Here’s the scenario: You have a thousand MP3 music files sitting on your home computer—which is great when you’re actually sitting at your computer but a lot less useful when you’re in the kitchen or living room. What you need is a dedicated device in another room that can pull songs wirelessly from your PC’s music library and play them through its own speakers. Several off-the-shelf products can handle this task, such as Logitech’s Squeezebox; unfortunately, they start at around $300.
If you read on, and look at the parts list, you can click the link to the $72 PC, which is another article on PopSci's website that shows you how to build a PC that boots to a USB drive (512 MB, I think). Click here to see it: http://www.popsci.com/node/2805 That's obviously what they used for this project, even though they don't make it very obvious or clear. The USB drive makes way more sense anyway: lower power consumption and less noise and heat. I saw a 4 GB drive on tigerdirect.com for about $15. Linux is the other "catch" for this to work very well, IMO.
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