What are some cool/useful things to do with a spare computer?
I'm looking for interesting extra functionality I can add to the house.
Thanks!
The coolest project I've done with an old box involved playing with power-on over ethernet. The box I've had was configured (using BIOS) to power up in the middle of the night, send "wake up" packets to other machines (they were turned off), wait for them to power on, incrementally backup up their entire hard drives and power off everything including itself. I would wake up in the morning with all computers powered off. That was fun to watch multiple machines waking up, buzzing their drives and turning off by themselves.
These days I never turn anything off though...
My own particular set of computer horror stories include a batch of Olivetti laptops (Pentium I-era) that refused to run a critical business app, a Gateway Desktop that refused to run a critical database app, a Sony Vaio desktop that was cute but completely useless ... all of which I would cheerfully have shot.
The only one that's seen success is the media center that records television, and that's only because the capture card didn't have the right drivers for my current desktop.
The other most common uses I hear (servers to tinker with Technology X) can just be done in a VM, which will generate far less noise, heat, and power bills.
That person will most likely be a broke student entrepreneur in dire need of more computing power.
General replies:
1. I will not donate this computer as it's the only spare one I have. I do promise though to donate the next spare one I get.
2. It's a laptop, so turning it into an aquarium is not going to work. Poor fish.
3. The reaon that it's spare and not donatable is that the screen connection is very very loose and so the Force of Duct Tape is what's keeping it alive.
What I've decided to do based on the replies:
1. Install Linux (of course) and set up a central backup server, attach the house's printer to it, and attach the current external backup drive.
2. Turn it into a media server. I'll be trying both MythTV and XBMC and will report later.
3. I will donate the spare CPU cycles to Folding@Home, at least initially. BOINC and other distributed computing projects will get time. Maybe I'll cycle once a month.
Thank you again :)
Put a kill-a-watt on it and see how much power it draws, to consider whether you should leave it on all the time. Booting it up once a week and running the backups might be smarter. As a rough back-of-the-envelope figure, at 11 cents a kilowatt-hour running one watt for a year costs a dollar -- so if it sucks 80 watts sitting their with no monitor (a reasonable figure) that's $80 bucks a year, if you are paying more than 11 cents it is correspondingly more.
You can never have too many backups, and in my experience having the data on a complete separate machine is more reliable and easier to recover from than USB disks or other schemes. If everything else dies, just flip on the backup machine and start working from there, presuming it has the necessary software installed.
Samba share.
Pluto home (really nifty home automation + media server).
Donating to those who need a computer would be my first choice; donating CPU power to something like BOINC my second.
- HostAPD and experimenting with different wifi configurations, like one open/one closed network, maybe incorporate RADIUS or something cool.
- Try another OS that's intrigued me, like Haiku or Plan 9
- Set up a virtual honeynet, maybe connected to a graphic representation like in that one xkcd comic, and watch the malware go
Giving it to someone who needs it for their main PC is the best bet.
- control lighting, I'm looking into installing RGB LED's and so it would be ultracool to be able to have a program that can actually control the LED's, with different shades of colors, turning down the light when the sun goes up, etc.
- monitor engine vitals. A friend of mine has done some really cool small wireless data recorders that can be used (http://dzl.dk/projects/electronics/102logger/102logger.html)
- power usage. When I'm sailing everything runs on batteries, so I really want to monitor how much power I'm using and how much I've got left.
- Charts. I'. thinlking about a webbased application that shows the boat in the middle of Google maps, so I know what's around me when I'm out sailing. There's usually 3G wireless when you're close to land.
- Music. Last.fm when I'm on the net, mp3's when I'm out to sea.
Might even end up as a startup...
Pretty hard to hack a computer with no power. Pretty hard to accidentally delete a file from one, too.
But, old computer buildup is why I'm looking into getting a local rack, possibly a bladecenter for home use. I can usually use some more power for long-running/heavy-load programs, but I don't want to have that many desktop boxes under my desk. I'd rather just accumulate a local grid.
All my other machines use the drives on their for storage and backup and use small and fast drives such as the WD Raptor instead of something like the Spinpoint 1TB drive.
Improves the performance of my real desktop and puts my data under linux rather than windows making remote access possible if I want to take the risk,
Install linux on it and in ten years you'll get a kernel hacker (yes, growing hackers actually takes ten years)
Or put it in the kitchen for recipes etc.