MeeGo

So, bye bye Windows? When Nokia introduced its Booklet, something like this was an expected measure.

Google Buzz looks interesting. It would be nice to find some sensible use for this service...

Wave

I finally got a Google Wave invitation. It surely looks interesting, but at the moment, the whole thing is rather pointless with only one friend :)

Picasa Web

Taken from Picasa: Terms of Service:

You agree not to access Picasa Web Albums by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google for use in accessing Picasa Web Albums.

So no upload to Picasa Web Album from F-Spot, Gthumb, etc?

Nokia Booklet

Nokia just introduced Nokia Booklet 3G mini-laptop. It is interesting to see if there are plans for a Linux version. With Qt, the underlying operating system should be somewhat irrelevant.

N900

Mobile Review has an interesting review of Nokia's forthcoming N900. It also includes some absorbing speculation about Nokia's strategies.

Maemo goes Qt

Now it's official: Maemo will switch to Qt. Not a big surprise.

Ubuntu One

Finally I got an invite to Ubuntu One. At the moment, it looks like a poor dropbox clone. But despite of this, I'm very much interested in seeing the future of it.

On the other hand, it would have not been a bad choice to call it Canonical One instead of Ubuntu One. Could you imagine Linus Torvalds selling a web service called Linux One...?

Firefox

New design ideas for Firefox look really interesting.

Trinidad

I kind of guessed it that Nokia is planning to enter laptop business. After acquiring Trolltech, it makes a lot of sense. Mobile phones, laptops, and internet should work well together. In a sense, Google, Apple, and Nokia are doing the same thing. They all think that this is the future and they want to lock their users to use their services. At the moment, Google is strong in the internet, Apple is strong in laptops/software, and Nokia is strong in mobile phones. Microsoft hasn't been very succesfull in this regards yet, but it is interesting to see what will happen.

Newsflash

Qt goes LGPL.

Backup

During the holidays, I though about backupping. I wanted to have a simple backupping system that works automatically. That excluded RAID (too complicated) and DVD's (not automatic). Applications that seem to be useful in this regard include Simple Backup Suite and Unison. There is also a possibility to make a backup of the whole disc by using the dd command. However, my solution was to buy an USB disc and do some rsync+cron magic. Pretty much similarly as described in here.

Themes

I very much like the idea of those Gmail themes which change their appearance depending on the local weather or the time of the day. This idea should definately be applied to the desktop. With Compiz, it shouldn't be that difficult to make effects (or themes) that behave like this.

Tabbing

I have actually always thought that tabs should be handled by the window manager, not by the program itself. Of course, this is one of the fundamental ideas behind Ion. It seems that Google is taking a step into this direction with its Google Chrome browser. A quick mockup of how the mentioned idea might look in Chrome:

Ubuntu theme

The new theme for Ubuntu Interprid is simply awful. It's even worse than the previous one. This mockup should be the way to go.

Qt

Nokia helps port Firefox to Qt (which is great news for KDE users) and Nokia adds Qt to Maemo. These news are not very surprising since Nokia acquired Trolltech last January. Is the long run plan in Maemo to switch completely to Qt? I would imagine that having two toolkits (i.e. Qt and GTK) increases the memory consumption (which is supposedly a bad thing in a mobile device) and also makes it more difficult to get unified look and feel among the applications.

Homer Simpson euro

Quite an impressive work ;)

Knol

I really don't get Knol. It is a site that hosts many articles written in various subjects. The idea is that only the author has the right to modify the article. Granted, other people can rate and comment articles. They can even write their own versions of the article. But still, all articles are based on someone's viewpoint, or even worse, opinion. Does rating and commenting the articles give enough peer reviewing? In my opinion, Wikipedia's approach makes more sense. In Knol, 1+1+1=3, but in Wikipedia, 1+1+1=4.

If I'm missing something, please enlighten me.