Sure. In theory - I've not heard of it being done in practise other than wrt to specific bios settings like clock speed.

As far as I know, this isn't possible in Windows (or linux) - happy to be proven wrong though. Do you have any links with further info? My cursory 30 seconds of googling seemed to suggest was still not possible.

yup. but the bios settings are typically a lot harder to change from userland than, well, userland settings (if it's even possible at all - normally it's not)

Yeah - that's just a software control though and (i imagine) trivially turned on programatically.

Most (all excluding Apple?) laptops wil allow you to turn off / disable the wireless chipset in the bios. Many also have a physical kill switch on the side of the case.

Barring some wikileaks sort of tomfoolery from the CIA, this should stop any network access (assuming you also don't plug in a network cable).

I had to go through a similar setup at the start of last year - with the exception that i had to pay for it all myself, so I was working on a budget.

I got a kitset office - 2.4m x 2.4 meter with a small veranda/sheltered area out the front. This had to fit an existing concrete pad so it was perhaps a little smaller than I would have liked. (But then again, I didn't want a huge building taking up all the space in my back yard!)

I insulated and lined it myself. I was expecting it have issues keeping it warm in winter, but ended up with the exact opposite - with no ceiling space it's very hard to keep cool in summer. I bought an air con unit about a week into using it.

I got a sparky to wire the unit up to the house - mains only (no data). I had to dig the 1.5 meter trench myself. Internet is just via wireless into the house - speed is fine (about 35M) and no worries about redundancy. I use a laptop and have data on my phone so in the event of a blackout (which I wouldn't expect now days) I can just use the laptop and phone for access.

You'll definitely want carpet, I wouldn't bother with a plastic protector. White boards etc too. You want it feel office like imo.

Security - I got an alarm that texts my phone if ever there is a break-in. After a while though I stopped using it and often don't even bother locking the door at night. My laptop comes in to the house with me at night, and the most expensive thing left in there is my keyboard or maybe the air con unit. It's hard to make a space with glass windows/doors secure. The alarm will hopefully scare people off if you are home, but if you're out then they're kinda pointless.

yeah, this was going to be my original approach. (I had a previous project where I had stored images in a db, which showed the limitations of this approach).

However, I ended up chucking them in the database for simplicity. I'm able to just move database dumps from production to dev and that's a complete snapshot of the application - no need to worry about also having to sync an emails directory. It also means I don't have to worry about error handling for when an email body is not found (if the db record is there, the email body is there), or making sure emails get purged off disk correctly.

As I'm only ever retrieving one email at a time, performance has not been an issue, and as I'm only keeping a gig or so of mail, disk space hasn't really been a concern either.

Obviously if your dealing with many more emails than I need to, then this may need to be revisited, but in this case, I'm happy with my quick and easy implementation=)

I run a similar (though waaaay less popular) site - http://dudmail.com/
My mail is stored on disk in a mysql db so I don't have quite the same memory constraints as this.

I had originally created this site naively stashing the uncompressed source straight into the db. For the ~100,000 mails I'd typically retain this would take up anywhere from 800mb to slightly over a gig.

At a recent rails camp, I was in need of a mini project so decided that some sort of compression was in order. Not being quite so clever I just used the readily available Zlib library in ruby. This is just run straight over each email as it comes in with no reference to any previous emails, so very "dumb" compared to mailinator, but still fairly effective.

This took about 30 minutes to implement (in about 6 lines of code) - and then a couple of hours to test and debug. An obvious bug (very large emails were causing me to exceed the BLOB size limit and truncating the compressed source) was the main problem there...

I didn't quite reach 90% compression, but my database is now typically around 200-350mb. So about 70-80% compression. I didn't reach 90% compression, but I did manage to implement it in about 6 lines of code =)

(Managable) DRM issues asside, Stanza for the iphone is an excellent reader if you already have an iphone, and don't want to splash out for a dedicated reader.
The screen is easy to read, books are easy to source and it's free =)

For the PocketPC - ubook is one of the better ones out there.