10 Feb
2000
10 Feb
'00
8:41 a.m.
On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
in them. What I've decided to do for terminals
around the house (including
the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
X-windows, and let them surf the web as well as accessing our answering
machine (which runs on our file server, and is already web-enabled), Mister
House control console, and the CD jukebox control software. I'm going to
*try* to set up either a Real Audio server or some kind of multicast audio
server, and have a sound card in the server sampling and digitizing the
output of the CD jukebox and the computer-controlled FM radio tuner, so you
can "tune in" from any workstation in the place and listen to the radio or
CDs. (Hey - I've gotta have *something* to keep me out of trouble!)
Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked on touchscreens though.
Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
to come with caveats... I have some 386 mono-LCD tablet computers with
them, but with only 2 megs RAM and 5 megs flash, which basically restricts
them to DOS apps. And a couple of touchscreen CRTs for Macintoshes
which work great, but can't be wall-mounted like the others and I also
don't have a lot of suitable software for the Mac yet. I'm just going
to end up having to write some software. I'm playing with the metawidgets
concept (XML to describe what the GUI should consist of, and leave its
rendering up to the client). More about that at
http://cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com/~ecloud/journal/
For now on the Mac in the kitchen, I can use a touchscreen keyboard to
do command line stuff via telnet to one of the Linux boxes, or I can run
an old version of MacX to run X apps but that's ugly because it won't
run full-screen. The menubar and titlebar waste a lot of space.
--
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