ldunbar: Haha. Well for one thing, I've been told by another reader that "Anybody who calls you the famous *anything* (except famous slutmonger) is insane". Wise words indeed ;-)

As to the LCD, it was fairly easy to set up, it's an LCD 2401 from Matrix Orbital. The only tricky bit was wiring up power - a mate tried to do the same thing a month later and blew his up - so you have to be real careful. (It was quite impressive btw, it apparently literally exploded...)

After that, a serial cable, wired carefully out and back into the case, a hacked hole in the front of a drive bay and I was all set. Software wise, lcdproc is very cool, it runs as a daemon you connect to and ask it to draw widgets on a panel. The clients can have as many panels as they like, and they get cycled according to their "priority". So I coded up a little perl client that spouted mp3 info about the currently playing song and it was job done :) You can check out the client here btw. It's that easy.