mgkimsal2 asks: "My in-laws are leaving tomorrow for Australia and they've become quite fond of our Tivo. They asked if there was any way to get Tivo in Australia, but I'm turning up a blank. It seems that some people are hacking it to work over there, but it's not commercially available. Are there other PVRs commercially available in Australia? Similarly, are there any cool PVR products in other countries we've not seen in the US yet?"

solli asks: "After 13 years of relatively faithful service my Mitsubishi(!) VCR has finally kicked the bucket, and I am now thinking of moving on to DVDs. One of the only things preventing me from buying a DVD is the fact that some media companies like to make you watch FBI warnings, trailers, and ads before allowing you to view the actual movie (like Disney's Tarzan). Of course, there is such a large demand for region free players and other specialized needs that niche markets have developed to fill that demand. However, I have seen nothing about players that give you the freedom to navigate through the disk the way you want to, instead of how the content producer wants you to. What DVD players exist that let the viewer take full advantage of the nonlinear properties of the DVD media? Can any of the available players ignore the directives embedded on-disk to disable certain controls at particular times?"

kernel_panic writes "Okay, I've been reading up on combining two or more SDSL connections together to give you one big fat pipe, but I haven't seen any references to doing this w/ ADSL. This place even manufactures a nifty little hardware device (ePipe) that combines two WAN ports for the aggregate sum. I've seen the Netopia 7000 Series routers support this capability as well, w/ an add-on card, but all of these places only mention accomplishing this w/ SDSL accounts. I've seen a lot of info on bandwidth load balancing, but I want bandwidth aggregation (inverse multiplexing). Has anyone had any experience doing this kind of thing w/ your Linux/BSD gateway boxen?"

Tsk asks: "One of the companies I work for uses ACE server for which I need a SecurID. This works fine in closed source Unix environment, however at home I have a mix of closed source unix, free unixes and Windows machines. I would like to be abe to use my SecurID at home and thus secure my network. I'm trying to do this because I have a client that only has BSD/Linux servers, who would like to implement a SecureID based solution. I did a Google search already using 'ACE server Open' and 'ACE server Free' and received no results. I'm wondering if such setup is doable, if the software to build it is available?"

semanticgap asks: "My employer is seeking to revamp the way its numerous servers and workstations are managed, and we're considering developing or piecing something together that is based on the DMTF CIM and WBEM specs. There are a few open source tools out there that implement these, e.g. Pegasus or IBM's SBLIM, and the spec seems to have been in development for years and supported by big guys like IBM, Sun, M$, etc. Does anyone use DMTF standards out there, and do you think it has a future?"

byrnereese asks: "It seems that every organization I have worked for has been plagued with the same problem: 'how do you effectively manage multiple environment configurations for the various development, staging and production environments that exist.' For example, each application at our company requires a different set of database credentials for each environment we deploy it to. For a long time we have maintained different config files for each environment and checked them into our SCCS; but that has proved incredibly error prone because a different build is required for each environment. Each company I have worked for utilizes a different systemology to make config file management a little easier, but none of them have stumbled upon anything that is any less error prone, or any easier to manage than any other solution to choose from. So I am curious, how does your company manage environment specific application configuration? And what does your change management process for these configurations look like?"

zrosener asks: "A have a friend who has ALS (Stephen Hawking's ailment), a particularly nasty disease in which her motor neurons deteriorate over time, slowly waylaying her. She is in pretty bad shape now, and her movement is restricted to moving her eyes, and very limited (1 inch in each direction) hand movement. She has very light bell that she uses to wake up her husband when she needs assistance, but as her strength wanes it is becoming less and less effective. She is afraid at night now that if something were to go wrong she would not be able to rouse her husband. My challenge to you is to design a noise-making-husband-alerting device cheaply and quickly assembled from strip mall parts (Radioshack, Walmart, etc.) that she could use with her extremely restricted movement. Buttons are out of the questions, as are anything that requires gripping. Analog answers are encouraged too! Please email all suggestions or post them."

