Did you know you can use your Mac to connect to any Windows PC? Microsoft has a client, which even allows you to relay audio. It’s pretty cool!

Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2

Or click here for a nice chart of possibilities

I’ve been using ÜberTwitter for some time now and in fact it’s the only serious BlackBerry application for Twitter.

Unfortunately the started using ads a little while ago, which really bugged me, although I understand the wish of the developers to make a living out of it.

I happened to see the possibility to pay $5 and get rid of the ads (the ad supported version remains free of charge), which makes it the perfect app for me. It’s well worth the money! Do you have a BlackBerry? Take yours to the address below and pay those lousy $5. Happy tweeting!

Get ÜberTwitter – The only Twitter Client for your BlackBerry!

Technical evolution makes hard drives bigger and cheaper. Today, we have bigger files and more pictures and video’s on our computers than ever before.

Are these files safe? Do you have a backup of there beautiful memories? Even today, in 2010 a lot of computer still don’t have a proper backup.

Imaging the following scenario: What happens if your hard drive crashes today? What is safe and what isn’t? After reading this post you have no more excuse for not having a backup of your home computer (corporate servers are a different league).

Today, we have Wuala! Wuala is a free noline service that allows you to store your files. When you open your free account, you get 1 or 2 GB free of charge. You can use Wuala as a web drive, allowing manual storage of your files, but you can also use Wuala as a backup solution. In that case just point to a folder (directory) and tell Wuala to keep a synchronized copy in the cloud.

Wuala keeps all your stored files encrypted. Your files can only be retrieved with your password. Remember: If you lose your Wuala password, there’s no way to recover your files!

Every file Wuala stores is chopped to pieces and kept in (a minimum of 5) different places on the internet. Nerd note: This is done using P2P (Torrent) technology.

Wuala allows you to buy storage, but you can also trade local disk space for online disk space. If your PC has been online for a while Wuala will inform you that you can trade storage. The more you trade, the more you gain.

All files are private files by default. If you have friends or colleagues using Wuala you can share folders with them. If they wish to download a file from one of your shared folders, they don’t only download from your PC (it may not even be switched on), but the file comes from the collective, making downloads a lot faster!

You can use Wuala on more than one computer and it runs on Java, so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux! I keep a Windows Media Center PC at home (powered by Windows 7). It is always on and online. I traded 30 local GB’s for (almost) the same amount of online storage. I’m using this space to keep a backup of my laptop files, while I have easy access to these files from my home computer!

Please note: If you want to use Wuala as a backup solution, you need a Wuala Pro account, which you will get automatically when you buy or trade storage. If you join through a friend you get 1 GB free storage extra (as does your friend). It pays to makes friends on the Wuala network.

If you use the link below, you can become a 2 GB Wuala member as my friend

Wuala – Secure Online Storage – Backup. Store. Share. Access Everywhere.

Last year we saw the announcement and release of Google Wave.

For those who didn’t get it: Google Wave is a Hosted Conversation Service. Google thought: “If email were invented today instead of 40 years ago, what would it look like?”.

Rather than sending endless emails to each other, Wave allows you to start a conversation at one central place and involve other people, yes even entire websites!

If all of this doesn’t ring a bell, have a look at: http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html
There is short video (2 minutes) that explains in plain english what Wave is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8wXnVRnYdc

You can get a Wave account through an Invite, just like Gmail at its time. I still have tons of invites left, so if you’re not on Wave yet and I made you curious, let me know and I’ll send you your invite. Invites can be received at any random email address, but I discovered that invites to Gmail addresses actually take longer to arrive! Once you have your invite, you can subscribe to Wave using a Google Account (can be a different address than the one your invite was sent to). If you don’t have Google Account yet, you can create one on-the-fly and you’re ready to go. In the end you get a new address within Google Wave, which, funny enough, doesn’t allow you to receive email… Your Wave address ends in @googlewave.com and it allows others to add you to their Wave. I use daepunt everywhere, but unfortunately daepunt@googlewave.com wasn’t available, so if you want to share your Wave with me, add puntdae@googlewave.com instead.

