What do I do with an old laptop?

[Phil Hagelberg]

On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 22:12 -0500, Matt Price wrote:
> make it into a big clunky ipod with amarok and blackbox.  buy a
> wireless pcmcia card and you can stream audio from wherever. 

This is what I would do with it. =D

1. Set up your desktop or server to share your music collection over
NFS.

2. Get your laptop on wifi and mount it.

3. Plug your laptop into your stereo.

4. Install mpd [http://musicpd.org] and put gmpc on your desktop.

Other crazy ideas:

Use it as an extra display for your main computer using x2x
[http://technomancy.us/article/x2x] (I've done this, and it's really
great.)

When I was in college I had a Debian 486 laptop that we had for the sole
purpose of calculating who was doing chores which week at our house. (It
was really complicated; there was lisp involved.)

Put it in the kitchen and store recipes on it.

Give it to a kid who shows an interest in software.

Load it up with a bunch of emulators (SNES, Genesis) and use it as a
gaming device.

-Phil