Ever wonder about what you might need to wire your own house or apartment with its own LAN or home automation system? This might just be the topic for you. Royster and theguru are both looking for information as to the best ways to go about this. I'm sure there are quite a few of you Slashdotters out there who have already gone through such things and could help out these two with any issues they might have. Read on for their actual submissions.

Glarvat the Hepcat writes, "Lucent is preparing to sell new 11 Mbps cards at costs to rival some of the 2 Mbps cards such as WebGear. They also are supposed to be also to handle distances of up to 1500 feet. Released to select retailers by late March. " Recently we ordered a few Lucent cards at the Geek Compound to test them out. The impressive thing about these things is that Wavelan has Linux drivers: Source code and all. How many vendors have tarballs on their sites? The hardware gateways are fairly expensive, but simply setting them up peer to peer and using IP Masqing works pretty well. I haven't tested the range but they quite quick.

diggem writes, "I don't personally have this problem (YET!), but I know people who do... too many PDA-like devices, all with their own desktop syncro software which isn't usually compatible with other sync software. A new proposal is trying to correct the problem. It's called SyncML, an XML-based spec for sharing data between portable devices, your computer and the Web. The initial draft has backing from Palm Computing, Nokia, Psion, Motorola, Starfish (Motorola subsidiary), IBM and Lotus (IBM subsidiary). So it looks to have fairly significant backing. Cool! "

h0rus writes, "One of the guys from Ars went to Cyrix's unveiling of their new x86 chip, the Cyrix III (codenamed "Joshua"), and wrote up a summary of what was announced. The chip looks like a pretty sweet budget/mobile x86 option: 64K L1, 256K L2, dual-pipelined FPU, Socket 370 compatible, and not clock-locked. Maybe Cyrix can redeem their name with this one. "

cloudscout writes, "The latest craze in handheld computing isn't the new Palm IIIc, it's the IBM WorkPad z50 currently being unloaded at ridiculously low prices by all sorts of discount Internet retailers. This device runs Windows CE 2.11 by default, however, a successful NetBSD Port means that this device could be the first widespread *NIX handheld. There's even a Linux Port in the works. The initial blowout saw these devices selling for under $250, but the huge demand has driven that price up to the $400 range now. Still cheap for a nearly full-sized system with 640x480 color LCD. "

An anonymous reader sent us a story about Seagate spinning 15,000-rpm disk drive. This stuff spins faster then my head ;) I don't shop for hard drives very often... it kinda blew me away to see 40 gig IDE drives for only a few hundred bucks. I'm getting all nostalgic for the days of two 360k floppy drives. Weird.

homerj79 writes, "Palm Computing announced today the release of their next generation Palm's, the IIIc and IIIxe. The IIIc sports 8MB of RAM, PalmOS 3.5 and a very cool 256-color TFT display. The Palm also has a built in rechargable battery that supposedly lasts for two weeks between charges. The IIIxe is much like the IIIx, but doubles the RAM to 8MB. Both also have a new casing on them, with a dark slate colored case rather than the gray of the past. "

Ender42 writes "Princeton scientists have created a variety of light-emitting materials that could greatly accelerate the development of flat-panel computer screens and other compact video displays. The discovery, a feat of engineering materials at the level of quantum mechanics, also may yield insights into the basic properties of light-emitting substances. " Practically speaking this means cheaper, higher res, lower power LCD displays. "

Hollinger writes "Dimension Technologies, Inc. has created and is selling LCD displays that yield true 3D images without tracking hardware. 'No Glasses. No Headtrackers. No Eyestrain. No Compromise. No Kidding,' according to their Web site. " I'll believe it when I see it, but can you imagine playing Everquest or something on this thing?

Wes Peters writes (via DaemonNews): " I bought an ABIT BP6 dual Celeron (socket 370) motherboard today, to work SMP projects with FreeBSD. While poking through the user manual, I was pleasantly surprised to find the following in section 1-5.

Dual Processor Knowledge You Should Know

For best performance, you should use an OS (Operating System) that supports multi-processors. The following OSes can support multi-processor functions: Microsoft Windows(R) NT (3.5x, 4.x and 5.x), SCO Unix, FreeBSD 3.0 or later, Linux, etc.

