Idiot things to do with computers

And I honestly beleive I am in the top 10 on this one.

I have been involved with computers for way too long. My mother was right, I should have got a proper job!

I am not rich, and I certainly do not earn enormous sums of money, but that has not prevented me from having a formidable collection of working computers. None of which are worth a red cent.

One of the misconceptions about computers is that you have to have the latest and greatest hardware. If all you do is play online, do a little bit of word processing, and things like that, any old piece of junk will do (and I should know).

Junk is what I like, and junk is what I do.

Our main TV is an old Apple Mac Performa, it has a TV card in it, and it works great! I have an old 19 inch monitor on it, I even have a remote control for it. As I recall it was from the 1996 vintage of Apples, a very fine year indeed. Recently we had to call in a plumber, and apparently (according to my wife) he walked by it, stopped, retraced his steps, and said "wow, how the hell do you do that on a computer?". Jans answer was simple, "I have no clue, you would have to ask Simon". In my opinion this is a great use of a computer that other people would just junk.

One sunday morning about a year ago, I was bored, I needed some diversion, well I decided that what the family needed was another computer. I had no plan or need for another one, but it seemed like a good way to while away and hour or so. The first hurdle that I encountered was I did not have a case to put it in, my junk pile was high in motherboards, processors, ram, and all of the other internal stuff, but not a case in sight.

What I did have tho, was some empty beer can boxes. This was the start of the BeerBox project. You can find all of the gory details here.

The BeerBox has been a very stable platform, I have Linux (fedora) and all sorts of interesting software running on it. In fact if you clicked on the link above, you were actually on the BeerBox, its my Web Page Server!