Web-based movie review index FlixPulse might not provide the voice of rationed wisdom on how good a movie is, but it's a nifty way to see what the uber-connected Twitter community has to say on it. Real humans scan through film mentions across the short-messaging community, then group them into good, bad, or indifferent piles to compile a percentage. Of course, most people aren't going to Twitter about movies they found only reasonably good, but it's a great conversation starter and, occasionally, a refreshing dip in the schadenfreude pond.

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Web site ReviewGist gathers the results of expert reviews from around the web to give you a better understanding of the pros and cons of a potential purchase. Aside from its deep analysis, which dives into the nuts and bolts of what a reviewer liked and disliked about a product, ReviewGist also provides a great comparison tool to check the ratings of similar products side-by-side. While a lot of people tend to stick to the consumer reviews on the site they're purchasing from, like Amazon, ReviewGist looks like a great place to check out the broader merits of a product before making a big purchase.

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I'm pleased to say that while I was at the OLPC love-fest that was Linux.conf.au last week, I managed to snag one of their XO mini-laptops to review. We have two in the household so we'll be able to test out some of their cool mesh networking capabilities. I'm also keen to see how it stacks up as a mini-laptop compared to the *other* geek toy du jour, the ASUS Eee PC.
Watch this space for the full review plus pictures. :)

There have been a few diet plans published for geeks over the years – we told you about a few of them previously, including the famous Hacker's Diet. This latest one, The Geek Diet, is a 51 page ebook by Mark Faithfull, who describes himself as a typical geek who wanted to tackle his weight in a sensible and easy to manage way.
He has clearly approached his subject with the scientific curiousity of a geek – in fact he says he got the idea for the Geek Diet from a Scientific American podcast. He's sprinkled the book with quotes from various studies on eating, food and weight loss. I have to admire the honesty of a diet book which begins by quoting a UCLA study which found that 83% of people who go on diets end up weighing more than when they started.

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Review aggregation site Summize certainly isn't the first kid on the multi-site review block, but it's looking to stand out with the sheer breadth of its coverage. Type in a movie, book, gadget or anything else that someone might have taken a critical eye to, and Summize shoots back a colour-coded summary of what bloggers, user reviewers and other sources had to say about it—divided into segments ranging from "great" to "wretched." Many of the reviews seem to come from database-type sites like Amazon, IMDB, and the like, but round up hundreds of blogs, dozens of newspapers and user comments on any topic, and you'll never want for input. The site is free to use, and sign-up seems to mostly be for the benefit of bloggers who regularly contribute to the discussion.

It may have been aimed at kids and the education market, but a lot of Linux geeks have been looking forward to checking out the Linux-based ASUS Eee PC mini-laptop. I got my hands on a review unti last week, and let me say upfront this review will not look at whether this laptop would be great for kids - I'm not a kid anymore and I don't pretend to know what they need or like in a computer. I wanted to roadtest how the Eee PC would work as a laptop replacement for an adult user. Read on for the full review.

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Get gift recommendations for the best products for your loved one's hobby or area of interest with expert recommendations from web site Lootist. Although there are tonnes of sites that provide customer reviews of products, it's difficult to know how much you can trust a reviewer. Lootist changes that by making reviewers sign up and declare their specialty; users then rate the specialists so that over time you can find trusted recommendations from quasi-verified experts. Lootist doesn't actually sell anything, instead linking to off-site stores like Amazon or Best Buy. If you're having a tough time finding the perfect gift but you know what hobbies might be of interest, Lootist could be a good place to find that perfect gift.

Anthony at Pocket Mojo has just reviewed Apple's new database creation application, Bento. The review is particularly interesting because he used Bento to create a productivity tool for himself. Check the review to see his walkthrough of how he used Bento to organise his workflow, by taking advantage of Leopard's ability to directly read and write iCal and Address book data:

"As all my workflow is now in iCal I can sync it to my mobile phone and access it from within iCal and Mail - applications that I always have active."

Good stuff Anthony! Any chance you can share the app you created? It sounds neat. :)

Mobile web start page Paged Mobile provides shorthand web navigation from their mobile start page. From its short URL (http://pa.gd/) to its web URL shorthand (which generally uses the first four letters of a URL followed by the last), most popular shortcuts on Paged only require four keystrokes. For example, you can navigate to Lifehacker by entering lifr, or Remember the Milk with remk. In addition, Paged Mobile employs YubNub web command line-like operators and shortcuts, so you can search Wikipedia by typing .wp Lifehacker (searches Wikipedia for Lifehacker). Granted, you've probably already got a lot of your favourites bookmarked in your mobile browser anyway, but Paged Mobile's simple shorthand makes it a very useful mobile start page.