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Graham Wheeler asks: "Lately I've been obscessed with grassroots community network projects, and the hardware that enables them. Most sites I have seen focus on wireless RF networking, but I have noticed a few projects revolving around free space optical transcievers. Twibright Labs' RONJA is a good example of what I'm talking about. Not being an electronics hobbyist, however, makes the various plans for building a comm laser from scratch look rather daunting. It seems to me that it would be easier to just make a lens and housing system into which would go one of the many cheaply available copper-to-fiber media converters. Then you could simply modify it so that the laser ports were optically connected to the TX and RX lens assemblies instead of the standard fiber interface. So, what factor(s) am I overlooking that would explain why nobody seems to be doing this?"

redcliffe writes: "This website has complete plans to build a 10 megabit per second optical data link that can work over up to 1 kilometre. It uses fairly cheap components, such as standard LED's instead of laser diodes. This also makes it a lot safer to work with, i.e. you won't burn your eyes out if you accidently look into it."

It's quickie time! Let's get into the action with some blood and guts. cthulhubob told us about Overkill. In light of all the irritating infringement news, An anonymous coward pointed us at http://www.groucho.com. I don't know why, but Jesper Skov thinks that having turbojets on model airplanes is a fantastic idea. Hey Doc, are you reading? Gabriel Golden submitted The Boomtrain Manifesto. leviathan shared the l33t surfer. According to our anonymous source, "Wired News is reporting that Danni Ashe has become the Most Downloaded Woman on the Internet. In your face, Cindy Margolis!" Bluedove (with a little help from Wes) showed us how to pirate music and video without a computer. alienmole gave us the origin of @. Mantis! is a Sega Saturn obsessive. Check out his site. Garth, while busy turning it up to eleven, told us about the upcoming re-release of Spinal Tap. On a personal note, just wanted to tell my friend Raja to get well, and that we're all thinking about him.

x mani x writes "Looks like Logitech has collaborated with Vojtech Pavlik to write linux drivers for all their digital game controllers. All source code and documentation is available. Now I like this company even more ... " Excellent-now if only more companies would get onboard, and recognize the value behind this.

Hitchhiker wrote in to say that a couple of nasty new holes have surfaced recently in the kernel. Apparently both the filesystem code and memory allocation code has serious holes. Don't worry- 2.0.34 will be out soon with fixes for both. Read this one for some better info.