TUAW's Daily Mac App: Shuttie

Ever wanted to leave your Mac running unattended at night, but don't want it running all night long? Today's Daily Mac App will help you do just that.

Shuttie allows you to bind one of six actions to a countdown timer, allowing you to shutdown, restart, sleep or logout of your Mac, or fire off an AppleScript or an alert. You select the action you want, the countdown time and hit the activate button. Shuttie will provide periodic Growl notifications as it counts down to zero, as well as a timer on its dock icon, and then it will initiate whichever activity you've got selected. Loading an AppleScript is a drag-and-drop affair while your desired alert text is entered into a text box.

Sure, there are other ways of doing this kind of thing, but Shuttie is a good way to set up these tasks to be performed remotely. It's US$1.99 in the Mac App Store.