Once you get yours hands on an Asus EEE PC (I've just taken delivery of a black one btw and am using it to write this!) you'll probably find it an incredibly useful tool for keeping up with your work, email and favourite websites.
Recently my mobile phone broke, well in fact the charger did and mobile phones are rather pointless without electricty so it was time to get a new one. I have to confess that I had been a bad person and not backed all of the various numbers that I have on my mobile. On top of that I'm sure I don't know anybody's number off by heart. Sound familiar?
Not long now until the long anticipated release of KDE4, a major update to the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Kubuntu users and users of many other Linux distributions will be familiar with KDE as powers the desktop environment of their machine. Even the Asus EEE in its 'Advanced Mode' uses a KDE desktop. January 11th is the big day with a launch event at the headquarters of Google.
Some time ago I got a free DVD set of Solaris 10 delivered to me. Solaris is a version of UNIX which is supplied by Sun Microsystems ususally with their servers, but more recently they have been supplying versions suitable for use on other equipment.
So you've had a look at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/ are found a great extension for OpenOffice that you would like to try. Only problem is that in the version of OpenOffice that we use there is no sign of the "Extensions" entry in the tools menu
Top educational blogger Stephen Downes has compiled his own list of who he feels should have been Edublog winners, and our very own Course Profiles application in Facebook gets his vote for Best educational use of a social networking service.
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.
Admittedly, I didn't actually try to put the EEE into a handbag, but a couple of people very enthusiastically mentioned that such a feat would be possible. Now of course as I'm sure you know there are few subjects more serious than servers, this is the impression I have got over the years from sysadmins suspicious of developers! So we ought to see if some serious technology works on the machine, could we really use it as a web server? Or a database server? Maybe even for Drupal?
The EEE does lots more fancy multimedia stuff. One great program that is on board already is Amarok (although it has been renamed Music Manager here). This has got to be one of the greats of the open source world. Through this application you can listen to your music collection, listen to internet radio, subscribe to podcasts and it integrates with last.fm (so you can listen to streams and scrobble tracks).