The first thing I came across once I got started with Wave, was the interface. The screen looks like an interesting mix between Gmail and Google Docs (a chaos I never got used to). Wave is still in beta, so try not to use it for life/death stuff. On the other hand: If you’re not using it for serious purposes, how will you ever find out what it can/can’t do?

We’re using Wave in a production environment, which makes us discover interesting stuff on a daily basis. I’d like to share a few of those things.

The first thing I immediately missed was mobile support. I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone and a I perform a significant part of my job on the road. Google Wave runs within a browser and there’s no mobile support yet. There are numerous non-official Wave applications for the iPhone, but I’m always very careful with that. Those Apps require you to save your name and password and after that, you have no idea what happens to them. No, thanks! I’ll wait for the official Google App, although you might wonder if your name, password and data are safer with Google…

Google intends to turn Wave into an open platform, allowing the whole world to develop my mobile BlackBerry/iPhone App. But until that day comes, you’re stuck to a browser on a PC. The smartest thing I found was a FireFox Add-On, allowing you to see your unread Waves at the bottom of your FireFox screen: https://addons.mozilla.org/nl/firefox/addon/14973

Wave is still work in progress. My browser hangs a lot and today I discovered that it’s impossible to “unshare” someone, after you accidentally added the wrong person to your Wave. This means you have to be very careful when sharing Waves. Fortunately there is a way to copy existing Wave content to a new Wave (so your data doesn’t get lost), allowing you to share your stuff with the right people. You will then discover that there’s no way to permanently delete your old Wave! Emptying it or stuffing it with bogus is the only way to get rid of a Wave you accidentally shared with a wrong contact. Be careful with sharing (especially with the wrong people) because this is also a way to connect people to each other, which may not always be your intention…

Despite these quirks I see huge potential for Wave. There are people who worry about Google’s influence on our daily lives and I think it’s important to worry about privacy. Yet, I think Google is no bigger threat than Microsoft and we need to consider the options here. We should choose between existing possibilities instead of theoretical, non-existing products/services.

All progress is achieved step by step and taking active part in new developments enables you to stay involved and up-to-date. I don’t know if Google Wave will remain to exist in five years, but I see potential for a service like Wave. And Wave being Open Source creates spinoff projects, allowing you to run your own corporate in-house Wave server. That solves the privacy argument against Google and I reckon we might very well be installing local Wave servers in SMB companies, which are currently dominated by Microsoft Exchange only, anywhere between now and five years…

I wish you all a happy 2010 and I hope we will continue to see beautiful developments!

From: BlackBerry Network Administrator
Subject: BlackBerry Messenger Software v5.0.0.57 Update Available
Sent: 23 dec. 2009 20:20

A new version of BlackBerry® Messenger software is now available. If you are currently running version 5.0.0.55 or 5.0.0.56 of BlackBerry Messenger, please upgrade to version 5.0.0.57 as soon as possible. This version addresses issues with versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56.

To download the most current version of BlackBerry Messenger software, please visit www.blackberry.com/blackberrymessenger and follow the on-screen instructions. Please note that the software update is available free of charge, however downloading and using applications over the wireless network may incur data usage charges depending on your service plan. Please check with your airtime service provider for information about service costs. If you have any questions about this update, please visit www.blackberry.com/support/messenger.

Thank you,
Research In Motion Limited

©2009 Research In Motion Limited. All rights reserved. BlackBerry®, RIM®, Research In Motion®, SureType®, SurePress™ and related trademarks, names and logos are the property of Research In Motion Limited and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world.

Are you using a BlackBerry? Go to the above URL and get the latest version of BlackBerry Messenger!

