sandwichesandapples

A few years ago, an elementary school, having made the awful decision to switch to Windows machines, was selling off their fleet of Mac iBooks but only to employees and their relatives. They originally tried to get a couple hundred dollars for each iBook but the cheap machines had a huge caveat — they were running OS 9 and would probably need a memory upgrade to run OS X. Also, the batteries sucked. Since upgrades to make it run like a decent laptop would cost me as much as a new machine, I passed. (continue reading…)

I can’t wait to check this out — an audio, video, graphics suite for ubuntu.

I really want to know more about the gOS operating system. Such a pretty interface.

I was looking through the comic book introduction that Google has created to explain their new open-source browser Chrome (that’s right, Google has a new open-source browser). Instead of reading about this awesome new project, all I could think was “this comic looks like Scott McCloud’s work.”

Sure enough. It was.

As a fan of open-source, I’m eagerly awaiting the first phone on Google’s Android Operating System. And of course, I’d love to play with an OpenMoko. But until either of those events occurs, I’m following several blogs about each. So expect to find many new items on open mobile devices to be shared in my “Shared Items.”

Oh and check these OpenMoko videos.

And this Wired piece on Android is a pretty good introduction to it.

Supposedly, this is a video of Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices:

it’s a pretty crappy video but I’m just happy to see it working. Hopefully more info like this will sneak out in the next few months. Android is open source so I’d hope information about development on it becomes more open and available.

I’m researching / experimenting with open source ecommerce solutions, specifically ones that run in PHP on MySQL. My host company, Dreamhost, provides a one-click install of Zen Cart but I’ve heard that one’s a bit difficult to customize.

I’d heard of Freeway recently but wasn’t really impressed with them. Then there’s the Market Theme, an ecommerce solution for WordPress. But you’ve got to buy that one. It’s cheap and I’m necessarily looking for free but the whole idea of paying for something to add to WordPress seems antithetical to me.

Then yesterday, I found Magento which blows me away. I’m installing it now to put it through its paces. I can’t wait to see how it holds up to ASPStoreFront (my firm’s default ecommerce solution and a ridiculously heavy and user-unfriendly platform that runs on Windows very much not open source server). I’ll let you know.