Have your computer speak when a ping works, like in this classic story: http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/ping.html

ping_speaker.sh

#!/bin/bash

# Ping-speaker oneliner

# This shell oneliner will ping a host once twice every second, then call my
# custom text-to-speech program to speak that output. This is meant to act
# similarly to the classic story of a use for ping found here:
# http://ftp.arl.mil/mike/ping.html

# Be aware, I wrote this to work on Cygwin on my system specifically. It also
# relies on a custom program, "text-to-speech.exe" that I haven't released the
# source code for. So this is not really all that useful for anyone else :/

{ while true; do ping "$1" -n 1 > /dev/null 2>&1 && echo "ping" && sleep 0.5; done } | { while read line; do text_to_speech.exe $line & done }