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Radio-frequency energy from television, AM, FM, cellular, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and other broadcasts can now be harvested to power electronic devices, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have claimed. It's said applications could include security, environmental sensing, structural monitoring, and bio-monitoring devices....

As we have been expecting since May, the next Adobe Flash Player release finally re-syncs the 64-bit build with the Flash updates in the mainline code available to 32-bit users. This is the first public beta release of the Adobe Flash Player 11 that offers both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries to Linux users, along with 64-bit binaries for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X users...

Along with better support for new chipsets and graphics cores from AMD and Intel, not to mention drivers for Microsoft's Kinect and DVB-T2, Linux 3.0 once again offers a number of workarounds for a wide range of hardware problems.

Most of you must have heard about PinguyOS already, one of my favourite among Ubuntu derivatives. Now, they have released another version of PinguyOS called Ping-Eee OS which is supposedly optimized for small screen netbooks. Interestingly, the release coincided with my purchase of Linux pre installed Acer Aspire One D260 netbook. I was not really impressed by the default Linpus Lite OS that came with it and decided to give Ping-Eee OS a spin in my newly acquired Intel Atom powered Acer Aspire One netbook.

The Wine development release 1.3.24 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

We take a look into the latest version of Pinguy 11.04 Ping-Eee which is a Linux distribution designated for netbook users.

Gökcen Eraslan proudly announced yesterday, July 12th, the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the popular Pardus 2011.1 Linux-based Turkish operating system.

Many Open Source advocates have turned into Open Source pragmatists. That doesn’t mean we’ve surrendered. We’ve evolved. It came to my surprise last week when a fellow Open Source advocate and DATAMATION contributor, Bruce Byfield, called yours truly and my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes out in his piece Tech Pundits Surrender: The Retreat from Free Software and Open Standards. What set Bruce off? Well, he seems to think that as a group, “Tech Pundits” are collectively giving up on Open Source and Open Standards under the auspices of pragmatism and convenience.

French Linux provider, Mandriva, has announced that it has joined the industry consortium CompatibleOne – a research project working on the development of a free cloud infrastructure using open standards and interoperable open source technologies. Its members include companies such as Bull and Inria.

Ubisoft, the massive video game publishing and development studio, has been busy playing with Linux. In particular, exploring opportunities presented by Xen virtualization with regards to VGA pass-through as a means of decent gaming performance in a virtualized environment. A discussion began in the Phoronix Forums yesterday about Ubisoft's Xen VGA pass-through demo...

Free-as-in-freedom software is very often free-as-in-beer, too. This is normally a good thing. But one open source project developer is calling out a troubling problem with free software: counterfeit applications. The problem, according to VideoLAN developer Ludovic Fauvet, is this: VideoLAN's highly regarded VLC Media Player, which is licensed under the GPL, is being redistributed by various organizations' websites, some of which claim that VLC is actually their application to distribute. These websites attract users with paid Google AdWords ads that come up in various media-player related searches.

Over on the GNU.org Hurd news page is a status update for the GNU Hurd operating system for Q2'2011...

NionCom is preparing an Android 2.3 mini-tablet reference design that includes an embedded pico projector, capable of displaying content on a wall or screen sized up to 100 inches diagonal. The & MemoryKick Vision& offers a 4.3-inch capacitive WVGA display, 4GB flash memory, a 500GB hard disk drive (HDD), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, plus HDMI in and out ports, according to a story in Picopros....

From my perspective, Knoppix now simply follows the trend to update packages up to the latest version of those. Nothing significant happens in this part of Linux world. Somebody can call it stagnation. Somebody can call it stability.

So, you got yourself a nice OpenVPN box. People need to login with their certificates but... if their laptop is stolen anyone could login. Sure, you could add password login but that's a bit outdated. The solution for this is using an OTP (one time password).

One of the most popular and award winning board game Memoir '44 is now available as an online computer game. Ranked 50 by Board Game Geek, The digital adaptation of the game was long awaited by the fans and now hundreds of players can play this game online from a dedicated Linux client.

In the past year I have written a couple blog post about monetary contributions to Open Source projects. There are lots of great projects out there that have taken many unpaid hours to create. The question I had was how to contribute to them monetarily. Today I ran across what I think is a great idea, Fairware.

I was reading an article in Information Week cleverly titled "The OS Mess". The article raises the issue of the technology world becoming flooded with a plethora of different operating systems. I think having a variety of different platforms available is a good thing. Competition stimulates innovation and market growth.

Fluxbox is a fast, lightweight, very customizable window manager for X. Fluxbox is a great choice for Linux users who favor speed and efficiency, and setting up their working environment just the way they like. Today we'll look at some super-saver speed tricks such as grouping applications with tabs, tear-off menus, sticky buttons, the infamous slit, and more.

I have this weird idea about computers. I think that we should control them, and that they should serve a higher purpose than being high-tech TVs feeding us a steady stream of drivel. We don't even get good drivel anymore — it's drivel lite.

Thanks to a great application list made by Carla Schroder I’ve discovered this software: Game Editor. Game Editor is the open source game design software that gives you the power to create the games of your dreams, and, unlike other game creation tools, gives you the chance to get and change the source code of the game creator and design and develop 2D games for personal computers as well as mobile devices.