I work for a local salon as both a stylist and the only IT person. I do pretty much everything. So when it came down to working with the inventory I figure, no problem, we use Linux as both our server and our desktop - so it shouldn’t be an issue finding a good POS solution.

How wrong I was.

My search lead me up and down the google-scape coming across a number of possibilities. Some of these possibilities looked promising only to wind up falling miserably short or far too complex for our needs (or worse yet, simply not working at all.)

And then I found Nolapro.  Not only did this application wind up fitting the bill to a “T”, it offered features that would allow our salon to grow. The setup was simple, inventory was easy to enter, and the POS was solid and easy for the less-than-geeky to use.

In the end I was really quite surprised how bereft of good POS solutions the open source community held. I thought for sure it would be a quick search and destroy…especially in a landscape that would easily benefit from open source way. Ultimately, though, I was happy to at least find one solution that was not only available but still being developed (hello BananaPOS????).

I’m sure this is one of those areas that the open source community needs to invest in. It reminds me of the days of the old Burlington Coat Factory win. Remember that? BCF decided to migrate all of their POSs to Linux. I’m sure a LOT more businesses would do the same if the solutions were readily available.

Ever had one of those times that you wanted to send a message to a friend, but didn’t know quite how to do it?  Let the Royal Navy do it for you!  All you have to do is select a method of delivery, enter in a few details, and off it goes!  Let the hilarity ensue

I personally like the commando delivery.  Let me know what you think in comments!

Here’s the second web comic I’ve pieced together.

I stole the idea of 2 MSN buddies talking to each other from the MS Office Team, they did something similar to advertise the goodness of OneNote. Unlike my previous experiment, this one uses 4 frames and I’ll continue to make tweaks until I’m told to stop.

Comments? Positive, Negative, Indifferent, waste of bandwidth?

Electric bills can be murder. But now you can cut down on costs and find out which machines are actually worth keeping plugged in. Simply connect your appliances to the Kill-a-Watt electricity usage monitor and it will assess how efficient they really are.

A large LCD display counts consumption by the Kilowatt-hour just like utility companies. You can figure out your electrical expenses by the hour, day, week, month, even an entire year. Monitor the quality of your power by displaying Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor.

It can display volts, amps, and wattage within 0.2 percent accuracy.

There’s a post over at Zuneboards on this cool application called zAlternator that essentially unlocks the Zune to make it available as a general USB media device that can mimic an iPod sync’ing with iTunes and other more generic devices that can sync with Windows Media Player or WinAmp.

From the post, it appears the app is still a little untested like the iTunes features, but if you’re the adventurous sort it’s likely not going to cause harm that a re-sync with the Zune software won’t fix, eh? If you have problems head to the support thread, it appears folks are having problems with sync’ing on iTunes which is to be expected.

The post also lists a few short manual steps that ‘unlock’ the Zune to make it worky in these other modes.

Me? I’m not the adventurous sort.

Technorati Tags: Zune, zuneboards