Another week has gone by and I am back to open the front door to greet the flurry of news swirling around the figurative doorstep located somewhere where it is cold. Yea, train of thought sort of derailed at the end of that sentence. Let’s completely ignore my failed attempt at typing up a colorful phrase and head right into some tech news.

First up, I found this little piece about an autonomous robot designed to crawl along the underside of ships to clean off what is called hard foulers. That usually consists of barnacles, oysters, and pretty much any sort of underwater life that will latch onto the bottom of a vessel. This little guy has been dubbed the BUG (Bio-inspired Underwater Grooming) Tool. Initial tests of the BUG Tool have apparently proven to be “very exciting.” How exciting? Well…I honestly have no clue, but let’s just imagine a bunch of stereotypical geeks in big glasses jumping up and down cause their robot works. Funny mental image isn’t it? 😛

Microsoft is hopping into the non-smartphone part of the cellphone market with a fairly intriguing piece of software called OneApp. Very appropriately named since this app lets the standard cellphone that supports it to use Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, and several other services all from this tiny little program. From the tech demo, the thing looks pretty fast and if I didn’t have a Blackberry I would give this app a few test runs in a heartbeat. Once it is released outside of South Africa that is. Ahh…test markets. Gotta love them. Anyway, here’s the tech demo if you wanna see a visual of what OneApp does.

Nokia’s N900 finally has some pictures leaked out to the public. If you remember from last time, I mentioned I have the N810 version of their internet tablet and really do enjoy using the thing. It has come in quite handy for doing remote administration on my network and for popping it out of my pocket to load up the modified Firefox for a quick something to read while lounging on the couch. The N900 will run the new Maemo 5 operating system which is based around Debian, which in turn has spawned arguable one of the most popular Linux distros out there: Ubuntu.

Now it is time for me to show just how geeky I can be, not many know what today is. On today eighteen years ago, a college student living in Helsinki posts a comment to a Usenet board asking for a bit of feedback on this project he is working on that is based around Unix. This college student is none other than Linus Torvalds who at that time had built a simple kernel that was Unix-like. From this simple request, thousands of volunteers helped him refine the kernel he had built and the first version of his kernel was posted to the FTP server at the Helsinki University of Technology. This version was named Freax, but the sysop of the FTP server renamed the kernel Linux in honor of its creator. The first full version of Linux to be released, the 1.0 version, was released three years later in March of ’94.

Now that the history lesson for today is over with, and I’ve tipped my hat to the creator of the kernel that my OS runs off of…it’s time again to show you just why I picked that title, and yes there is a strange video to go along with it. Didn’t think I was going to let you off easy now did you?

Opera has been widely adopted as the go to choice for mobile browsers on cellphones and the sole browser used by the Nintendo Wii. Opera is getting ready to release version 10 of their browser that is supposed to be significantly faster. I am curious if this will help them out any in attracting new users to their browser since the internet browser market is dominated by Internet Explorer and Firefox. Enjoy the video while I go get some video game time in, then some much needed sleep.