Archive for April, 2009
Dropbox
From what I recall, quite a few people have heard of, or even use Dropbox.
Dropbox is similar to Apple’s iDisk, in the respect that it is an online backup/data storage facility. The only difference is, dropbox will give you 2GB of free storage, just for signing up. There’s also an option to pay either $9.99 per month, or $99 per year, which will upgrade your storage capacity to 50GB. For me personally, I don’t (yet) need any more than the 2GB, though I may consider looking into the 50GB option in future.
What I like most about Dropbox is that it’s cross platform. For me this is fantastic, because I run Ubuntu (9.04 64 bit if you’re interested) on my desktop, and my laptop is an aluminum Macbook. Now I had the problem of somehow remembering to put things in the Dropbox directory so that they would get synced to the server and thus between my 2 machines.
Solving that problem was a lot easier than I could’ve expected. No thanks to my friend Gabby, who told me what he had done on IRC. Using
you can create soft links to the directories to/from the Dropbox directory, and any changes you make to that directory outside of the Dropbox directory, get automatically synced. Put simply, if I make any changes to something in ~/Documents, it automatically gets backed up/synced to Dropbox. Awesome!!
If you’re unsure of the syntax of
, as it is a little confusing, it’s the following:
And finally, if you want to join Dropbox because you haven’t already, following this link will (according to Dropbox) get you a little bit more space 
Edit: I’ve just been informed (thanks Matteo!) that the referral links don’t seem to be giving extra space any more. This is likely because Dropbox limits the amount they give out. Please feel free to use the link at the end of the post if you want, but don’t feel obliged to if you do want to sign up. Join Dropbox
Laconi.ca
Now I’m sure most of you have heard of twitter? Ok good, that’s a start. Identi.ca? Even better.
Identi.ca runs on open-source software called Laconi.ca. It supports the Open Microblogging Standard, and in my opinion, is better than twitter. There’s 2 main reasons I say this:
- It doesn’t have the same downtime as twitter. A microblogging service that has downtime as often as twitter doesn’t present
a good service. If I’m out, and I want to update my friends, I expect to be able to fire up LaTwit (my application of choice for
my phone, as it supports Laconi.ca AND twitter). - It isn’t limited to one site like twitter. Identi.ca runs on laconi.ca as does The TWiT Army & Open Microblogger,the beauty of it however, lies in the
ability to subscribe to users on other laconi.ca based sites. So lets say that army.twit.tv/randomguy123 wanted to subscribe
to my feed at identi.ca/joeb454, that’s totally possible. Then I can subscribe to randomguy123 over at TWiT Army and receive
his updates on identi.ca.
Number 2 is what I like the most, if/when laconi.ca based microblogging systems catch on, or other microblogging software begins to implement the Open Microblogging Standard it should allow for a huge network between users, no matter what service they choose to sign up to. Although the networks can be closed as well from what I’ve read. You can stop people signing up to your laconi.ca installation if necessary, and of course if you want to restrict who follows your notices, simply block them, and then you have a semi-private network.
Personally I’d like to see more people move over to laconi.ca based systems, and status.net (a recently announced project) looks very promising. I’m also pretty interested in the development of laconi.ca, as it already has some awesome features (the XMPP service for one), but time will tell, so I’ll sit tight and see what the future holds for Open Microblogging
Ubuntu Forums News
I know that ubuntu-geek has already posted about this (and probably jacob too – way to steal my idea!).
We have some new staff over on the forums! bodhi.zazen & bapoumba have been made members of the Forum Council – thus, forum administrators, and we have 4 new moderators on the team too. They come in the form of tinivole, forestpixie, cariboo907 and Michael.Godawski.
Congrats to all, it’s great to have you on board, and I’m sure you’ll do a great job
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