A great piece from John Naughton in the Observer, hanging off the back of the Eric Schmidt lecture at Edinburgh but (rightly) critiquing too much British computing education as being about learning Word, not learning programming, and highlighting Arduino and the forthcoming Raspberry Pi £15 Linux computer.

I've already got Netatalk running on my funky Debian/Ubuntu hybrid home server but there are some useful tips here (usedot, avahi and custom icons, in particular).

"I am locked because I have Time Machine backups, [and] Time Machine backups can only be restored on macs" What use is a Windows backup without Windows? Anyway: hfsplus on Linux will read your data. (Hm, can it cope with the directory hard links?)

Billed as "a Flickr photo uploader for the Gnome desktop". Looks nice and minimal, and has a command line interface too. Possibly useful for Eee types, if they have image processing sorted?

One of these things is not like the other. It's the one that "had users file a bug on me to make Thunderbird’s new account dialog smaller, so they can get to the buttons."

"these defects are minor compared with the machine’s astounding value and functionality - and to the future trends in computing it heralds" On the Eee and Linux, sounding a bit like Charlie Stross.

Slightly nuts Ubuntu Linux installer that lets you put a Linux disk image on a hard disk (no partitioning) then uses magic bootloader invocations to start up. What's next, a freeware Q VM?

A short review/narrative about candace's first week with her Eee. "Either I will be online 24/7 non-stop and never get anything done, or I will be able to get work done whenever, whereever, on my terms, and with little hassle."

The Register's hardware site notes that RM are selling the Asus Eee (rebadged as a Minibook- better name anyway) from next month. The headline price is ex vat and for the low end model, but still, not bad.

I'd need to change screen -RR (two capitals?) to -Ux, and also distinguish if I've got multiple screens (at home, anyway) but this could be handy.

How to squeeze the best performance out of a Squid caching layer.

Code and howto for the new iPod hashing algorithm. It's not exactly user friendly yet, but then I suppose it is less than a day old. One curious thing: it uses a "firewireID" despite all iPods being USB only for about three years.

"Pyro works fundamentally by drawing your entire computer screen as a Web Page, all from within Firefox. Indeed, at the core Pyro is simply a window manager which renders Web content alongside existing native applications." Insane. But interesting.

"The new Banshee services stack will provide a powerful D-Bus interface that will make it possible for developers to create alternate user interface frontends" I wondered ages ago about iTunes splitting into UI and a DAAP provider. Sounds interesting.

"An attempt to improve text rasterization algorithms using only publicly available information" Follows on from the Safari 3 for Windows rendering debate, apparently.

Still want one for the OS X. Suppose I'd better write my own. It's such a niche though. Isn't it?

"Michael Dell, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Dell, is himself an Ubuntu user." Could be interesting; depends how well hidden the Linux option is.

Found for andym, who inadvertantly lost his movie files on a memory card. I've seen plenty of stuff like this for the Mac and Windows, but it's payware- this is cross-platform and free (GPL).

"Real is now entitled to include support for Microsoft's proprietary video formats in its video player products" but presumably not the DRM

"Tangerine is an application that allows you to publish music over the local network, using DAAP. ... Music files can be specified either by a directory, or can be automatically discovered using Beagle." Good idea, this. Doubt it'll displace mt-daapd for

Giant Disc looks like a Linux jukebox system, but it has a Palm client. Nutty, but also interesting

Including fixing bash history from multiple shells, incremental searching, and so on. Old, but good.

Uses binary search and labelling to discover which patch causes problems. Clever.

Because I want to be able to ssh hunter.local without having to run dnsmasq and dhcpd

Scarily, it works. Unsurprisingly, it's pretty slow.

Unlike Spike, has a Linux version. Sadly, unlike Spike, doesn't use Rendezvous

Current departure boards for the Bakerloo line, London