Here’s an interesting idea – rent a virtual desktop on the internet and use that instead of a PC. Nivio are selling exactly that – for under £10/month you get a Windows PC with MS Office. A range of other applications can be installed for a nominal monthly fee.

You can access your Nivio desktop from anywhere so if you’re travelling and have access to the internet you can still use all your installed applications and files.

As a replacement for a home PC it doesn’t make much sense, since you still need a PC to access the internet based PC. If you want a second or third machine though (for others in the house or just to separate tasks) it could be useful, since a cheap netbook can get you access to a range of applications you might not otherwise have.

If you want to avoid buying a PC entirely you can always get the “Companion” – a box that uses your own keyboard, screen and mouse to provide access to the Nivio desktop.

There’s a free demo available on the site so you can try before you buy.

Digital mapping software is starting to become more common with the growth of more powerful phones and PDAs. Effectively replacing an entire pocket full of Ordinance Survey maps, “Quo” from Mapyx is the latest to join the lineup.

Quo is a simple application to use and (more importantly) it’s free to download. Once installed, you can plan routes using the tool which can then be exported to GPS waypoints. A Windows Mobile version of the software is also included, which will display your chosen route on your smartphone/PDA.

Compatibility is excellent with Garmin and Magellan GPS devices supported as well as the ability to import maps and routes from a variety of other applications.

When planning a hill walk, the included map will not contain enough detail so the software lets you buy official 1:25000 Ordinance Survey maps of a specific area. A very slick download interface means you can just buy the maps you’re interested in and have the product automatically integrate then. Covering the whole of the UK in this resolution would get expensive but the software lets you choose your areas in 10×10KM tiles so it’s not too bad – you’ll pay about £2 per tile.

One nice feature I found when playing is the ability to select an area and ask the Quo to find appropriate walks from walkingworld.com – it’s a nice touch and shows the thoughtfulness that went into the product.

You can download Quo for free from www.Mapyx.com

For a limited time you can get it from select resellers at the discounted pre-order price of £49.99 for Home Premium and £99.99 for the professional edition.

If you’re wondering what the difference is, Paul Thurrock over at WinSuperSite has done a pretty thorough comparison of the different editions. For most of us the extra networking capabilities of Professional won’t make a difference but the inclusion of a licensed copy of XP (for use in the funky new compatibility mode) might just make the extra £50 worthwhile.

If XP mode isn’t important to you then £49.99 sounds like a bargain so head over to your favourite e-tailer and snap up your copy. A list of participating vendors is available from the Microsoft UK pre order page.

If you’ve ever investigated alternatives to the standard Internet Explorer browser that ships with Windows you’ll have come across Firefox, but you may not have seen Opera.

They used to charge for it but it’s been free for the last couple of releases and offers a slightly different experience to the other two big players. It’s also available for Mac and Linux users.

It feels quite fast (even without the “Turbo” mode enabled) and has a couple of nice user interface touches – you can try it for free at http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

The weekend saw the launch of Wolfram Alpha – a search engine designed to do more than just return lists of results – in fact, it doesn’t work that way at all so if all you’re after is a picture of a chocolate bar you’re better off sticking to Google.

If, on the other hand, you want to know what’s in the chocolate then Wolfram comes into it’s own. The idea behind Wolfram is to make knowledge “computable” – in other words, to take raw information and turn it into something meaningful.

It does this by searching it’s own extensive database of facts and figures (instead of the whole internet) and letting you slice and dice the numbers however you want.

The best way to explain it is to try it out, so give it a go at www.wolframalpha.com. You can check out the extensive list of examples to get an idea of how much it knows.

I’ve recently bought an Asus EeePC901 which runs an Asus version of Xandros as standard. All very nice and simple but I wanted to take a look at some of the replacement Linux distributions that are out there without actually having to install them, at least until I find the one that works for me.

The thing is this means creating a bootable USB memory stick which takes time and gets a little technical. It was while I was looking at the various distributions that I stumbled across the Unetbootin utility which automates the entire process for you whether you run Windows or Linux on your PC.

The usual warning about messing with your OS applies: you do this at your own risk so don’t blame us if you accidentally trash your main hard drive!

Having said that, the process worked for me so if the warning didn’t scare you away, read on…

Unetbootin knows about various standard Linux distributions out of the box – choosing one of the known distributions from a drop down list allows you to then choose from the various versions and types available for that variant. In my case I chose the Live versions which allowed me to boot directly from a USB stick rather than install the distribution. Once you’ve picked a distro, Unetbootin downloads it for you.

Alternatively if you’ve found a distribution online download that and tell Unetbootin where you’ve saved it.

All that remains is to point Unetbootin at the USB stick, HDD or SD card that you want to make bootable and click on the OK button. Bootable images are created very quickly allowing you to easily try a number of distributions. I finally settled on the Remix version of Eeebuntu as it has all the drivers required for the ASUS and works well with the small screen.

To see the location of other people you either need to run the mobile maps application or use an iGoogle widget. (hint – before you install it on your phone, first uninstall any previous version of maps and power-cycle the phone otherwise the “locate” menu might not appear)

It has some pretty comprehensive privacy controls built in (including the option to set your location manually to anywhere you feel like) but the reality is, as always, that the technology itself is no more evil than the people using it and the praise / criticism heaped upon the service after the launch largely depended on who was pursuing which agenda. For example:

Privacy international are concerned that phones could be gifted to people with Latitude enabled, creating a stalking scenario. (because you’d accept a new phone out of the blue from somebody you don’t trust, wouldn’t you?)

JR Raphael from PC World doesn’t see the need to have everybody know where he is.

Chris Brogan on the other hand thinks it could change the way we view the world!

And my take? The key is that it’s completely opt-in. Don’t want to be tracked? Don’t install it. Don’t want to have it covertly enabled on your phone? Don’t leave the thing unattended in a bar…

It’s a neat piece of technology and it’ll doubtless open the door for location based adverts in a few years (which is a whole other argument waiting to happen). I can see some situations where it could be useful and the rest of the time I’ll leave it disabled.

If you’re even semi-serious about digital photography you owe it to yourself to check out Lightroom – it’s hard to describe the product in a sentence but Adobe pretty much have the niche to themselves, at least until Bibble Labs get around to releasing version 5 of their much-acclaimed RAW converter.

If you’re already a Lightroom user you’ll be pleased to know the release candidate for version 2.3 is available to play with on Adobe Labs.

Highlights of the new release include support for the new Nixon D3X and Olympus E-30 cameras, as well as a batch of bugfixes and additional foreign language support.

Microsoft Flight Simulator has been part of the computing landscape for nearly as long as PCs have been around – amazingly the series started in 1978 although the first Microsoft branded version came out in 1982. In the 25 years since that first version arrived it’s seen a dedicated following spring up, together with a host of hardware and software addons.

Luckily for flight sim buffs X-plane (Flight Sim’s main competitor) still looks strong and it wouldn’t surprise me if a number of current add-on vendors started looking that way for potential converts.

Via [Gamasutra]