We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form.

Back in early October a tweet by someone I follow alerted me to the fact that the deadline for submissions to the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) was less than 48 hours away. In a lunch break I whipped up a quick proposal for a lecture called "After the Hype - The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs". A couple of weeks later I learned that my submission had been accepted.

MSI and Novell will soon ship MSI's new Intel Atom N450-based MSI U135 netbook with SUSE Moblin Linux v2.1. Loaded with the netbook-focused version of SUSE, the U135 offers up to 2GB RAM, a 10.1-inch screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 160GB or 250GB hard drives, says MSI.

The browser and Songbird music player developed out of the Mozilla project have come together in a cooperative framework with Philips in the 2010 models of their GoGear MP3 player series.

The attempt to introduce software patents into Europe failed a few years ago, but the danger remains. Moves to create a new, pan-European patent could allow them in by the backdoor. The fight to stop them has begun.

The new Nexus One is a sleek, awesome handset, but the most important ingredient in touchscreen smartphones is software. The screen is just a canvas that software paints on, and Android 2.1 is a work of art. Coming from the chunky G1, the thin and flat Nexus One hearkens back to my iPhone days.

So, I needed an application that could load a couple of pictures, showing two pictures side-by-side for visual comparison and at the same time presenting the more important meta-data attributes such as focal length, exposure time, ISO and aperture.

Even though in the world of Twitter there are a lot of fantastic, feature-full programs for the Twitter power user, that's not exactly what I, a simple Twitter user, is looking for.