iPhone Cover Flow Meets Palm Pre’s Cards

Why can’t multitasking really be that beautiful? Hopefully, the user experience engineers at Apple will take a page out of the Ocean Observations book.

Reasons to Hack Your Android Phone

Just like the initial iPhone jailbreaks, rooting, or hacking your Google Android phone was a scary process at first. If you screwed up, you’d have to do a hard reset at best, if you really blew it, you had a broken piece of hardware.

However, several posts over at Lifehacker have shown us that the rooting process has been vastly improved upon, and is now relatively safe to perform. (By the way, this article is pretty much a rewrite/reiteration/combination of these LH posts, but I agree whole heartedly with every point, and had to share my paraphrased version.)

Still not convinced you should take the leap? Here are some pretty darn good reasons to have a cracked Android phone.

A noticeable performance boost. Most of the complaints from Android users is the lag experienced when navigating through the phone’s interface. Having to wait any noticeable amount of time after hitting a button for the action to perform gets to be a drag real fast. It’s reported that using the CyanogenMOD ROM makes things really snap into place.

Extremely easy cell tethering via WiFi or Bluetooth. android-wifi-tether is a free application that allows one click tethering of your cell connection for use on your computer. Run the app on your phone and you will be able to connect to your phone and access the internet. (WiFi SSID/Bluetooth Device: G1Tether)

Improved on screen keyboard. Cracking your Android phone allows the use of the on screen keyboard designed for the HTC Hero, instead of the standard, sometimes problematic, Android keyboard. You can enable it by navigating to Settings, Locale & Text, then turning on the “Touch Input” feature. You can also adjust its spell, suggest, and feedback settings.

Multi-touch web browsing, baby! It might not feel as suave as the iPhone experience, but it still improves the flow of browsing just as much. You might never see this on a regular Android phone, unless the Big Apple wants to share.

Specifically, all the build specific Android apps! If you choose to root your Android phone, you will have access to all the different applications available from any Android build, including applications not available in the United States, such as the apps on the HTC Hero, and the apps from the Android Donut build, which isn’t even distributed by wireless carriers yet!

So, there you have it. Several pretty solid reasons to nudge you over the edge and persuade you to hack your Google Phone!

Amazing GDM Login Screens

If you’re looking to customize your Gnome Display Manager’s login screen, look no further! Let me point you in the direction of some of the most amazing GDM Themes publicly available.

ArchDark Don’t let the Russian text scare you, this login screen uses your language, so don’t worry.

Somatic GDM If a brightly colored off-color illustration is your thing, this is your thing. Several different illustrations available.

Humanoid

Woobuntu 2 If you like to stay classy and rep Ubuntu at the same time, this is the login screen for you.

Underground Ubuntu

Once you’ve downloaded your theme’s tarball, go to System > Administration > Login Window, then select the Local tab. Click on the [ADD] button, and open your tarball, and voila!

Hackintosh Netbook Compatibility Chart

Mad props to the excellent folk over at Boing Boing for creating this Mac OS X Netbook Compatibility Chart, updated against the new Vostro A90, Toshiba NB200, Asus 1008HA Leopard compatible models.

HacBook Compatibility Chart

Obviously you’re going to want to be going with a Dell Mini 9, EEE 1000H, HP Mini 1000,

Rename Multiple Files in GNOME

Renaming your photos downloaded off of a digital camera to something relevant can be quite a chore, especially if you have hundreds of pictures to rename. If you’re running a GNOME desktop environment on your Linux machine, Nautilus and Purrr makes this an easy task.

First off, we’ll need to install the Purrr application, which is a GUI application that will allow you to rename multiple files at once with a slew of options to modify the naming conventions. Run the following command in your terminal:

sudo aptitude install purrr

Once Purrr has been installed, navigate to the files you wish to rename, select the files, then drag and drop them into a Purrr window. If you want to rename pictures with a numeric offset, use this as your naming template:

BeachPictures_[C,100].[E]

This will rename all files selected to BeachPictures_100.JPG, BeachPictures_101.JPG, BeachPictures_102.JPG, and so on, and so forth.

Group Similar Windows in GNOME

Or for some of you still stuck on Windows, you are more familiar with the term taskbar.

If you want to automatically group different windows of the same application when you’re running out of room (or just group them all the time) then all you have to do is right click on the Window List area (taskbar) and click Preferences to open up its options dialog. Under the Window Grouping section, select whether you would like to automatically group similar applications when space runs low, or all the time, and then close the options dialog.

Email to SMS Gateways

If you’ve ever tried to make your own text messaging application, you know how tough it can be to handle each and every one of the various carrier’s sms gateway’s. So, why not go the easy way and just e-mail the cell phone you are trying to message?

Wait. What?

You heard me. Most cell providers have what is known as an email to SMS gateway, which allows text messages to be sent to cell phones via an email address.

So, now you can use your favorite mail function and text away!

Be Excited For Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

It’s been a long time since Ubuntu to drop another amazing bomb of Linux goodness on us, and that’s what they’ll be doing with the next installment of the Ubuntu operating system, version 9.10, also known as Karmic Koala.

First of all, Karmic Koala will provide a new theme, bringing some aesthetic flair to an all too familiar desktop setup, as well as showcasing one of the fastest boot times for a fully packaged Linux distribution.

Firefox 3.5 is now included, which has support for HTML 5′s Open Web Video, Ogg Theora/Vorbis, and much more!

Instead of ext3, ext4 is now the default file system. What’s different between ext3 and ext4?

Karmic Koala includes support for the newest Linux kernel, Kernel 2.6.31, as well as for a multitude of newer NVIDIA (VDPAU/CUDA) and Intel drivers.

Karmic Koala features all of the above, and so much more. Stay tuned for more updates until the release!

Gecko Laptop Runs On AA Batteries

Don’t underestimate the Gecko just because it runs on AA batteries, because not only does it boast some of the most amazing energy efficient technologies we’ve seen in laptops, the Gecko EduBook is a decent computer at that. It features a 1Ghz Xcore86 CPU, up to 1GB DDR2 RAM, SD or IDE Flash for storage, and then WiFi and your other standard netbook features.

Gecko will run for 4 hours on NiMH or Li+ 3S AA’s, and 6 hours on LI+ 3S2P batteries.

Portable Ubuntu for Windows

Portable Ubuntu for Windows is a compact and completely integrated Ubuntu platform that you can interact with from your Windows XP shell.

Now you can run those Linux only applications (well, most of them) directly from your Windows XP environment!