The Raspberry Pi has turned out to be a fun and interesting platform for tinkerers, inventors, and gadgeteers. As intended! But you'd be hard-pressed to out-geek David Hunt, an Irish Linux developer who has been having fun finding new and interesting projects for his Raspberry Pi kit. Not content with previous projects, including a DSLR attachment and a mini ( really mini) RAID server, he has this time built a cellphone . The project runs about $150 in parts including a small antenna and a touchscreen produced by Adafruit, but it works!

"It's a bit of a mess, but you wouldn't actually use it in the real world," Hunt says. "You can feel it getting a little bit warm. It doesn't crash or anything, but I'm sure it wouldn't be good to put it in an enclosure without some sort of heat sink."

Read more at: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/engineer-builds-cell-phone-raspberry-pi/#ixzz30CrGySCJ

Hurray for the free market and its few remaining giant members.

Because of pressure from Google Hangouts, which has offered free group video calls for a while now, Skype has announced they'll begin rolling out free group video calls. Unfortunately they're starting with desktop clients first.

Lifehacker has a brief writeup here , with more information available via the Skype blog .

This is good news for me since I have an Android phone on which I've thus far completely avoided registering a Google account (though I was just about to, since I found out that you can do two-way Hangout chat with a GMail address but WITHOUT having to succumb to Google+).

This is a nice alternative for those who'd rather sell this part of their identities to Microsoft instead of Google, and who have still managed to avoid the incessant +ing of Google.

Score one for heterogeneity.

[Ed. note: Coincidentally, this comes very close on the heels of Google pulling back on Google+ and supposedly moving its Hangouts dev team to Android.]

How much do you trust popular websites to maintain your data and online privacy? In this week's poll you can rank them using the Borda Count voting method.

Instructions:

1. In the box next to each item, put your choice of rank. The site you trust the most earns a "1", the site you trust just a bit less gets a "2", a site you trust even less gets a "3", etc. So "1" is the site you find most trustworthy.
2. You don't have to rank all 8; you can just rank the ones you have an opinion about. But since there are only 8 choices, you can't input a number higher than that (ie, it's impossible to rank something 9th place in a contest with only 8 places).
3. Simply be careful not to duplicate numbers!
   Have fun!

[Post edited by zafiro17 2014-04-28 13:54 to clarify the instructions.]

Plenty of updates this week! Nearly every single source file and database table was modified this week to help further the distributed goal of the Pipecode project. More information on this will be given over the following weeks as more functionality gets merged to live.

• Comment Reply Notification - You now get an internal email notification sent to you when someone replies to one of your comments.
• UID to ZID - Usernames and Identification are now shown in an email style format (username@pipedot.org)
• Clickable Bare Links - Bare links will now automatically be wrapped with the correct HTML tags to make them clickable.
• Consistent Newlines - Posts with blockquote/ul/ol/li/pre HTML tags should now have better newline handling.
• Servers upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS.

Can you make money by writing a book? Carter Phipps shares his experiences in publishing his first book. He describes advances, self-publication, and book promotion - all very relevant information for someone looking to start writing their own masterpiece.