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One of the things that I’ve been debating about is what to do with older, perfectly serviceable, hardware. It’s a problem that’s become worse in recent days with the development of the Intel Atom, dual and quad core chips, but it’s not recent – this is a problem that’s followed me for a while, but of late it’s become a little ridiculous.

It started with a friend in college dropping off a 1.0GHz Pentium 3 box, saying that he couldn’t get it working, and had bought a new computer. As it was the middle of the exams in the fall quarter, I put it aside, and figured I’d get to it a little later, maybe after winter break. Opening the case after the break revealed that the machine was fine, but that dust had clogged up the fan, preventing it from spinning and causing the BIOS to refuse to turn on the computer. 15 minutes and a through brushing later, it was up and running and I called my friend – only to discover he’d graduated early and that he no longer wanted the computer back. “Cool. Free hardware!” I thought. I decided to put Windows Server 2003 on it and learn the basics ahead of a major transition to Server 2003 from NT 4 Server and Server 2000 machines at a city school I volunteered at. A year later, I installed an early version of Ubuntu (I think Hoary Hedgehog, but it may have even been Warty), and used it to become familiar with Linux. A year after that, I sold it at graduation for a $100, a princely sum for a machine that I acquired for free and was the better part of a decade old by then.

Two months after graduation, a friend came visiting me from New York, bearing gifts from another friend – an apparently dead AMD Athlon64, motherboard and an ATI Radeon 9800. Some amount of twiddling later I figured out that it was a bad capacitor on the motherboard, but I had neither the tools nor the soldering skills to replace the component. Instead, two years after I got it, I passed it on to a colleague at work who was studying for his CCNA, and told him how to repair it.

Of course, in the interim, I had acquired quite a collection of hardware from various sources; mixing and matching produced my current home server from spare parts, and a half-done photo-frame PC. Other parts have made my home network, allowed me to fix nearly a half-dozen laptops for friends and relatives and so on. But I still have a ridiculous number of parts from all sources, ranging from the useful-by-itself (a dual-core Athlon64 x2 HP Slimline with a bad 6150 that will become my and my flatmate’s DVR after the digital transition is done and we rid ourselves of cable) to the what-do-I-do-with-this (a Mini-ITX board with a soldered down ULV 600MHz Celeron that served as a firewall). I’ve tried selling a number of these things, but in this economy, no one’s buying, and those things that I’m willing to give away, people don’t see enough value in coming to pick up.

Most recently, two days ago, I resurrected my flatmate’s “obsolete” HP machine and made it a dedicated encoder machine – it sits and converts media from useless formats to useful ones. Sure, it’s slow, but I can’t help but feel bad about tossing a 5 year old, 2.0GHz AMD Athlon64, 400GB of hard drive space and a gigabyte of RAM. I’m still not sure what to do with the little Mini-ITX motherboard; any suggestions? What about a 1.6GHz Pentium 4M laptop? What about a 1.42GHz G4 Mac Mini? So far, I’ve thought of an Asterisk server (don’t really need it), a development box (for what?), and a bedside computer (though I have a netbook) respectively for each of those. Or maybe I should send the Mac Mini to Nevada, and give the laptop to my parents?

One of the pretty nifty new features of Ubuntu 9.04 is its global notification system. Just like Growl for Mac OS (and clone Snarl for Windows), this basically creates a single, unified, neat little notification system that shows up in one spot on the desktop. Not only does this cut down on clutter significantly (just take a look at the mess that is the Windows task tray notifications, if you don’t believe me), but it also makes the whole OS less intrusive, yet highly communicative.

It got me thinking, though, about a universal notification system – as in, for every computing thing in the world. That includes things like “Machine with MAC ID 00:11:22:33:44:55 (‘Varun-Nangias-Mac’) connected to the router” to “Updates available”. In fact, most of the messages (“New SMS on Blackberry”, “Printer on fire”, “New Yahoo! IM from Kats Gupta“, etc.) all fit in 140 characters. Sure you could have longer messages but for the most part, 140 characters is more than enough to communicate the jist of the message and to provide a no-nonsense summary of the event; if you really need more information, you should be able to take further action on by looking up a syslog, or the requisite application. And putting this information in an RSS feed or a Twitter-like stream on the Internet means that it’s easily accessible from almost any device with a web browser.

Given that Laconi.ca already exists and can be deployed to your own server, basically what is missing is software that links clients to the Laconica backend. Ubuntu and Mac OS already have most of that support – the notification systems can forward events that they receive. Windows support is sort of there in the form of Snarl (though very, very few applications use it). A J2ME application is needed for the vast majority of phones out there; an Android phone can have this sort of background daemon running all the time, anyway. Apple would likely need to build some sort of support into its push notification system in order for iPhones to mimic this functionality.

Put all of this together, and you’ve suddenly got a way to aggregate your digital life into a single, very easy, stream of information. Add the ability to respond to certain events via replies (ex.: “Updates available. Reply ‘install’ to install available updates”) and the cost of your remote management system has dropped to pretty much zero. How cool would that be?