Off you go… into the purple yonder!

This country never ceases to amaze me. Everything is standardized – down to the kind of cheese you get when you order a sandwich. There’s American, Swiss, Cheddar, Provolone, etc.
Somehow Emmentaler, Gruyere and the many other cheeses from Switzerland got standardized into ‘Swiss cheese’.
And that ‘Swiss cheese’ often tastes best when imported – from [...]

Via the Google blog: the FCC is set to rule shortly on the unused ‘white spaces’ – parts of the spectrum between broadcast TV channels that currently goes largely unused.
Google’s launching Free the airwaves – a campaign to make people aware of the FCC’s pending decision that could alter the broadband landscape significantly. If the [...]

Dell announced that a few more models are now available pre-installed with Ubuntu: the XPS 1530n and the Studio 15n.
I configured an XPS 1530n with the following specs, which are available both with Ubuntu and Windows:

SYSTEM COLOR
Tuxedo Black

PROCESSOR
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5850 (2.16GHz/667Mhz FSB/2MB cache)

LCD AND CAMERA
Full Hi Definition, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch LCD (1920×1200) [...]

I’ve got a number of servers that run coreboot + Xen. I like to run coreboot with a linux-as-a-bootloader (LAB) payload. That means that coreboot, after bringing up the machine, boots into a small linux kernel + busybox environment, entirely contained in rom. That environment can serve as an emergency fallback to resolve booting problems [...]

Ars Technica describes a pilot project in Ottawa that puts a new twist on telecommunication infrastructure: the customer-owned last mile.
From the article: A private company has recently completed a project to string dark fiber from a colocation facility under the Ottawa City Hall to a neighborhood of 400 older, upper-middle-class homes.
The idea is to [...]