It’s been a couple of years since I reviewed a laptop from ZaReason, the UltraLap SR. Now I’m reviewing something a bit smaller — the ZaReason Terra HD. ZaReason is a different type computer company; every single computer they sell runs Linux, and they only ship Linux (or no operating system at all) on all [...]
Neuros Control Pad 1002 is an Android Tablet With an Idea
I’ve been watching Joe Born’s Neuros Technology for quite a while. From the mp3 players to the Neuros OSD to the Neuros Link, Joe’s products have all had open source and technology in mind. What if that idea was applied to remote controls? That’s where Joe’s bright idea comes up. Joe has worked on procuring [...]
Maker of the Tuxdroid, Kysoh S.A. is Bankrupt
I love my Tuxdroid, the little robotic open source penguin that could read e-mail, weather and the time to you. I decided to revive my Tuxdroid as I had not played with him for a while. I hit up the website for Kysoh, the makers of the Tuxdroid and the site appeared up, but the [...]
Ohio Linuxfest 2010: Here’s to the Hall Track
Another Ohio LinuxFest has come and gone. The friends of the penguin gathered at the Greater Columbus Convention Center for yet another year of great sessions, networking and lots of fun and merriment as friends meet to discuss what is new and interesting in Free and Open Source Software. This is my second year working [...]
Backups and Recovery Are Your Friends…A Cautionary Tale!
A few weeks ago I made a really dumb mistake. One of those, “I have been a geek for far too long to forget this” kind of mistakes. The easy to avoid, harder to fix kind…what happened? Read on and find out. It all started during a discussion in the “back room” here at Gear [...]
Callpod Releases Keeper Data Vault for Almost Every Platform and Why I won’t Use It.
Callpod who is the maker of the Chargepod, fueltank and other products for mobile phones has branched out into software now with the release of Keeper and Keeper Mobile. These programs are password data vaults that run on pretty much every smartphone including iPhone, Android and Blackberry based phones. The free version let’s you store [...]
Droid X Gets the Lockdown: Does it Matter?
There’s been a bunch of stuff going around the web about the Droid X and the fact that it likely will not be able to run custom ROMS and may even be hard to root. I’ll try to describe, in layman’s terms, what this may mean to a prospective Droid X buyer. What is this [...]
Southeast Linuxfest 2010: Building Strong and Lasting Connections
Friends gathered once again in South Carolina to learn about Linux and check out what is new in the Linux community. It is a time of learning as well as time of camaraderie and a over all great time if you are a fan of Linux and Open Source technologies. My trip to SELF started on Thursday [...]
Preview: Southeast LinuxFest 2010
Up until this year, I had only attended the Ohio LinuxFest being lucky enough to live in its host city of Columbus, Ohio. The Ohio LinuxFest is an awesome community driven event that amazes me every year it’s run. However, in 2010, I will be attending both the Ohio LinuxFest and the second year of [...]
Steam for OS X? Old News! Now We Hear About … Steam for Linux!
There has been considerable excitement in the Mac gaming community leading up to next week’s anticipated release of the OS X Steam Client (and the associated games). Now thanks to Phonorix we have pretty definitely looking information that Valve is working hard on a Steam client for Linux. According to the site: Less than two [...]
Review: SpiderOak Cloud Backup
Backing your data up to the cloud and living out of the cloud is all the rage. SpiderOak cloud backup has a lot of features that I have been looking for in an online backup solution. First, to get started with SpiderOak, you need to download the software for Windows, Mac or Linux and install [...]
Ubuntu One Music Store Now in Public Beta
For a long long time, Linux users never really had a built in music store like Mac and Windows users do. That all changed today IF you use Ubuntu, specifically the 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” Beta 1. The service is run by 7digital in the US and pretty much everywhere. Songs are 320 Kbps MP3′s with [...]
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” Preview
Spring is in the air! The trees are budding and the flowers are starting to come out of their slumber. It also means that it is time for another release of the desktop oriented Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu will frequently produce what is called a LTS or a Long Term Support release. That means unlike non [...]
Qi Hardware’s Ben NanoNote: A Completely Open Source Pocket Computer
Imagine not only building your own computer, but making the boards yourself. Yeah, it’s not something the common person would do, but Qi Hardware’s Ben NanoNote is open in a way most hardware isn’t. This is a similar model to the OpenMoko Freerunner and has been started by former members of the OpenMoko team. Not [...]
Maemo to Merge with Moblin to Create MeeGo
Maemo, the Linux that runs on the N Series Internet Tablets and more recently the N900 will merge with Moblin, to create MeeGo according to information coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Moblin was a Linux desktop that was started by Intel and targeted at Tablet devices. PC Mag reports that the new OS [...]



