"There's finally an Indy on my desk instead of a Sun4. This means that I also have an IndyCam, so I hacked up a script to grab and save a frame of me sitting there every five minutes." (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html)

https://github.com/thwarted/picsofourlives

"You don't look confident in the picture, is there some reason for that?"

Would there be any straightforward ways to pull this off with Git on my Windows machine?

$ time sh -c exit

real 0m0.002s

user 0m0.001s

sys 0m0.000s

$ time ruby -e exit

real 0m0.009s

user 0m0.008s

sys 0m0.000s

OTOH I do agree that it is a bit silly to start a Ruby interpreter if you're only going to use it to shell out :)

Because the time it would take them to check the arcane shell syntax would dwarf the time it takes for them to throw a Ruby script together.

Because they like using a superior programming language over the cruft that are the shell syntaxes.

Because they can add more fancy stuff and features to the Ruby version far more easily.

Because they can incorporate the Ruby version to a larger program later on.

    file="~/.gitshots/$(date).jpg"
    echo "Taking capture into ${file}!"
    imagesnap -q -w 3 $file

    #!/bin/sh
    imagesnap -q -w 3 "~/.gitshots/$(date).jpg"

Plus the above wont even work as is, since $(date) contains spaces.

This would be "more direct" part.

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    num_snaps = 5
    time_int = Time.now.to_i
    num_snaps.times do |i|
      file="~/.gitshots/#{time_int}__#{i+1}_of_#{num_snaps}.jpg"
      system "imagesnap -q #{file}"  
    end
    exit 0

Picturesnap somehow supports sequences but there's no control to how long they should last (would require firing a background task), and snapshots get saved in the running directory (instead of based on the passed filename/path) which would require mving each file. Pull request could be a short and sweet free time project...

Here's what I have for what it's worth:

    #!/usr/bin/env ruby
    require 'rubygems'
    require 'systemu'
    Dir.chdir(File.expand_path('~/.gitshots'))
    cam_warm_up_time = 2
    num_snaps = 6
    interval = 0.2
    systemu "imagesnap -w #{cam_warm_up_time} -t #{interval}" do |cid|
      sleep cam_warm_up_time + interval * num_snaps
      Process.kill 9, cid
      exit 0
    end

Are there any more "unusual" git hack?

Rampage!

Not really designed for public consumption, and the code is quick and dirty. Designed to run on a Mac.

Can also be used with speech recognition and applescripts to curl the web server for voice commands.

http://coderwall.com/p/ijgggw

I'll just leave now.