A quick peek at the high-tech that runs the South Sea Republic website.

Idolatry

A photo taken in my basement.

SSR runs on a mini-itx box (about 25 cms high) pumping out a whopping 800 Mhz of central processor unit cycles, with a massive 256 megabytes of random access memory and 20 giga byte hard-drive. Sticking out the back is a 256 megabyte key-drive that operates as our database backup.

The other big black box there is a UPS for backup power. The area I live in is rather notorious for having pretty flaky power. The SSR server connects wirelessly to my wireless router, which connects by cat5 to my wireless broadband antenna. This sits on my roof, and broadcasts into a tower in the local town where the ISP has their antennas.

I think I got the Via motherboard for about $80, the case was about $60. I scavenged the RAM, HDD and wireless card but I think I payed $30 for a PCI elbow card. The OS is Fedora Core. All up it is a pretty cheap solution.

The Wireless Box

Gary Sauer-Thompson and I were discussing what form future health care would take. I claimed it would probably be anonymous black boxes in our basements that connect to our local networks wirelessly. These black boxes would be off the shelf solutions built by the likes of GE, Siemens, Netgear etc. They would be as ubiquitous as fuse boxes - every house would have one in their basement.

I was at O'Faillons with a mate of mine the other day, having a drink. He is an Integrator. He programs PLC's in ladder logic to get them to do what he wants. He has written the logic which controls datacenters, water plants, government facilities etc.

He was telling me how he was going to set up a home PLC system that could control his christmas lights through the internet. Nothing really new, but an interesting project none the less.

He already has a PC hidden in his entertainment system which publishes his photos to an LCD he scrounged. The box is uni-purpose, doing nothing else, except rotating through stunning image, after stunning image. If you have seen the movie Total Recall it is just a smaller version of the changing wall images.

Enthusiasts and technologists are already building mono-purpose systems in their houses and basements. Industry will determine which of these uni-purpose systems are popular and will commoditise them into little grey and black boxes that you can get from Harvey Norman or Best Buy for $30.

Future houses will probably have a server rack for these black boxes, either in a cupboard, or in the basement. I expect they will be so cheap, that when your cholesterol in the urine detector box the technician will just swap it out for a new one and throw the old one away.