Ubuntu's website announces 10.04 launch

The good people at Ubuntu announced today the release of the much anticipated 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) version of their popular linux distribution. Ubuntu has long been a personal favorite of mine, and why wouldn’t it be. A free, open-source operating system that makes computers running it work faster and not crash. At least that’s always been my experience with it, and thus I say it’s not hard to love.

Ubuntu comes already loaded with the software you’ll need to browse the web, work on documents, and communicate. However, your options as to the applications you need or want to use are abundant. The built in Ubuntu Software Center gives you easy access to thousands of free, open-source applications to choose from.

More than 2,ooo years ago, Aristotle said about humans “We are social animals”. Then Facebook, twitter and a bunch of other online social services decided to act upon this assertion. Now, new in Ubuntu 10.04 is making your social networking ever so easy. Access, control and update your networks and conversations, through the Me Menu.

Also new is the integrated music store in Ubuntu’s music player, allowing for quick purchase of the music you want to buy, while the Ubuntu One free online storage service allows you to store your music and files online, and listen from anywhere.

You can find out more about this new release of Ubuntu here, and download for free here.

Copyright laws wouldn’t allow for real magazine titles to be used, so the magazines you’ll be on are called things like “National Geography” and “Vague”, but still it’s a fun effect and saves you a whole lot of photoshop work. Try it out and see what you think!

You get started by typing in the name of a favorite artist or band, and you instantly begin listening to streaming radio-like music by those musicians and others in similar genres. You can create your own radio stations and listen according to your mood or taste. No interruptions, quick and easy, free – music to your ears.

As an added benefit you can have your own user profile where you can add friends in the manner you do on social networking sites such as MySpace, and share the music you like with everyone.

Jango makes being online a much more pleasurable experience, so check it out today.

Opera Mini allows you to access your favorite websites by sending a smaller size version of every page to your phone, allowing fast browsing with little to no compromise regarding the display. This makes it easy to browse the web even if you don’t have a fast G3 mobile phone or connection, and have to use GPRS.

Opera Mini 4 beta has recently been launched, and it is truly amazing. It is exactly how a mobile phone web browser should be – and it’s still in beta development.

The previous version of Opera Mini made website content fit to your mobile phone’s screen. Usually breaking the design intended to be viewed on computer screens by displaying text and images in a linear manner.

Now, “fit to screen” remains an option for users of the new beta version, however websites load by default almost exactly as they appear on your home computer’s screen. Of course, that makes everything extremely small – but users can place a rectangular selection tool over any part of the website they need a closer look at and Opera Mini instantly zooms in on it. Check out all the new features at their website here.

Support for CSS makes it easier for web designers to produce content that will render and display near perfectly, while users can manage RSS subscriptions, and bookmarks of their favorite places on the web.

Do you mobile browse? If you never tried to before, perhaps now is the time!

Click here for more information and how to get your free copy.

More information can also be found on the Wikipedia article for Opera Mini.

Sure not all artists there allow for the free downloads of their music, but many do. Enough to renew the contents on your iPod. A chance to meet new artists, and perhaps boast about being among the first to discover their music once they make it to the top of the charts.

Try it out over at Download.com Music.

Write journal entries, post photo albums, invite and make friends. Among the wonderful features of My Life Of Travel is the ability to have an interactive Google Map pinning out the places you’ve been at, and the ability to earn revenue on the ads displayed on your journals. Something not all free blog / journal services allow.

Most important, it’s fun, and you can start by adding the places you’ve already traveled to.

Vox is all of these things and then some. A free service by the same people behind LiveJournal and TypePad (Six Apart). What Vox does is offer people a suite of tools for expressing themselves online and keeping in touch with friends or meeting new people. The participatory nature of Vox, encourages people to view, subscribe and comment on content created by fellow users.

The service is free and you get a free blog, photo and video posting, more privacy controls than what you’ve grown accustomed to expect from a service of the type, and seamless integration with other popular web services you may already be using, such as Flickr and YouTube.

Truth is there is too much there which may get you confused at first, but once you get a feeling of the place and learn how to use it – it can be a whole lot of fun.

Below I present you with my hand-picked favorite providers of free to download and listen audio books. If you have any comments, or would like to introduce even more resources, please leave a comment to this article!

Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/audio/

The ultimate resource of freely downloadable eBooks, now offers a constantly growing collection of freely downloadable Audio Books. Most titles are in .mp3 or .ogg audio file formats. New titles are added all the time, and you could volunteer to read one of the titles they already have in eBook format as well I’m sure.

LibriVox

http://www.librivox.org/

LibriVox is a relatively new community project where people can find Audio Books, or even volunteer to read for an Audio Book! Very nice collaborative effort, worth your time and more than a single visit. At the time of posting this, there are not too many titles available, but they grow steadily as the number of volunteers grows as well.

LiteralSystems.org

http://literalsystems.org/

LiteralSystems.org offers a nice collection of Audio Books which you can get for free, nicely categorized by genre etc, and features some great reader talent. Hosted by ibiblio.org, it’s a promising project that has already achieved quite a lot.

As always though, there is a catch. Most of the titles offered on all of the above resources, are classics, whose copyright has expired in the US. If you would like to get the latest best sellers and other contemporary books in Audio Book format, your best source would be the Audio Books section, at Amazon.com.

If you know of a good free audio book resource not listed here, leave a comment to tell about it!