Man, Is Hardware Getting Cheap!

Tiny, powerful, but with low power requirements, we're starting to see some amazing hobbyist hardware appear.  These little computers are powerful enough to let you write applications in a high-level language, and most use Linux as their operating system (meaning you don't have to learn an entirely new environment because you move to new hardware).  For little one-off, just-for-fun kinds of projects a hobbyist might be interested in, these are practically perfect little vehicles.  You might well pay more for the power supply and the enclosure than you do for the computer!