You have probably already heard of the One Laptop Per Child Project, which aims to equip children in developing nations with low cost laptops to aid their education. The XO-1 is the first machine to be made by this project, and is very innovative in both hardware and software design. Getting your hands on one of these machines is quite difficult, especially if you don't live in North America, but what you can do is get hold of an image of the machine's operating system and run it inside a virtual machine.
ubuntu
You might find your self in the situation where you have a bit of time to spare, but sadly with an unreliable, absent or just very expensive internet connection. This might happen if you are travelling, maybe on a long distance flight, or staying somewhere without internet facilities. Well now you could be using that time to pick up some new knowledge, maybe taking a course on a subject that has always interested you, or learning new skills to enhance your career. I'm not talking about one of those cheap CD-ROMs you see in computer shops promising to teach you vast amounts of knowledge, but are often disappointing, instead I'm talking about genuine Open University materials that can be loaded onto your computer absolutely free and used interactively when your are offline.
Recently my mobile phone broke, well in fact the charger did and mobile phones are rather pointless without electricty so it was time to get a new one. I have to confess that I had been a bad person and not backed all of the various numbers that I have on my mobile. On top of that I'm sure I don't know anybody's number off by heart. Sound familiar?
Some time ago I got a free DVD set of Solaris 10 delivered to me. Solaris is a version of UNIX which is supplied by Sun Microsystems ususally with their servers, but more recently they have been supplying versions suitable for use on other equipment.
So you've had a look at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/ are found a great extension for OpenOffice that you would like to try. Only problem is that in the version of OpenOffice that we use there is no sign of the "Extensions" entry in the tools menu