Back in the day, I'd tee a supposedly quiet log file to /dev/snd0 on my workstation so I could take a nap under the desk and be sure to be woken up when the particles hit the fabric, so to speak..
It'd be an audio device on probably some old Sun or SGI workstation. It would expect to receive bytes in RIFF (WAV), AU, or some other format the backing hardware is equipped to decode. Teeing a log file into it would produce some form of horrible noise every time a line was written to the log. So if you set up that tee while the logfile is quiet, turn the speakers up, and stretch out under the desk, it'll give you a very effective wake alarm when the log starts seeing new entries.