WednesdayMorning

Hey guys,

Those of you that follow me on twitter may have noticed I’ve been posting of my favorite news articles of the day up on there, this is mainly because I’ve started to use Google Reader to manage my news feeds rather than a desktop application. So far I’m finding it very useful and much easier to manage my news stories all in one place. I particularly like the “star” feature which also appears in GMail for highlighting interesting articles from the blurbs to come back to them later. I’m going to share a few of my favorite stories of the last few days and I think I’m going to make this a general trend for my blog as well as talking about other things just as before.

Going to start with one of my favorites of the week thats about a Nokia phone (http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/08/21/1155217/Nokia-Leaks-Phone-With-Full-GNULinux-Distribution), supposedly coming with a full GNU/Linux Distribution. I really hope that nokia take the time to release their PC software for the phone to the open source community. I must admit I’m not one to follow mobile phone technology but this story just a caught my eye. I’m however still very happy with my iPhone 3G and won’t be swapping it for anything any time soon, especially as I’ve only had it a month.

Another linux(ish) story about a distro swapping to KDE, not personally a fan of KDE it always seemed a bit clunky and big to me however I do find I prefer a lot of the KDE apps to Gnome ones. Anyway the story is here and it warms my heart to see OpenSUSE to see them change default and also I really do like to read stories about things being changed to how the community like it and especially as a response to a user request. In this case 68% of OpenSUSE users prefer KDE against the 27% that prefer GNOME (the second most popular).

I’m going to briefly move away from technology to a story about worms (http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/21/123236/New-Species-of-Worms-Found-To-Release-Bombs?from=rss). When reading this one I imagined a worm throwing under-riped banana grenades like in the old Worm games. I do love a bit of random every so often and found that one quite a nice break from the hordes of tech related news.

Back to technology and we can talk about the recent love for Blizzard at Blizzcon 2009, I didn’t get the online stream or a ticket but I have enjoyed reading news about the new expansion pack. There is a huge stack of stories (http://www.wired.com/gamelife/tag/blizzcon-2009/) on wired about whats going on at blizzcon and I just you take 20 mins to read through them. I’m going to follow on quickly and tag on the end of this another gaming related story about Microsoft’s new baby Natal. Those of you that watched the E3 streams may remember this baby (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8214385.stm). Natal the hands-free gaming experience for the Xbox, In my opinion is a step up from the Wi and PS3 competitors versions however I think for some games I’d still prefer my controller! There is another gaming story I would mention about the PS3 slim however I think its an expensive pile of worthlessness. PS3 has lost it’s good exclusive titles and is nearly  £100 more than other Xb0x 360 packages that provide better titles and a just as good If not better gaming experience (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/08/ps3-slim-hits-september-1-for-300-ps3-price-cut-wednesday.ars).

There has been a lot of controversy about the iPhone and it’s app process lately, mainly around the google voice app. It looks cool but is US only which in my opinion should be the reason not to have it on the iPhone. iPhone apps should be usable by all iPhones not just people living in the US however the FCC (again something to do with the US but really the EU should stop at Microsoft when it comes to dealing with matters of technology) has been investigating and the statements have been given from AT&T, Apple and Google (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/08/ps3-slim-hits-september-1-for-300-ps3-price-cut-wednesday.ars). Google it seems are taking hits from USA Today who look to be trying to milk the Smart Phone app outrage as much as possible even attack the android phones (http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/21/google-refutes-usa-today-report-on-blocked-skype-application/) over a Skype application.

I think I’ll leave it there for news, I’ll add some more interesting stories as I find them or you can follow me on twitter and just read them as I link them. As for other stuff going on, a friend of mine has recently released his 4th flash game so I figure I’ll plug it!

I don’t think I have much more to rant about, still doing stuff for the society and trying to research for my third year project. I’m having trouble finding material to do the research with however.

Hope to keep up the regular writing!