Question: I'm toying with the idea of a pet project..

I wanna make our coffee machine remote controlled by a web interface.

The idea is to hit a "make me coffee button" and have it poll the router get the MAC address list to see who's in the office and send them a growl notification (we all use macs) asking if they'd like coffee and then doing something with a relay to turn the coffee machine on..

Can you recommend a programmable wifi relay or small embedded system for this?

Answer: 
***If*** your "normal" download would supply *those exact headers*, then ***no***.

However, a number of things could cause the server to decide to send different headers:

* If **[gzip](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip#Other_uses)** is turned on (and browser accepts it)
* If the [request](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_header_fields#Requests) sent an **If-Modified-Since** header and the content has not been modified
* If the server decides to send a **Last-Modified** time
* If the server has some other sort of [cache-control logic](http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/caching.html)
I would think this would also let you create a download for a resource that is normally forbidden for a user to directly access. It also seems like you could use this for a file that only exists in memory, without having to write it out to disk first.