In part of my line of work - web application development - you tend to develop software that needs to work (properly) on an awful lot of different web browsers. If these all adhered to web standards, a simple run through the W3C Validator would suffice. Unfortunately life sucks, and as such there is a need to test all sites on as many browsers as possible.

I use virtualisation to run a bunch of windows browsers in their native environment. However, testing this way took an awfully long time, as my desktop computer had a "mere" 1.5Gb of ram and only a single (Athlon64) CPU core. By the time you add GNome, Evolution or Thunderbird and Firefox to this, not a great deal is left for virtual machines.

What with DDR2 ram prices being pretty much at an all-time low and CPUs not being far behind in cheapity (wrong, but sounds nice) I decided it was time for some new tools of the trade.

After over a year of using myth on my laptop (which has tv out) to view video files on tv, I now have an honest-to-god working mythtv setup with dual tuners, remote control and everything.

For my birthday I obtained a DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4, after doing a spot of googling about Linux compatibility. This is a PCI card that, after plugging in, is detected as two USB tuners and an input device.

Hardware 

I had scrounged together a pile of hardware from various defunct machines in the house and been given a mobo by a friend (Thanks Steve!) The system is an Athlon64 2800+ with 512Mb ram, a fanless nvidia FX5200 with an RCA tvout connector and an 80Gb harddisk. (Though all recording is done to a 500GB LVM volume in another room via NFS over 100baseT)