Archive for the ‘internet’ Category

For many people a blog has become almost synonymous with WordPress. Running your own version, rather than going through WordPress.com, has a couple of advantages. As in: you have full control over everything. Change your theme? Add plugins? Some widgets, perhaps? Tweaking the code to suit your needs? All of it is possible… It’s become so powerful that by now it’s become much more than just a blogging system: you can run a full-fledged website in it, if you want, all of it with the same ease of use that we’ve naturally come to expect from WordPress.

And the good news is that those nice folks at WordPress.org (the organization which offers you the downloadable version of their software) have released a new version.

Here’s what’s new, according to their site:

WordPress 3.0.2 is available and is a mandatory security update for all previous WordPress versions. Haiku has become traditional:

Fixed on day zero
One-click update makes you safe
This used to be hard

This maintenance release fixes a moderate security issue that could allow a malicious Author-level user to gain further access to the site, addresses a handful of bugs, and provides some additional security enhancements. Big thanks to Vladimir Kolesnikov for detailed and responsible disclosure of the security issue!

Since version 3, upgrading should be relatively pain-free (just go to your Dashboard and hit the upgrade link). If you happen to work for an organization where the system administrator doesn’t know how to manage a server park properly, though, and the upgrades aren’t possible due to server configuration mistakes (and we don’t have any specific organization in mind here, COMU), you can always download 3.0.2 and do the upgrade manually.

Those wonderful folks at Videolan have released a new version of the VLC Media Player. If you’re using an ATI graphics card, and you’ve got version 10.7 or higher of the Catalyst drivers installed, then VLC can use DxVA2 hardware acceleration as well.

What’s new in 1.1.5:

• 1000 Web-shows listing integrated inside VLC’s playlist, provided by Channels.com
• New Game Music Emu (GME) support
• Windows SMB security issue - VideoLAN-SA-1006
• Major updates in translations, and new translations in Asturian, Armenian and Modern Greek
• Mac/Power-PC port fixed in 1.1.4.1
• live .webm streams support
• GPU HD decoding using Intel IGP on Windows, using DxVA2
• Miscellaneous fixes on all Interfaces, Demuxers and Decoders modules
• Codecs updates

Get it while it’s still hot!

Randall Munroe (of xkcd.com fame) has blessed us with a new map of Online Communities. Yes, new, because he already did a first one in 2007. Interesting to see how the situation has evolved (e.g. Facebook vs. Myspace, and who would have thought that Farmville alone is bigger than Youtube?). Since the new map is based on the rate of activity in the various sites and communities, it gives you a pretty good idea of where things are happening at the moment. A word of warning, though:

Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).

Nope, my keyboard is actually quite fine, thanks for (not?) asking. What I’m talking about? Why…the title, of course. Goo.gl.qr. Surely you’ve recognized the first bit as resembling Google, and there’s a good reason for that: the guys and girls from Mountain View (California) have come up with a very cool URL shortener. I hear you asking “why another URL shortener? Aren’t there enough already?”, and the answers are obviously “no” and “because this one offers some cool (hidden) features that the others don’t” – in reverse order.

What’s it all about, then? Well…Say you want to link to a specific post in a site, but the URL (being SEO and all) is really long and confuses email programs, or it’s just too long for your Twitter message, or whatever…that’s when you want to shorten it to something more convenient. Others have done this before, with varying degrees of fame and success. When Google thinks they have something to add to the market, you know that at least they have the server capacity (and the speed) to do so. Enter…goo.gl! Read the rest of this entry »

Are you one of those people who really love Skype, because it lets you…

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.

If you are not yet using dropbox, then maybe you should start considering it -it’s a fantastic tool for synchronizing your important files across multiple computers. If you are already a dropbox fan, then you might be interested in IDriveSync, which does essentially the same thing but with a few more options. Check out this review on downloadsquad for more details.

Okay, we know: you use Videolan‘s Media Player VLC (because you know what’s good for you), but what we don’t know is if you’re using Windows as well. If you are, then you might want to upgrade again, because some problems have been fixed:

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!

Everybody’s favourite media player, VLC, has been upgraded to version 1.1.3. Everybody’s favourite music player? Sure! Because VLC can literally play just about any music or video file out there, and if it doesn’t play, then it’s most likely not music or film. It does so by using a series of internal codecs, so there’s no need to install any extra software, either: everything works straight out of the box.

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.

In his blog post Social media and trying to drink from a firehose Jason Renshaw comes up with a few interesting observations -seasoned Twitter & facebook users will undoubtedly recognize that sometimes it really can get too much, and that you can indeed spend hours trying to keep up with things. Luckily enough, there are also a couple of applications that allow users to keep all their social accounts manageable. Read the rest of this entry »

Fastcompany has an interesting read about the impact of smartphones and handheld computers on the way we teach (or should teach).

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?