At the moment, House Galiagante only has a single major project worth noting. This came about after recent fuel prices rose to completely insane levels, and methods for saving on fuel costs became necessary.

So, without further delay, allow us to present the following interesting (non-computer-related) project(s):

• Alternative Fuels Research Page by Rick Pelletier. Home of our very own Biodiesel research project and related notes. A "must-read" for anyone interested in BioDiesel! Last updated on January 24, 2005.

For those of you who prefer something computer-related, we have pointers to a few rather modest but very useful pieces of software that might prove interesting. Note that these packages were intended for and written for UNIX-style systems, and you'll need either BZIP2 or GZIP and GNU TAR to access these archives (if you don't have them already).

If you're an MS-Windows(tm) user, I encourage you upgrade to something more useful, like one of the most excellent BSD variants: FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD. And let's not forget DesktopBSD and FreeSBIE, both of which are shaping up to be excellent desktop O/S's and worthy additions to the BSD family.

Or perhaps a nice point-and-click Linux distribution such as MEPIS, Yoper or Ubuntu would be more to your liking? All these advanced operating systems run on PC hardware, are easy to set up and use and posses a level of stability and utility that MS-Windows(tm) has yet to fully match.

For those of you who haven't yet taken a good look at Apple's OS X yet (not to mention Apple's new hardware platforms), I suggest that you do!

Here are a few other useful things that might be worth your attention:

• GNU Privacy Guard is an advanced OpenPGP-compliant communications security package that uses both symmetric and asymetric encryption methodologies. This package is part of the FreeBSD Ports Collections and the Linux RPM Collection, as well. This package (and related documentation, bells and whistles) may also be directly downloaded from the GNUPG primary site.
• For Netscape 6.X+ and Mozilla/Firefox users, please allow me to recommend an excellent e-mail plugin called Enigmail that will help you add GNUPG functionality to your e-mail system. It's a personal favorite! If you're still using some other web-browser, I encourage you to upgrade to Mozilla.
• MCrypt (An advanced multi-algorithm crypto application) Version 2.5.x (and 2.6.x) by Nikos Mavroyanopoulos. This application includes the current NIST AES algorith (Rijndael) and numerous hashing algorithms and is the symetric crypto app of choice here at House Galiagante. This package requires libmcrypt, also by Nikos Mavroyanopoulos, which contains a complete programming interface for numerous hash functions and encryption algorithms. Note that this package is part of the FreeBSD Ports Collection and the Linux RPM Collection, as well. Both of these packages (as well as documentation) may also be directly downloaded from the MCrypt primary site.
• SAFER (Secure And Fast Encryption Routine) Version 1.2 By Richard de Moliner. This is a completely free, public domain 64/128-bit encryption algorithm has been a favorite here at House Galiagante due to it's continued resistance to known cryptanalysis. This cipher was originally designed by J. L. Massey as part of a project sponsored by Cylink Communications. This implementation also includes the Davies-Meyer hashing algorithm.
• Jetico software has a number of handy programs, but BCWipe was our favorite. This program allows for secure erasure of files using either Gutmann or U.S. Department of Defense specifications. Note that this package is part of the FreeBSD Ports Collection and the Linux RPM Collection, as well. This package (as well as documentation) may also be directly downloaded from the Jetico primary site.