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.

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.