If you have a BlackBerry, taking screenshots can be a great help when making manuals.
You can do this by using a tool called loader.exe, which is a part of the BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
This program can be found in folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader (on 32 bit systems). On 64 bit PC’s it is the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader folder.

Connect the BlackBerry to your PC, open a Command Prompt, go to the directory mentioned above and start:

loader.exe /screenshot filename.bmp

to take a ‘picture’ of your BlackBerry’s active screen.

You can find more information and options in Research in Motion’s KB17215:

Use loader.exe to take screenshots of your BlackBerry

Earlier I wrote about the possiblity to share your Twitter Favorites (for example to Twitter, via TwitterFeed).
I assumed this would be possible some day and today I figured out that it works! If you run into a nice video on YouTube, it’s easy to mark it as a Favorite. RSS allows you to share your YouTube Favorites with your friends (or Followers on Twitter).
If you have an iPhone, you can set a Favorite by pressing a single button, allowing quick and easy sharing.

In fact: the approach is exactly the same as sharing your Twitter Favorites. You just need the URL address of your YouTube Favorites.
Go to www.youtube.com and log in using your account. If you don’t have one yet, sign up (you can use your Google account), so you can get started!

Your Favorites on YouTube

Go to your Favorites and check the URL in the address bar (click the picture to enlarge it)). Notice the orange RSS icon. YouTube automatically creates a dynamic RSS feed of your Favorites and we’re going to use it.
Click the orange RSS icon:

Your Favorites on YouTube as an RSS feed

Write down (or copy) the address of your YouTube Favorites and use this RSS feed as an input source for TwitterFeed. Just like the Twitter Favorites, you can run this feed through Yahoo!Pipes to add or manipulate the stream. If you’re interested in who’s clicking your favorites, you might consider using Google FeedBurner. Yes, FeedBurner even allows you to set up an automatically generated Newsletter by email with your favorite video’s…

And Bob’s your uncle! As soon as you mark a video as a Favorite on YouTube, TwitterFeed can now send out a tweet to Twitter. Of course you can replace Twitter by MySpace, Facebook or even your weblog…

Good luck!

I wrote about Woopra earlier, which allows you to view live website traffic, unlink Google Analytics, which has about a one day delay.
If you have a high traffic website Woopra looks very impressive! @marcned made a cool video to demonstrate this:

Have you been using Google Analytics to find out who’s been visiting your website? After all: knowing beats guessing, right?
Although the one day delay in Google’s statistics was always bothering me. Well, Woopra does it live! With a world map that could have escaped straight from a James Bond movie, telling you who’s visiting your website right now and even how (s)he got there! You can even start a live chat with your visitors. It’s great! Free beta testing closes today, so make sure you get a free account and sign up your website(s!) for beta testing approval ASAP!

Woopra – Web Statistics 2.0

If you have several weblogs and a username and password for almost every social network available? Collect and combine all data from these networks into one readable timeline with

Are you looking for a good, reliable and free TFTP Server for upgrading software of your switch, firewall or router?

Try TFTP Server from SolarWinds!

TFTP, Free TFTP Server, TFTP Server: Free Network Monitoring Tools from SolarWinds

Tip: If you want to know if a program is 32-bit of 64-bit, you can use FileVer.exe to find out.

How to use the Filever.exe tool to obtain specific information about a file in Windows

Are you worried about the security of your WordPress blog and do you want to upgrade it to the latest version?

If you’re using WordPress MU, you’ll probably run into an error.

Read the following link and find out how make one tiny change to a file can repair WordPress MU’s auto upgrade feature.

WordPress MU › WordPress MU Forums » Upgrade to WPMU 2.8.2 failed

The next trick I discovered “by accident”, when I realised it is, in fact, very cool:

If you’re on Twitter, you can use your browser or client on your phone (iPhone, BlackBerry) to mark (or unmark) a tweet as a Favorite with just one single click. This allows you to quickly mark a tweet while you’re on the road and read it later on, when you’re comfortable behind a computer with a nice big screen.

