Freespire is the community arm of Linspire, a Linux distro that’s been in the news a few times, most famously for getting into trouble with Microsoft for it’s old name – Lindows.

As the old name suggests, Linspire and Freespire are aimed at the Windows user to make switching to Linux easy. Linspire has always been a paid-for distribution – there’s been no free to download pre-packaged version. Freespire is set to change all that, and it helpfully has a version which includes various proprietary software bits. The benefit of this is that not only do things like WMVs, MP3s and DVDs (lots of acronyms) work out of the box, but so do a larger number of bits of hardware. There are wireless card drivers, modem drivers, 3D graphics drivers and more – note that not everything is guaranteed to be there, some manufacturers are still bone idle enough to ignore Linux support.
So if you’re a someone who’s tried a Linux distro but have been put off by non-support or difficult to set up modem drivers, wireless card drivers or media support, give Linspire a try!

• Freespire Homepage
• Download Freespire

Just finished my review of RSSOwl that I promised. It was a bit critcal – particularly of the interface, but at the moment it just doesn’t meet my needs. Still, I mentioned that, the cool features that are there and what I think the RSSOwl development team should do next.

The quest to find a better feed reader goes on, and I’ll look for my next candidate soon, which might this time be a web-based offering. Still using Google IG for now then…

Just came across this blog post, detailing some positive experiences with Ubuntu. Hey, apparently, even the wireless networking worked with zero configuration! Now that’s impressive, even for a commercial operating system.

So why not try Ubuntu today?

OPML is really cool. In case you don’t know, OPML is an implementation of XML that basically produces a list of feeds (RSS, Atom and the like). Now I use Google’s Personalised Homepage (also known as Google IG) to track my feeds. It’s not quite as featured as Google Reader, in that it doesn’t natively support OPML import/export. Thankfully, there is a cool plugin for your Personalised Homepage called OPML Export. It’s a tiny bit of JavaScript that extracts a list of your feeds and sends you an OPML file.

The aim of exporting the list of my feeds was so that I could try out some different feed readers for a change, to see if they were better (I’m sure there are many better ones). OPML file in hand, I tried importing into Google Reader. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t accept the OPML file, but after adding an XML line to the top of the file, it successfully imported my feeds.

The next thing I wanted to have a look at was Firefox Live Bookmarks. I knew about this feature, but I hadn’t used it very extensively. Thanks to a neat Firefox extension called OPML Support, I could import my feeds as Live Bookmarks. One gripe. It imported them all into the root of my bookmarks. I tried to batch move them to a Feeds folder, but batch moving caused Firefox to crash (bug do you think?), so I had to move the Live Bookmarks one by one into my Feeds folder. Thank goodness there’s only 30 odd and not hundreds.

Well, now I’ll try out some more feed readers – desktop and web-based – and see if I find a better solution than Google IG.

Sorry, I just have a fundamental disagreement with MySpace, I’m not sure about other social networking sites, but these are my reasons why:

1. MySpace is dangerous – there are dangerous people on MySpace.
2. MySpace push malware-infected ads.
3. MySpace uses other ad campaigns that target young people – it’s debatable whether this is irresponsible in some cases.
4. MySpace profiles attract terrible CSS coding and terrible web usability.
5. MySpace profiles often have irritating auto-play Flash music players and other Flash embeds.
6. MySpace blogs are generally rubbish.
7. I already have ‘my space’ – that’s this blog. I don’t need someone to plonk their advertising on it and restrict what I can do.
8. From my very limited experience of MySpace, you get people posting stupid messages/comments on your profile, and I find that irritating.
9. Rupert Murdoch has enough money already without me giving him more advertising revenue.
10. MySpace should leverage technology like XFN to promote open standards (don’t get me started)

OK I’m sorry about that, I just don’t like and don’t intend to use MySpace. I’ll post something nice and friendly now.

Well, I’ve been blogging a lot about Zooomr recently. I think they’re actually very interesting. Like Flickr were originally (before Flickr got gobbled up by Yahoo), they are a small independent start-up (to the best of my knowledge).

