This is cool! How about a real bell that can send you an email when its struck rather than ring? A hack has surfaced that takes one of those bells it connects the bell to your computer via USB. The idea is that instead of those computer generated dings to tell you when you have new email, this bell will ding to tell you for realz. It seems that the virtual bell would do the trick just as well and you can mute the sounds if the dinging drives you crazy.
The USB bell uses an electromagnet to activate the bells dinger. Apparently, the bell is easy to build as well. You need a few parts and you need to have some soldering skills, have a bit of electronics understanding, and you don’t need to know much in the way of programming.
Read more here.