I am a big fan of Readability, a simple bookmarklet that removes all forms of distractions from the content that you are reading and presents them in a plain, pre-defined, form that is easier for everyone to read. I like readability so much that I added it in every single blog posts here at GeekTechnica so that you can read the content in a simple form with just one click. Ideally I would love to make this site less distracting and remove all the ads from all pages, but removing ads is not an option and making the site less distracting is an on going process (expect some changes in layout in coming months). Instead we give readers an option to remove all ads and read content with less distraction with a single click.

With the new Readability update Arc90 goes one step further by removing distracting links within the content and convert them in to hyperlinks. They were inspired by Nick Carr’s interesting blog post about how distractions on online contents (including hyperlinks within contents) are changing our brains in the way we consume online information.

“Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they’re also distractions. Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read. Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters. People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on comprehension.”

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 Source: Flickr

Most of us probably don’t even attempt to read any TOS of all the software and web services we use. But if we were to learn anything from facebook’s habit of frequent privacy invasive updates in their TOS, we probably should pay more attention to them. Thankfully, Apple does a great job of writing a TOS so big that it could easily pass as a book.

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I am a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson and I am also a big fan of Linux. So when I saw this short interview of Tyson sharing his love for Apple computers, it didn’t go well with me. So naturally I had to ask him what’s up with that:

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Ubuntu release cycles are shorter and changes are subtle. Over the last 6 years there has been 11 Ubuntu releases, once every six months. When you compare that to commercial, proprietary Operating system’s, Windows or Mac OS, release cycle of ~2yrs its quite an impressive feat. As impressive as a six month release cycle might be it would be disingenuous to compare Ubuntu release to it’s commercial counterpart. Ubuntu, just like all other Linux distribution, relies on work done by developers outside Ubuntu ecosystem (ie, Linux kernel, GNOME) to churn out frequent releases.

The advantage of short release cycle is that you are always up to date with the most secure and best version of the software; but this also has the disadvantage of not having enough time to do extensive tests to minimize issues with the final release. Even with Feature Freeze and stages of alpha and beta releases stability issues creeps in to the final release. So, its a good idea to wait couple of weeks before upgrading to the latest release.

Ubuntu has come a long way since its first version. Development process has been much more streamlined and organized. Over the last few releases the developers are concentrating more on speed and User Interface, as a result, with Lucid Lynx we will see some of the biggest changes to Ubuntu to date.

Let’s take a quick looks at how Ubuntu has transformed over the years:

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The word “FAIL” should be only used for this kind of fail.

Html5 is the new craze in town. Even though the final draft is far from complete and the working specification is expected to reach W3C Candidate Recommendation in 2012, many aspects of the specifications are already stable and ready to be implementation. It it those stable specifications, which includes video, canvas, Geo-locations – to name a few – that everyone is gunning for. From Apple, who is embracing html5 video over flash; to Google who is slowly deploying html5 video to YouTube; Adobe who is adding Canvas importing option to CS5 and even Microsoft is trying to make Internet Explorer 9 a more html5 compliant browser.

As a matter of fact html5 is the one of the several selling points of IE9 (including faster JavaScript engine). So its deliciously ironic that both IE8 & 9 fails miserably on html5 test we conducted on the 5 common web browsers out there.

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