The great thing about WordPress is that there’s a huge, active and helpful community of users and developers. There have been WordCamps organized all of the world, as well as many smaller meetups. Last week, Kaj Rietberg and I put together just such a meetup in the Dutch city of Amersfoort.

The event was sponsored by open source development company 4WORX and hosted at the neighboring Dara restaurant (recommended!). Kaj and I were happy to welcome around 25 WordPress enthusiasts, a couple of whom had been tricked beforehand into preparing presentations. Kaj has written a more detailed account over at the WordCampNL website (in Dutch) which includes the slides from two speakers.
More WordPress meetup Amersfoort

I used to be a real nitpicker when it came to preparing images for the web. I’d laugh at people using large images in web pages, showing them in a smaller format by setting the width and height properties.

In the days before broadband was everywhere it was bad karma to do this, because a large image file would take a long time to download. You needed to prepare the image at the size you were going to be displaying it. Nowadays, things are a little different.
More Browsers are pretty quick at scaling images

I’ve recently decided to move my business out of my family’s home, to a nearby office building. While this is very convenient in many ways, it also meant I had to find a way to move data to and from there safely. As a web freelancer, I feel it’s my responsibility to keep client data very secure. Not only do I not want to lose it, I also need it to remain private. That’s why I looked into things like RFID protected and rugged harddrives.

There are two distinct threats I wanted to keep my data safe from. One is from data loss through drive failure. I’m going to be taking it with me every day, so I needed a sturdy drive that could take some (accidental) abuse. The other threat is theft. I wanted the contents of the disc to be protected in case it fell into the wrong hands. It was essential for me that I’d be able to use the device on Windows, Mac and Linux computers, which rules out most products that use software encryption.
More How to keep your data safe on a budget

I came across another ad today that advertised high end HDMI cables as offering “superior image quality”. You’d think with all the controversy surrounding Monster cables in the US consumers would know better by now, but apparently, that’s not the case. Most of that controversy was around cables that transport analog signals, but with HDMI it gets even more ridiculous. That’s because HDMI is digital.
More Don’t buy expensive HDMI cables!

There’s been a lot of controversy over Apple’s decision to ban Flash (and Java for that matter) from the iPhone since the day it was released. Now, with the iPad about to hit retail, there’s been more debate on whether this was a technical decision or not, and whether it’s a severe limitation for the devices, or a blessing. Being both a Flash developer, an iPhone OS user an open source advocate, I thought I’d weigh in on the conversation.

Before I get started though, let me point out that I’m not a fan of Flash. I think it’s a real shame that there’s no open, official standard that lets web designers do the things Flash can. Adobe has the web in an awkward stranglehold right now, and I’d love to see that change. But the reality is that Flash is an integral part of the web today.
More My thoughts on Flash and the iPad

It’s been a while since I blogged about Chrome OS. Things have been pretty quiet around the Google-supported operating system for netbooks and tablets. But Hexxeh, a 17(!) year old developer who’s been supplying pre-built versions of the OS for a while now, released an new version yesterday, and it’s a lot more polished than earlier builds. It boots in seconds and runs pretty smoothly for a pre-alpha OS. If you’re curious about Chrome OS, this is the perfect opportunity to give it a try.

Not only is the ‘Flow‘ build very easy to use, there are complete setup instructions as well. The OS is installed on a USB stick or an SD card (provided your target computer has a card reader it can boot from). It runs off of that drive, so nothing is left behind on the computer’s hard drive. Simply take out the SD card and boot up to get back to Windows or whatever you were using before.

Remember my review of the world’s smallest ‘desktop’ PC, the Fit-PC2? I recommended it for use as a lightweight, energy efficient server, but apparently you can do much more exciting things with it. Matt Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical engineering senior, used it to power a very cool, spider-like robot. And it turns out Intel just bought two of them to show off the Atom’s potential. It uses other stock parts too, including a Logitech webcam.
More Fit-PC2 used to power amazing robot spider

A little over a year ago, I got myself the cheapest media center PC ever, on the form of an old refurbished office machine. It was fast enough to handle most of what I wanted it to do, but it was lightly too big for my AV setup, and decidedly beige. Ugh. But my main issue with it was that it was also making long hours. The Pentium 4 series of processors is notorious for its high power consumption, and I was starting to feel guilty.

I’ve had a couple of Atom based PCs in my home (a netbook and that really small PC I wrote about earlier), but found them to be slow, especially when it came to graphics. Intel’s ancient 945 chipset was a real bottleneck, and the newer US15W had terrible driver issues in Linux. That’s why I wanted to try nVidia’s Ion chipset. I decided that an ASRock Ion 330 would be the perfect little HTPC for me.
More ASRock’s ION nettop really rocks!

I hate having to do this, but I’m going to be closing the comments on most of the WP-Cumulus related posts on this blog. Because some have several hundred comments, they’ve become impossible to read and I find that the same questions keep getting asked over and over again. I’ve tried to patiently answer all of them, but I’m no longer able to keep up. Blog comments just aren’t a very good support mechanism.

If your question is about WP-Cumulus, the original WordPress plugin, not one of its ports or variations, please post it in the WordPress forums. This allows others to find the answers, and chances are your question has been discussed already. The forums are an invaluable resource, and offer a much better platform for WP-Cumulus support. If you add the “wp-cumulus” tag to your thread, I’ll almost certainly see it.

I’ll also try to update the FAQ more often. It’s a little out of date, but definitely still a good place to start. Oh, and for more info, see my support page.

I stumbled across MiserWare MicroMiser a couple of days ago. It promises to shave 10 to 30 percent off your PC’s power consumption, without you even noticing. All you have to do is download and install the program. I have to admit this sounded a little too good to be true at first, but considering how I’m really into low power computing, I decided to sign up for the beta program and give it a try.
More Can software really reduce your computer’s power consumption by 30%?