79 Joysticks for Input Joysticks, particularly old ones, make wonderful input devices because they interface with the parallel port on most standard sound cards and are physical rugged. This enables the buttons to be reused, particularly as foot pedals, to control software. Indeed, this provides a very cheap way of adding a dictation module to your machine, without the need for an Arduino providing the input. In addition to triggering individual events on a Linux machine, such as requesting a weather report or the state of the machine, it can also feed messages to other applications. mplayer , for example, can operate in slave mode, allowing commands to be fed to it from the standard input or a named pipe. Similarly, the X Window TV-viewing software, xawtv , comes with xawtv-remote to change channel and volume (as per most remote controls), giving you capture on/off and screenshot facilities. This makes it possible to freeze frame magic shows to see how they do it!