That’s assuming “Sputnik8″ is a guy. A couple of days ago, he (or she) posted a series of Windows UI concept designs on The Verge. They’re chock-full of elegant new interface ideas, yet they clearly build on existing Microsoft design conventions, most notably “Metro“. Despite (possibly unintentionally) using Ubuntu’s default color scheme, they show a possible direction for Windows. And I love it.

More Dear Microsoft, please hire this guy!

Noel Tock, who’s at WP On Tour with me, just released a brand new WordPress plugin that lets you accept Stripe payments. Stripe is a new, highly developer-friendly payment solution. They have low rates for processing and a great API. Right now, you can only use Stripe to accept payments if you’re in the US, but if you are, you can accept money from all over the world.
More Easily accept credit card donations with WP-Stripe

In my opinion, one of the coolest things about Ubuntu is that it comes with a Bittorrent client pre-installed. Transmission is an excellent torrent downloader. I use it all the time on my media server PC, both using the GUI (on my TV) and the web interface. I’ve even set it up so it watches my dropbox folder for new torrent files, so all I have to do to start downloading is power up the computer.

However, in order to make that work, Transmission needs to start automatically with Ubuntu. This used to be really straight-forward in older Ubuntu versions. You could simply add the terminal command “transmission” to the startup programs and that was it. Since “Meerkat” (or perhaps the version before that), this does not work any more.
More Auto-starting Transmission in recent Ubuntu versions

Last week saw the kick-off of the first completely unofficial Dutch Wordfeud tournament. I’m competing, and so far, things are going great. I have no illusions about making it to the next round though. Even though I’m winning most of the round one games, my scores are mediocre at best, and the accumulated total scores decide which sixteen players will compete in round two. But there’s a catch…

More Wordfeud cheat battle: Scrabulizer vs. Wordfeud Helper plugin beta (UPDATE)

Now that I have a speedy internet connection at home, I’ve been looking for ways to properly use all that speed. Previously, I’d been using Bittorrent to download movies Linux distributions, but brute-force as that protocol is, it never really maxed out my 120 mbps line. So I moved to Usenet instead. I’ve been trying out premium Usenet provider Binverse, and the results are very promising. They contacted me about possibly doing a giveaway, so I thought I’d offer you a chance at winning a free account.
More Contest: Win a 200GB Binverse account! (UPDATE)

Mobiles Republic recently launched a new iOS and Android app that allows you to keep track of the latest geek news. It displays articles from over 70 sources, and uses a clever tagging scheme to navigate between them. Mobiles Republic’s Rudy Viard explains:
More APPY Geek Honeycomb app is all about tags

When the first wave of netbook computers appeared, I got myself an Asus Eee-PC 901. I loved it, and used it to play around with various flavors of Linux, even Chrome OS. But since then, I’ve been forced to buy a full-size laptop computer, and I handed the 901 down to my daughter. At first I installed Ubuntu, but the 4 GB SSD in the Asus turned out to be too small for that to really work out. So I decided to try Joli OS instead. And I think it’s great. Especially for kids.
More Joli OS is great for kids!

The latest version of Ubuntu, released two months ago, replaced the Gnome desktop interface for a new one called Unity. In terms of simplicity and speed, I quite like Unity, but I found that operating it through VNC was horribly slow. Often, I’d be unsure whether VNC was still connected. Screen updates would sometimes take minutes. Today, I found a workaround that makes VNC usable again for me.
More Having trouble with VNC and Unity? Try this!

Last night’s WordPress meetup in Amersfoort was, at least as far as I’m concerned, a resounding success. Around 70 people attended, and we had a lot of interesting speakers. Most of the presentations were captured on video, and will be placed online later. For now, I’ve put the snapshots I managed to take on Flickr for you. Enjoy!

I’ve also created a Flickr pool for Dutch meetup images. Please feel free to add you pics there. I’m still pretty new to Flickr, but I think I allowed everyone to contribute…

Converting video files from one format to another has always been a pain. You’re dealing with large files, tons of different formats and software that offers more settings than mere mortals can possibly comprehend. Programs like Handbrake work well and offer useful presets, but Miro Video Converter goes one step futher. It offers the simplest possible user interface, making transcoding as easy as it possible can.
More Miro Video Converter strips it down to the basics