Overview: Quick and Easy SSH SOCKS Proxy
SSH (Secure Shell) is a very versatile tool that can be used for far more that just remote command line access. In the following example, you can create an SSH tunnel mapped to port 9999 that will allow you to proxy your Internet connection to bypass content filtering, IP Geolocation lockouts, or anything that filters/monitors your connection based on your public IP Address.
How To: Dell Studio Hybrid Home Theater PC/Media Center
About a year ago I purchased a Dell Studio Hybrid (now discontinued) to use as a discreet and silent home theater PC. The hardware in the base model is powerful enough to easily handle 1080p video and maybe even run a virtual machine or two in the background for testing purposes. My first configuration included Windows 7 with Boxee, but this soon proved to be rather unstable and the boot times were horrendous (as in nearly five minutes) with the slow laptop hard drive in the hybrid. After doing some research, I was able to find a much more lightweight approach using Ubuntu 10.04 Server. At the same time I decided to switch from Boxee since development has pretty much stopped after the release of the Boxee Box. The interface was very buggy as well and it would become unstable for no given reason which required frequent application restarts.