Heya guys. Most of you know I’m hosted on the (mt) grid, which is really great web hosting and I totally recommend it, but it’s only web hosting. By it’s nature, it’s so specialized, it can’t really do anything else. Surely a lot of you have noticed that I’ve gotten very disinterested in making little javascript widgets (mainly because the vast vast majority of my user’s never donated or even said “Hi”) and have become more interested in ruby and hacking and desktop apps and also, robotics. At my house I have a Macbook, an iPod Touch, and an iMac G4 on loan from someone who will be picking it back up any day now. What I’m looking for is a Mac Mini or something very similar to it that I can run Mac OS or Ubuntu on, which runs silently, or very very close to silently. It needs to be able to interface with my wifi network too, but I could get that happening with a USB stick or something in machines that don’t have it. The iMac lacks an airport card too and it works fine on a Belkin usb stick after a bit of hacking.

If any of you out there have any computing devices of this nature which I could run ruby stuff on and the likes, and has a couple of usb ports on it, or could have them added with a PCI card, please do let me know! I might be able to pay some small amount for it, I really don’t mind how ancient it is as long as it can run a recent linux okay.

Alternatively, if any of you guys know of any cheap devices that can be hacked to run linux and interface with wifi networks, that’d be great to know! Unfortunately neither our toaster nor our fridge feature usb ports or processors. Something akin to an iPod Touch but much much cheaper would be quite ideal.

Also if anyone has any old little laptops like iBooks with say, a dead screen and battery, that would be really perfect, small, quiet… as long as it can boot, do wifi (or usb), and run a unix based OS from the last ten years or so. If you have anything like this you’d like to get rid of, contact me at “blue@” followed by this domain! :)