Having trouble converting your family and office mates into OpenOffice devotees? NewsForge (Owned by the same people that bring you Slashdot) can now help you convince the visual learners around you that they can do it. NewsForge is releasing a series of free video segments that demonstrate OpenOffice in action from installation to day-to-day use.
Basic CMS for YOur Homepage
XHP (eXpandable Home Page) is a personal home page program (CMS) that is easy to install, easy to use, and easy to expand. It includes blog, image gallery, content modules, and an API for contributed modules. It tries to fill the lack of personal home-page oriented CMSs, since most of the current CMSs are dedicated to the enterprise market or large portals.
O’Reilly Launches Podcast Page
We’re gathering some of the things we’ve been working on in podcasting in one spot. Come visit and let us know what you think.
The page is sort of a short directory of the podcasts folks at O’Reilly are listening to. One would assume that original content will follow along.
Google Pays For Firefox Referal
Google will now pay you $1 every time you successfully refer someone to download and install Firefox (a version pre-loaded with the Google toolbar, of course). US-only for now, it seems.
Gregarius » Dave Shea’s mezzoblue
This is one way to get more Firefox out there…
Tracking Wex in the Wild
Since Wex is new and didn’t show up in Google’s blog and web searches before 11/10/05, I thought this would be a neat opportunity to track the spread of a new site across the blogosphere and the web. What I’ve done is create a page at gada.be: browse on over to wex-lii.gada.be to watch it spread. Of particular interest is that within 36 hours a couple of splogs are linking through to parts of Wex, and how the major search engines at MSN, Yahoo, and Google have already crawled the site.
Frontier-Based Aggregator to be Released as Open Source
However, before that, we will release the aggregator under an open source license, the same one we use for the OPML Editor and for the Frontier kernel, so the community can have a go at it, and equally important, to serve as a test-bed for the implementation of OPML reading lists for RSS aggregators.
Dave is going to kick this loose as part of the development of OPML reading lists project. I just wish it would run on Linux:(
Another Easy Way to Have Fun With Asterisk
This article describes how to build a Linux-based telephone answering machine using a low cost winmodem (softmodem) for the telephone interface. We describe how to install the drivers and libraries, and how to select and install the proper modem card. Our answering machine program is a couple of hundred lines of C code in a single file. If you’ve ever used a telephone you should have no trouble understanding the code.
A $10 Linux Answering Machine LG #120
Good as a followup to my talk at ALE last night. This card, some old PC, and your in business. You could build a Classcaster box with this.
More Amazon Patent Fun: Consumer Reviews
The online retailer of books and just about everything else was awarded three new patents, covering its purchase circles, search and consumer reviews. While Amazon.com’s patent police would go after Web publishers, not consumers, the review patent could put the kibosh on the social networking components of many search services.
Asterix GUI Control
This is a suite of programs that are designed to interact with the Asterisk Open-Source PBX Phone system at a client computer level to extend the functionality of your phone and system.The suite of software is designed to work with an Asterisk system that has Zap(T1/E1/PSTN),IAX or SIP trunks and SIP/IAX/Zap phones.
astGUIclient – A GUI client application for the Asterisk open-source PBX
A Wiki for Structured Data
The product is the wikiCalc program — a web authoring tool that creates web pages. It is for creating and maintaining web pages that include data this is more than just unformatted prose, such as schedules, lists, and tables. It combines some of the ease of authoring and multi-person edit ability of a wiki with the familiar formatting and data organizing metaphor of a spreadsheet.
Hmm, may be useful for a number of projects. Download it here (link is at the bottom of the page).