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.

News

linuxdotcom

Web http://linux.com/
Bio Linux.com is home to All Things Linux. Knowledge, tools, information, all in one place.

Web http://www.linux-foundation.org/
Bio The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.

Web http://www.linuxjournal.com/
Bio Your favorite Linux magazine since 1994!

Tips & Tricks

bashcookbook

Web http://www.bashcookbook.com/
Bio Authors of the best book on the bash shell.

Web http://www.shell-fu.org/
Bio Command line tips and tricks

Updates

linuxkernel

Web http://www.kernel.org
Bio Announcing new releases of the Linux kernel.

Web http://kde.org/
Bio The K Desktop Environment

Web http://www.gnome.org/

Distributions

debianproject

Web http://twitter.debian.net/
Bio The Universal Operating System!

Web http://fedoraproject.org/
Bio Freedom, Friends, Features, First

Web http://www.linuxmint.com
Bio GNU/Linux distribution aiming at providing an elegant and easy to use desktop operating system.

Web http://fridge.ubuntu.com
Bio Ubuntu News For Human Beings

Update: Added a few more (I’m leaving the title though!)
 

News

Linux

Web http://twitter.com/Ekushey
Bio The latest buzz from the Linux world… keeping you updated, 24/7.

Web http://www.linux-foundation.org/
Bio The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.

Bio Linux / distro feeds. All about Linux.

Web http://digg.com/linux_unix/
Bio All digg news about Linux or Unix

Web http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/
Bio Tasty premium blend of Linux and Open Source

Web http://www.linuxjournal.com/
Bio Linux Journal is the original magazine of the Linux community.

Tips & Tricks

bashcookbook

Web http://www.bashcookbook.com/
Bio Writers of the best bash book

Web http://www.shell-fu.org/
Bio Command line tips and tricks

Updates

KernelTracker

Web http://doobie.com/tbots
Bio I announce new releases of the Linux kernel.

Web http://www.gnome.org/
Bio The Free Software Desktop Project

Web http://kde.org/
Bio The K Desktop Environment

Distributions

opensuse

Web http://news.opensuse.org/
Bio News and updates about openSUSE.

Bio Aggregated tweets covering all things Ubuntu.

Web http://www.clububuntu.com/
Bio Your updates about the ubuntu things

Web http://fedoraproject.org/
Bio I’m infinity, freedom, voice

Web http://www.mandriva.com/
Bio The Linux desktop that’s easy to try and easy to keep

Web http://www.karan.org/
Bio CentOS developer who loves Belgian beer, most things computers with a borderline addiction to rpm.

PNG: 1024×768 1280×800 1280×1024 1440×900

JPG: 1024×768 1280×800 1280×1024 1440×900

You can see a screenshot of the wallpaper in action here

GTD Workflow Copyright, David Allen & Company

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.

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.

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]

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.

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…

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

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.