Raspberry Pi has announced that its first batch of $35 computers will be finished manufacturing as of February 20th, and they will be airfreighted to the UK immediately after that; they should be available for purchase by the end of the month. It has also gotten Broadcom to make available a datasheet about the ARM peripherals in the Pi’s CPU chip—useful for those who want to port other operating systems to the device, or are just interested in the tech specs. As I’ve said before, this device could be quite useful in education and for Internet access in places...

Over the last few days, reports and pictures have surfaced showcasing the new OLPC XO-3 tablet that will be debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The 8-inch tablet will cost under $100 for its target market. In terms of what’s under the hood, The Verge reports: In terms of raw specs, the XO 3.0 has an 8-inch, 1024 x 768-resolution PixelQi display, which can be read indoors and out, a Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, 512MB of RAM, and will be configurable with either Android or Sugar operating systems. Sugar...

Remember the Raspberry Pi, the $25 computer intended to promote first- and third-world education one game developer is launching? The Raspberry Pi foundation has posted a video of a standard alpha board Raspberry Pi unit playing Quake 3 at 1920x1080 resolution. Though the computer isn’t intended as a gaming platform, it is a great way to demonstrate just how capable the little ARM-powered Linux gadget is with a decently-demanding graphical game. “I remember spending 250, 300 pounds on a graphics card that couldn’t render it this fast,” founder and designer Eben Upton says during the clip. If...

OLPC, Sugar on a Stick, eat your hearts out. Game developer David Braben has come up with a $25 ARM-based full-fledged computer in a USB stick form factor. The device has a USB port in one  end and an HDMI port in the other; if you plug a monitor into the HDMI and a keyboard or USB hub + keyboard and mouse into the USB, you have a full-fledged working computer that will run Linux, or it could be combined with a touchscreen to make a cheap tablet. It will probably ship with Ubuntu. Braben plans to use this...

Author Keir Thomas has posted an account of how he came to write and self-publish an Ubuntu Linux reference book, after being spurned by a number of other publishers including O’Reilly who felt the profit margin was too low on inexpensive books at the moment. So Thomas decided to write and publish the book himself through Amazon’s print-on-demand subsidiary CreateSpace. And to drum up interest in the printed book, which he priced at $12.99, he gave the e-book away as a free PDF. Thomas estimates that the book had to be downloaded about 446 times for every...

The Art. Lebedev Studio, the same folks behind the hyper-expensive Optimus Maximus keyboard (in which every key is a miniature, reconfigurable LCD screen), have come up with a design concept for a disposable paper USB flash drive. It’s just a design concept, and I’m not sure whether it’s even technologically feasible yet (the design’s use of the future tense, “Soon the flash drive will evolve into a disposable form…”, makes me suspect not).  But it’s a very interesting idea. Essentially, the drives come in a perforated sheet of several, and when you want to use one you just tear...

In contrast to my review of Jolicloud from the other day, John Scalzi has posted a review of the other popular cloud-based operating system. Google sent him a Cr-48 with ChromeOS to try out, and he has set down his thoughts. Scalzi found a number of things to like about the hardware, and liked how ChromeOS was implemented largely to stay out of the user’s way. But he also zeroed in on a couple of the big problems with a cloud-based operating system. First, many of Google’s on-line applications simply aren’t “there” yet for heavy use. When he...

In reference to my post a few days ago about free on-line writing possibly devaluing paid prose, an interesting post came my way from Mary Hamilton at her Metamedia blog in which she talks about unpaid work versus paid from a standpoint of social relationships. Hamilton cites a chapter from a book called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, on the effect of market forces on social relationships. The chapter talks about an experiment studying how hard students would work on mindless tasks if paid nothing, fifty cents, or five dollars for their work. It turns...

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that it is possible to root a Nook Color and turn it into a fully-functional Android tablet. Now Ars Technica steps up to the plate with a full-length guide on the process, explaining in detail how and why to do it. Essentially, even though it’s a bit lower powered, the Nook Color provides most of the capabilities of the $500 WiFi Galaxy Tab at half the price. The article looks at the various different methods of extending the Nook’s environment, then concentrates on explaining in detail the most useful method for day-to-day use....

ReadWriteWeb has a report on Jolicloud, a cloud-based spinoff of Ubuntu with a user interface based on Chromium (the development version of the Google Chrome browser) and HTML5. This zippy little Linux OS is mainly meant for running on Intel-based netbooks and tablets, but today dropped an update that will make it usable on computers as much as ten years old. While this may not be directly related to e-books, anything that makes older hardware more usable means it could be more easily used for educational purposes by the needy—purposes such as reading e-books. I’ve been playing with Jolicloud...

I previously mentioned the OpenPandora Linux-powered gaming tablet back in April. As an entirely open Linux-powered device with a 4.3” 800x480 screen, it might have the same potential for e-book reading as any other small hand-held, and perhaps even better. Well, the $350 device is now shipping in dribs and drabs, as they become available to those who pre-ordered—but a number of the units have been set aside for immediate sale at the higher price of $500 for those who absolutely can’t wait, guaranteed to ship within 7 days. (As Engadget points out, this can’t make people who...

Engadget has an exclusive report indicating that Barnes & Noble is phasing out the Nook 3G. The company is encouraging retail partners not to send bulk orders, noting that the supply is dwindling to the point where there will not be sufficient supplies to fill them. This is more than likely the first sign that a next-generation Nook is on its way, and will feature the clearer Pearl e-ink display found in the latest version of the Kindle. On a related note, David Carnoy at CNet reports on a Barnes & Noble press release noting that more than...