On Monday, December 30, 2002, at 03:16 PM, Brian O'Neal wrote: > I have been thinking about buying a G3 Powerbook on ebay with a dead > display > for use as an add-on to my home entertainment system. I haven't really > thought it all the way through yet.
My current thought project is a quite different from this, but related. A few weeks ago, the CD player on my sound system went out. My first reaction was to run down to Best Buy and grab another. After sleeping on it for a couple of nights, I started thinking about putting a computer there instead. It can have a CD player and all the MP3s I want. Then, I started doing a little research, and decided that it makes sense for it to play DVDs too. From there, it was a short hop to do-it-yourself Tivo. All the software is available for free, and there are several sites out there talking about how to do it with Linux. There are several places that make "LAN party" boxes. These are complete Intel or AMD computers not much larger than a shoe box with no fan. They have on-board video and Ethernet. You can buy them sans drive, processor and RAM. Most have one empty PCI slot. My idea is to put one of those ATI cards that have video in and s-video out in the PCI slot and wire it in to my home network. I think all this could be done with a Mac, but I'd want to do it with something like the Cube, and that would be really expensive because there's no cheap way to get the video in and out. -- Lee Larson, Mathematics Department, University of Louisville Phone: 502-852-6826 FAX: 502-852-7132 | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 28. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>.