(emphasis added) This is the first specific mention of BSD I've seen in a PC hardware manual. This board comes strongly recommended."

Stacey Brewer sent us linkage to a press release from Xybernaut DCH Technology to work on 24-hour fuel cells for use with their Mobile Assistant: a crazy little wearable that yes, will run Linux. I need a demo unit, darnit!

An anonymous reader pointed us to an anandtech article that discusses the future of device attachment. Specifically USB 2:Electric Boogaloo and Serial ATA. Definitely 2 standards will likely matter a lot in the future. That Serial ATA stuff looks interesting...

Adas writes "We've slapped an article discussing and presenting something that could make your brand new 6X DVD-ROM drive blush in its bay. It's called FMD-ROM and is is slated to be ready for production before the end of this year. The 12mm (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) disc version of this memory will store up to 140GB! In the future, we're looking at capacities of up to 1,4 _terabytes_ per disc, and transfer speeds of up to 1GB per second. Wipe the drool off your collar and read on here. "

Avrice writes "National semiconductors gigbit ethernet is backwards compatible with existing systems and smart enough to fix your wiring screw ups for only $95. Maybe bandwidth (at least on the network) won't be such a problem after all."

J. FoxGlov writes "UCLA's Project Appleseed has been updated with new benchmarks showing their clusters of Macintosh G3s and G4s running neck and neck with Crays and kicking the snot out of Pentium II clusters, generating fractal clusters in parallel. Includes the recipe for making your own Apple-flavored Beowulf cluster. "

DeepDarkSky writes "This is a general interest story in the NY Times about Morris Chang - the founder and chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor - and the dynamics of semiconductor manufacturing in Taiwan, and how the earthquakes a while back affected it. Since Taiwan is the leading manufacturer of chips, with Intel, Motorola, and IBM (also Transmeta, as I vaguely recall in the press releases) all having chips manufactured in Taiwan, I thought this would be an interesting read. More significantly, also in the NY Times, another story about the U.S. House of Representatives voting to strengthen military ties with Taiwan. Perhaps they are all too aware of the U.S.'s (and the world's) dependence on Taiwan's chip manufacturing prowess (reminded by the earthquakes) and are eager to protect this source against China?" (free NYT reg. req.)

PsyMaster writes "I found this article over at PalmStation. There's a dude who made a Palm case out of rosewood. There are some great pics and the person even changed his stylus to be wood-covered. I wondered if it was a simulated wood initially, but you can definitely see the real wood scratches. Very cool."

Brian Hayward asks: "Does anyone have any experience using the Palm Pilot with packet radio? I'm interested in using my Palm IIIx to connect to my home Linux computer in a wireless fashion, but I don't want to pay the ridiculous per minute/per kbyte charges that are currently levied on wireless data users in my area. I know it's possible, but I'm not sure that the PalmOS software exists to do this. (I haven't seen AX.25 software for PalmOS yet). I know the software exists to do this on the Linux side."

gasp asks: "At work, our computer rooms use high-end rackmount systems. At home, I use the '8 year-old folding table piled high with computers held together by daisy-chained power-strip rat-nest' system. I find plenty of ATX and AT style midtower cases for about $30, but I haven't found any simple rackmount cases for less than about $200. Does somebody make the equivalent of a midtower-size case turned sideways with a couple of 19" rackmount brackets? It sure would be nice to find an affordable solution for home." Man, with four and soon to be five boxes sitting in my living room, I sure could use something like this!

AntMan asks: "OK. I am building a new system for myself. Now checking on pricewatch.com I noticed that Dual processor motherboards can be had for under $100. My budget was $800 tops. But on doing some research I realized that I could build a 866 Mhz dual Celeron system in that much with change left over. But when I looked on Anandtech, Aceshardware, and tomshardware, I found very few reviews/guides for building dual processor systems. Additionally I wanted to build a system, in which I can put in a couple of cheap 433MHz celerons PPGAs, and hopefully upgrade to a couple of 1GHz PIIIs when the price is right (in about a year or so). So my question is ... Is this possible? And what MB would people recommend?"