Zooomr are similar to Flickr in the fact that they are both photo sites, but Zooomr does quite a few things better:

• They don’t have ridiculous restrictions on what is and isn’t a photo – put what you want on there (within reason, of course)
• Geotagging is awesome (when I have some real photos to test I’ll get a better look)
• Trackbacks on photos (Flickr are almost as slow as Blogger are on getting trackbacks on blogs, come on Blogger!)
• Flickr has RSS feed support – but Zooomr really pushes it and I think RSS is available to syndicate a lot more things than Flickr can
• Tagging – Zooomr’s implementation is just slick and appears absolutely everywhere
• Uploading is great – I love the fact that multiple uploads are handled so intuitively
• Integration with Google Maps API is everywhere, I love it

However, they could work on:

• Speed – at times Zooomr is painfully slow, when Flickr is fine. Yes, this must be difficult to afford the server & bandwidth capacity when you haven’t got Yahoo behind you, but still it will drive people away
• The interface of Zooomr personally I don’t think looks as nice as Flickr’s – Flickr looks and feels friendlier to the new user
• I can’t see anything along the lines of a set creator or something like Flickr’s Organisr. This functionality would be nice
• Something like (or better than) the cool Flash animations and little HTML snippets that show your recent photos – I’d put one on the sidebar here!
• Publicity – Zooomr’s great, but hardly anyone knows about it. I suppose the free Pro accounts (and people like me blogging about Zooomr) will help them, but without product awareness, they’ll never beat Flickr
• Innovation – not to say they haven’t innovated already, they have, but they need to work on some really awesome features that leave Flickr’s in the dust (feature wars anyone?)

Anyway, I hope this helps the Zooomr team try and increase their popularity – I think it’s nice to see the small players win sometimes. Zooomr – I think you won me over with the free Pro account. One question – how would you have upgraded to Pro if you didn’t get upgraded for free? I couldn’t see the option anywhere.

I wasn’t very fair about Zooomr when I said they were “a bit similar to Flickr”. Hey, they are a bit similar to Flickr, but they’ve actually got a few more features.

The GeoTag system is really cool. If you upload a photo and then ‘tag’ where that image was taken, Zooomr analyses and finds other photos tagged with a nearby area. I haven’t had a chance to use this extensively yet, but it looks interesting.

That’s just one of the things Zooomr has that Flickr doesn’t. There are a few more, so give Zooomr a try if you haven’t done so. And blog about it for a free Pro account (thanks Zoomr).

I love the free VMware Server. It’s a great product, and thank you VMware for it. But the compulsory upgrading is irritating. Now I haven’t been using VMware lately, so I’ve been forced to upgrade twice, once for Linux and again for Windows. As you can see, nothing on the interface has changed:

VMware on WindowsHosted on Zooomr

OK there’s probably bugfixes, but it’s not like it was particularly buggy before!

By the way, I hosted this image on Zoomr, because they’re offering free Pro accounts to any bloggers who host on Zoomr, check it out. They look a bit similar to Flickr, but officially they allow non-photo uploading (perfect for my screenshots!).

Yes, it’s true. As of Thursday, I did my last exam so school is now officially over and I can look forward to a good holiday with a lot of coding. But enough about that.

I finally wrote my last Vista article (Digg it) and dediced to put Windows XP back on my computer, mainly because I wanted my applications to be installed again. See, having a multi-partition setup meant that not all my applications (in fact, hardly any) are on what Windows would call the C: drive. But that’s a different story entirely.

The main website project for Hybrid is back in full-time development now, and there will be things happening very soon hopefully. Stay tune.

OK, I haven’t posted for some time now. Sorry.

But today I have finally seen a MacBook ‘in the flesh’. And it is awesome. It might be quite a small screen, but personally, running at 1280×800, it is very nice.

It’s also fast (2x 1.83 GHz cores). The only thing I would complain about is the hard drive size on the £749 model, which is 60 GB.

But, I’m most definitely getting one now…