So far, the only two things I've done that might conceivably be useful to anyone else is "varianlog", a small perl-script that can be used to do continuous monitoring of vacuum pressure via a "Varian Multigauge", as well as bjgm,a set of shell scripts that facilitate microblogging via jekyll (also works from Android!)
here is a link to the varianlog source-code. Dependencies: well, perl of course, and the SerialPort package.
The script I use to populate my Jekyll-powered (micro-)blog is called BJGM and works from any computer (or phone!) that can run bash and git. It lives on github at https://github.com/mhellwig/bjgm.
you can reach the owner of FNANP at mhellwig (at) in (dash) ulm (dot) de
since this seems to be required by German law (nobody knows for sure, though), Impressum and privacy policy / Datenschutzerklärung.