Place of Stuff

Gael Duval is the creator of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva, since the merger with Connectiva Linux). Gael left Mandriva in March 2006 and went on to start a new project called Ulteo. Mandrake was the first distro I persuaded to install and was, for some time, my alternate work PC. Interestingly, he was fairly quiet on the whole Ulteo project for some time – I guess he wanted to concentrate on setting it up and getting it working before talking about it. So what’s it all about?

I am going to assume that everyone who reads this blog is savvy enough to know about Google apps and to have, at least, tried them out for at least a few minutes. This is similar but bigger. Ulteo is an entire desktop available via your internet browser. It’s based on Ubuntu and gives you everything you need to be fairly productive as long as you have access to an internet connected PC. In the spirit of Linux, you can create an account and use it for no cost. So what does it look like? It looks like this:

(click for bigger)

As you can see from the desktop, the whole thing is designed to help you be productive from the beginning – you have a shortcut to Konversation (for instant messaging), Thunderbird (for email), Firefox (for internet browsing) and to 3 of the most used OpenOffice.org programs. Ulteo saves your settings so that, no matter where you log on, your desktop will be as you left it. You are also given 1Gb of storage space, so if you absolutely need to work on a document you can. Duval has also come up with a great idea for printing: when you hit print a pdf copy of your document is created allowing you to send it to a print enabled machine, to a colleague or to a USB key.

The product is dependent on the PC having Sun Java installed, other versions will produce errors and problems. Usage speed also seems to be dependent on your connection speed, as with any remote desktop. I will admit that I haven’t played with it that much, so this review is a bit limited. That said, if you are away from your home machine, your office machine or even your home country, you can be working fairly quickly whether you carry a laptop or not.

If you are interested, go to the Ulteo homepage and sign up and try it out. It’s still in it’s relatively early stages (the software included in the desktop is not current) but already you can see that you have much more than Google are offering.

More screenshots:

If you browse through my Links page, clicking merrily away, you will have seen that I link to Yirmumah – a funny site, you should read it – by D J Coffman. For a few years now he has been publishing his strips in book format and selling them to readers around the world. Well, he is now able to offer them free for downloading. At least, you can download them if you live in the US.

Wowio is a site where you can download 3 books per day in pdf format. These books are sponsored and the author (or their estate) gets money per download. They have comic books, fiction, nonfiction and a variety of other books. And the price is right. So if you would like to enable lesser known and better known creators to get money when you click that mouse button, this is a worthwhile site. It’s easy to navigate and pretty well laid out.

The books download to your hard drive and you can then read them at your leisure whether on your PC or laptop or PDA device. As the help page states:

Does WOWIO use any kind of digital rights management (DRM)?
Since anyone can defeat the most “sophisticated” DRM with the print screen button, we believe that technology-based DRM is essentially a fraud. Our approach takes the market incentive out of misbehaving, rewards people for doing the right thing, and tries to stay out of the way of honest users. To help keep everyone honest, however, readers must authenticate their identity and agree to a licensing agreement when they set up their account. Then, each ebook is serialized with the reader’s authenticated name and a unique serial number, as well as other less visible markers. WOWIO will immediately terminate the account of anyone caught illegally distributing ebooks, and will prosecute serious offenders.

So these books are easy to obtain, easy to read and available for the price of a download. So, if you live in the US, there is no real reason not to use the service is there?

Please note: while this is a plug for Wowio, I am not getting paid for it in any way, shape or form.

Anyone who looks at my Links page (which is, admittedly, tricky since the link to the Links page disappeared) will have seen a … link … to Hero By Night comic. UPDATE….. TheLinks link is back now…..

A little backstory: aside from occasionally checking out graphic novels from the library (Neil Gaiman, DC, Marvel and, of course, Judge Dredd) and that mostly to relive my childhood, I haven’t really read a comic book for around 20 years. I watch justice league on the box, if it’s on, I’ll watch other cartoons – but none seriously. They just don’t …. talk to me in the same way.

I happened across a link to Yirmumah ages ago. If you don’t already read it, go there now and read all the archived issues. Go on, I can wait. Go on. I’m not going to continue until you have read all the archived issues. And I will be testing you on this later.
Right, now you’re back from all that llama-y and Brick of Silence-y goodness, we can continue. D J Coffman entered a competition and won and got himself a contract to publish his hero comic. So huge kudos to Coffman. If you read his blog, like I do, you will know that he has long had the ambition to revitalise the comics industry and create a new hero which will bring people to comics who either would not normally read them or who gave up on them. Has he suceeded? Only time will tell.

He does have an online prequel which leads up to the first published comic, and I would definitely recommend it. I’m not going to discuss the story line because I think it’s better if you read it yourself and make up your own mind. I enjoy it and read it every (week)day.

As I said, only time will tell if this works, but he has managed to do what he wanted to do: publish a comic. Whether he changes the comic book world will remain to be seen, but he’s on the right path.

For U.S. readers, the site has a Comic Book Store Locator for you to find the nearest stockist to you and for the U.K., Forbidden Planet stocks it. And, if you need more, there is even a trailer you can see.

In case, anyone thinks I’m just whoring myself out, I have no link with D J Coffman (although he did once respond to something I posted on his blog), I just enjoy the comic and would love to see where it’s going.

Monkey Kick Off has to be one of the most frustrating games I have played. The site gives this gem as instructions for playing:

It’s easy to play Monkey kick off – simply click your left mouse button or press any key on your keyboard to have Monkey kick the ball. Remember, you need to time it just right. Here’s a hint from Monkey himself:

“It’s all about the laws of physics. Think speed and angle for monster kicks.”

So, there you have it. Hopefully you’ll be able to do far better than me.  This is one of those games that can be played alone or against a friend.  Maybe you can play it with a partner to see who gets the highest score.  Maybe you could add it to your list of free “romantic” games for couples playable on the PC

However, for sheer playability, Nanaca Crash wins out.

Online Arcade GamesEnjoy