FeedBurner makes it easy to receive content updates in My Yahoo!, Newsgator, Bloglines, and other news readers.
Learn more about syndication and FeedBurner...
This morning, at 06:00 GMT, the eagerly awaited Raspberry Pi computer went on sale. The foundation behind the Pi announced that they have entered into manufacturing an distribution deals with two large electronic parts suppliers, and in order to get your hands on the credit card sized computers, you need to order through them. I spent the better part of an hour trying to get through to the order page on both sites, and got just about every error a website can throw at you. Eventually, I was forced to give up.
It seems like the Pi’s launch was both a resounding success and a complete failure. For consumers, it feels “unfair” to have set your alarm clock, have your credit card ready, and then not be able to order. On the other hand, there seems to be an overwhelming amount of interest, which is excellent news for the foundation. The educational benefit of the Pi probably depends heavily on community acceptation of the device, and right now there’s so much community interest that it can easily knock over two large web shops.
As I write this, an hour and a half after the launch, I still can’t get either of the websites to respond. On Twitter, the Raspberry Pi foundation has announced that at least on of them is out of stock. I guess I’ll have to wait for the second batch.
That’s assuming “Sputnik8″ is a guy. A couple of days ago, he (or she) posted a series of Windows UI concept designs on The Verge. They’re chock-full of elegant new interface ideas, yet they clearly build on existing Microsoft design conventions, most notably “Metro“. Despite (possibly unintentionally) using Ubuntu’s default color scheme, they show a possible direction for Windows. And I love it.
I think it looks amazing. Windows 7, despite its design “fresh-up” in my opinion looks outdated and lacks a certain elegance. It works, the new taskbar is just enough of an improvement, the overall stability is now pretty good, but there’s nothing to really love. A redesign like this could finally make Windows a truly desirable platform. Not just the reliable way to launch programs (that runs well on cheap hardware), but something users would enjoy working with. So please Redmond, do this. Do this now.
The previous two years, I’ve helped put together a WordPress meetup in Amersfoort. While this was fun to do, it didn’t really make sense, because I do not live in (or even really near) Amersfoort. As a result know very little about essential things like venues there. It looks like this year, local WordPress people will take over “their” meetup, and I’ve been thinking about setting up a brand new one in “my” 035 area of The Netherlands.
Ideally, I’d like to do something that’s a little more informal than the Amersfoort ones were, and probably also more frequent. If there’s anyone who’d like to help organize, speak at, or simply attend such a meetup, please let me know in the comments. Oh, and despite the little joke I pulled with the logo, I’m hoping to keep it as low-key and relaxed as possible. Suit and tie entirely optional, perhaps even frowned upon .
When I bought my Samsung tablet, the runner up was the Asus Transformer. That tablet’s main appeal was that, at the same price point, came with a cleverly designed keyboard. I convinced myself that I’d still fire up my laptop if I needed to answer a lot of emails, and got the lighter, thinner Galaxy Tab. But now, a couple of months later, I think a tablet keyboard can be a really good idea. I find myself using my tablet for a lot of things that involve text entry, ranging from note-keeping to server administration using SSH.
This is why I jumped at the opportunity when GearZap offered to send me their “Metal Keyboard for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1″. On paper, it looked like the perfect companion for my Samsung, and it’s a lot cheaper than the Transformer’s keyboard.
In essence, this is a simple bluetooth keyboard, with a ridge that’s designed to hold the tablet at the perfect angle for typing. There’s no connector inside that ridge, the connection between the two devices relies on bluetooth alone. Mechanically, this solution installs little confidence. It doesn’t really feel like you’re docking the tablet, the ridge just sort-of keeps it from toppling over.
The keyboard is also designed to clip onto your tablet as a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 case. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work reliably either. I was able to get all four corners to clip around the tablet, but found that they pop back off way to easily. If this would happen while the combination is inside your bag, the sharp plastic corners of the keyboard could end up damaging your tablet’s screen. Perhaps a strap or rubber band could fix this, but I’d be really careful.
The main reason to get a keyboard like this is the poor feel of on-screen keyboards. If you’re doing a lot of text entry, you need tactile feedback. This keyboard however manages to feel even worse than its on-screen counterpart. When you press a key, you can see all the surrounding ones sink as well. There’s so much flex that you can press keys all the way through the metal sheet that surrounds them. There’s also barely any “click” and I found that the space bar only worked half the times I pressed it. I needed to really pay attention to press it all the way to the bottom. It’s like typing in mud.
