Number 314 - July 2009

The following contains a number of short pieces about things of general interest that we found on the website of Durham Personal Computer Users Club.
OwnerIQ    This website holds online copies of user manuals for hundreds of thousands of manufactured products. Memberships are free, but you should expect to receive directed advertising from the various manufacturers of products you own, or you search for. That's how this highly useful consumer service makes its money. A further bonus to the consumer is the ability to view and contribute solutions made by other members of OwnerIQ regarding specific, shared models. Members also receive personalized updates about their products as new items are posted in the discussion area. http://owneriq.net ZONBU    Zonbu is for people who need a hassle-free computing experience. What's particularly novel about Zonbu is the fact that it stores files on the Web - in the "Cloud" - on Amazon's servers. In addition, all OS recovery and updating, is done automatically and remotely. Therefore it is nearly crash-proof and virus-proof The original version of Zonbu was a computer in a small box, about the size of and external drive ($99), and the other was a full laptop (about $400). Technology moves so quickly these days that both products are no longer in stock. Instead the software is free to install on your old computer, or run directly from CD. Nowadays, you can order a variety of pre-installed boxes from them. So,Zonbu has become just another flavor of Linux, but with the ability to transparently upgrade, backup and store (50 GB) for $15 per month. Otherwise it	works just like a standalone computer, until connected to the Web. Zonbu claims to save users money without the need to upgrade software, or install third party security. A VMware version is available. www.zonbu.com/ Gog.is/ - simple URL slapper and forwarder    When trying to send a Google search to someone as an e-mail link, it hasn't been possible to send them a simple, all-in-one phrase that searches only within certain categories - until now. The gog.is service uses certain prefixes to direct the search (and to restrain itself), to certain areas, such as just "products" (shopping results), or just blogs, or just books on a certain topic, or just news, or stocks, or wiki results, or movies (imdb), or youtube, or twitter. Here are a few examples of gog.is "slappers": Try http://gog.is/y:standup for a YouTube search for "standup comedy"; Try http://gog.is/book:poetry for a search inside Google books for poetry. Many more examples and techniques are shown at: http://gogglis.appspot.com/. One Laptop per Child - update    Curious about what children are able to do with this computer? Now you can download the operating system--called sugar--along with the educational software, to a thumbdrive, or to a Virtual Box, or to VMware. Sugar OS is a stripped down version of Fedora (Linux). This download should work on all machines--Windows, Mac and Linux. Look for "Sugar on a Stick" at: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/.
Number 314 - July 2009