When you go to the page of your Twitter account and click Favorites, you’ll see the orange RSS icon in the address bar of your browser. Click it, to see the address of the RSS feed of your Twitter Favorites.

This RSS feed you can use on your weblog and use it yourself, but it also allows you to share your Favorites with the readers of your weblog!

Tip: You can manipulate or add stuff to your Twitter Favorites RSS feed by feeding it to Yahoo Pipes and if you make a Feedburner feed out of it, your list of Favorites suddenly becomes an “intelligent” feed, allowing you to add interaction to it. Read my Crash Course FeedBurner for more information on the use of FeedBurner. And if you’re really into it, you can even use TwitterFeed to have your newly added Favorites tweeted to your followers! Now, how cool is that?!?

Some things you can prepare ahead, but when it comes to email, you can only write drafts and keep them until it’s actually time to send them out.

Free service Deferred Sender lets you send your emails now, allowing you to have them actually sent out at the time you decide.

Be careful! Make sure you read the Terms and Conditions very well. As you may know, email crosses the planet in plain text and delivery between sender and receiver always goes through hops, rather than directly. Without special measures anyone can read your incoming and outgoing email (Deferred Sender changes nothing about that).

Do you care about privacy? Then, consider the use of encryption. Contact our office for more information about encryption and email.

Deferred Sender

Are you using Citrix’s (free) XenServer and would you like it to shutdown its vm‘s (virtual machines) (was well as the Xen host itself, of course) after the light has gone out in your server room? Article Citrix Knowledge Base article CX119910 Citrixdescribes how to do this. Mind you: You need a Windows Server with APC PowerChute installed…

Make sure your Xen host is plugged in to the same UPS as one of your (physical) Windows Servers. Install Citrix’s management software (XenCenter) on this Windows Server. XenCenter contains a tiny program named xe.exe, which allow you to shutdown your vm’s and eventually your host. Write a batch file shutdown.cmd that your Windows Server executes after power blackout and Bobs your uncle!

Be aware: this shutdown.cmd file needs proper protection, as it contains paswords, necessary to shutdown the vm’s and the host!!

CTX119910 – How to Integrate XenServer and APC PowerChute – Citrix Knowledge Center

A new phenomenon in Social Networking I discovered today, is Aardvark.

Aardvark is a network that allows you to ask questions or to answer them. You can link your Twitter account to, for instance, your Windows Live Messenger account, which Aardvark will then use to ask people’s questions (if they match your expertise or interests).
There’s nothing to it! No software to download or install. Just click the link and get your free account.

In your Aardvark profile you can indicate your areas of expertise and off you go!
I subscribed earlier today and I already helped people get answers to their questions. Whenever you help somebody, Aardvark tweets that you did on your behalf.

Are you offline? Don’t worry. Aardvark will email you the answer to your question. Does Aardvark send you a question that you can’t answer? Reply lmk (let me know) to Aardvark and it will ask the user to share the answer they got with you eventually. It’s great!

Try it yourself and maybe we’ll be in touch soon. Who knows!

Follow @vark on Twitter

2009-07-15. Example: Writer @VeronicavS was looking for a logo for her books on profiler Althea Sang Min Molin. I didn’t know that, until I checked out the facts afterwards… Yesterday I got a question through Aardvark from somebody in Sweden, who wanted to know how Althea is written in korean. I explained him how it’s done and click this link to see what happened. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of Aardvark & Social Networking. Great!

2009-09-18. There’s an Aardvark App for your iPhone!

I really love my BlackBerry and I really love WordPress. Earlier this week, an application was released that brings the two together: WordPress for BlackBerry. Great!

Now, I speak more than just one language and I’m using WPML to make my weblog multilingual. Great!

