The latter was interesting as I intend to build something like that one day. The control system looked good as it was more like a DVD player than a PC to use. It was running on a humble 800MHz C3, which is not much by modern standards, but allows it to run cool and quiet. When I get around to it I'll be looking for the ability to play DVD, CD, various video file formats, MP3/OGG etc as well as recording TV from digital terrestrial. Another option in this field is MythTV.

Apart from my digital video success my other Linux find this week was that you can use a URL like fish://user@server in some browsers to get secure file transfer. It works in Konqueror, but I've not been able to find much documentation on it apart from some forum/mailing list comments. It seemes to be related to the command line scp, but allows you to drag and drop. I know I'm losing geek points by now using the command line, but I sometimes like a GUI. This goes back to my early days of using the wonderful Norton Commander on DOS. I ought to try out the Linux clones.