When I first started using WPMU, the now-integrated multisite version of WordPress, I found it strange that there were no built-in tools to aggregate content onto the main blog. It seemed to me that that was something plenty of people would want to do. Sure, there were plugins and hacks, but none of them were as polished as I’d like them to be.

Fortunately, things have changed. WordPress 3.0 now has multisite capabilities built right into it, and Bjorn Wijers, a friend of mine and one of Holland’s top WordPress developers, has created a really cool plugin to handle content aggregation. Called bbAggregate, this plugin doesn’t just collect posts from blogs to be displayed on the home page, it allows you to display aggregated content on any of your network’s blogs. And to do this it introduces the concept of streams.
More bbAggregate lets you mix and match WordPress content

Don’t get me wrong. I hate nag screens as much as anyone, but after playing the free version of iBubble Shooter for quite some time I’m can’t really blame them for trying to get me to upgrade. The game is based on the classic bust-a-move principle, in which you shoot bubbles from the bottom of the screen trying to group them together based on color. It’s pretty good, certainly the best touch screen translation of the concept that I’ve played. At € 0.80 it’s a steal. But that was even more true for the original free version.
More iBubble Shooter now has nag screens, but can you really blame Absolutist?

For a project I’m working on, I needed to create a split menu, where the top level navigation was in a horizontal menu in the header, with all underlying content listed elsewhere on the page. This turned out to be a little harder than I had anticipated, but I managed to get it working. Here’s how I did it. Feel free to add suggestions in the comments if you see room for improvement.

More Creating a split menu in WordPress 3.0

I’ve been using an Android phone since April, and it took me a while to get used to Google’s OS. I’d had two Symbian devices before getting the HTC Desire, and as it turns out, I made a few mistakes in getting used to my new phone that ended up keeping me from fully enjoying my new phone. I found myself needing to unlearn old habits in order to use Android as it was intended. Here’s what I learned.
More How to get the most out of your Android phone

When Intel first introduced their Atom line of processors, they told us it was aimed at smaller, so-called MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). Soon after that, Asus released the first netbook, and a new category of computers was born. But they weren’t really MIDs. In fact, the term MID hasn’t really caught on, and there are very few devices that are generally considered to be MIDs. Nokia’s internet tablet series for and Sony’s Mylo come to mind. But both predate the Atom processor.

Atom’s major advantage over other small, power-sipping CPUs is that it uses the same x86 instruction set as desktop CPUs. This means that Atom-based devices, if powerful enough, can run Windows. Intel probably thought this would be essential for MID adoption. But then Apple released what would prove to be a game-changing device.
More The end of the Atomic Age?

The Twitter community has a very positive feel to it. This is in part because unfollowing other users is easy, and unless the people being unfollowed have special tools in place, they’ll never know.

But sometimes, simply unfollowing someone is just not enough. That’s why there’s now Gunfollow.com, the Twitter hitman. You can “hire” Gunfollow to unfollow and block a user. It’ll be quick an painless, and you can choose a message that gets delivered to the “victim”. If you prefer, this message can be delivered anonymously.
More Introducing Gunfollow, the Twitter hitman

The most important thing about keeping your data safe is that whatever backup or redundancy setup you choose, it has to be easy. If you need to remember to make backups, you’ll forget. For me personally, I’ve opted to go with a RAID1 solution, where my data is written to two separate disks. This means my data is safe from drive failure, and since I’m using a version control system, I don’t really need any kind of rotating backup scheme. That’s why I got a QNAP TS-210 a couple of weeks ago, and so far I love it.

I’m no expert when it comes to NAS devices (this is my first one), and so I’m not saying the QNAP is better than the similarly priced Netgear ReadyNAS Duo or the Synology DS210j. I couldn’t find any comparative reviews, so I went with the one I thought looked cool and had the best hardware specs. I did want to go with a specialist brand as opposed to something like the WD “World Edition”. I’ve never really trusted consumer solutions, and WD isn’t my favorite brand.
More QNAP TS-210 first impressions

As some of you may know, Twitter is fading out support for “basic authentication”. This basically means that app developers (like myself) can’t just send a user’s login information to Twitter’s server when we want to send a tweet or change a setting. Instead the application needs to be “authorized” by the user using a process called oAuth.

For Snapatar, this meant I needed to make a lot of changes. OAuth is far from trivial to implement, and I was lucky to find a library that handles most of the complicated stuff. With it, I was able to get oAuth working on snapatar.com, and beat the August 16 deadline. More Snapatar now uses oAuth (phew!)

I was approached by Mastiware, a new game development studio founded by four French students, to take a look at their first game, “Joe the Worm – Escape or Die”. As a casual gamer, currently hooked om a poorly made but very addictive Bust-a-Move clone on the iPod Touch, I’m absolutely not a gaming expert. But I decided to take a look anyway, and now I wish I hadn’t.

In “Joe”, your task is to keep a little worm alive. this wouldn’t be very hard if not for two complicating factors. First, Joe is very hungry. You need to point it to fruit scattered around the screen. But at the same time you have to keep him away from two intersecting “beams” that move across the screen randomly. This means our little worm is either constantly hungry, or in risk of serious harm. Fortunately, there are several powerups, which you get when you complete a “recipe”. Certain combinations of fruits unlock things like increased speed, or the ability to stop the beams temporarily.
More Helping Joe the Worm escape is not easy

I know they look good, but placing your external hard drive vertically (as many are intended these days) is actually a data security risk. Models like the Lacie pictured here, many WD models and countless others may be easier to fit onto your desk than horizontal designs, but you can knock them over. It happened to a friend of mine yesterday, and it looks like he’ll have to pay a lot of money to get his data recovered, or consider it lost.

This also adds a reason to why RAID1 drives (with two disks that store data twice) are safer. Typically, those type of devices have a wider base and are much less inclined to topple over. But anyway, if your drive is the kind that can be placed flat on your desk, I’d recommend doing so.