Google has announced that the Google Reader service will not be available after July 1 of this year (2013). The service, which provided a “cloud” portal for aggregating News feeds from several RSS Feed sources, is the latest victim of Google’s spring-cleaning. Since the spring-cleaning started in 2011. 70 services and applications have been eliminated or consolidated. Google Reader is [...]

This article is a take on how to “Improving the Fedora boot experience,” which was the subject of an email by Matthias Clasen to a Red Hat developer’s mailing list. In the email, he wrote that he “would love to see F19 make a good first impression.” If you’re new to these parts, “F19″ is shorthand for Fedora 19, the [...]

Kali Linux has just been released. ISO and VMWare images for Kali, a Linux distribution from the developers of BackTrack Linux, just hit a download mirror near you. BackTrack was/is a specialty distribution for security professionals and penetration testers. Before being re-branded, retooled and relaunched as Kali Linux, the last “stable” edition of BackTrack was BackTrack 5 R3. The “R” [...]

Manjaro is a new desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Arch Linux is known for its text-based installation process, so a feature I’m always looking for in any distribution based on it is a graphical installer. While there are many good graphical installation programs that new distribution developers can reuse, many still opt to code one from scratch. That shouldn’t [...]

So a company whose revenue from last year was about $50 billion is about to reach a $7 million USD settlement with state attorneys general of 30 US states for wardriving. An activity where the company was able to capture user data from private wireless networks. No one is officially calling it wardriving, but that was what Google was doing [...]

That should be obvious to anybody who’s been following the development of Ubuntu, but for those who have not, here’s the deal: Ubuntu is not a community distribution. The sooner you get that, the better, especially if you’ve been under the illusion that Mark Shuttleworth cares very much about your own idea of what a community distribution should be. Yes, [...]

I just received an email about Jolidrive, a new offering from Jolicloud, a technology outfit based in Paris, France. As you can tell from the name, Jolicloud has something to do with cloud computing. It started life as a provider of Joli OS, a kinda (Linux) distribution for the cloud. I signed up when it was launched just to see [...]

The EU Competition Commission, which levied a fine on Microsoft, had indicated long before the announcement what was in store, so “EU fines Microsoft” was expected. What we did not know was how much the fine was going to be. The fine was for failing to offer users of Microsoft operating system a choice of Web browsers, after agreeing to [...]

News flash: LG Acquires webOS from HP to enhance its line of Smart TVs. Now we can ad LG to the list of companies that have been associated with the webOS, one of the more promising, but, so far, disappointing cross-platform operating systems. When Meg Whitman was hired at HP and made webOS an open source project, I actually had [...]

In less than two months, April (2013) to be exact, you will be able to buy a Slate 7 Android tablet from HP for $169 USD. Announced at the ongoing Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, the Slate 7 Android tablet is HP’s first consumer-level tablet device since the failed webOS-powered Touchpad. But for that price, what will you [...]

Kademar is Debian-based Linux distribution, with KDE as the default desktop. The first beta of what would be Kademar 5 was released a few days ago. And this beta release is my introduction to this distribution. As always, I’m always curious to find out what the installer looks like and if it supports the features that define a feature-complete graphical [...]

The Software Development Kit (SDK) and preview installation images for Ubuntu Touch have been released. Ubuntu Touch is the umbrella name for Ubuntu for Phone and Ubuntu for Tablets. Both platforms were released this year, with the latter coming just a few days ago. This is a developer preview release for the code-happy to mess with. But since Canonical does [...]

CoolShip Android computer in a keyboard is the latest Android-powered computer. But this one is unlike other Android units. It’s not in a USB stick, but in a keyboard with most of the connectivity of a standard desktop or notebook computer. As non-standard computers come, the CoolShip is unlike others that are powered by Android. Think the Commodore 64/128, but [...]

Chromebook Pixel: Wow! Yes, wow, just wow. I think I’m used to seeing Chromebooks in the $200 to $300 price range, so when Chromebook Pixel flashed on my RSS Feed reader, I was expecting another ARM-powered computer in that price range. What a shock! Chromebook Pixel is Google’s latest offering in the computer hardware sector. Like all other Chromebooks, it [...]

Ubuntu on tablets is the latest Ubuntu platform from Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution. Barely two months ago, the company announced Ubuntu for smartphones. Before that, was Ubuntu for TV and before that, too, was Ubuntu for Android. While Mark Shuttleworth and crew seem to be making all the right moves, making their operating system available on [...]

Firefox PDF reader for Firefox Web browser might just be the add-on that put Adobe’s acrobat PDF reader out of business. When surfing a website, encountering a PDF file is one of those minor annoyances I wish I did not have to deal with. That’s because it interrupts the Web experience. With the release of a built-in PDF reader for [...]