http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/910features/

I’ve been a full time Ubuntu user for almost two years now, and after upgrading all of my computers at home to 9.10 this past weekend I have to say that this is without a doubt the best release yet.  The new Software Center is a great redesign and should make it much easier for new users to find and install software.  Also, the Ubuntu One cloud storage seems like it could be a useful feature for sharing files and documents between computers, as well as providing a simple method for offsite backup of data (you get 2Gb for free).  There are other notable software updates in this release, including the latest versions of Gnome Desktop, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org.

If you have yet to try Ubuntu, I highly recommend that you give this release a shot.  It’s completely free to download, install, and share with your friends.  Try doing that with Windows 7 . 

Mr. Lee recently gave a talk at the TED conference where he demonstrated a few of these Wii-mote hacks. Probably the most impressive is the use of IR goggles to allow the software to provide 3D feedback based on the user’s motion. This could have huge implications for the future of 3D gaming.

For more information on these projects, check out the following links:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

http://www.wiimoteproject.com/

If you’re not already familiar with TED, here is a description lifted from the About page:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

I invite you to go to TED.com and find a talk that interests you. If you’re looking for a starting point, here are a few of my favorites:

• Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
  A journey to the center of your mind (2007)
• Raul Midon
  “All the Answers” and “Tembererana” (2007)
• Michael Shermer
  Why people believe strange things (2006)
• Jeff Han
  Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design (2006)
• Steven Pinker
  The stuff of thought (2005)
• Richard Dawkins
  The universe is queerer than we can suppose (2005)
• Dan Dennett
  Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes (2002)

What sets Miro apart from just viewing the videos in your web browser, however, is that it saves a copy of the video files to your hard drive so you can keep them around for later viewing. This has come in handy when they take videos down off of YouTube for being copyright protected, offensive, etc. By default any videos that you watch will automatically be deleted after a few days to help keep room for new content, but you can always choose to save any specific videos that you like for an indefinite period of time.

Once you’re subscribed to a bunch of video feeds, it really can start to replace the standard television experience because you can just come home from work and have a whole set of shows ready to watch. While you’re gone it’s consistently monitoring the feeds for updates so that you get new videos as soon as they become available.

But I have to say, where I really see Miro having potential is that it now natively supports Bit Torrent, meaning that you can subscribe to any rss feed of video torrents and it will manage the downloading and seeding of the video (which is configurable). When used in conjunction with a site like tvrss.net, one could potentially subscribe to feeds of regular broadcast TV shows and in theory watch their favorite shows “on demand”. However, I’m sure one wouldn’t condone this activity.

Anyway, just wanted to pass this along to anyone else interested. Check it out if your curious, and be sure let me know if you have success with it.