Today we went to the Acropolis, where we could marvell the wonder that is the Parthenon. For more videos, check our Facebook page.

Hundreds of volunteers contributed for months to bring you this wonderful piece of software, which is still freely available as open source software. Thanks a billion, all! Your work is greatly appreciated by this non-profit!

What’s new in Joomla 1.6?

• Better access control for viewing and editiong of content, with definable user groups and access levels.
• A completely user-configurable category structure (no more messing with sections!), allowing for simple or complex, multi-layered categories.
• Improved extension management, allowing you to install several extensions in one simple go, or to update existing extensions with a simple click of the button.
• Improved language support for the development of multilingual websites.
• Configurable start and end dates for the visibility of modules; more control over where modules are visible.
• New templates, and a semantic template markup, pleasing both to the eye and to search engines.
• More creative possibilities thanks to the template styles.
• Hundreds of other new functionalities to improve your workflow and productivity

You’ll understand that we won’t be rolling out a new version of our website just yet – we’ll wait until the application deadline for our Comenius & Grundtvig courses is over, if you don’t mind!

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!

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).

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.

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?

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.

The latest version can be downloaded from their site, and contains the following changes:

WordPress 2.8.6 Security Release

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch. The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations. Thanks to Benjamin and Dawid for finding and reporting these.