I personally think that Nintendo screwed up with the Wii. Sure, it has a revolutionary interface, but the possibilities for end user experiences with this console were endless. If they only could have released a Youtube channel, a movie trailer channel, ... It would have lifted the Wii up from the simple game console it is now, to a multimedia Home Theater interface that could have been a smashing success. But instead, Nintendo chose to reinvent Mario Bros for the 10^6th time; Virtual Console ? Come on, Nintendo, was this all you could give us ?

So maybe your Wii has been resting too much time at your TV side too ? Do you want to give it a second chance ? Then the Homebrew Channel might be something for you. It is an application loader to run unofficial Wii software, which behaves as a separate channel. Most of the software provided are simple games, but with some, you can transform your Wii into a FTP or web server or transform it into a home theater solution with MPlayer CE, which runs on top of a slim Linux distribution.

Unfortunately, the Homebrew Channel isn't delivering what Nintendo failed to do : I would love to see Youtube support get provided as a simple application, or get better integrated into the MPlayer CE app. And most of the gaming applications are emulation softwares for eg Nintendo64 or Sega games, which mostly provide ... Mario Bros games. Sigh...

A word of warning before you head over to the HomeBrew website : it uses hacks and bugs in the Wii software to run these kind of softwares, and with the installation, there might be a slim chance that you brick your Wii.

Internet savvy people will know this problem : you have a blog, are using microblogging tools as Identi.ca or Twitter, and of course have a Facebook or Netlog account. But what about your target audience ? Do you expect them to follow you wherever you post something on the internet ? And as more and more people are using Facebook as a medium, the less popular blogs are becoming. Sure, some people use a feedreader for this, but it requires extra software to be installed, and feedreaders are sooo 2008 anyway :) In this post, I'll show you how you can use a single channel for the display of all your internet publications.

First of all, we must choose a consolidation channel. In my case, I'll be using Facebook for this. It has the advantage that it has lots of features which can help you realize many of your consolidation efforts.

Let's start with your blog posts : we want our blog posts to be displayed on our Facebook wall. This can easily be achieved by using the RSS feed aggregation that Facebook is supporting. To activate this, Go to your Profile, choose Actions, Imported Stories. In the first section, you can use other social networking sites as Youtube or Flickr to be imported. To import your own blog, simply head over to the second section, and choose Blog/RSS,and enter the feed URL of your website. A disadvantage of this is that Facebook imports the whole story and stores it internally : typos that you have made cannot be corrected this way, even if you update your blog post. Just use a good spell checker (default in Firefox) to minimize the damage ;) Another thing is that everything you post on your blog gets drawn into Facebook, which might be a disadvantage. This can be solved by creating categories or taxonomies for Facebook posts only, but it requires your blogging engine to support this.

In a next step, we want our Twitter feeds to be displayed also on our Facebook wall. Facebook supports many Twitter applications, from which I personally like Selective Twitter Updates the most. You can select which tweets are to be displayed on your wall by ending them with a #fb suffix. It looks a bit weird on your Tweet list first, but this is something you're getting used to quickly. Selective Twitter Update has the advantage you don't submerge your wall by every tweet you're publishing.

There you have it : some simple steps to steer all your internet posts to a single distribution channel, which might help you save some time.

Symbian still uses certificates to sign applications. In the case you want to roll out your own Symbian application, you need some way to sign your app. Turns out the certificates can easily be created on your own by use of the OpenSSL toolkit :

$ openssl genrsa 1024 >my.key
$ openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 3650 -key my.key >my.cer

After entering the second command, you are prompted for various bits of information about yourself that is embedded into the certificate. This process only needs to be performed once, and the generated certificate can then be kept for future use with CreateSIS or SignSIS.

Green datacenters are hot (pun intended). In every RFP we send out, we must add an entry about power consumption and heat dissipation. Sun has put up a page with different power calculators per system, giving you the Watts and BTUs your datacenter crew needs.

Wie België vroeger in Google maps of Google Earth bekeek, wist al dat enkel op de as Antwerpen - Brussel de kaarten gedetailleerd waren. In de rest van Vlaanderen was de resolutie niet echt om je huis gemakkelijk op terug te vinden.
Sinds kort echter zijn in Google Maps nieuwe satelliet foto's van België geïmporteerd, met details die goed genoeg zijn om het zwembad van de buren wel te kunnen bekijken. Deze foto's dateren van april 2009.

Toeval : in de buurt van onze woonplaats vind ik deze toevalstreffer terug. Op deze manier zie je ook dat Google met satellietfoto's werkt, en niet met foto's genomen vanuit vliegtuigen.