I've been thinking about building a Gumstix or Soekris-based embedded system. I don't have a particular reason; I'm not even sure what I want to build yet. Anyway, here's some of the neat stuff I've stumbled across:
- CrystalFontz LCDs: Actually these guys aren't really for embedded stuff per-se; they're useful for desktop PCs
- Dirt cheap old-school LCD: THere isn't much in the way of documentation on this guy, but I did find this post which explains (roughly) how to interface with it.
- 240x320 8-bit touchscreen LCD (2 for $60): I'm definitely going to use these guys for something. The best part? In addition to being dirt cheap, this guy already has it working in Linux.
- List of places to get parts: Title pretty much says it all. Part of the really interesting embedded projects page on ladyada.net.
If that wasn't geeky enough, I've also been aggregating all the Star Trek information I can found online into a SQLite database. It's far from complete, but at the moment I've got a list of episodes from every Star Trek show ever (including the oft maligned "Star Trek: The Animated Series"), a fairly expansive list of species and planets encountered or referenced in the Star Trek universe, and a list of Trek particles defined and organized by category.
You can download the raw database file (2.4M gzipped SQLite3 database), or the entire working directory, including extraction scripts (4.4M gzipped tarball). As usual, there is no documentation, although you can regenerate the database by running scripts/generate.sh (you need Ruby installed, of course :D).