Being able to control my home automation setup remotely is critical but I also wanted to receive event notifications from the computer on my phone. The solution is relatively simple, especially if you have an iPhone.

I installed Growl for Windows. To send notifications from the command-line I downloaded growlnotify from the same site. The final component is an app for the phone that can receive Growl notifications over the Internet. In my case I chose Prowl for iPhone but there are other services available.

To avoid receiving Growl notifications you don’t want (such as application events that don’t need to go to your phone) you can set the priority of the message with growlnotify and then configure Growl to only forward notifications of a certain priority to your mobile device.

This is especially useful if you have alarm events setup or reminders. For example, sometimes I forget to put the trash up at the curb so mControl is configured to send me a notice on the appropriate morning for trash pickup.