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...

From a Chip Chick post. The QOOQ tablet really shines with a subscription to QOOQ’s services, though. A subscription will net users 3,500 interactive recipes from some of the world’s top chefs, 1,200 of which include video instructions. Those recipes are accompanied by a comprehensive and detailed wine list and suggestions for each meal. There are also 100 featured chefs that offer up video tutorials for individual cooking techniques, in addition to whole recipes. That by itself isn’t overwhelmingly impressive – those kinds of resources can be found with a little poking around the Internet. The QOOQ tablet does have some...

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...

From the Linux Journal: As a long-time hard-core Linux user, I thought that some of you other Linux folks might be interested in how to write and publish a Kindle ebook using only Linux tools. Before I give the the list of required software for publishing a Kindle ebook using Linux (it’s a short list), I want to point out there there isn’t any good single “Howto” guide that I’ve been able to find that describes the best way publish a Kindle ebook. There are a whole bunch of references that describe part of the process, like this one...

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...

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...

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...

Andrei Pushkin at blogkindle.com has put together a short tutorial on how to get the Kindle for PC app running on his Ubuntu operating system. The solution, which you can probably guess if you’ve spent any time with Ubuntu or other Linux OSes, is to use Wine 1.3 or higher, which is a new enough version that you have to install it through a terminal window and not the software repository. Pushkin says it’s working for him just fine, except for the dictionary: Books download, you can read books, highlight passages and annotate. I couldn’t get dictionary lookup to work. On one of...

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...

LinuxInsider has an in-depth review of this program: FBReader is an e-book reading program that makes it quick and simple to access thousands of free literature titles available on the Internet. It runs on the Linux, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Windows and Free BSD platforms. In addition, it runs on various Linux-based mobile devices such as Nokia (NYSE: NOK), Motorola (NYSE: MOT), Sharp and Siemens (NYSE: SI) smartphones. ... A recent release makes FBReader very current. FBReaderJ is a Java-based clone of FBReader that runs on the Android platform. Neither version will let you read DRM (Digital Rights Management)-protected e-books, though. But...

Goodreader has a review of this competitor to the Kindle DX. They like it. The Pocketbook PRO 902 is a 9.7 inch e-reader with a resolution of 1200×825 and 166 DPI. At its core it features a Samsung, 533 MHz processor and has 256 MB of internal RAM. It also has 2 GB of internal FLASH memory and you can further enhance it for up to 32 GB via the micro USB port. Internet connectivity of the new Pocketbook 902 is done via WI-FI, and will connect to open and secure networks. ......

Here’s a bit of an unusual tablet hack: someone’s figured out how to turn the Insignia Infocast Internet appliance into an 8” media tablet. The device, originally intended as a Chumby app viewer, has a number of apps already (such as Pandora or the NY Times podcast) but some users have ported a Webkit-based user-interface framework to it. The $170 device already had an 800 MHz processor, 2 GB onboard memory, and a touchscreen, plus wifi connectivity and two USB 2.0 ports, and runs Chumby Linux 2.6. “While it’s marketed as a device for...