It took about a week to get here, but it finally arrived, my Asus Eee PC is here. First of all I had to curb my excitement as the batteries took some time to charge – up to two hours. So why did I buy this? Well I have to admit to a wee bit of technolust. But avoiding technolust was the very reason I did not just go out and purchase one as soon as the Eee PC came out. After I had one in my hands for 3 minutes, I knew that I wanted one and that it would be useful. How useful? Well, let me tell you.

Today, I'm going to show you a great little application for easily generating a Web gallery of images that requires no server side coding. Just generate your gallery with a simple command, then upload to your Web site. Of course, coding a Web page is easy enough if you know even basic HTML, and you can create thumbnails with the tools in ImageMagick easily enough, but setting up that little web slide show can be a tad time consuming even if you know how to do all these things. There are also some great Web photo gallery packages out there, like Zenphoto, but what if you don't have shell access to your Website or you aren't allowed to install programs or run scripts? You might well be in a bind. This is where iGal comes into play.

A Seattle-based nonprofit organization called Literacy Bridge hopes to create a low-cost audio player for the developing world. The $5 "Talking Book" is an iPod-sized flash-based mp3 player that juices up on health, educational, and other audio programming at Linux-based content distribution kiosks.

"Have you ever wanted to get involved in The Perl Foundation, but didn't know how? Well, now's your chance. I'm pleased to announce open self-nominations for the following TPF roles..."

Known in the development world as the father of Java, Sun Microsystems' vice president and fellow James Gosling has urged coders to stop using the antiquated Emacs text editor and move to a more modern IDE like Sun's own open source NetBeans.

IBM has teamed up with partners in Austria and Poland to offer Microsoft-free personal computers for the eastern European market, IBM said in a statement on Tuesday. [They] said it was offering the PCs based on the open-source Linux operating system together with Red Hat software distributor VDEL of Austria and Polish distributor and services firm LX Polska in response to demand from Russian IT chiefs.

I knew it. Vista simply wasn’t ready for prime time. Some internal documents that emerged from a class-action lawsuit over Vista Capable illustrated that hardware vendor, Dell, pushed back on Microsoft to fix issues with Vista before launching. Microsoft knew fully well of Dell’s feedback as early as Aug 2005.

Mobile phone design company Openmoko has posted industrial design source CAD files for its Linux-based, open source Neo 1973 phone (pictured at left). Openmoko has also committed to providing open source access to the mechanicals for its upcoming Neo Freerunner phone design.