Ridiculous Ideas Dept.

I was playing with Axel this afternoon while we listened to what I used to think was a rather boring album that seems to have grown on me even though I’ve not listened to it for about three years: The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. I was surprised by how many “rather British” samples there are in it. Churchbells, leather on willow, lawnmowers, that kind of thing. But for some reason I got thinking about what to do with that dusty old PC I have.

How about I turn it into a net radio? Take one old P166 with 64Mb of RAM and a 1Gig hard drive. Fit it with a sound card and a wireless NIC. Install Linux on it. Then install a streaming media client, and maybe that RealMedia open source client. Connect the sound output to hi-fi amp.

Then log in to it over the network with a terminal of your choice (for me that would have to be my PC as I’ve not got a network-capable handheld) and connect the client to a net radio station.

Of course, the chances of me actually doing this are slim, and until I get a 2Mb connection it might be a bit of a bandwidth hog, but I like the idea of it.