I've been reading up lately on natural forms of building construction, especially Cob. It's like hacking housing -- you build it yourself, from the ground up, using common materials like clay and straw. And when you're done, you know everything that went into your building and how it fit together.

Unfortunatly, building a Cob house is impractical in my 1/4 postage-stamp size, paved, back yard. Oh well, maybe later.

On the computer side, I've been working on building custom debian cd's, and not much else. 6 hour compile/test/debug cycles suck.