Apparently, we’re very close to having a low-power, affordable Linux media (er, audio) center, driven by a tiny wall-wart. It should only need to support networking, USB, ssh, external storage, and audio output. The candidate is called the Marvell ShivaPlug, and it features some of those, and maybe the rest can be satisfied.
Some webhosts make it a bit tedious to send email from your shell, and even harder inside your scripts or web apps. But setting up Django properly enables this to become a one-liner whenever you need it.