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We've had technology to replace monitors for well over 20 years now. I tried one on at a trade show back in 2000. It was like the old "Private Eye" monitor from the early 1990s, which was red-on-black CGA only, but this one was 1024x768 full-color SVGA IIRC. You wear the device on your head like glasses, and it has a small arm that extends in front of your eye. While wearing it, a virtual screen appears to hover in front of you.

What ever happened to these devices, I have no idea. They'd be great for working privately, or for using with a portable device.

I use a personal wiki for stuff I don't mind sharing, and usually plain text files in ~/ideas or ~/notes or ~/journal for stuff I don't want to share (backed up occasionally to another system of course). Very rarely I need to use inkscape or dia or gimp to make an illustration of something, although I plan on doing a bit more of that now that I got a Cintiq (it was cheap at a computer swap meet, couldn't resist). It's far from ideal, but we don't have good enough software for that yet... at least, not software which I consider will have a long enough lifetime to be worth using (MS OneNote doesn't count because I don't run Windows often, and can't control what will happen to OneNote or any data that I might store in it. But the UI is slick.) Also I have been using toodledo on the iphone for really terse notes about random ideas that come up while I'm out and about (when I go hiking and get the endorphins going I come up with the most far-out ideas), and also for shopping lists. Again, not ideal, but at least it syncs to their site... I have been planning to write a better tool for that eventually, so I can control where the data is stored.

Just to name them with the date & time, I routinely use exiftool for that. I copy the files from the camera's memory card and rename them at the same time.

http://ecloud.org/index.php?title=Organizing_digital_photos#Script:_get-photos_.28cut_to_the_chase.29

However the OP seems to be asking for more than that. Of course you can use exiftool to edit any metadata tags that JPEG supports but it's not a GUI. Would be easy enough to write a GUI which uses exiftool to do the actual editing.

I just use folders for events or periods of time, and the folder contains the date in a standard form; e.g. 2006-summer, 200607-china, 20060504-phoenix-zoo, etc. Usually I can remember approximately when a picture was taken.

But yeah EXIF tags have a comment field so why don't you just put a sequence of keywords in there (or whole sentences if you like) and then use a full-text search engine? I've had good luck with Swish++ to search other kinds of documents (MP3 metadata, Word docs, PDFs, plain text, HTML, C source files, etc.) It can be extended with filters based on MIME type to extract keywords from each kind of document that it finds.

Also see this regarding how to extract dates/times from EXIF files and incorporate them into the filename.

The classic telecom reason, I believe, is that since the government required the old Bell monopoly to offer 100% reliability of phone service, everything had to be able to run on batteries during power outages. So they chose 48VDC as a practical voltage that doesn't require excessively big wires for large power transfer (like 12V would), yet isn't too dangerous (like 120V or 240V would be), doesn't require an excessive number of cells in each backup battery, etc. So from a data center perspective these reasons still make sense don't they? Data centers also need battery backup, and it's a hell of a lot easier to just have the batteries in the circuit all the time, on float charge, and therefore instantly available to run the servers when the AC power fails, than it is to continuously be converting AC to DC (to charge the batteries) then back to AC (to run the server power supplies) then back to DC again (inside the computers).

However you still cannot get away from some conversions because switching power supplies are so much more efficient than linear regulators. So the PSU inside the PC is just as complex - there's no way around it. Yes, you could use separate bus bars for 5V, 3.3V etc. but the currents become larger and there can be problems with noise coupling from one system to another. Computers need very well filtered, quiet 5V and 3.3V. So the multi-voltage external supply may be more efficient but not more reliable.

I am running some DC power at home, and one more advantage for me is being able to use solar panels to directly charge the batteries rather than relying 100% on grid power. Again it is easier to use DC since that's what the solar panels put out. This would also be an ideal thing to do at a data center. The government ought to do something to encourage it (the way some European countries are). (But my system is 24VDC. Maybe I will have to switch to 48V if that kind of PSU becomes abundant and affordable.)

I've also wanted to do this for a long time. It's been a lot of work over several years, so I'm not sure if it was a worthwhile obsession, but I have combined a DC power bus with battery backup and supplemental solar power.

http://ecloud.org/index.php?title=DC_power_system

Get one of these and then try not to spill stuff on it. At least you can do quite a bit without a keyboard or mouse, 'cause it's touchscreen. I use mine with a web server containing recipes, home automation scripts, personal contacts, etc. Just making a bookmark to my.yahoo.com is pretty indispensible too, for checking TV and movie showtimes, weather etc. But, I mounted it on a pull-down shelf that was intended for knife storage; it's perfect - hangs down below the cabinets when I want it, folds back up when I don't, and I was able to attach the ethernet adapter to the underside - and the Audrey stays booted all the time while not consuming much power with the screen off, so no wait time. Even for quick web lookups I don't really need access to in the kitchen, it's quicker than going to my main workstation, waiting for the dual monitors to power up, waiting for that slow monstrosity Mozilla to finally load, and mousing around. So I find myself using it now and then, and my wife does too. I also wrote a caller ID application for it, but it still has a bug I haven't fixed yet.

Some links: Here's my caller ID thing and audreyhacking.com will tell you everything else you need to know.

This was my first significant web effort back in 1994 and since then, I never managed to acquire much hardware, or find the time for any 3D programming, or even think of very many good applications for it. I have experimented with a couple of "toggle goggle" designs (one big LCD shutter for each eye, synchronized with alternating images on your monitor); they work, but are a little cumbersome and for me, the applications are very few. I'm not a big-time gamer, although I did play Descent in 3D a few times (in 1995 or so). I would like to think that VR has many general-purpose uses, but so far not many. Actually I don't completely understand myself why I lost interest, just too much else to do maybe.

I hope to build a fast, portable remote-UI system to use on such systems. It will run on DOS, Linux and Macintosh at least; maybe the Palm too. If I get it done some day, there will probably be a link to it here.

Speaking of Palms... they are a better alternative to the GameBoy someone else mentioned, IMO. Old ones can be cheap on ebay; and they have a real touchscreen.

Of course, use an iButton to securely store login credentials.