it's only a matter of time until someone hacks up a helpful GUI front-end to it. Hit the link for a guide to getting started with Incron.

Online office suite Zoho continues to push the envelope with advanced features you never thought you'd find in a webapp—this time it's macro recording and playback in Zoho Sheet, their online spreadsheet product. Instead of composing Visual Basic code by hand, Zoho Sheet can record a set of actions and play them back over other sets of data. Hit the play button to see this huge time-saving trick in action.

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Personal finance blogger J.D. Roth is on the road towards making his money system completely paperless. Direct deposit, automatic savings transfers, Quicken, and auto bill pay gets most paper out of the way. Then Roth scans any paperwork that does come in to PDF with our favourite scanner—the Fujitsu ScanSnap—and then he shreds it. Nice to see how several parts of his paperless system has also evolved into an automated finance system, too. How do you make your money go without too much paper (or intervention)? Let us know in the comments.

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Tim from the Daily Cup of Tech weblog has transitioned to an almost all BitTorrent TV diet, but the resulting disorganisation of files left him with an unsettled stomach. He prefers to archive everything he downloads to a system of folders, but while some video files he downloads hit his hard drive as plain AVI files, others are archived RARs, and manually organising it all became to much of a hassle. The solution: a saucy Windows batch script that automatically extracts RARs and sends all of his files off to the proper, well-organised folders. If you've got your own method of automating your file organisation, let's hear about it in the comments.

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Windows only: Freeware utility Z-Cron replaces the Windows task scheduler with a more robust, cron-like alternative (but with a graphical interface). Z-Cron ships with a long set of useful actions you can automate, like sending an email, copying a folder, deleting files, emptying the trash, and way more, which makes writing batch files to do these things for you effectively obsolete. Z-Cron is a free download for Windows only.

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