I keep Tux on my desk at work. I expect to use him to assist me with a number of tasks including monitoring systems that I maintain. However I don't want him to notify me of events while I am away from my desk. As such I am working on a simple feature that will permit me to notify tux when I'm away so that he won't speak during that time. At this point I'm thinking that it should monitor my screensaver. When active Tux will know I'm away. It also seems reasonable to have it monitor the status of my instant messenger or simply provide a command that can be given to Tux to enable/disable it's speech functionality. I'm looking for ideas as to how to implement this feature. For instance can this be accomplished by writing a gadget or do I need to get into the API? I'm comfortable with either solution. Furthermore I'm interested in whether there are any projects already working on this functionality.

I look forward to your thoughts,
Dustin