Arduino hack lights up the tree with every email, spammers get in spirit

The vacations are all about eggnog, ugly sweaters and disconnecting from the web just long enough to reassure the family you continue to care. For those people with web separation anxiety, the folk at MAKE have hooked us up with a good way to remain hip to incoming emails — by connecting the vacation fir to the Internets. It really works as such: using an Arduino and PHP script , the tree will check for incoming emails and lightweight up if the number has increased. The set-up may be tweaked in line with your most valued kind of alert like YouTube comments, texts or changes within the weather. To the family, it should seem like unparalleled holiday cheer instead of your cue to ditch the sing-a-long and come back to Gmail. Investigate the video after the break.

[Thanks, Matt]