The official website for E-Lead Electronic's Noahpad UMPC has just gone live: www.noahpad.com. Along with the announcement emailed to me this morning came a full press release (below) containing several references to the Eee PC and some clarification about the "dual large touch pads" and backwards typing mentioned in the previous promotional material.

That was my initial assessment. Look...I am past the honeymoon stage as a Linux User. I've seen it early in the morning before its had its coffee. I've stood too close to it before the morning tooth-brushing has taken place. I've even had my hands in parts of it that most people never need or want to see. Gone are the days of being endeared by cute little mannerisms. Past are the times when I would gaze lovingly at every part of it, cherishing the fact that it was mine.

"I'm not even going to pretend to write all this marketing rubbish, because quite honestly I'm not much good at it and it's a senseless waste of time. Really there's no point anyway, on the surface there's really nothing new - most of the changes are upgrades and kind of "under the hood" (kernel 2.6.23.12, KDE 3.5.8, Firefox 2.0.0.11, Thunderbird 2.0.0.9, OpenOffice.org 2.3.1), although you will probably see some really nice new wallpaper images in KDE..."

Have you ever gotten annoyed by Wine/Cedega/CXOffice not matching to your otherwise pretty desktop? It is possiable to change the Wine color scheme to closely match your default desktop colors. You can even install a large varity of themes and have Wine use them to make your favorite applications look even better.

Yesterday I realized that I have run over 30 different kinds of Linux on my laptop. My final choice?

"After an extensive development period, the Syllable project has released Syllable Desktop 0.6.5 with improvements all over..."

Jabber is the only mainstream free (as in speech) instant messaging protocol. Unfortunately, most Jabber clients for GNU/Linux only provide options for messaging and group chats, overlooking the audio chatting portion of Jabber (powered by the Google-funded libjingle). Enter Jabbin, the free Qt-based Jabber VoIP client.

GNU/Linux is bursting with information about the system on which it runs. The system's hardware and memory, its Internet link and current processes, the latest activity of each user -- all this information and more is available. And, despite such desktop tools as the KDE Control Center or GNOME's System Monitor, the easiest place to get all the system information available is still the command line.