When I signed on with my company, they stuck a PC on my desk. I immediately wiped the drive and installed FreeBSD on it. FreeBSD is a good server-class OS, but the Mac has utterly spoiled me. So I actually bought myself a Mac Mini to use at work. It will be a while before there's any IT budget for a new machine for me, and in the meantime the mini is just fine, and it was very inexpensive, as things go.
I like IPv6 quite a bit. It's a great way to leave behind all of the restrictions and inconveniences that NAT impose. Anywhere I have a routable IPv4 address, I can set up 6to4 and do things like directly ssh to machines at home on the inside LAN.
Well, at work I don't have a public IPv4 address. To make a long story short, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 just wasn't going to fly with the corporate firewall. I didn't want to make a big issue or anything, so I decided to tunnel over UDP. The easiest way to do that, of course, is with openvpn. So to make a long story short, I was able to set up IPv6 connectivity between my office machine and the house pretty easily.
Then along came the mac. What to do? Well, the mac is Unix-y enough that building and installing openvpn is no problem at all. Rather than fetch and install the LZO library, I simply added "--disable-lzo" to the configure command, then a make and make install. One last task is to obtain a tunnel driver for OS X.
I've actually been doing lots of hacking lately on the house. I added a reverse osmosis system under the kitchen sink, then ran a branch from the output side of that over to the fridge and installed an ice maker. What struck me while I was doing all this was how little there was on the web about those subjects. I thought you could find anything on the Internet.
The RO system was straightforward enough. The whole system is piped with 3/8 inch and 1/4 inch Polyethylene tubing. The tubing connects from point to point with quick connect fittings (with the one exception being the connection to the water supply - that one is a compression fitting).
The hard part was figuring out how to connect the reject water output up to the sink drain. I wound up adding a dishwasher drain connection fitting to replace a piece of PVC under the side of the sink without the disposer. Then a baffling set of tubing and adapters took it from the barbed dishwasher fitting down to the 3/8" reject water tube. No sane plumber would have done it that way, but it doesn't leak, and I can get away with it because that water is not under pressure (the reject water hose comes from an air gap built in to the faucet and is gravity-fed to the drain).
After the RO system was installed and set up, I turned it off, emptied the tank and cut the supply tubing on its way to the faucet and put a T, a short piece of Polyethylene tubing and a valve, all quick-connect. Then I waited for the weekend so I could get a friend to climb under the house and run the polyethylene tubing from a hole in the sink cabinet over to the wall behind the fridge. I bought a small 'ice maker hookup box' from Home Depot to mount in the drywall behind the fridge. That was made with a 1/2" screw connection, but it was easy to add some adapters to turn that into another 3/8" quick connect fitting, ready to receive the 3/8" poly tubing. The "user" side of the box has a standard 1/4" compression fitting for soft copper pipe to the fridge.
It took a couple hours before I was convinced that none of the fittings were leaking. They warned against overtightening the copper compression fittings, but it turns out their warnings, IMHO, were overstated. I had to tighten those damn things pretty tight before they stopped leaking. The other leaky spot was the adapter from the 1/2" threaded copper valve to the quick connect adapter. You need lots of teflon tape for a plastic-to-copper screw connection, I guess.
My wife is exstatic about the whole set up. We have really good tasting water and ice cubes that don't make "floaties" in the water (or iced tea).