I recently learned that the free digital textbook competition in California was completed and judged (http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/08/13/1450220/Open-Textbooks-Win-Over-Publishers-In-CA). The findings? Of the 16 books submitted, only 4 met 100% of the California standards. However, none of the "traditional" textbook publishers' books made the cut. Which did? Three were from CK-12 and one from H. Jerome Keisler.

If you're not familiar with CK-12, I'd recommend you check out their site: http://about.ck12.org/. They are a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide. Their books (currently Chemistry, Calculus, Trigonometry, Geometry, Biology, Life Science and Earth Science) are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

It is exciting to see such progress in the realm of accessible, open information. Bravo, CK-12, and a big "thank you" to California for pushing America toward a brighter tomorrow.

My Dell Inspiron 6400's LCD screen recently failed. After some searching and determining what I wanted in a replacement I decided I wanted to get a laptop that has moderate usefulness for my normal tasks (e.g. writing, programming, graphic design), but with a specific aptitude in battery life and portability. I decided on an Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T.

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope without incident. Most things worked out-of-the-box. However, two specific problems exist: brightness controls do not work (i.e. they don't affect the brightness) and the optical drive (CD/DVD) never mounts its contents.

Some searching on UbuntuForums.org revealed a quick-and-easy fix for the brightness issue. Run the following command in a terminal:

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL native

Source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7673757&postcount=2

I'm still looking for a resolution to the optical drive problem.

Update 2009/08/18:

It appears that the brightness fix was just temporary. The same "fix" must be applied after every reboot. So I can't call it fixed. Here's the list of problems:

• Backlight controls non-functional without xrandr command
• Optical drive non-functional
• Ethernet port non-functional
• Expanded trackpad functions (i.e. "multitouch")
• Trackpad lock button will lock the trackpad, but will not un-lock the trackpad
• Battery life is roughly 1/2 of what it is in Windows (likely due to the Acer power drivers which do things like power down the optical drive while not in use, requiring a button press (eject) to re-activate)… I still get over 4 hours, but the laptop is capable of around 8 hours