I’ve been using Twitter for a few months now(*), and I can’t imagine life without it. But I’m still not sure how I’ll want to use it in the long run. I see many people trying to get as many followers as possible and then using it as a glorified marketing tool (similar to RSS or email newsletters). I know ‘me marketing’ is hot, but the longer I think about it I believe these people will eventually kill Twitter. And I’m way too fond of it to let it die without a fight.
More Why I’m not following you back on Twitter

I know I’ve been writing about Ubuntu for a while now, but the truth is I’m still pretty new to Linux. I’ve only been using it for a year now, and with Linux’s uneven learning curve (by which I mean that it’s very easy to get to a novice/intermediate level and it gets steeper from there), I’m really not an expert.

One of the things I’d not done before was upgrade from one version to the next. Under Windows, upgrading is such a recipe for disaster that I chose to do fresh installs of Ubuntu when I moved from 8.04 to 8.10. But as it turns out, upgrading is another thing that works really well under Ubuntu.
More Kudos to Ubuntu for a great upgrade experience!

Last week’s internet failure in my home has made it very clear to me that I need a backup. Even my wife, who frequently works from home using Citrix, had a lot of trouble getting anything done. We really need to be online all the time. So the first thing I did was sign up for a second broadband line. I’ll soon have both a cable and a ADSL(2+) connection. Now all I need to do is tie them together.
More Where have all the dual WAN routers gone?

One of the silliest things a blogger can do (imho) is to blog about why you’re not blogging. I’ve had “blogger’s block” now and then, but have always resisted the temptation to write a “I’m still alive” type of post. Until now. Sort of.
More Offline for almost a week now

A couple of people have emailed me, complaining that my Flickr widget does not work on wordpress.com blogs. As it turns out (I didn’t know this because I host all my blogs myself), Automattic blocks a number of HTML tags, including every single one that could be (ab)used to display Flash movies. There’s a workaround that might work, but that’s far from ideal.

So how about Facebook, MySpace, TypePad and all the other things I don’t personally use? Has anyone tried adding my widget to any of these, or anywhere else of interest? Please leave a comment if you have and report whether it worked or not. I know that it works fine on Blogger, and I’ve just submited the widget to Hyves.nl, which is Holland’s biggest social network, to be considered for inclusion.

I bought a new home phone this weekend. Two of the extra handsets from my Siemens Gigaset setup had given up after years of daily use, and since new add-on handsets are nearly impossible to find (and very expensive), I decided to go for an all new system. One thing I noticed was that it’s very hard to find anything really nice. When DECT was a new technology, getting a new phone was exciting. There were lots of models to choose from, and some of them were really sexy.

It may be the current recession, but all three stores I visited had the same bland, boring and cheap models. None of them offered anything special, and the only model with a decent color screen was gathering dust in the back of the display and had only a single handset.
More Idea: Corded DECT phone

First of all let me point out that I’m no expert at hardware prototyping. I’ve never done anything like that, and am not familiar with the steps involved in getting a product launch-ready. But still, common sense tells me the unboxing experience is probably one of the things you’re going to be testing last, right?

When leaked Crunchpad images appeared online this week, Michael Arrington, who runs the project was very quick to point out that this was an early prototype. But is it? Arrington’s comments sounded a bit irritated to me. As if a his big surprise had been spoiled.

My guess, and I do mean guess, is that Crunchpad is a lot closer to becoming a product than the team is willing to admit. This may be wishful thinking, but why else would there be nice, colourful boxes in the pictures?

I really should ‘egosurf‘ more. It was only because I was testing a seach engine yesterday that I stumbled across this post on ZDNet’s Linux and Open Source blog. In it, Dana Blankenhorn argues that social media make this recession different from previous ones, and that releasing open source software can help advertise your abilities as a media professional. And he does so by taking me as an example.

While it is true that WP-Cumulus has brought me some modest fame in the WordPress community, I wonder why Dana didn’t contact me to confirm some of the details in the story.
More On ZDNet, the recession and optimism

Lots of people have contacted me, asking for a version of my Flickr widget that they could use on their website, without having to use Flickr (or Picasa). Doing such a version was easy enough, but I was hesitant to release it. The DIY version of WP-Cumulus has yielded more support requests than the actual WordPress plugin, and answering all the email has been taking a lot of my time.

One thing I could have done was to simply release the sources for the Flickr widget. But there’s a lot of Flickr/Picasa specific stuff in there that you would need to take out before being able to hook the movie up to another data source. So that would have made things harder for everyone.
More Introducing Photo widget, floating thumbnails for your website

Microsoft pounded itself on the chest last week saying over 96% of netbooks now use Windows. This made me somewhat sad, because I was hoping these little computers could be the break Linux had been waiting for.

The first couple of netbooks all had Linux pre-installed. Unfortunately, Asus chose to go with a custom Linux distribution for which it has yet to release its first update. No Firefox 3, no Flash 10 and no easy way to get additional software. Except for the easy to use interface, they came up with the worst example of what Linux can be. But if there’s one thing Linux offers its choice. It is my opinion that Ubuntu is the most user-friendly Linux distro out there, and I highly recommend giving it a go on your netbook.
More Five reasons to put Ubuntu Linux on your netbook