The keyboard has a built-in battery, but unlike with the Transformer, it just powers itself. There’s also no trackpad, which would have been a welcome addition. The top row has Android-specific and multimedia keys, which are convenient. But the “feature” that ruins the whole experience is the overly aggressive, non-disableable, power saving mode. It kicks in after only fifteen seconds of inactivity, and each time it does, the keyboard needs three seconds or so to reconnect to the tablet. I found that this happens very often, and it’s annoying as hell.
This is a product that looks nice on paper, but has so many serious design flaws that it completely fails in practice. It doesn’t connect well, type well, dock well or protect well. If you’re looking for a Galaxy Tab keyboard, I’d suggest getting a better quality product like Samsung’s own solution, or perhaps a good generic bluetooth keyboard and a stand.
One of the biggest, and most useful additions to WordPress in recent years has been the introduction of Custom Post Types. Before CPTs, all the content in your site needed to either be in pages or in blog posts. If your site needed a lot of different types of data, you’d typically use categories (or even tags) to tell them apart. I’ve seen (and probably built) examples where “products” and “news” were post categories, and the site’s front-end would continuously filter out one of the two. In hindsight: madness.
Since the introduction of Custom Post Types, it makes sense to declare separate types for different types of data. When doing so, there’s a crucial argument (passed to the register_post_type function) called “supports”. This argument tells WordPress which post features should be available for the new post type. This allows you to mix and match various features. No need for an excerpt? Require a “featured image”? Need custom fields? No problem. But there’s a catch.
There’s a fixed list of features you can enable or disable. They correspond to the features present in WordPress’s two built-in types, post and pages. Nothing else. And as far as I know, there’s no (easy, developer-friendly) way to add new features. As nice as CPTs are, I think this seriously limits their potential.
Imagine being able to do something like this to create a CPT for a travel video blog.
'supports' => array( 'title', 'editor', 'author', 'thumbnail', 'subtitle' 'video', 'geo-coords', 'event-time' )
The first four features come standard, but the real fun is in the other (fictitious) ones. Being able to add a video to a post in a manner similar to how featured images work could have many potential advantages over simply adding it into the post’s content. And although there are plugins that’ll let you geo-tag and add timestamps, not all of those support CPTs, and they do not all store data in the same way. They’re all adding data to posts, but they’re all doing it in their own way.
I’m not saying all these features should be in WordPress’s lean and mean core. Most of the ones I can come up with are arguably plugin territory. But it would be nice to be able to define custom post features once, and then be able to add them to any (custom) post type. WordPress could offer a coherent, standardized way for them to present themselves and store their data. A Widget API of sorts, for the backend.
One might argue that you can do all these things using meta boxes, post meta (or extra database tables) and such, but I feel there’s a certain elegance to opening up “post features” as an API. For one thing, there are plugins that let end users define CPTs without any coding, and this would give them more things to mix and match. And perhaps, something like the functionality of those plugins could eventually make it into core…?
Noel Tock, who’s at WP On Tour with me, just released a brand new WordPress plugin that lets you accept Stripe payments. Stripe is a new, highly developer-friendly payment solution. They have low rates for processing and a great API. Right now, you can only use Stripe to accept payments if you’re in the US, but if you are, you can accept money from all over the world.
WP-Stripe keeps track of recent payments (without storing the more sensitive bits), and has a widget that shows recent incoming transactions, with gravatars. If you’re running a charity, this can be a great way to thank your sponsors. Donors who’d prefer to remain anonymous can of course opt-out of this.
The donation form is inserted into any post or page on your blog using a simple shortcode. Here’s how it looks (screenshot, not an actual donations form).
Noel needs people to test the plugin, and fortunately, there’s a test setting in the API that lets you make payments without them actually getting processed. This is fully supported in version 1.0 of the plugin, and from what I’ve seen it works perfectly. Recommended.
This week, some of the brightest minds in WordPress – and me – are co-working in Sitges, Spain. As I wrote before, I’m part of the first WP On Tour, organized by Karim Osman of Automattic. We’re in a very nice villa and, compared to back home, the weather is excellent here. But more importantly, it’s really nice to be surrounded by fellow WordPress users and devs for a change.
