Keeping notes, todo lists, or just anything you are writing synchronized between computers can be a hassle. Some solutions, like using DropBox, require you to install software on computers that you regularly use. If your needs aren't that heavy, but you'd like a free way to keep your text available wherever you are, check out SimpleText.ws.

SimpleText.ws is an open-source, very light text editing environment that allows you to create and manage documents in a web service, and access them anywhere. It uses Google for authentication, so if you already have a Google account, signing in is as simple as clicking the Sign In link.

The fact that SimpleText.ws is open source means that if you're not comfortable hosting your text on someone else's server, you can grab the server code and host it yourself.

There is also a public API available for SimpleText.ws, which means that developers can write applications that synchronize with it. Currently there is only one, but it's a good one: Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom for iPhone.

How do you keep your text files available no matter what computer you're working on?

I can see the conversation now:

Open Source Advocate 1: 'So, dude, we really should do something about this Godawful UI. I mean we tried our best to imitate Microsoft but it just... isn't working out.'

OS Advocate 2: 'There must be some other way... some way we can avoid paying any kind of skilled user-interface master to actually develop a sweet-ass interface.'

OS Advocate 1: 'I know! I KNOW! WE'LL MAKE A MOUSE! A homebrew mouse with enough buttons to map EVERY function to it! We'll simply do away with the usual interface! GENIUS!'

OS Advocate 2: 'Er... OK. Stop waving your Perl manual around like that. You're starting to scare me.'
...

Slashdot are reporting that OpenOffice.org has a new mouse -- the succinctly-named OpenOfficeMouse. Manufactured by WarMouse (the awesome naming never ceases), this behemoth has 18 buttons, a scroll wheel and, get this, an analogue joystick. You couldn't make this stuff up. It has macro support, storage for up to 63 profiles... 63!

I know what you're thinking: OpenOffice can't possibly fully-utilise this beautiful piece of (patented) technological mastery. This thing is for gamers.

I have no idea if Egoboo's original creator named this thing, or if the name came later on after the mantle had been handed down a few times -- and I had absolutely no idea what that word meant... until I punched it into Google! Check out the definition, if you feel the need to know. If not, read on!

Egoboo is a (90 megabyte!!) 3D Rogue-like game. Rogue is a very, very old game -- the original adventure game, really -- and Egoboo builds on its legacy, throws in a little hack-and-slash... and it's even a bit of a RPG! There is loot, there are gribbly monsters that are out to eat your face, and there are plenty of pretty zones to explore (plus there's a map editor!)

To top it all off, it's fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac AND Linux) and has a thriving forum community. It's free of course. Oh, and It's quite brutal. I died several times very quickly, so I'd recommend reading the guide before you jump in.

Download Egoboo (yes, their site is so old it even uses frames! OK, iframes, but still...)

A web browser without tabs? Hard to come by. Windows Explorer, on the other hand, is still pretty much the same pane it's always been.

Qmmander is a lightweight, portable alternative. Built on Nokia's QT framework, Qmmander (like many Explorer replacements) adds tab support and split-window views to power up your file management tasks.

File browsing is snappy, even when exploring shares on a local area network. Qmmander's panes can be displayed horizontally or vertically, and an extensive set of hotkeys is built-in for those who prefer mouse-free computing. Qmmander's interface isn't overly-complicated and it still sports a nice set of features in a small, portable package.

However, one feature advanced users might find lacking in Qmmander is the ability to bookmark or favorite folders. It would certainly make for a thoughtful addition. I usually work in the same set of 5 or 6 folders, so being able to load them quickly and easily would be a real time-saver.

Qmmander is free, portable, open source, and runs on Windows. It's packed as a 7z archive, so you'll need an app (like 7-zip) to extract it.

A French website [Google Translate link] is reporting that 130,000 Tax Authority computer systems are soon to make a major switch to open source software. Email and calendar duties are being handed over to Thunderbird and the Lightning plugin. The move also includes a transition to OBM's open source groupware/collaboration/messaging platform.

When the General Directorate of Public Finance was formed, two tax agencies were combined. Their users were split, with 80,000 using Lotus Notes and 50,000 running Microsoft Outlook. In the end, the new agency's decision had a lot to do with a desire not to re-license Lotus Notes and Outlook and to simplify operations by supporting a single client.

Thunderbird had already made inroads with the French Department of Defense as well as the Misitry of Culture. The new migration brings the total number of installs to more than 200,000.

Always nice to see Mozilla adoption in the enterprise!

