Ah, yes, the Mac SE-- one of our personal favorites in the classic "toaster-style" all-in-one line. The SE, you see, actually has a flat and level top, making it perfect for use as a nightstand for an alarm clock/telephone. Or you could take several of them and stick some sort of broad, flat surface on top and, voilà! A classy coffee table. Of course, there's always the basic MacQuarium, too, and about a billion other things you can do with a Mac SE. Oh, yeah, we almost forgot-- you can even use it as a Mac! Just because it's twelve years old or so doesn't mean that it can't be a productive and useful member of computing society. It may max out at 4 MB of RAM, but it still serves as a nifty word processing terminal and email station.

Beyond those basic computing tasks, though, the SE is somewhat limited, and that's why a lot of them are out there serving as nothing more than cute and fashionable doorstops. But according to a Wired article pointed out by faithful viewer Jim, that's not stopping some Linux developers from trying to give the SE a new lease on life. Linux, as you probably know, is the free open-source Unix-like operating system that continues to grow as it attracts new users every day. It's not as user-friendly as the Mac OS, that's for sure, but many "computer people" find it a powerful and refreshing alternative. It's apparently really big in higher education, and that's why the SE Linux project is moving forward: to give all of those unused SE's in academia something to do.

We admit, we find the idea of an SE running Linux to be kind of amusing, if only for the mild paradox of a friendly Mac toaster running a fundamentally text-based OS with a command line interface. So if you want a cheap Linux machine that also does double-duty as a kickin' bookend, you can't beat the SE. Heck, we found ours in a trash pile, and we bet it wouldn't take much digging to find one for $30 or less. And, the iMac notwithstanding, those toaster-style classic Macs still have a boatload of charm all their own.