You hook a blower to the bottom "intake" of the smoker and you put a temperature probe at the grid where the meat is located. The controller turns the blower on to force air into the smoker which feeds the fire making it hotter. Once the probe reads the target temperature it shuts off the blower until the probe reading is below the target.

This is a DIY version of the Stoker from Rock's Barbeque (https://www.rocksbarbque.com/). It costs $340 to get the basics, pit thermometer, food thermometer, and fan. So add up the DIY costs and you could see some savings if your time is of no value or you just love doing things like this. I purchased the Stoker before its WiFi version was announced. I found a cheap WiFi adapter and hooked it up the the Stoker's Ethernet port. Once connected you can monitor your pit and food temperatures and control the pit temperature using any web browser and/or a program called StokerLog. If you really wanted to you can access it via telnet and do the same things. My Stoker keeps my large Big Green Egg to with +/- 3 degrees of my pit probe target over what is usually a 16 hour cook. Using my iPhone I'm able to check the food probe temperature and if needed change the target pit temperature, all from anywhere I have data access. With StokerLog running on my laptop it will create a graph of your cook showing the temp probe temperatures and fan power cycles over time. It also has open lid detection where it will pause the temperature control until you close the lid and the smoker stabilizes, not that you should be opening the lid during the cook. The main point of the ATCs is to give a steady pit temperature and allow you to get some sleep during the overnight cooks.

Just make it USB powered and then you can connect it to your laptop's USB ports... no more cables!

I have a local backup to an external HDD. Plus I have another external HDD that I seeded and took to my parents' house in another state. I now have three copies of my important data, two local (original and backup) and one off-site with CrashPlan. This gives me the ability to quickly restore using my local backup. If the house catches on fire then I can use the off-site to restore. I'd probably have it mailed back to me once the fire is put out... If I had to deal with 20 discs each time I created a backup then I probably wouldn't do it or it would be way out of date. Now it is all automated plus has a low $/GB.

Nothing like backing up to ~20 discs. I think I'll stick with my nightly backups to my external HDD and off-site external HDD connected with CrashPlan.

Wow, a 35 year old CD. Where is that time machine located?

Probably symlinks for the Amazon purchased music only. If 100,000 users uploaded a file with the same name then it would be 100,000 individual copies of the same file.

From the PS3's ability to be linked together...

I use an Obi110 device to make and receive calls on my home phone using Google Voice. It was the best $50 I've spent on a VoIP solution. It will remain free until at least the end of the year while GV is still free. Before that I used a Linksys PAP2 connected to an Asterisk server to do the same thing.

IIRC the Xbox 360 ban-hammer of fall 2009 took out the ability to install game discs to the hdd, use the Media Center Extender, and corrupted the user profiles so they cannot be transferred to another console (you have to restore from your Live online profile). A later update restored the install to hdd option, but the profile was still corrupt.

I see what you did there.

That just means the 3.55+ game downloads/torrents will already be cracked. Not everyone will have actual disc in hand trying to make a "backup".

The games would be on external drives and copied to whatever internal drive you currently have. Once you start filling up the internal drive you start deleting ones you don't play as often, but they still reside on the external drive. External drive space is cheaper.

Replay value is irrelevant when it involves free/pirated games. If they start banning from PSN and you really must play online you would either: risk it and play on your modded PS3, get the 360 version, or get another PS3 for online play and buy the game. Those with banned 360s typically have another clean system for Live and buy the multiplayer game of the day (COD or Halo). It doesn't take many pirated games to save enough money to buy a new system (~5 @ $60).