The phenomenon that is Web2.0 has brought about many new opportunities to interact with websites. The downside of this so far has been the necessity to register for each site separately that creates the baggage of having to remember lots of user names and passwords. Help is at hand though with a new system called OpenID that might life easier for all of us in the future. The good news is that this can easily be integrated into Drupal to make your users' lives easier.

Drupal has been officially updated to version 6! An announcement detailing some of the new features is available at: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0. If you are unfamiliar with Drupal you can get a booklet that describes it at: http://drupal.org/node/10767.

Many visits to websites now are as a result of a search made by a user. In fact you may be reading this very article as a result of using a popular search engine like Google or Yahoo.

If you are trying to get a Huawei E169G modem from 3 to work on your EEE then please have a look at this blog post: http://www.greenhughes.com/content/huawei-e169g-easy-way

After the relative ease of getting a local Moodle installation going on Kubuntu, is it possible to shrink this whole situation so we can get a few Moodle powered OpenLearn courses onto the Asus EEE PC and then take them with us wherever we go?

You might find your self in the situation where you have a bit of time to spare, but sadly with an unreliable, absent or just very expensive internet connection. This might happen if you are travelling, maybe on a long distance flight, or staying somewhere without internet facilities. Well now you could be using that time to pick up some new knowledge, maybe taking a course on a subject that has always interested you, or learning new skills to enhance your career. I'm not talking about one of those cheap CD-ROMs you see in computer shops promising to teach you vast amounts of knowledge, but are often disappointing, instead I'm talking about genuine Open University materials that can be loaded onto your computer absolutely free and used interactively when your are offline.

It's funny how the phrases "paperless office" and "it'll never happen" can occur in close proximity, but just maybe there is a way to work towards this dream. Modern offices are often a colossal mess of paper, high powered printers churn out copies of electronic documents, scraps of paper litter people's desks and people remind themselves of tasks to be completed by sticking little notes to available surfaces. If somebody turns up to speak to you about a topic, they will often print out an email about the subject.

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.

The Course Profiles application, which allows you to display a badge on your profile in Facebook about your Open University studies has just been updated. This is a bit of an interim release while we plan a brand new user interface that will enable users to connect with the application's features more easily. Not that this is some sort of dull maintenance release though, we've put in some new features!

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!