Find your ex, former coworker or long lost high school pals at Pipl, a people search engine. Unlike the recently launched people search engine Spock, Pipl returned an impressive number of results for my own name, including my personal homepage, press mentions, SEC documents, MySpace page, Amazon wishlist and profile—stuff I didn’t realise or forgot was online. Put in the first and last name, plus city, state and country of the person you’re looking for and Pipl will go to work. Pipl says its indexing bots interact with databases in the “deep web” to get more info than Google or other search engines, and from the looks of things, they’re getting it right.

Editor’s Note: Since even cyberspace tends towards a US-centric view of the world, I entered my name in Pipl to see how it copes with searches for (non-famous) non-Americans. The wesite defaulted to “Au” as my location when I arrived at the site, which was a good sign. It did return a few hits which google AU hadn’t found, but it didn’t weed out the many hits for various American Sarah Stokelys, which was a tad disappointing given that it purports to be a location-specific people search. See how you go with it.

Thinking of taking the leap to Linux but want to be certain your hardware will work with Linux? Many *nixers will assure you that your hardware will work just fine with Linux. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. If you want to be absolutely certain, you can verify your compatibility with a list of resources compiled by Linux.com. Covered hardware and peripherals includes video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital cameras, and wireless cards. Experienced *nixers: what hardware (if any) have you had a hard time using in Linux? Share in the comments.