What if Microsoft demanded a 30 per cent cut of your speaking fees if you happened to make use of a PowerPoint presentation in your talk? What if you used Photoshop to edit your photos and Adobe only allowed you to sell your creations through their online photo store? Sound crazy? That's what Apple is up to with their new iBook Author software.

The first 10,000 Raspberry Pis will be coming off the assembly line in the next few weeks. What's a Raspberry Pi, you ask?

It's a little $25 single-board computer that's about as powerful as a typical smartphone. The project is the brainchild of Eben Upton of Cambridge University who co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation is a registered charity in the U.K.

While the first batch of Raspberry Pis are expected to be snatched up by hackers, computer geeks and electronics hobbyists, the ultimate aim of the project is to get these cheap little computers into the hands of schoolkids.

I'm always saddened to hear about the passing of anyone before their time.

The recent announcements of the premature deaths of two very public individuals has brought wall to wall media coverage, very public displays of mourning along with speculation on the future of their life's work.

Having never been a fan of the empire that Steve Jobs built, I posted online wondering when this fawning coverage would end. Someone remarked sarcastically that it would last about as long as the coverage of Jack Layton's passing.

Last winter, I wrote in this space about Diaspora*, a new free software-based, decentralized, privacy-aware social networking service developed by four computer science students at New York University.

At the time, Diaspora* was in the very early "alpha" stage of development and access to the service was by invitation only.

Right now, there are probably a couple of dozen "Pods" (servers) up and running on the Net and for all intents and purposes, Diaspora* is open for business!

What's different about Diaspora*?   

"When Patents Attack!" is the title of a recent episode of This American Life, a program produced by Chicago's National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ Radio. This one-hour episode is an expose of a new and parasitic industry that's burst on the scene in recent years, namely the "patent troll" industry. It also takes a look at the current patent war under way between the giants in the tech sector.

I've been meaning to write this post for a long time, but like many of you I've been wasting far too much time on Facebook. Facebook has been dutifully logging all of my posts, photos, personal messages etc. They mine my personal data and display ads for ham radio and electronic parts companies, Linux web hosting companies, Wordpress training and even the occasional ad for a social justice organization. Facebook's data mining software knows me as a somewhat geeky lefty. Not bad.

Over the last year plenty of things both good and bad have taken place using the power of both social networks and mobile devices. We've seen millions in the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Athens, Madrid and now even Tel Aviv demanding social and economic justice.

This month saw Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation team up with the Apple Computer Corporation to launch the world's first digital-only newspaper called The Daily.

This newspaper is not available on the web at all. It's solely available as a paid app for the Apple iPad for US$39.99 a year, or US$0.99 per week. This new iThingie-only newspaper will have its own staff of approximately a hundred journalists.

Personally, I don't give a rat's ass what Rupert Murdoch puts out. I'm not going to buy it.

Apple Computers, already well known for crushing end user freedom on their devices, has hit a new low.

According to this blog post on iFixit.com, Apple has begun replacing the standard "Phillips" screws on the cases of new iPhone 4's sold in the U.S. with "Pentalobe" screws.   They've apparently already done this to iPhones sold in many parts of the world.

Although Twitter has denied reports that they are blocking the "#wikileaks" and "#cablegate" hash tags from their list of "trending topics", the important thing to remember is that they can if they want to.

And, although Facebook has not shut down Wikileaks related accounts, they can if they want to as well.   In the past, Facebook has closed accounts used for union organizing and for promoting things like breastfeeding.