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Diaspora, an open source open alternative to the monstrously popular social networking site Facebook is set to launch on 15th September.

Describing itself as a “privacy-aware, personally-controlled, do it all, open source social network”, the Diaspora project has been driven by four impossibly fresh-faced New York students – three computer scientists and a mathematician – who have so far raised $200,000 (£140,000) in funding.

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Billed as a “timesheet killer,” Toggl  is great way for freelancers and team-workers to keep track of their time spent working for The Man.

The free service comes in several flavours: a downloadable desktop widget for Mac, Linux and Windows, an iPhone/Android application and an iGoogle gadget that runs on all the major browsers – Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera.

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WordPress – the most popular blog software on the planet and the content management system powering this very site – has just enjoyed a major upgrade to version 3.0.

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The good folks at Mashable have put together an interesting interview with Free Software Foundation and GNU founder Richard Stallman, discussing just how “open” Google really is.

Super beardy Stallman is a bit of a legend amongst the open source cognoscenti, so he’s more qualified than most to take a close, critical look at Google’s claims.

Check out the video after the break…

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Ubuntu’s penchant for daft version names for their Linux OS continues with the v9.10 “Karmic Koala” release now being replaced by v10.04 which regales under the name, “Lucid Lynx.”

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When it comes to the relatively simple task of watching a video file or getting an earful of an audio file, most people are happy to stick with whatever’s already installed on their machine.

But is there anything better out there?

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Clearly hoping to scoop up some of that frenzied iPad buzz, UK company X2 Computing has launched their own “iTablet” range of Windows/Linux-based tablet PCs.

Described as coming “hot on the heels of Apple’s latest product launch,” X2 claims “the iTablet will revolutionise the way that Windows users can access and use data on the move”.

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It’s still under development and not expected out until the second half of this year, but Lenovo ‘s U1 Tablet/PC Hybrid has already got us a lot more excited than Apple’s frankly underwhelming iPad offering.

Showcased at CES earlier this month, the tablet packs everything you’d need from a fully functioning tablet PC – touchscreen, full multitasking, automatic screen orientation, 3G, Wi-Fi, onboard camera etc, but comes with a very clever  twist: it can clip into a special shell to become a full Windows 7 laptop with a proper keyboard.
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It’s taken a while to get drrssed, but the latest 3.6 version of Firefox has finally rocked into town.

Promising nippier performance, natty one-click themes, safer add-ons and plug-ins, improved font handling and other life enhancing properties the browser is now ready for your downloading pleasure.

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After the sheer horror that was Vista, Microsoft looks to have got things back on track, with Windows 7′s strong 2009 holiday season sales being reflected in a growing OS market share.

The operating system now has a bigger overall market share than all the tracked Apple OS X versions  (10.4, 10.5 and 10.6), even if the total Windows market share dropped 0.31 percentage points (from 92.52 percent to 92.21 percent) between November and December 2009 .

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Here’s a neat tool for Windows users who’d like to experiment with the Ubuntu operating system without having to faff about with dual booting systems or risk trashing your current installation.

The free Portable Ubuntu for Windows application lets you runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application – and then carry it around on a USB stick.

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Say hello to Lenovo’s new Skylight netbook, the industry’s first ARM-based, Qualcomm smartbook, purring along on the freshly minted 1GHz Snapdragon processor (as seen in the Google Nexus One phone).

It’s a curious but attractive looking affair, but at least no one could accuse Lenovo of releasing a “me too” netbook, with the super-thin, shiny clamshell serving up a feast of curvy lines with the added bonus of an oddball attachable USB stick.

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Mozilla Thunderbird, the free email client produced by the makers of the Firefox browser, has recently undergone some important revisions, and is now available as Thunderbird 3.0 RC1.

RC stands for Release Candidate, meaning that this version of Thunderbird 3 is designed for testing, and might still have a few bugs, so don’t install it in production environments.

I’ve been using Thunderbird 3 in its various Beta iterations for a while, and have now updated to RC1, and I believe that this latest version of the popular email client is a considerable improvement over its predecessors.

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Launched on November 9, 2004, the web browser Firefox is now five years old.

Starting life as an experimental arm of the Mozilla project, whose hefty suite of apps included a web browser, mail client, news reader, irc client and web page editor (Mozilla Composer), Firefox looked to offer a slimmed-down alternative to the wobbly lard of Internet Explorer.

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Anyone looking for a stylish mini PC netbook at a super-cut down price, should swiftly cast their eyes in the direction of the Aspire Revo R3600.

Offered by e-Buyer, who are currently offering the Revo for a few pennies under £150, this looks tremendous value to our eyes.

A stylish, Linux-powered number small enough to fit on to the back of your monitor, the Revo is powered by an Intel Atom 230 CPU (the single-core version of dual core 330), running at 1.6GHz – perfect for a small home server or media centre.

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