Sunday, March 19th, 2006 04:35 pm GMT +8

With the growing amount of talk on the usability of Linux for beginners, there have been quite a few people who have mentioned a script called “Automatix” for Ubuntu as a means of easing the average joe into a life of Linux. Linux.com’s (a Slashdot sister site) Tina Gasperson takes a closer look at Automatix and how it could help soften the blow of a Linux switch, at least in the short term. From the article: “Automatix lives up to its reputation. It’s worth any time and small frustration it might take to get through the script. And it’s even worth that ‘over-the-shoulder’ time you might spend with a new Linux user to walk them through it. I don’t see any reason why a beginner would not be delighted with Ubuntu after a magic touch from Automatix.”

Your favorite site doesn�t provide news feeds? This service, Feed43, converts any Web page to an RSS feed on the fly. Subversive!

Another company, FeedYes, released a similar product today. They claim that FeedYes is easier to use and faster and has one-click adding to MyYahoo and MyMSN.

An alternative is email notification.. There�s lots of people who feel more comfortable with email than with RSS. So, here�s a solution. Use squeet ??” just enter the RSS feed you want to be warned about and it�ll email you every time that RSS feed is updated. This is in principle to yahoo Alerts

Crank up something nice and loud (Sammy Hagar, perhaps) and check this out.

At zdnet. Not very comprehensive, but it does mention the two distinct groups:
1) The big guns: Microsoft (live.com), the Google Personalized Homepage and Yahoo (My Yahoo, which is still mostly an old-style portal).
2) The little companies: Netvibes, Protopage, pageflakes, a href=”http://www.cfempire.com/home/”>HomePortals, Goowy and a host of other contenders.

One of the comments pretty much encapsulates my feeling about these, though…

All these AJAX homepages seem to provide nothing more than Google Search, RSS Feeds, and a weather applet/gadget/widget. The problem is there’s no business model in something my browser can provide me – either through built-in functionality, RSS feeds, or bookmarks (remember them?).

There’s only value in an AJAX homepage if you can do something more with the components available. Assuming you can get the AJAX-world to settle down, and decide on the right way to do AJAX, then you have the problem of the “walled garden”, i.e. who owns the customer ?

For example, say I wanted to “mash up” my GMail client, with my Plaxo contacts, and Flickr photos, so I could create a not -too-far-fetched super-web2.0-mail-client. I would need a environment that makes those APIs available , a simple -to-use programming language to foster a development community/ecosystem, and a slick AJAX GUI builder. All online, otherwise you would remain dependent on in-house development staff.

I don’t see this happening for a while yet. We still have a couple of hurdles to overcome: a common system for user authentication, webservice standards (SOAP that works seamlessly across multiple vendors/platforms?), and reliable CSS2 across IE and Firefox to name a few.

Find out in this video of the making of the Microsoft I-pod PRO 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription.

From Ars Technica:

Traditionally, the Budget Box on Ars Technica is all of the following things: versatile, capable, and extremely affordable. Budget in our minds has long meant a low-cost, yet capable box for your money, and certainly as a gaming machine, the Budget Box does all right. Think of it as a respectable budget gaming box, and you can understand why we throw in so many significant extras into the mix.

The Ultimate Budget Box tosses the gaming focus out the window, instead focusing on a bare-minimum budget system. To all those people clamoring for a minimalist Budget Box: this is it. Look around inside most corporate offices, where most computers need to handle a few Office documents and light Internet use. They don’t need to be able to burn CDs or handle 3D-intensive games, but they do need to be reliable and affordable. Lots of consumers out there probably want a similar box??”an appliance that lets them get onto the Internet, take care of e-mail, and create a few documents. For them, being able to burn a CD-RW would probably be nice, but anything beyond that is an extra. Low-cost, reliability, and quality are key.

Reviews of several portable wi-fi access points from the New York Times. If you have cellular Internet access (some of these devices run exclusively off 3G networks, some are exclusively EVDO services), you plug the PC card into the wi-fi box and presto, you’ve got Wi-Fi from wherever you are.
Note that this isn’t a wifi network that someone in a physical office or house has running unsecured. This is a box that connects to a cellular network and then rebroadcasts the signal via wifi. So wherever you and the box are, you have a wireless access point as well.
slashdot discussion, including pointers to build-your-own versions of these.
Here’s another review of the Kyocera KR1 which is EVDO capable.