Buy an empeg. Install it in the room with ethernet, and always leave it in standby (so it remains at room temperature). Use http to periodically poll /proc/empeg_therm to read the room temperature in degrees C. Problem Solved!

You know, I'm not making much use of my Mark 1...

Of course, if I did that, I'd need a way to get empeg_therm (okay, I could do it from the serial port with a bit of scripting), but then I'd want to use it as the music server for our phone system music-on-hold, thus defeating the leave-in-standby.

As it stands, the PC I'm thinking of using for our thermal sensor is the music-on-hold server... It's the only one running win98 and a lot of those thermal sensor programs won't run on NT variants...