Morten Bentsen, a 17 year old from Norway made a system that would show him the quality of his internet connection at a glance. If you are into online gaming this could be something useful.

"I recently made an indicator to show the status of my internet connection. It consists of a small VB.net application, which pings a certain site with a set interval (both user-changeable, and sets the DTR-pin of a serial port (port name is changeable) depending on the ping-answer. The DTR-pin goes to a small mosfet, which controls a small telecom relay. The relay is switching 24 volts to the LED-panels this is great for LAN-parties, because the participants can easily see if they are the only one who dont have internet, or if the whole party has lost it. There is one problem though, when I watch videos at youtube, the lights are blinking, because youtube is using all my bandwidth. (yeah I know, my internet connection sucks :D)"