Klas Elmby writes "I have completed the building of a MP3CD player for my home-stereo. I hope this could inspire/help others to do the same thing. It is based on a Matrix Orbital LCD-display with keypad interface and ... yes, linux. " Now that is what I want for Christmas! The RIAA needs to back off so we can all buy these things. With 9 gigs hard drives. Imagine not having to rummage through mountains of CDs to find that perfect track. Update the other link died fairly quickly. Klas has since moved the pages here.

Gavin Peters wrote to tell us about a free CPU to be released soon. It runs at 9MHz and is programmed into a $10 FPGA. Gavin reminds us that "A FPGA is a "Field Programmable Gate Array" - a matrix of gates that you can configure _through software_ - to do essentially anything. You can make an ASIC, a custom microprocessor, and/or memory. All reprogrammable many times a second.".

Mike Johnson writes "Going back to all the talk about the nifty little LCDproc displays, I found something that might be of interest. Check out this site for information about a small display." Its a bit thin on details, but it costs only $99. Takes RGB input. SVGA would be cooler, but hey, its cheap. Add sine QuickCams for cheap videoconferencing, Or hook it up in a space where you don't have room for a big screen. I dunno. It just looks cool.

Michael Eilers has written a sort of introduction to Beowulf, what it does, what it doesn't do, and why we should care. It really is a sort of quickie distributed computing FAQ that many of you might enjoy. So hit the link below and find out.

Sixl6 wrote in to tell us about another encryption cracking project happening. Virtual Matrix Encryption claims to be the strongest in the world, but if you can crack it, you can make some money- web page says over a million bucks if you can rip open VME98.