PC RIP
My PC has died, and rather than go through the hood reseating components and swapping things out until it works (which I might do anyway to make a Linux box out of spare parts), I'm going to go for a serious upgrade.

The wierd thing is that I've got so behind the times with respect to PC technology that I had to buy PC Shopper to find out what PCs do nowadays. And my SO is seriously pushing an Apple, and it's not as if jonnynexus hasn't fallen in love with his (http://www.livejournal.com/users/jonnynexus/145329.html http://www.livejournal.com/users/jonnynexus/161650.html). It does sound like it has the install-what-you-like flexibility of Linux without the hassle of having to download all the right drivers yourself. But I haven't quite decided whether I'm ready to give up on playing PC games. (In the last couple of years, I have found myself seriously missing old-fashioned analogue board games, but very rarely arcade-style computer games.)

That's the realistic stuff I know I can do. This is the pie-in-the-sky hope:

I'd like to be able to, when at home, use my (bluetooth palm) PDA to control music. My main desktop would control the library of podcasts and mp3s (and it would be nice for it to be able to record streamed radio programmes does, PVCRs & media centre PCs), and my PDA would tell it to play them on speakers such-and-such ... or my PDA would tell the speakers to download the files from my main server and play them. (I think running them as WiFi peripherals might work better, but that would probably mean they needed their own IP address.)

At which point I don't really know where to start looking for information. It doesn't really fit into a google query ...