It happens to most of us and can be very frustrating - often is :)
Looking on and off for an easy & cheap switchable mains device and a few weeks ago stumbled across this from digital-loggers.com, readily available from amazon for $20.
Often these devices aren't so cheap, but this one looks great. Sure you can use the normal 2 pole relay with a load of hand crafted wires, but I'm not up for this in this instance when we are talking about a box that needs to sit near the cable modem itself an kids are around.
The device has 2 sockets normally off and 2 normally on, and is Raspberry Pi ready, so theory goes should be just drive-able from gpio..
I figure we'll use the normally on sockets to power the cable modem and when the Pi can't talk to the outside world it will be a simple case of cycling the the sockets down via gpio...
time for the 'amINetConnected-Pi' project to be born...
