Over the holidays I got a second-hand Kindle DX from my sister. As I have been doing some serious reading these last couple of years, an EBook reader was something that both excited and scared me at the same time. Let me explain. Being able to carry several books, often pretty thick and heavy, in one simple and light device has its advantages. Add to that the massive number of free EBooks and regular plain text books available on web sites such as the Internet Archive, Open Library, Project Gutenberg, and all of a sudden we’re talking about having your own private and portable library on the go!

To kick off the new year, here’s a list of the Top 10 Posts for 2010 here at The Journal of an Open Sourcee! Because my blog is syndicated by several different aggregators, the numbers below correspond only to the number of people who actually clicked their way from the original web site back to my blog. My server logs, however, show a different picture with much higher requests and visits for this year:

Just in time before the new year, it is with great pleasure that I announce the release of BillReminder “Keep Their Heads Ringing" 0.4.0 after a 27-month hiatus! During this period I tried many different approaches and techniques to both improve the user interface as well as the overall experience. Many of the “core” changes were performed only to satisfy my own curiosity and experimentation with other technologies out there, but overall you should have a good time playing with it.

The Foresight Linux team is looking for a good graphic designer to help them with a splash screen! **Foresight Linux,**a desktop operating system featuring an intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software" is now gearing for a major release with all the latest and greatest applications out there! Would you like to see your art work distributed and displayed whenever someone boots Foresight Linux? If so, please drop me a line for more information!

One of my New Year’s resolution for 2010 was the ambitious goal of reading one book for every week of the year! In other words, to read a total of 52 books for 2010! I knew that it would be very hard to complete this resolution without cheating and choosing thin books but I figured: “Aim for the moon, that way, even if you miss you’ll still be amongst the stars!

Spent a good chunk of my free time reading all 9 (out of 10) parts of Lovelace and Babbage Vs The Organist this weekend! I don’t know where to begin to describe how incredibly awesome this comic is! The graphics, the clever writing and jokes, even the sometimes absurd plot twists all combine for delivering a fantastic, fun reading experience! I highly recommend that you read at least a few episodes and allow yourself to wander around the many links and tidbits about Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Quasiamicable Pair, musical instruments, math and many other items in the notes section!

Just passing along the information sent by Andre Veri on behalf of the GNOME Membership Committee to announce our new members (in no particular order): Zachary Goldberg (PyGi, Zhaan, Bug Filing, UPnP Hacking) Sebastian Dröge (GStreamer, Debian packaging) Sumana Harihareswara (Marketing, GNOME Journal, Empathy) Jelle de Jong (Bugreporting, Debian packaging, Marketing, Testing) Christer Edwards (Sysadmin Team) Pablo Castellano (Buoh maintainer, Bug fixing and Triaging for Seahorse and JHbuild) José Aliste (Gedit-plugins, Evince) Daniël van Eeden (Dutch Translations and GUADEC 2010) Francisco Diéguez Souto (Translation to Galician language, Coordination of Galician language) Jeremy Perry (GNOME Shell design) Thank you all for the splendid work, dedication and support you have shown and welcome to the GNOME Foundation!