Problem is: I can’t use WordPress for BlackBerry to post in any other language than the native language of my weblog (which is Dutch). Now, I could post using my BlackBerry and change the language with a browser afterwards, but that’s probably the least interesting option. Besides: I understand it probably doesn’t make sense for WordPress to add built-in support for just WPML. Therefore I think it could be interesting for WordPress to investigate the possibility of supporting plugins within a wider context.
If the owner of a WordPress blog uses and trusts a certain plugin, why wouldn’t the WordPress for BlackBerry (don’t forget the iPhone) app “inherit” additional database fields, post features and offer there through the app?

Amir told me he hasn’t got a BlackBerry (yet) so I posted a few pictures to illustrate:

Thanks for reading this and feel free to comment or contact to me.

(well, actually this is a manually translated post, not posted by WordPress for BlackBerry, since it won’t let me post a translated version of the original post I wrote in Dutch. This is just to keep you English readers up to date)

This is a test post. I noticed that I can add Tags to this post, but no Categories. Of course, I wonder if and how it shows up on my blog.

Let’s not put in a picture just yet, although it is supported…

I can’t tell the app which Language my post is in, so I can only write this in my blog’s native language, which is Dutch… I wonder if the authors of this application will contact the guys from WPML, or maybe they can make it even smarter, by supporting Plugin driven posts…

EDIT: Of course it is possible to indicate a Category. You just have to press the BlackBerry Option button.

The current stable version of WordPress is 2.8

Do you have a weblog that you don’t want to break, but don’t mind if it did? Maybe you like to check out the latest experimental version 2.9, that is being programmed during daytime and which can be downloaded at night. The updates go by the romantic name of “Nightly Builds”, which is exactly what they are… Be careful not to set fire to your blog! We’re talking pre-alpha code here!

WordPress – Download – Nightly Builds

At last there’s a website dedicated to gadgets! It’s called gdgt, which is pronounced as: gadget.

It allows you to make three kinds of lists:

1. Have. This is the list of gadgets you currently have
2. Want. This is what you’d like to have
3. Had. These are the gadgets you had

The cool thing about it is, that you can write reviews about the gadgets you (used to) own, exchange ideas, buy the gadgets you want (smart!) and… If you put a BlackBerry Storm or Bold on your wishlist, you might get one from gdgt, according to this tweet.

Of course it features followers (like Twitter); people keeping up with your gadgets (Facebook is currently transforming itself to the Twitter model). gdgt is a social network of people who care about gadgets. I wonder what the future of social networking has planned for us… Beware: The first gdgt burglary hasn’t been reported yet, but do not fear: I’ll be watching its development closely for you! I can imagine that somebody knowing your gadget list, might increase the chances of theft. Your insurance company may even give you a nice discount if you choose not to join gdgt…

In the meantime you can go to gdgt.com and create your own account free of charge or check out my gadgets at: http://user.gdgt.com/daepunt

It goes without saying, that gdgt can be followed on Twitter: @gdgt

Right. How am I going to explain this?

When I woke up this morning, I found something on Twitter about a new system called TweetBoard. I heard something about Alpha invites, allowing me to test their new service free of charge. Alpha is a geek word for experimental software. First, there’s only an idea. Then comes the Alpha release, Beta release, then the Release Candidate (RC) and finally the Ready to Manufacture (RTM). TweetBoard is still Alpha software… Good to know!

It took a while before it got to me. TweetBoard can best be described as a bridge between Twitter and your blog. I sent an Alpha request by using a specially formulated tweet:

Requesting an invite for Tweetboard Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by @140ware, for my site: http://www.daepunt.com

If you want to have a go at this for your own blog, copy the request tweet e x a c t l y, but don’t forget to replace the URL of my weblog with yours. About a minute or so later I received the following message:

@daepunt, your Tweetboard Alpha invite request has been approved. Find installation instructions here: http://bit.ly/1JtNr