strredwolf asks: "I may have a challange for you. I'm looking for specifications on the New Media Toast'n Jam PCMCIA card, also known as a Noteworthy SCSI/Audio combo card. Yeah, I know the Adaptec 152x driver works on this -- but I want to get the audio working on it! Does anyone have one of these cards and have audio working on it via Linux? I'd love to program up a driver for them. I've already looked via Google for both, but aparently, New Media Corporation doesn't exist anymore. And I don't have any documentation on this card with the box (had to pull the drivers through a third party)." Yet another argument for a company at least releasing the specs for their hardware when they go out of business. Has anyone had any luck teasing out soundwaves from their tweeters using this PCMCIA card?

Mr. Jackson asks: "What kind of disk transfer rates (MB/s) do people get in the real world when moving around large (100s MB) files? Either every machine in our building is mis-configured, or our notions about what we were getting are way off. I've tested half a dozen machines, mostly Win2k, some Linux, by just copying a large file and timing it with a watch. 8 MB/s seems to be about average for inter-disk copies. RAID 1 (stripped) got as high as 12 MB/s after fiddling with cache settings. RAID 5 was as low as 2 MB/s. We all thought the numbers should have been around 30 MB/s."

tom asks: "Buying second hand computers you always run a risk. I was wondering if the slashdot readers could suggest a toolbox of (preferably small) tools that you could take along with you on one or two floppy's so you could run some diagnostics on machines you would consider buying. I'm thinking of the checkdisks, benchmark programs, soundcard checks, USB checks etc."

GreenKiwi asks: "I've been really interested in finding a news source that has MP3s of their brodcasts. I have an iPod and download the news in text form most mornings to it so that I can find out what's going on. However, I would love to download (preferably automatically) news in the form of an MP3 that I could download to my iPod in the morning so that I could listen to the news on my way to work. The BBC has Real Audio output, but no MP3s that I can find. NPR has them for Real and WMP. I guess I could download and then convert the files. If that's possible. I'd love to hear whether anyone is doing this and how."

GilesP asks: "With so many USB flash drives around (like the pendrive, Targus Go-Anywhere, and others), and with the demise of the floppy disk, I began to wonder if it would be possible to boot from a USB drive? So your BIOS is going to need to support booting from a USB device, but what else would be involved? I'm primarily thinking about Linux here, but other OSes would be interesting too. These devices come in a range of sizes from 8Mb up to 1Gb, so there is plenty of room to hold a Linux installation. Has anybody done anything like this?"

An anonymous reader asks: "I've been looking for a cost effective (ie, cheap) way to remotely administer several servers running a variety of OS's, and would like to have a solution that would allow for monitoring of the bios on startup, etc (ie, not VNC). The most appealing solution is KVM over IP, which really just means a souped up KVM switch with something like VNC running on it, unfortunately all of the solutions I've been able to find are more expensive than I can justify spending. I've played around a bit with making my own Poor man's KVM over IP; I did this by purchasing a cheap (sub $50) VGA-to-NTSC convertor, then feeding it into a video card with NTSC input (the ATI All-In-Wonder Radion), and then by logging into a machine running Windows Terminal Services I'm able to watch the reboot process. Of course, this doesn't address the mouse/keyboard issue, and the quality isn't all that great. What I'm hoping is that someone else might have a suggestion on how to do this, preferably using Linux and the least hardware necessary. Does anyone have any suggestions or insights on ways to do this?" There are pre-existing solutions, but it seems they are all kind of pricey. Can any of you suggest cheap solutions (at or below $500USD) that could handle a farm of 5-10 machines?

