Technology

Barnes & Noble drops price of Nook with GlowLight e-reader by $20

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Barnes & Noble has cut the price of its popular Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight e-reader by $20.  The competition from the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite, which will start shipping in October is obviously what caused the shift.

 

The Nook with GlowLight, slashed to $119 from $139, is now the same price as the Kindle Paperwhite, which Amazon introduced earlier this month. Target and Walmart stores now list the e-reader at the reduced price.

It’s a smart move for Barnes & Noble considering the interest people have shown in Amazon’s flagship e-reader. While I have been a fan of the NookColor the strong competition from Amazon makes me wonder if Barnes & Noble can continue competing in the ereader arena.

 

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Google shutting down more services

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Google announced on Friday that it will be doing some “spring cleaning” of some of its services. The list includes AdSense for Feeds, Classic Plus, Spreadsheet Gadgets, Places for Android, and +1 Reports in Webmaster Tools.

The company also plans to merge its Picasa photo service with Google Drive, which means you’ll have 5GB of free storage for both Picasa photos and Drive items. I hope this means that the interface will be better integrated between the two services.

A service previously announced that my family will miss will be iGoogle for the browser. I’ll be sure to find a substitute for my wife prior to that being shuttered but it’s something she will miss.

 

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Valve to test Steam on Linux next week

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According to the Valve Blog, Steam for Linux will be released next week… kinda.

On the negative side it is planned to be an internal beta but here is hoping for a leak. For those not familiar with Steam, it is a games marketplace application for Windows, Macintosh, PS3 (kinda) and soon Linux. The marketplace manages customers digital rights and downloads of games and also provides an online community.

Sometime in October, Valve will release a closed beta for 1,000 external players. Next month’s external beta will support Ubuntu 12.04 and include one game along with the steam client.

From the official Valve Blog:

“For existing Linux users, the external private beta is a good release for seeing where we are in running our games on Linux,” reads the blog entry. “We will be using a sign up page for the external beta. Information about the sign up will be announced in a future post.

“For those new to Linux, we recommend waiting for a subsequent release where more features are implemented along with improvements to the user install experience.”

Earlier this month Valve also launched the beta for Steam Big Picture Mode, which brings PC gaming into the living room and gives a controller-friendly makeover. While Big Picture Mode will not be supported on the initial Linux Beta, it does make me wonder if they are building on Linux as a potential future platform for a console.

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Crunchbook

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Sure it’s not #ShowYourDesktopFriday or #ShowYourLinuxDesktopFriday but I had someone ask me to share a shot of my old laptop running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS w/ Openbox. This started as a Crunchbang Linux install when they used Ubuntu as a base. I have just been upgrading it to the LTS release as they come along.

This laptop is a Gateway 5300 that boasts a700MHz Pentium III CPU and 256 MB of PC100 RAM (Max amount). At idle this system uses around 61MiB of RAM w/ synergy running in the background.

I normally run this machine as a second monitor with Xchat running on it. Though it can also run MapTools pretty well when I need a spare machine for a game map.

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