My wife and I have been building a collection for the last few years. It's amazing how much space books take up. We have filled a room with wall to wall shelves and we only have about 1500 books. I first cataloged them using LibraryThing, but now I'm re-cataloging them using Koha, an open source library system, of which I am one of the developers. It's great even for tiny collections such as mine. I love the subject linking that comes with using MARC records. The main site for it is http://koha.org/

You can already buy smoke detectors that come with a ten year 9v battery ( which is apparently also the life of the detector itself. I just bought a few at Wal-Mart for $15 each.

I cannot use anything but joe. It so bad that in Word or OpenOffice I try to save and quit by hitting ctrl+k+x.