nasteric asks: "I travel a lot for my job and I meet quite a few people when I go out for **beverages** It might be at a club in Spain, a pub in Ireland or at a Manhattan bar. Unfortunately, I don't bring my PDA to many of these places so I have to resort to getting email addresses/phone numbers on napkins or old receipts. I usually end up losing these napkins/receipts during the course of the night/morning and when I try to get in touch with them I usually don't remember their email address or phone number. Lately, I've been using some free online utilities to look up phone numbers/email addresses but I know there have to be better resources. As a result, I am turning to the Slashdot community for help. Does anybody know of any FREE online resources for locating email addresses/phone numbers, assuming you have the persons name and city/country of residence? Any online utility will suffice, whether it be a telephone companies website or a sited designed specifically to be an online directory." For phone numbers, about the best resource I have found is The Ultimates is a site that seems to do it all. What other similar sites have you found?

haogemenr writes: "I work in an all Apple architecture firm, but we have a Linux box that primarily functions as a DSL router. The options for large format plotter drivers in the Macintosh world are few and relatively expensive. PostScript output devices are a great, but expensive solution and HP doesn't provide any Mac-friendly drivers for non-PostScript plotters. What are the *nix solutions? You can write PostScript from CAD application using a generic PostScript driver, but converting PostScript to an RTL file or HPGL2 file is necessary for lots of older plotters. I've heard of an application named makertl, but I haven't been able to find it anywhere. What do Unix folks use for large format image processing?"

xpndsprt asks: "I'm trying to develop my own projector (i've been reading DIYAudio forums for a while and finaly decided to put together my own), but it seems that people are having problems with light source. The Slashdot crowd seems to always have interesting answers to problems at hand, so to get to the point: Does anyone know of a powerful lightsource (200w+) which would produce a high temperature light (5000K+) and would not heat up too much (ppl seem to be using mag.Hylide bulbs, but those seem to heat up tempreture in the room by about 10F. Xenon lights are out of question, since too hot and not bright or white enough. If someone could help, it would be greatly appreciated."

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm flying from the US to Europe in a few weeks and am taking my iBook along for the ride. With a seven hour flight looming, I'm wanting to take some games along to play. But I don't want to download a bunch of freeware that may or may not be junk; I just want the classics. What are the classic free games? I've already downloaded Nethack and am looking into Freeciv. What else is there? I need something that's multiplatform (or at least has a Mac port), something that's stable and has stood the test of time, and something that is more complex and engrossing than a Tetris clone. Thanks!"

TibbonZero asks: "I am using Digidesign's Digi001 audio interface with Pro-Tools 5.3.1 (an industry standard recording application), but this requires using Windows XP. I was wondering if there have been any attempts at writing drivers that would add Linux support to the soundcard? The Digi001 is a PCI based soundcard, with a breakout box. It provides 18 channels of I/O; 8 Analogue, 8 ADAT Optical, and 2 SPDIF as well as Midi I/O. There is a large users's group that supports most issues with the interfaces, and software, but few of them have the time or skills to program drivers, there is a wealth if information to be found there however. Are there any Slashdotters who are into audio and are willing to help out this community by programming drivers for it. Even getting a two channel stereo driver would be a great start (there is one available for Windows if reverse engineering it would help)." As an add-on to the question: What multi-I/O cards already have Linux support, and what do you think of them?

paulumz asks: "I'm having a great deal of difficulty finding novels about distopias. Or any novels with a good depressing ending with no hope of a future. I'm well aware of 1984, Brave New World, and Handmaid's Tale, I'm looking for lesser known ones. Know of any good ones?"

foobar104 asks: "I'm fascinated by the idea of putting in a home PBX or key system. I don't really have a good justification for this; it just sounds like a neat thing to have. There are commercially available small PBX systems available for $500 to $2,000, plus another $500 to $2,000 for voicemail, but putting in one of those doesn't sound like as much fun as building one from scratch using an older PC and some off-the-shelf components. I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for sources of information, tips, HOWTOs or other knowledge on this subject? I'm sure it's been done before; GNUCOMM and GNU Bayonne are out there, but I'm not having much luck finding tutorial-type info about them."