What follows is a simple description of a way I use to additionally "shield" my important files (a daily "tar" I take every night through a cron job), so that even if some sectors hosting them are lost, I still end up salvaging everything.

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use.

The Nano-X Window System is an Open Source project aimed at bringing the features of modern graphical windowing environments to smaller devices and platforms.

Webconverger is simply a Web kiosk/terminal, that is easy to deploy and secure. In most cases all you need to do is boot from a CD.

Ekiga (formely known as GnomeMeeting) is an open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME.

Colorifer is a wrapper to run program and colorize it's output. [sic]

Openswan is an Open Source implementation of IPsec for the Linux operating system.

s3fs is a fuse filesystem that allows you to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a local filesystem. It stores files natively and transparently in S3 (i.e., you can use other programs to access the same files). Maximum file size=5G.

Jungle Disk Desktop Edition lets you store files and automatically backup data easily and securely to Amazon.com's S3 Storage Service.

This article, which focuses on scanning books, describes the steps you need to take to prepare pages for optimal OCR results, and compares various free OCR tools to determine which is the best at extracting the text.