This clip demonstrates a prototype of Sony’s flexible OLED display. The color screen is only 0.3mm thick and fully flexible, even while content is being player upon it.

HowStuffWorks has posted a helpful explanation for how OLEDs work.

While the above video shows Sony’s prototype, the technology is actually licensed from Kodak. The Eastman Kodak Company, in fact, has been busy signing licensing deals with a number of electronics manufacturers, including an agreement with LG this past week.

GE’s announcement of a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLEDs lighting devices (press release) spurred the normal engaging commentary on a Slashdot thread.

Kyoto Prize winner Hiroo Inokuchi, whose organic chemistry work led to the development of OLEDs, is bullish on the techology. In this interview with Wired, he forsees applications in photovoltaics and improved energy conversion.

Will these thin, cheap and green color displays be embedded in surfaces around us within the next ten years? Maybe. Toshiba engineers are reporting problems with high OLED power requirements. In other words, cereal box cartoons may take a bit longer than that to play at a breakfast table near you.

This video from a 15 year old UK student demonstrates a successful installation of gOS on a laptop nearing a decade of service.

He installed some snark in his YouTube video notes as well, noting that:

I managed to install gOS on a 9 year old IBM ThinkPad 600E laptop. This video shows just how well Linux will run on pretty much any hardware. Vista doesn’t look much better than gOS and would never even boot on old hardware like this, let alone run demanding applications such as GIMP.

You can download and try gOS from ThinkgOS.com.

Say what you will about link bait — this list of freeware and open source Web development applications from Andrew Sellick is a great resource if you’re in the business (or even hobby) of building Web sites and don’t have the budget for Adobe’s creative suite. While some resources are likely to be familiar to many, like Eclipse or the IE Toolbar, if you work in the creation or maintenance of online content, it’s a sure bet you’ll discover something new and worthwhile in Andrew’s list.

Thanks to Andrew for all of his hard work researching and pulling them together — and to the delicious community, as always, for highlighting the achievement by collectively bookmarking it to the top.

snap2objects.com knows. In fact, Mauricio Duque’s list of the 45 best freeware design programs is just the thing to help you or any (cheap) relatives with image editing, desktop publishing or Web design.

The Colombian graphic designer affectionately known as “Mao” took a break from working towards his master’s in information systems design to go through thousands and thousands of applications and bring us his list of the best of the best. As he says, none of them will replace Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Quark or other professional applications, but the price is right!

I’ve loved GIMP for a while, but, I have to admit, most of these were new to me. Thanks, Mao!

Netvibes.com is a terrific, highly customizable start page . It comes with some defaults but you can change just about anything on the page to get whatever you want to see first when you log in.

Dion Hinchcliffe named netvibes the best start page in his Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006:

Increasing in popularity in particular are what some people call Ajax desktops, or personalized start pages. Well exemplified by Microsoft’s Live.com, but also by the likes of the popular Protopage and Netvibes, the interest in these online desktops is being driven by a confluence of factors.

One major factor is that we are struggling with attention scarcity; finding enough time to digest the proliferating sources of information we need to track on a daily basis. I don’t need to tell you that the sheer variety can be daunting and now usually includes e-mail, calendars, contacts, to do lists, news, weather, school closings, blogs and work documents like spreadsheets, presentations, and more…

This is making the simplicity and elegance of online desktops ever more attractive.

To be fair, we discovered Google Desktop years ago. The recent introduction of Google Desktop for Mac, however, caught our attention and led us to revisit the application.

Desktop search itself is nothing new either, of course. Google Desktop has, in its Windows incarnation, been the subject of both security concerns and accusations of spyware.

In fact, recent patch vulnerabilities and a generalized need to lock or secure Google Desktop (read expert Matt Schwartz’s tips on how to tame Google Desktop, if you’re curious) have left enterprise and individual users somewhat cautious about inviting the desktop search engine (DSE) onto their hard drives.

We can’t whole-heartedly recommend it because of these concerns, though the end user experience of many of our geeky early-adopting friends has been positive.

Now, Mac users have the same choice, though as most will immediately protest, OS X’s fourth generation (10.4, aka Tiger) has long had such an engine already built-in, appropriately named Spotlight.

We’ll leave it to you to compare the two, though the Unoffical Apple Weblog (TUAW) has done if for you in this excellent review of Google Desktop for Mac that contrasts the feature sets of the two engines.

If you use other Google apps on your Mac, notably Gmail, Google Desktop may be worth your time. ArsTechnica’s Jacqui Cheng offers a generally positive hands-on review of Google Desktop for Mac as well.

Go, go Google Gadgets! Google has now made more than 100 of its gadgets available for free download and use. Like Apple’s Dashboard widgets, there have been a huge variety of Google Gadgets created, including mapping software, weather forecasts to Bible verses, quotes, IP address mapping and language translations, all available right from your desktop.