'Overclockix', and 'Pad Plus'

Overclockix

Specialized live CD of linux that can be booted and run on any machine, no matter what os is already installed. Features and included apps make it amenable for Distributed Computing and lots more. Also includes Advanced Tools for Rescue and Recovery. It has a Custom look - This is what sets Overclockix apart from many other custom Knoppix CD's. KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, and IceWM desktops have all been customized for things like transperancy, png icons, and flashy background screens.Included are thousands of GNU applications, from webservers to office suites, to image manipulation software and ftp/p2p clients, to media players, web browsers and chat programs More than 1000 executables in all. Overclockix is a pre-rolled desktop OS you can carry around anywhere you go and is great way to get a taste for the capabilites of Linux. Hard Drive installation requires about 2GB for the root filesystem, and a 128mb+ swap partition is optional. Some minor tweaking is suggested post-install to make the OS more secure and to fix some minor Knoppix-specific quirks. These scripts use the Lilo bootloader and are dual-boot friendly with an existing Windows installation.

http://overclockix.octeams.com/

Pad Plus

Pad Plus is an app which makes use of Zooming User Interfaces (ZUIs) where zooming is a fundamental part of the user's interaction with the computer (also known as multiscale interfaces).Imagine that the computer screen is a section of wall about the size of a typical bulletin board or whiteboard. Any area of this surface can then be accessed comfortably without leaving one's chair. Imagine further that by applying extraordinarily good eyesight and eye-hand coordination, a user can both read and write as comfortably on any micron wide section of this surface as on any larger section. This would allow the full use of a surface which is several million pixels long and high, on which one can comfortably create, move, read and compare information at many different scales. The above scenario would, if feasible, put vast quantities of information directly at the user's fingertips. For example, several million pages of text could be fit on the surface by reducing it sufficiently in scale, making any number of on-line information services, encyclopedias, etc., directly available. In practice one would arrange such a work surface hierarchically, to make things easier to find. In a collaborative environment, one could then see the layout (in miniature) of many other collaborators' surfaces at a glance. The above scenario is impossible because we can't read or write at microscopic scale. Yet the concept is very natural since it mimics the way we continually manage to find things by giving everything a physical place. A good approximation to the ideal depicted would be to provide ourselves with some sort of system of `magic magnifying glasses' through which we can read, write, or create cross-references on an indefinitely enlargeable (`zoomable') surface. Pad Plus gives users this zoomable surface.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/