We’ve set up a Flickr group, but at this time there’s very little in there. On Twitter, we’re using the #wpontour hashtag.
Most of the current generation of computer nerds started out writing small programs in languages like BASIC. If you’re in your 30′s, chances are you started out on a Commodore C64, or one of its competitors, and fiddled around with writing small programs. Since then, computing has changed dramatically. Knowing your way around Microsoft Word makes you a “whiz kid” nowadays, and knowing how to install Windows can get you a job.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is developing a small, inexpensive computer aimed at bringing back the “hacker spirit” from the old days. Starting at a mere $25, the “Raspberry Pi” is a credit card-sized circuit board with an ARM-based SoC (system on a chip), 128 MB of RAM memory and connectors for a display, keyboard and mouse (USB). It uses an SD card as storage, and can be used with a DVI-capable monitor or a TV (composite video). The $35 “Model B” has double the RAM and a wired network port.
Don’t let the low purchase price fool you though. The video above shows an early prototype running Quake III at Full-DH resolution, and while that is not its intended use, it shows that the hardware is quite capable. The CPU is a single core one, running at a mere 700 MHz, but the graphics unit is quite potent, and with some cleverly chosen (written?) software, it should be usable as a general purpose PC.
(image shows a prototype board)
The Foundation is probably right to expect mostly selling the first 10,000 boards to developers and enthusiasts. Like many (current) geeks. I can see tons of applications for this little board. It uses only around 1 watt of power, so it’s perfect for “always-on” type applications like small (NAS?) servers. Plus it plays video really well, so it could also be used to create a Linux-based media player. The sky is the limit . Or rather, 10,000 is the limit. This thing has “EPIC WANT” written all over it, so I’d be surprised if that first batch isn’t sold out in the blink of an eye.
In my opinion, one of the coolest things about Ubuntu is that it comes with a Bittorrent client pre-installed. Transmission is an excellent torrent downloader. I use it all the time on my media server PC, both using the GUI (on my TV) and the web interface. I’ve even set it up so it watches my dropbox folder for new torrent files, so all I have to do to start downloading is power up the computer.
However, in order to make that work, Transmission needs to start automatically with Ubuntu. This used to be really straight-forward in older Ubuntu versions. You could simply add the terminal command “transmission” to the startup programs and that was it. Since “Meerkat” (or perhaps the version before that), this does not work any more.
I googled this issue, and found lots of guides about how to set up “transmission-daemon”, a “headless” version (which means it has no GUI at all). This is probably an excellent solution for setups where there’s no monitor attached to the computer, but it requires you to edit configuration files for things that “regular” Transmission allows you to set though its graphical user interface.
As it turns out, you can still fire Transmission (the regular version) by adding it to the startup applications (a process described here). The trick is to use “transmission-gtk”. Optionally, you can start the progam in minimized mode, by adding the “-m” switch. Here’s what I use.
transmission-gtk -m
So, if your computer isn’t a headless one, I’d recommend not installing “transmission-daemon”, but simply auto-starting regular transmission. That way, it’s much easier to use, even though this simple trick is so hard to find.
Last week, I came across the video below, and it made me wonder how this smartphone holder worked. The stop-motion animation shows both metal and plastic objects clinging to the holder’s surface, so magnetism was out. I tweeted about it, Ideasbynet offered to send me a sample. It arrived today, and I think I have it figured out now.
The holder itself is made out of plastic, but the dark rectangle on the front is silicone. That patch of silicone isn’t sticky (no glue), but it offers extreme friction. And because it’s at an angle, gravity pushes your device onto it. The result is that the phone doesn’t slide off, but seems to levitate. Nifty.
My HTC Desire has a camera that extrudes slightly, so the back of the phone is not entirely flat. Because of this, the total contact area between phone and holder is smaller, but it still sticks perfectly. I can’t turn the holder upside-down, like with the iPhone 4 in the video, but I wasn’t planning to anyway.
Unfortunately, ideasbynet only sells these in quantities of 100 or more. So you’ll have to talk your boss into giving them out as promotional gifts, or at Christmas or something. Shouldn’t be too hard, given the holder’s geeky appeal, or should I say “gravitational pull”?