[via OSOR.eu]

It's Sunday, and we're off the clock. Time for a little open-source RTS fun with Unknown Horizons! Though it claims to be a clone of the Anno series by Sunflowers/Ubisoft, you will probably associate this game more with the Settlers games -- a very popular, age-old series of 2D real-time simulation games.

The premise from their own website: 'The player starts with a ship somewhere amid an archipelago. The goal of the game is to found some cities on the islands and to earn money.' Such a simple concept. But as we all know -- the simple games are often the best and last the test of time.

And, believe it or not, defying most open-source expectations, Unknown Horizons actually plays rather well. If you don't mind hammering away at a very, very nascent user interface, this is a great game to have running in the background while you browse your favorite after-hours websites.

This is definitely one for the developers amongst you, but if you're developing an application in PHP and need to handle the reading of RSS feeds, SimplePie is a god-send. Some folks will point you in the direction of PHP5's built-in SimpleXML module, however it's highly intolerant of malformed XML - and certainly doesn't have any extra features such as caching that you get with SimplePie.

If you're looking for an easy way to work with RSS or Atom feeds, SimplePie is both easy to implement - and thoroughly documented to help you build on it. I've used SimplePie in a number of projects in the last year - from multi-feed collation to simply showing a list of recent blog posts in a sidebar - and every time I use it I find myself grinning like a cheshire cat at the amount of time it has saved me.

SimplePie is available under the BSD licence for your hacking pleasure, and the developers are currently seeking feedback for version 2!

If there's one thing better than a handy, free application it's a handy, free application that runs on everyone's computer. Looking for a cross-platform download manager? Take a look at Multiget.

Once installed, Multiget monitors your clipboard for download links -- or you can start putting the app to use via its floating drop box. Find something you want to download in your favorite browser, then click and drag a link onto the box to initiate the transfer. Downloads can also be started via Multiget's task menu.

Multiget supports multiple simultaneous threads per download, FTP and HTTP resuming (as long as the server supports it), and it works through proxies.

The developer provides binaries for Linux and Windows - as well as the source code, of course. Those of you running a Linux distro with apt-get can likely do a simple sudo apt-get install multiget. Mac and BSD users have to jump through the additional hoop of compiling from source, but Multiget will work for you, too!

The upcoming version of Mozilla's desktop email client, Thunderbird 3, just entered its 4th beta. This new beta adds significant features, including better Gmail integration, smart folders, and better search filters. If you've been looking for an excuse to stop using webmail - especially if you're a Gmail user - it looks like Thunderbird now has most of the features you would have missed.

Gmail integration now includes syncing for your sent mail and trash folders, and uses All Mail as the archive folder. Smart Folders allow you to combine special folders (like your inboxes, and the aforementioned sent and trash folders) from multiple accounts. Advanced Filtering lets you search by a specific category, including by sender, tags, and attachments. Sure, there might still be something you can do in Gmail on the web that you can't do in Thunderbird, but that list seems to be shrinking with every new beta.

[via Lifehacker]

Tr.im's history is already a bit of an oddball saga: it was shut down, brought back to life days later, handed over from a company to one of the company's individual employees, and then made open source. Well, now the open source promise is becoming a reality, but not as quickly as developer Eric Woodward had hoped. He's announced the first open source release of Tr.im - if by "release," you mean "at least a few more days of work to do before the release." The bigger news is Woodward's plan to hand the Tr.im domain over to a third-party custodian. Much like the open source version of Tr.im, that's also still a work in progress.

On the development front, Tr.im's login and authentication module still needs to be fixed, and there are a few more days of bug fixes to do. As for the third party that might hold onto Tr.im, Woodward has only written that talks are in their final stages, leaving out the important detail of who he's talking to. This all seems like another tease to draw out the Tr.im story while people might still be interested. I actually still use Tr.im, but I'm less interested in its business dealings, and more interested in whether it works properly.

Before I get started, yes, I do realize that this is not Engadget. However, TonidoPlug is a bit of a different situation for us. It's an excellent example of a software product making the jump to hardware -- and doing it well.

In case you missed the earlier posts, I took a look at the Tonido beta a while back. Anyone who is leery about offering up confidential documents and media files to the Cloud Gods, Tonido is for you. If you can read and follow directions and spare some of your valuable time to configure the suite, it's a simple, secure, and effective way to rock a cloud setup without giving up control and complete privacy.

