One of the comments that I received from my last post (15 Twitterers Every Linux User Should Follow) was that Twitter is pretty closed and not really in line with the whole Linux way of doing things. Well, that is true, though probably not an issue for the less fanatical amongst us, so I have decided to also look at identi.ca, an open Twitter alternative.
Identi.ca certainly doesn’t have as many users as Twitter, but does have a growing following in the open source community, as such I’ve been able to find a few users I’d recommend to anyone starting out or making the switch from Twitter.
If you have any other suggestions for linux related identi.ca users please let me know in the comments and I’ll update the list with the best ones.
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It’s surprisingly hard to find users on Twitter that are worth following in amongst the inactive accounts and mundane updates, but there are some real gems. Below is my list of the best Linux related twitterers. To follow any of them just click on their name to go to their twitter page. If there are any that I’ve missed please let me know in the comments.
Update: Added a few more (I’m leaving the title though!)
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After 2 years I’ve finally updated my WordPress plugin and decided on a new name (it started out life as SocialList, but someone else has that name now). Hopefully I’ll keep more on top of things this time!
PopuList allows you to track the popularity of your posts on social bookmarking sites reddit, stumbleupon, del.icio.us and digg. When PopuList is activated, a page is added to your dashboard giving the number of times a page has been saved or upvoted.
Prompted by an article by Andreas Gohr [splitbrain.com] giving a PHP function to get StumbleUpon rankings for a given URL I decided to revisit the SocialList Wordpress plugin I wrote in 2007 (I see someone else has taken the name for a different plugin now, guess that’s what I get for leaving it 2 years!)
Unfortunately Andreas mentioned that his method doesn’t work anymore as StumbleUpon have changed something. Well, I didn’t have anything better to do this evening, so I’ve reworked Andreas’ code and come up with a solution that works with the StumbleUpon changes.
This function should be pretty much a direct replacement for the one in the splitbrain.com article and the same instructions apply especially that to make it work you will need to set the two variables at top of the function.
Possibly useful to anyone testing a site in Firefox, I just found out you can view the error console in a tab by going to the URL:
chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul
Also of interest:
Library (bookmarks):
chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul
Downloads:
chrome://mozapps/content/downloads/downloads.xul
Add-ons:
chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.xul
You’ll need to copy and paste these into your address bar as links don’t work, also they only work in Firefox (and possibly other Mozilla browsers).
[From: MozillaZine KB]
IsMyLcdOK is a small program to easily check for dead/paralysed/stuck pixels on LCD monitors. There’s not much to it: Just run and then walk through the battery of onscreen tests designed to isolate any problem pixels. The only trouble is it’s Windows only.
There are some alternatives for other platforms, but I decided to make a cross platform solution, and what could be more cross platform than HTML (admittedly with some javascript). Feel free to try it out here: Check my LCD - Just click anywhere on the screen that loads to rotate through the tests, you’ll also get better results using your browser’s full-screen mode.
A quick question:
How many people know your mothers maiden name/first pet’s name/frequent flyer number etc?
More than you’d think.
Every time you sign up for the latest website, service or account you’re asked for details like this as a security procedure in case you forget your password. Often this information is all that stands between someone and complete access to all of your accounts.
Let’s look at an example:
1: You decide to try out the latest Twitter clone/social networking site/stupid Facebook application.
2: As part of the sign up process you are asked to provide your email (they promise they won’t share it with spammers) and the name of your first teacher (the ’security’ question).
3: You fill in the details and enjoy your new toy.
All seems fine so far right? Wrong! You may just have given away access your email account and probably a lot more besides. Say you’ve entered your email address as ‘jimbowejs@gmail.com’, and supplied your first teachers name as ‘Bob’, all an unscrupulous site owner needs to do is head over to gmail, claim to have lost the password for their account and fill in the details you’ve just given them. They now have access to your mail, and let’s not forget to any other sites that you’ve registered for with that email address.
What can be done to stop this?
Be careful with your security questions! When you can choose your own question it’s a good idea to do so. If you do use your own questions, consider not giving a question at all, but a clue to the password that only you would know (you can then give a random answer).
Try to know at least a little bit about who your giving details to before signing up for ANYTHING.
And, of course, use different passwords for different sites. You’re only making an attackers job easier if they can just use the exact same password you just signed up for their ’service’ with to login to your mail/banking/PayPal…
Reading through Maximum PC’s list of 50 skills every real geek should have I noticed ‘Downloading flash video’ from sites like YouTube was on the list. So, cunningly avoiding the many easy ways to do it, I decided to put together a quick shell script, after all it can’t be that hard, you just need to look at the HTTP headers…
Well it turns out YouTube don’t make it that easy, but after a bit of prodding I ended up with something that will at least save a YouTube video to an flv file:
This will probably only work till the YouTube site changes, so if it’s broken blame them and not my shoddy coding 
Simple one-purpose site Ding It’s Up sends you an email (or text/twitter message) when a site you specify comes back online.
Pretty useful stuff, but not content to let something remain simple I decided to make a bookmarklet so that when I’m on a site that’s down, I can just hit the link in my bookmarks bar and get an email when it comes back.
To use this, either drag the link below, or right click and select “Bookmark this link”. You’ll then need to change the bookmark properties to replace ‘YOUREMAILADDRESS’ with your email address.
Let me know when it’s back
If you find this useful, you may also like the ‘Get archived version’ bookmark which checks for archived copies of the current page from archive.org:
Get archived version
Both of these have been tested to some extent in Firefox. Please leave a comment if you have any problems.
