I've always liked XMMS as a music player program on Linux. It had enough features, but the basic interface was always simple enough to just work. Unfortunately, it is not maintained any longer, and in my latest Ubuntu upgrade to version 8.10, I found it was no longer included or supported.

The XMMS project continued with a successor, XMMS2, but it is much more than just a simple audio player. I looked at it and got lost fairly quickly. I just wanted something simple like the original XMMS.

We had a short power outage, and when the power resumed, the fan in our iMac (intel core duo) was stuck on full speed. It sounded like a jet plane. I waited a minute or two for it to slow down, but it didn't stop. Even rebooting didn't affect it.

After some Internet searching, I found that there is a chip which controls the fans, which can get stuck like this. Fortunately it can be reset also.

I bought a cheap GPS on EBay. I got a Palm Vx with a Magellan GPS Companion attachment for ten dollars. By PDA standards the Palm Vx is completely obsolete, but it works fine as a GPS data logger.

I've recently come across two interesting projects and web sites: openaerialmap.org and openstreetmap.org. These two projects are efforts to collect and share freely-available map information.

When I fixed up an old drill press, I found that the switch plate for the on/off switch was fairly worn. The original paint and lettering was worn away, so that the start/stop wording was almost unreadable. Even though I am clever enough to figure out that the big red button means "stop", it needed a clearly readable switch plate label.

I have an old laser printer which does not have a decent standby power-saving mode.  I built a computer-controlled power switch for it, so the computer turns on the printer when there is a print job, then turns it off again later.

JPEG images are a good data format for photographs because they contain data that is compressed in a manner optimized for the human eye. However, it is a "lossy" compression, meaning that if they are unencoded and re-encoded several times, the image will lose quality.

Sometimes all I want to do is crop a picture, to chop off uninteresting areas of the photo. Several tools can do this by working on the native JPEG data, meaning there is no loss of information from re-encoding the image.

I have been using LTSP for a while to turn old PCs into X terminals. LTSP works well for a desktop PC that can use PXE or Etherboot. LTSP does not work as cleanly on old laptops with PCMCIA network cards. In these cases, the kernel has to be installed on the laptop hard disk, but the rest of the LTSP installation runs from the server. When upgrading LTSP, the kernel on the hard disk gets out of sync with the modules on the server, and the laptops stop working as terminals.

I've been looking for a simpler setup for a laptop X terminal, and I've found ThinStation.

I have Linux running on an IBM ThinkPad T41 laptop. I recently upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 4. Several things broke from upgrading, including sound.

I acquired an older Connect-Tek KVM (PC keyboard/video/mouse) switch. I got it for free because it was missing the power supply. I decided to make one.

Like many people, I have growing number of pictures from my digital camera. I decided that I wanted a digital picture frame to display them in the houseThe purchase price is just too expensive for me to afford (anywhere from US$100 to $900 or more) so instead I am building one.

I acquired an older HP Omnibook 2000 laptop. It has a 2GB hard drive, PCMCIA slots, and an 800x600 TFT LCD display. I am now working on the software setup. After that is working then I will do the hardware frame part.

This Omnibook 2000 is old enough that the BIOS does not support booting off of a CD directly. Many Linux installers have an option to boot from a floppy disk. However, many other software these days comes on a bootable CD but without a floppy option. And those that have a floppy option are often still easier to use with a single CD.

Therefore I decided I needed to be able to boot from CD. After searching around with Google, I found Smart BootManager.

A good audio source is of course your local radio stations. Sometimes, however, I want to listen to shows at a time other than when they are broadcast.

Using an FM radio tuner on the computer, you can capture the audio from the radio signal and save it to a sound file, such as MP3.

I'm using the DLink DSB-R100 tuner. It is a small FM radio which connects to the PC using USB for the tuning commands and the sound card's line-in connector for the audio.

Non-Fiction

• IT Conversations: Talks and seminars on computing topics.

• Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig: Audio book about public domain and personal liberty.

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• Dr Dobb's Technetcast: Computer talks and presentations from various conventions and lectures.

With LTSP, all applications run on the server. This is great for the low maintenance involved: install an application program once, and it is available immediately on all terminals.

However, some times you may want to discriminate between different terminals. For example, you may want to restrict web browsing at one terminal or another.