I've written before about the blurring of offline and online worlds and here is a great example of the concept in action; an interesting program that allows you to integrate your Flickr account into the file system of your Linux-powered computer, making it as easy to upload and download files as copying and pasting between folders. This is continuing the idea of merging a web experience with the desktop experience rather than the web being confined to your web browser. The program that makes this possible is called flickrfs and is available as a package for Ubuntu systems and is worth setting up as it is interesting and useful in itself, but also because offers an idea of what it would be like to use a filesystem based on tagging rather than one based on rigid structure or classification.

The most popular post on this blog for some time has been Using you Asus EEE PC on the 3 mobile network, which is no doubt a lot to do with it being linked to from 3 Mobile Buzz. I think it is safe to say that the two hottest gadgets this year have been the Asus EEE PC and the 3G dongle from 3, which put together make a whole new computing experience. Why? I think this may be a similar change to the introduction of mobile phones. It seems to me there is a direct comparison between the way we get onto the Internet and how we use phones. First we started with a hard wired connection, just like the phone, now many of us are on a WiFi connection, which is a bit like a cordless phone, in fact it has a similar range, you can stray a short distance from the location of your network, but if you go to somebody else's house, another workplace or away somewhere you are left with a chore of trying to get access to another network. There are WiFi systems now where you can "roam" between different hotspots, but in some ways that reminds me of the old Rabbit phones where you took the handset with you and had to find a base station to go stand near to make a call.

An area where Linux is sometimes criticised is the level of difficulty expericed by people new to the operating system when installing software. Earlier today, Dr A J Cann posted an example of this criticism when he suggested that Ubuntu should follow the same model of software distribution used Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X of having a downloadable installer file for your desired program. I don't agree with his suggestion, but do see his point that installing software for someone unfamiliar to Linux can seem a daunting task. If I know someone is about to try out Kubuntu, I always try to sit them down and explain the package management system to them. There is no direct equivant of this on other operating systems, so I find it helps to explain it to people. Once, somebody explained package management to me and it saved me a lot of time.

On Monday 25th February I gave an introductory talk on Linux for the TiCREG group here at The Open University. As promised in that presentation and for those of you who could not make it here is the presentation in both OpenOffice and MS PowerPoint formats with a list of references and further reading.

If you fancy using the Asus EEE as a development environment for you web projects then you are in luck. The little machine will quite happily run the entire LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL, which are the operating system, web server, programming language and database components respectively. Being a developer isn't the only reason you might want to install this technology, it also lets you experiment with some interesting software, which I will be exploring in later blog posts.

We're hearing computers speak to us more and more these days. It might be the satnav system in your car, the telephone exchange or screen reader software. One development admittedly passed me by though, that is computers with accents!

The Asus EEE is without doubt an excellent machine, it may also hold some wider lessons for the future. It is lightweight, a convenient size (about the size of a book), lightweight (about 900g) and extremely versatile (see my previous posts). It feels very solid and would be perfect for someone who might have to travel a lot or attend a lot of meetings.

I've just had the good fortune to have been able to borrow one of these magnificient little machines for the weekend. For those of you haven't heard the Asus EEE PC is an ultramobile laptop. Think "Honey I shrunk the laptop" and you'll have a good picture of it.

Kubuntu 7.10 now includes WINE in the 64 bit version, a very welcome addition. WINE is a project to implement the Windows API in Linux, meaning that many Windows programs can run at native speeds on Linux. This is not an emulator, so memory and resource usage tends to be lighter.

Wow! From the look of this thing you would be forgiven for thinking the Kubuntu team have spent six months spitting and polishing this fine operating system to make it a really smooth user experience. I have just installed the 64bit version onto my aging Acer laptop and it has taken remarkably little time to get everything up and running.