They’re Bringing The Furby Back, And It Could Be All Kinds Of High Tech

Back in 1998 the world went a little apeturd over the Furby. While Amazon was still just getting off the ground and didn’t much suffer from the craze, brick and mortar stores were crawling under the demand. The £24 ($40 USD in 1998 dollars and $56 today) could be resold for as much as three times its price. It’s now a collector’s item and the company that made it, Tiger Electronics, seems to be planning on releasing a new version for the Holidays 2012. There isn’t much information on it aside from the picture you see above.

Toy expert Peter Jenkinson of www.toyology.com said: ‘The image suggests that the moving facial parts have been entirely replaced by an LCD screen. ‘This will prompt lots of talk, not all of it intelligible, on Furby forums.’

Other “experts” are predicting Wifi connectivity and only Furby-to-Furby interaction. Truth is, no one really knows. And no one is sure if the little fur balls will be able to recapture the insanity of their first arrival.

Hybryde Linux 1

Olivier Larrieu has announced the release of Hybryde Linux 1, a desktop Linux distribution with one unique feature - the ability to switch rapidly and fluidly between a number of desktop environments and window managers without logging out and without having to close open applications first. The list includes Enlightenment 17, GNOME Shell, GNOME 3 "Fallback" mode, KDE, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, Xfce and FVWM. The switching between desktops is achieved via a customisable Hy-menu which also allows launching applications and configuring the system. The project's website is in French and by default the distribution only supports the French language, but extra language packs can be installed from standard Ubuntu 12.04 repositories. If you understand French please visit the project's home page to learn more about the concepts and techniques employed by this distribution. Download (MD5) the live DVD image from here: Hybryde_Evolution_v1-live-dvd-32bits.iso (1,595MB).

Parted Magic 2012

Patrick Verner has announced the release of Parted Magic 2012_05_14, an updated build of the project's specialist live CD with a collection of software for hard disk management and data rescue tasks: "Parted Magic 2012_05_14. Huge updates with this one! New 3.3.6 Linux kernel, X.Org Server 1.12.1 with the most recent drivers, SpaceFM replaces PCManFM-Mod, Udisks replaces PMount, and an optional firewall for wired connections. To enable the firewall hit TAB and add 'firewall' at the first boot screen. All incoming traffic is blocked. Support for wireless connections is coming soon." Other updates include glibc 2.15 and MesaLib 8.0.2. See the distribution's news page to read the release announcement and consult the changelog for details about upgraded and newly added packages. Download (MD5) links: pmagic_2012_05_14.iso (193MB), pmagic_2012_05_14_i486.iso (193MB), pmagic_2012_05_14_x86_64.iso (194MB).