1. talk with people from all over the world for free;
2. chat through a simple interface, without all the unnecessary bells and whistles that many other messengers feature;
3. have video conversations?

Then we have good (and possibly some bad) news for you. Let’s start with the good news: a new beta version has been released. Skype for Windows 5.0 build 123 beta is available for download, and here’s what new in it:

• 10-way group video calling
• Skype Home experience
• Offline instant messaging
• New contact search and add experience
• Enhanced call experience under problematic conditions
• Post call experience
• General User Interface refresh

If you wonder what “Post call experience” is all about – don’t worry, we don’t have a clue either. We do like the 10-way group video calling feature, though (in a previous version this was limited to 5 only), and the offline instant messaging. Since my conditions for calling are indeed problematic (not everybody’s got access to the same amount of bandwidth, folks!) I’ll be interested in giving this one a go.

The possibly bad news is that I’ve read that this might be a free trial – what that means for the future of Skype I don’t really know, but I do hope they’ll keep the model as it is.

A bit after the 1.1.3, an important security issue was discovery in most windows applications, and VLC is affected too. Since security issues matters, here is a new release, targeted for the Windows platform!

• Windows Dll loading security issue, in Qt4 and dmo modules – VideoLAN-SA-1005
• Fix for folders opening issue on Windows
• Updated translations

Go and get that upgrade, already!

Because this is an open source project, the volunteers behind this program have ported it to many different operating systems: Are you using Windows 2000 or something upwards of that, one of the various flavours of GNU/Linux, or MacOS X, perhaps…no problem: there’s a version for you. If your system is not supported, you can even get the source code and try to compile it yourself.

What is really fantastic is all the different kinds of input it supports. Sure, it can play something from your hard disk, but what about this: if you connect it to a DVB source (Digital Video Broadcasting, via your satellite receiver, your digital TV receiver, or cable TV), it will play that, too. Give it any kind of streaming media via the internet, and you make it happy. If there are subtitles available, it will show them, of course, and if there aren’t, you can always add them. You can even use VLC to send your own streaming music/video over the internet, but if you’re advanced enough to understand this, you probably already knew.

Are you still using Windows Media player? Will you please stop doing that immediately? Get this download, and you’ll thank us soon enough. And if you don’t know how to do that, we can always give you some tips.

What I find particularly interesting is the ability to create custom groups: if for instance I want to post something to my LinkedIn, Twitter and blog, but not to my Facebook, then that’s no problem at all -I like that. I have created a group “Blogs” for instance, which comprises a blog of our own (blog.letslearnit.org) as well as a WordPress hosted blog (flwiblogt.wordpress.com). So, posting to both blogs simultaneously is now soooo easy! Downside is that the posts have no editor whatsoever -inserting images, or even simple links is not possible. Nevertheless, if you’re using multiple social accounts, then I do think Ping.fm is worthwhile exploring, as I will do now -I’ll probably come back to this in the upcoming days. Stay tuned!

When the Singer sisters were just 6 months old, they already preferred cell phones to almost any other toy, recalls their mom, Fiona Aboud Singer: “They loved to push the buttons and see it light up.” The girls knew most of the alphabet by 18 months and are now starting to read, partly thanks to an iPhone app called First Words, which lets them move tiles along the screen to spell c-o-w and d-o-g.

10 years ago, when I was giving Comenius / Grundtvig trainings and tried to persuade that very “soon everybody would have a digital photo camera”, many of the course participants scoffed at me. By now it’s hard to find a phone without a digital camera, and many of them have built-in functionality to send the videos that have been recorded straight to YouTube!

Tactile technology is making it easier for kids to learn how to use advanced technology, and is going to empower them in a way difficult to imagine for the current generation of teachers. Now does that sound like an interesting challenge to you, or what?

But what if you really want to get rid of Facebook then? Head over to https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account.  You’ll get a page where you can choose to permanently delete the account. Just make sure you don’t log in for 14 days, and then everything will be gone for ever. (And yes, your friends will probably miss you.)

Ping.fm has support for the wordpress.com sites, but not for the wordpress.org sites (which is what we use). They’ve promised us that they’re working on a solution, though. Nice folks, those at Ping.fm.

This minor upgrade fixes 34 problems, and if you’ve experienced problems with any of these problems before, then now is a good time to do the update. And if you don’t want to download the upgrade, then you can always go upgrade automatically via the Tools > Upgrade menu in your blog’s admin area.

While unfortunately many web 2.0 applications are merely a matter of novelty over substance -how many timelines have you embedded in your blog so far?- Backboard does performs one of the essential tasks in any professional domain, really, be that education or a private company, and that is collecting feedback.  Backboard allows you to do just that: the basic idea is that you can upload documents or enter a web address and then ask colleagues, friends, or anyone, really, what they think of your document/website.

Three simple steps will get you going, but there's more if you want to...

The system even allows for secure uploads, but only so if you have a premium account, which you can try out for a limited period if you want to (the free account gives you unlimited Backboards, 5 MB maximum size per file, and no SSL by the way). You then need to specify who should be able to access and assess your document: you can give free access to the whole wide world, but maybe you will be more comfortable with selecting your own executioners yourself, in which case you simply list their e-mails in a text box and that’s it. Additionally, you can also provide an access code which your reviewers then have to enter before they can view your document.

Reviewing a document then is as easy as either inserting general comments, or you can use the red pencil to indicate certain sections of the document and then comment on just those sections. The owner of the document gets informed whether or not you have given feedback yet. A simple test with a pdf document resulted in this:

Provide general feedback or comment on specific sections of a document

I haven’t tried many different formats yet, but th system should have no problems with Word (DOC/DOCX), Excel (XLS/XLSX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX), WPD, ODT, ODP, ODS, RTF, PDF, TXT, HTML, SQL and JS), images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, BMP and PSD), vector graphics (AI, EPS, PS), web pages or other URLs, and free-form text.

Next time you need a couple of opinions, give it a try -I don’t think you’ll regret it.