Get more life from those aging gadgets

There is a contingent of the gadget-obsessed among us who love their toys, but prefer to conserve cash every month (it seems) when the "latest and greatest" gadget comes out for public purchase. Instead of buying all that new garb and abandoning that perfectly working gadget from last month (heh), why not re-purpose some of those gadgets with a little elbow grease and finesse and give them the working life they really have inside?

A great example is the Xbox Media Center (XBMC) that turns your five year-old original Xbox into a fully-featured internet and home computer network media server. Wanna view YouTube videos, listen to your MP3 collection or browse RSS feeds? You can.

Don't toss that old iPod either. There are plenty of utilities to make that again music gadget useful for other things. Have a plain vanilla Linksys WRT54G wireless router? Install the open-source DD-WRT firmware and get options and features normally found on expensive routers only. I've performed this upgrade and turned that lousy Linksys user interface into a stunning new interface with many more options (which are much easier to use). No need for that $100 draft-n router, right? Well, not yet, anyway.

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