I’ve searched high and low for a good native Linux Twitter client, but there’s nothing out there that can really compete with TweetDeck. At least not in terms of functionality. TweetDeck is based on Adobe’s AIR platform and as a result is quite heavy on resources. But the biggest problem I had with it was getting it to open links in my default browser. It disregarded my setting and used Firefox to open all links. Twitter is far less fun if you need to carefully copy paste every link to a new tab in your browser. As it turns out, the issue is with AIR, not just TweetDeck, and it took quite a while and a lot of help for me to find a working solution.
More Getting Adobe AIR to use the default browser under Ubuntu

I spent last weekend at the Dutch Lowlands festival helping out with ‘Film It Yourself‘, a cool project by VPRO. The idea was to have as many people as possible film five shows. On their mobile phones or point-n-shoot cameras. The team I was part of harvested these videos from what turned out to be a wide variety of devices, and after some serious editing the result is a truly unique concert registration. I’ll embed the first completed result below. Great stuff.

(The player’s in Dutch, but we too use a triangle that points right for ‘play’ )

To celebrate the launch of Snapatar, we’re having a little contest on our site. If you use the site between now and midnight on Thursday, you automatically compete to win a $50 iTunes gift certificate. A highly qualified jury will select the most original and creative new Twitter profile image from what we hope will be a large number of great pictures.

Read more about the contest here, like the rules and exactly how to enter. Please RT .

I’ve written a lot of posts about the advantages for running Linux on my netbook. Unfortunately there’s been one application I haven’t been able to get to run smoothly under Ubuntu 9.04. Firefox. No matter how many little tweaks I used, it remained unusably slow, and would drift in and out of conscienceness even when simply using a single tab to check my Gmail. For a machine I use primarily to do that kind of stuff, not having a decent browser was a major problem.
More Chromium for Linux rocks!

I’ve pointed out this brilliant piece by Wired before. If you haven’t read it you should. It’s about how netbooks changed the computer industry, and ended, at least for some uses, the arms race towards ever greater performance. But there’s another thing that makes these tiny laptops very important, and that’s innovation. Hardware limitations and new use cases have forced software and hardware developers to come up with new solutions. Since the launch of the original Eee-PC nearly two years ago now I’ve spotted a number of really cool innovative projects that would probably not have existed without the netbook phenomenon.
More Why netbooks are important: Innovation

My latest pet project, snapatar.com is nearly ready to be launched. It’s been online for a few weeks now, and we’ve been fixing little bugs and adding features users have asked us about. The latest version, 0.9.5, adds two of those features.
More Snapatar 0.9.5 adds a self-timer and mirror mode