The U.S. Census Bureau has started mailing out its forms, so I would like to take this opportunity to announce a new demographic category for those of us who will be writing “journalist” in the “occupation” box: Old New Media Dogs. T-shirts and business cards are forthcoming. I’ve spent the last week attending a couple of conferences and speaking to a university class as a proud member of this cohort, and it’s been encouraging to see a few other ONMDs in the audiences.

Color is not typically a topic of much discussion on the Linux blogs, but in recent weeks, it’s been drawing a lot of attention. Why, you ask? Simple: Ubuntu recently announced a major change to its longstanding “Human” earthtone-palette theme and branding. “I don’t know whether to call it ‘poo brown’ or ‘dirt brown,’ but either way it is seriously awful,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. The new theme is meant to focus on the concept of “Light,” and it uses primarily hues in the dark purple and orange ranges.

In a move sure to make the grade with cyclists across the United States, Google on Wednesday added bicycle routes to its Google Maps service. Biking directions and extensive bike trail data are now available for the United States through Google Maps, giving cyclists nationwide a way to customize their trips, figure out the most efficient routes, make use of bike lanes and avoid big hills. More than 12,000 miles of trails are now included in biking directions and outlined directly on maps through the service thanks to a partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

The United States needs the help of both the private sector and individual Americans to tackle cybersecurity, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said at the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco on Wednesday. “We need to have an ongoing two-way conversation and effort between the private and public sectors, and we need to have an ongoing multifaceted effort with the public at large,” she said. The department is working on various technological projects to improve U.S. cybersecurity while respecting civil liberties and privacy.

TiVo has unveiled a new DVR that expands on its delivery of Web content while refining its interface for the high-def era. The new Premiere units will record up to 150 hours of high-definition programming, but what’s most significant about the boxes is the expanded array of Web content available. New selections include the music service Pandora and Frame Channel, a service that funnels news and other content to Web-connected devices.

Gaming companies like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft ask a lot of their customers. Every few years, they are encouraged by the companies to spend a few hundred bucks to upgrade to a fancy new console. But as far as I can recall, only Sony has ever asked its fans to not play those consoles. It happened Monday, thanks to a bug that kept those with older PlayStation 3s from accessing the PlayStation Network. An item on a company blog described the glitch as a problem with the console’s internal clock, which apparently thought it was a leap year.

Microsoft has brought a major botnet to its knees using a combined technical and legal strategy that it expects to deploy again. Earlier this week, a federal judge granted Microsoft a temporary restraining order that cut off 277 Internet domains believed to be run by criminals as the Waledac bot, according to an official company blog post. That cut off traffic to Waledac at the “.com” or domain registry level — essentially severing the tie between the botnet’s command-and-control centers and most of its thousands of zombie computers around the world.

Anyone whose home has been under attack from zombies knows all too well how incredibly annoying the problem can get — way worse than termites or even a wasp nest. Luckily, strategic landscaping in the front yard can be an effective defense, at least in the cartoony world “Plants vs. Zombies” inhabits. PopCap’s game for PCs and Macs has been scaled down into an iPhone/iPod touch version, which loosely follows the tower defense game genre while adding in some new features to keep things interesting.

After years of keeping everyone in the dark about its solid oxide fuel cell technology, Bloom Energy officially brought its first product out into the sunlight Wednesday with a media event launching its Bloom Energy Server, a cleantech refrigerator-sized power plant for homes and businesses. Bloom used the San Jose, Calif., headquarters of one of its first customers, eBay, as the backdrop for announcing the availability of what it’s calling a greener and cheaper way to wean consumers and businesses off power grids and fossil fuels.

Well it’s been a quiet few days on the Linux blogs, as geeks the world over hunkered down and waited for the Month of Love to come to a close at last. Out with the pink and red, we say! The blogosphere was not entirely without its diversions, of course — it never is. There was the news, for instance, of MeeGo, the joint project between Intel and Nokia that represents the merging of Maemo and Moblin. “Who named these platforms, a Lord of the Rings fan with a speech impediment?” Slashdot blogger goldaryn couldn’t help wondering.

Good things come in small packages, as the saying goes, and nowhere is that more true than in nanotechnology. Research in the field has recently led to several new strategies for employing nanotechnology in the fight against cancer, and — so far, at least — the results are promising. One of the hardest parts of fighting cancer is that drugs often hit healthy cells at least as hard as the cancerous ones, causing patients to get sick. However, researchers are using nanotechnology to sneak cancer-fighting particles into just the cancer cells, leaving the healthy ones alone.

With the latest iteration of its mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft aims to narrow the gap between its OS, the iPhone OS and Android. Built to focus on consumers, Windows Phone 7 Series — or WinPho7 — was designed from the ground up. “We made a very big decision to re-examine everything because the industries surrounding mobile are at an inflection point,” said Andy Lees, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business, about the operating system.

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