Weekly roundup

These are some interesting posts I found around the web this week, along with some commentary from me. You can check out last week’s roundup too. :)

• Four-part series shares story of Guitar Hero’s Iowa roots — I had always been curious about Budcat, especially as an Iowa City company that made something so recognizable. Sad that it ended without warning, but I’m hopeful for what the former team members have made since then, especially the Ouya game.
• Top 10 Awesome MacGyver Tricks That Speak For Themselves — I really want to try sealing a plastic bag with an old bottle cap, and the cable catchers.
• Three Big Tips for Inexpensive Spring Allergy Relief — Generics are always a good choice to consider, plus the other tips.
• Geeksphone Keon Firefox OS phone hits the FCC, user manual included — Although I’m not sure how it will do in the American market, a phone “built of the web” is still very intriguing. I hope it catches on (and is installable on Android-based hardware).
• It just works: Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition Linux Ultrabook review — I’m happy to hear Dell is being a good member of the open source community; I had chosen System 76 instead because of what I had heard aobut Dell in the past. I’d really like to see Ubuntu catch on as a desktop for developers, and it’s great to see this as a realistic, well supported option. If only the hardware could be configured (maybe 4GB RAM instead of 8?).
• Canonical Axe Ubuntu Discs for Non-LTS Releases — Kind of sad; I wish I had one of the older discs as a collector’s item. Hard to believe they used to ship them for free.
• 10 Best Ubuntu 13.04 Features – From Social Lens to Window Snapping — More an incremental release than anything, but in good ways. I’m happy about the performance improvements; it’s noticeable on my machine in the beta.
• Apple remembers where you wanted to get drunk for up to 2 years — Creepy. This type of thing should stay on your phone, in my opinion.
• Ouya $99 Android game console gets the FCC teardown treatment — I’m really hopeful for the Ouya. Here’s hoping openness makes it a winner, and that great games really make it catch on.
• Lilbits (4-17-2013): Old computers never go out of style — Too many people throw out old computers, rather than repurposing them. Although many of these are ancient by many people’s standards, I think it’s worth remembering that you don’t need the fastest machine on the block to do useful work.
• Lilbits (4-16-2013): Netflix to go HTML5, Xiaomi to go international — Finally Netflix isn’t dependent on Silverlight, although increased DRM in browsers isn’t a great development for consumers…
• blog.izs.me: Unix Philosophy and Node.js — I’ve never felt that Node.js has ever embraced Unix as much as Ruby has, but this article made me rethink what the Unix philosophy means in practice.