Google recently announced it’s new open source Android platform for mobile devices. As a programmer and designer, it sounds fairly cool, and as an end user it sounds fairly cool too!! I think I’ll be getting one of these Android devices as soon as they’re released as it seems like mobile computing has finally landed!
There’s a few interesting videos on the aforementioned site too.
Bit off-topic, but I’ve added links to the top of the site to access our travel blog and travel gallery as Laura (my partner) and I are going traveling.
Check it out!
The latest and greatest version of the free, open source GNU/Linux operating system Ubuntu has been released just minutes ago. If you’re tiring of Windows, or simply want to have a look at what all the fuss is about, give it a whirl.
Find out more at www.ubuntu.com. You can even run it from the CD, so there’s no need to erase your Windows XP install.
My girlfriend and I both have iPods. I have a 2nd gen shuffle, she has a 2nd gen nano. Both were working fine on my Edgy install, however, the 2nd gen nano wasn’t being ‘found’ by Gnome, and therefore not appearing in Banshee (which is what I really wanted).
There is a workaround, it’s a replacement for Gnome’s HAL. Simply follow the instructions here for results: http://www.tigert.com/archives/2007/01/09/ipod-and-ubuntu-edgy/
A relatively unknown bit of virtualisation software called ‘virtualbox’ from InnoTek has recently become open source’d. I’m actually quite surprised it hasn’t received more publicity. After hearing people rave about virtualbox in #hantslug on the blitzed irc network, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Setup was far easier and much more sane than vmware player/server, all configured via nice gui rather than weird perl script.
The best bit was yet to follow…the performance.
Finally, a decent flash player for linux! Woohoo! I’m not sure whether it will be much of an improvement on the beta (that didn’t crash once for me), but all the same, it was about time a long time ago. Check it out:
Penguin SWF
After wasting many hours messing around with VoIP solutions, I’ve finally decided that Tesco Internet Phone is the way to go. There’s a few good reasons why I think this, it’s easy for anyone to obtain and install. This was one of the main factors in my decision. With Tesco Internet phone, you don’t have to open ports on your router, it comes with a USB handset, so no need to get one of those, and you can just pop down to tesco and pick one up for really cheap (£15 I think) WITH a £5 calling credit thing.
I recently stumbled upon a really interesting site called Quickones which has a series of screencasts on how to use various things in Ubuntu (among other distributions).
For example, there’s a short guide on how to get flash to work on Ubuntu. Alan Pope delivers a very well paced and easy to follow screen cast. These screencasts are highly recommended to newcomers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution.