Gextyr submitted a question regarding something I've always wondered about as well. He asks: "I work at a local computer shop, and was just given permission to put together a Linux box for display and demo purposes. My boss gave me a touch screen for this (the touch matrix is serial controlled) purpose as well. I want to know if there is any touch screen support for Linux, and if so, where can I get mode information about it?"

needles writes "Afraid to leave home 'cause you'll be without your Linux box? Check out the CAJUN Car Audio Jukebox page where it describes how to use a linux box and a Matrix Orbital LCD display and keypad to add a mp3 Linux-based jukebox to your car audio system and fear no longer. The only problem I see in building this is the temperature and shock conditions for the components of the Linux box. Does anyone know what the most reliable components (especially the hard drive) for these conditions would be? " Something like this would work in your living room too. Somebody needs to sell these things. Anyone? Please?

Peter Williams writes "The second and third prequels for the Star Wars saga are to be filmed in Sydney Australia, in the renovated former showground studios. Filming is set to begin in 2000. The studios have really only been used for the forthcoming Keanu Reeves vehicle, The Matrix and the Babe sequel. Pig in the City. "

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.