Here's a quick recap of what Tonido provides:

• File sharing
• Photo gallery
• MP3 streaming with playlist support
• Thots, a simple blogging platform
• A collaborative workspace with calendar and task management

As for the plug itself, it utilizes Marvell's Sheevaplug base running the 1.2Ghz Foreceon processor with 512Mb of DDR2 memory and 512Mb of flash storage onboard. Ubuntu 9.04 provides the embedded software muscle and leaves plenty of room for expansion.

After a second (or is it third?) round of possible Chrome OS images captured by the ever-popular A. Nonymous Tipster on his trusty-but-low-res digital camera, speculation around Google's ethereal OS is bound to keep heating up.

I located a reference to Chrome OS in the Chromium source code's switches file yesterday, and today I was intrigued to find not just a few lines in a file but an entire directory.

Nestled in the 204 branch is a chromeos folder which only contains a couple of files at this point. They do provide a couple interesting insights, however:

• The status bar contains a clock, an application menu, and a non-working battery indicator.
• Some information about the single sign-on cookie: "To support single-sign-on for Chrome OS, we need a way to inject cookies into Chrome. In the case of session cookies, putting them into Chrome's cookie jar DB doesn't work. This CL adds a command line flag that tells chrome the name of a Unix pipe to open, from which it can read said cookies."

The inner geek in all of us is constantly curious about what exactly is going on under the hood of our computer; the trusty ol' Task Manager is usually pretty good at letting us keep an eye on things. Sometimes, however, said inner geek needs a little bit more control over their not-always-well-oiled machine.

Process Hacker is an open source application that incorporates all of Task Manager's features while adding a plethora of other functions, charts, and options. Included in Process Hacker's features are things such as a tree view to see where active processes came from, detailed graphs displaying each process's resource usage and statistics, and (my personal favorite) over a dozen different ways to kill a process.

Sysinternals fans may notice that Process Hacker is very similar to Mark Russinovich's Process Explorer utility. The two utilities trade off a few features; Process Explorer is a little more developer-oriented, where Process Hacker is geared somewhat more toward the average power user.

The download link on Process Hacker's home page is broken, but you can download it directly from their project page on SourceForge.

Update: Slashdot is reporting that CentOS co-founder, Lance Davis has reappeared and that the domain, trademarks and artwork are now under the stewardship of the CentOS Project. Let's hope they file the proper legal forms ASAP.

For users or businesses that want to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but don't feel like ponying up the required subscription fee to get the binary, CentOS has been a great option. Essentially, CentOS take the source from RHEL (which is released to the community), repackages it and offers up the binary for free to anyone who wants it. Although RHEL isn't really my favorite server-based Linux distro, one of my web servers uses CentOS, and it's a pretty decent solution.

Yesterday, some of the developers and maintainers of the CentOS project posted an open letter to Lance Davis, the co-founder of the CentOS proect.

It reads, in part:

You seem to have crawled into a hole ... and this is not acceptable.

You have long promised a statement of CentOS project funds; to this date this has not appeared.

You hold sole control of the centos.org domain with no deputy; this is not proper.

You have, it seems, sole 'Founders' rights in the IRC channels with no deputy ; this is not proper.

(...)

Please do not kill CentOS through your fear of shared management of the project.

For quite some time, it appears, Davis has been absent from meetings, unresponsive to messages and requests and just generally unavailable to the other project developers. As one of the co-signers of the letter, Tim Verhoeven points out in his own blog entry, this is problematic because not only is the centos.org domain in Davis's sole control (and he has now secured it with an anonymizing service so the owner of the domain isn't visible), the accounts from the Google AdSense ads and the PayPal accounts where donors have contributed to the project are also completely in Davis's control.

That creates a problem because money individuals think is going to help the project is really just going to one person who is doing God-only-knows-what with it.

Jake is a cross-platform collaborative file-sharing client that lets you create a folder and keep it synced for everyone you invite. It's built on open-source tools like Jabber, and seems to have a lot of features going for it. You can't really beat it for ease of use: setup is just adding a folder and inviting people, with no server-side fiddling to do. Even better, you can set Jake up on your intranet if you want to use it for work-related purposes.

The main difference between Jake and similar solutions like Dropbox is that Jake doesn't store files on a central server in the cloud. It just uses Jabber, XMPP and other open-source tools to sync the folder for users when they're online. Although Jake saves a log of the changes users make to the folder, it doesn't back up old versions of the data - again, no central server. This makes it slightly less powerful than some other, similar file-sharing services, but it makes setup a lot easier.