I followed the instructions. My weblog runs on WordPress and the instructions said that I should make a Text Widget and copy/past a piece of JavaScript in it. I did that and it worked, but it left me with an ugly and empty Text Widget, so I pasted the code in the footer.php instead and now it looks nice and clean. If you check out the left side of my blog, you’ll notice a coloured tab and if you press it…

As I mentioned earlier, the posts on my weblog automatically get tweeted to Twitter, as well as Facebook, Plaxo and Hyves. I felt sorry for my LinkedIn account. I’m not keeping it up to date with status updates, because I refuse to enter the same information in all those networks manually if those clever computers can’t do it for me. And that hanged today as Guido Jansen shows us in a presentation how to connect your twitter timeline to LinkedIn status updates. The system responsible for this is ping.fm and while I was there anyway, I decided to take care of MySpace as well

Meaning: the posts on my weblog are automagically reposted to:

1. Twitter
2. Facebook
3. Plaxo
4. Hyves
5. LinkedIn and
6. MySpace

Right! That saves a lot of time and this way everybody gets to read the stuff they’re interested in on the network of their choice. The only thing left on my wishlist is Hyves. Hyves doesn’t like Twitter’s #hashtags, which currently results in hashtagged tweets not being posted to Hyves. Ping.fm is able to remove hashtags (as it does with LinkedIn), but it has no support for Hyves yet (or the other way around).

If you put your ear to the railroad (make sure there’s no train coming!), you can hear what’s going on. That’s exactly what Laura Chappell did to “hear” the traffic that crosses your network as soon as you use Twitter. She captured all traffic (in so called WireShark Trace Files) and she wrote two amazing reports about it (one about Twitter in general and one about TweetDeck). The available trace files will help you to follow her steps of research. Try it yourself! Interesting!

Chappell University Projects Page

Imagine: You’re runing an Ubuntu box with a modem connected to it. You don’t want to use it for dialing out to the internet (that’s how it was done last millennium), but you want to set it up as a dial-in server. It’s strange, but most of the online manuals I found don’t cover this, so I will.

You need to configure a PPP dialin server and we’ll do exactly that in the next few steps:

1. You need mgetty. Install mgetty by using the following command:
   

   sudo apt-get install mgetty

2. Copy /etc/event.d/tty1 to /etc/event.d/ttyS0 (ttyS0 = COM1; ttyS1 = COM2 etc). The last line of /etc/ttyS0 contains a line that goes like:
   

   exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1

   Change it, so it says:

   exec /sbin/mgetty -s 57600 -D /dev/ttyS0

3. If you have an /etc/ppp/options, back it up by using the following command:
   

   sudo mv /etc/ppp/options /etc/ppp/options.bak

   and make sure /etc/ppp/options looks like this:

   lock
   10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2 #The first address is the address you can use to access your server and the second address is the one that is asigne to your PC after the connection comes up

4. Make sure to create an /etc/ppp/options.ttyS0 with the following content:
   

   10.0.0.1:10.0.0.2

   That’s it. Nearly done.

5. The last thing on our list is to define dialin users in /etc/ppp/pap-secrets. Remember: this file is (or should be) protected. Use:
   

   sudo nano -w /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

   to change it. Make sure it has the following line somewhere:

   user        *        password        *

   Example:

   johndoe        *        secret        *

Done! Let me know if it worked for you.

As I logged on to my WordPress Dashboard this morning, I found out that WPML version 1.0.2 had been released! Unfortunately the automatic upgrade didn’t work in one go. Automatic reactivation of the upgrade plugin failed, but when I manually activated it afterwards, it worked. It looks a tiny bit fast than the old version… Now I have to go and see if I can find the Change Log. WPML is a WordPress plugin that allows you to make your WordPress multilingual. Not its content (although there is a built-in option that allows you to have your posts translated by a human in exchange for a little money), but the plugin is a technical solution that allows you to translate your posts and everything else that’s required to make your visitors experience your blog in their language.

Click here for the WPML website