As found on the web (April 27th)

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frank liked 2 videos.
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frank liked 2 videos.
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Remove “via @addtoany” from Twitter

Although I don’t do Twitter and even though I removed AddtoAny from my blog over a year ago, people have been stopping by here while searching for ways to remove “via @addtoany” from Twitter.
If you own the site on which AddtoAny is used, removing the “via” is pretty straightforward and documented. Just add some javascript in your pages to define a “template” for Twitter, like this:

var a2a_config = a2a_config || {};
a2a_config.templates = {
    twitter: "Interesting read: ${title} ${link}"
};

Be sure ${link}, and preferably ${title} are in the template. The rest is up to you, really. And while you’re at it, you might want to configure AddtoAny not to do 3rd party tracking?

As found on the web (April 20th)

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frank Frank bloggen op de trein en dan geen vertraging hebben, da’s pech! ;-)..
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frank Frank heeft de internetverbindieng van zus (Saskia Goossens) gerepareerd en moest daar zelfs niets voor doen ;-)..
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frank liked 2 videos.
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frank posted Heaven.
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Audio-only YouTube embedding with WP YouTube Lyte 0.7

Last night I finished version 0.7.0 of WP YouTube Lyte. The bump in version number (0.6.5 to 0.7.0) is because of a new feature: the ability to embed YouTube as audio-only player, as seen on Pitchfork. Because after all, as great a source for music discovery as YouTube can be, you really don’t want to force your visitors to watch yet another clumsy fan-made slideshow while they’re listening to your latest musical crush, do you?
Embedding YouTube as an audio-only player is dead-simple; add an ‘a’ instead of a ‘v’ to the YouTube link and you’re good to go!
httpa://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFjgv1MO724
becomes this audio-only embedded YouTube with Dorian Concept’s “Her Tears Taste Like Pears”;

Follow-up Friday: Ubuntu Unity, Android security & WordPress Stats

Just a couple of small updates on previous stories to keep you posted really.
We’ll start of with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal; beta 2 has been released earlier today. I’ve downloaded a lot of updated packages over the last few days, so I guess I’m on the second beta as well. The Unity launcher now comes out of hiding perfectly and it scrolls down automatically to show items at the bottom as well. There also was a bug with the menu-items of some applications (e.g. Firefox 4) disappearing which seems fixed. Hope they can get the launcher to behave with Java apps (e.g. my favorite mindmapping application) soon.
On another note: Lookout, the Android app that allows you to locate your handset and -if you have the paying version- remotely wipe it, seems to be getting some serious competition from …. Google. Enterprises who have Google Apps for Business can now locate, encrypt and wipe their Android devices. Especially the encryption is important news, but it really should be available and configurable in the Android OS itself
To finish off with some news about WordPress Stats secretive inclusion of Quantcast behavioral tracking: it seems like WordPress Stats plugin will be replaced by Automattics Jetpack, which according to the site:

supercharges your self‑hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com

Jetpack actually is a “super-plugin” that offers functionality from Stats, Sharedaddy, After the deadline and other previously separately available Automattic plugins. The Jetpack WordPress.com stats module does still include the Quantcast “spyware”, doesn’t disclose this feature and doesn’t provide functionality that warrants Quantcast inclusion (in spite of Matt Mullenweg claiming “We’ve been using Quantcast to get some additional information on uniques that it’s hard for us to calculate”). But there is (some) good news in the Jetpack Stats source code though, because on line 145 it reads:

‘do_not_track’ => true, // @todo

This could mean that blog-owners will one day be able to opt out of 3rd party tracking or it might be that Stats will take e.g. Firefox DNT-header into account for your blog’s visitors. Having both would off course be what I will be rooting for!

As found on the web (April 13th)

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frank published Daar is ons Lentelieze.
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frank liked Jim Noir – Car.

Happy conception-day Linux!

Although Linux 0.1 got released on August 26th 1991, Mashable already ran an anniversary-story yesterday. According to Wikipedia’s entry on the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds did start coding in April 1991, so one could argue today is as good a day as any to celebrate our favorite kernel’s conception!
My first memories of Linux date from 1995, when a friend introduced me to mp3’s, the Internet and Linux in one session of what seemed ûber-geekiness at that time. Although I bought the Infomagic 5-CD Linux Developer Resource some time after that, I didn’t do a lot of Linux (probably because I was too busy discovering the Internet) until 1996. That year, while working at a PC shop, I started co-administrating the belgonet.be Linux-server for the ISP-service the owner offered his customers. I learned a lot on that box, especially when “rm -rf”-ing /bin instead of ~/bin and later when the server got hacked because it was running an old vulnerable version of sshd. Good times!
In the late nineties I switched to Linux-based distributions for my personal desktop-pleasure, running Knoppix at first and installing Suse and Red Hat later on. When the Belgonet-server got decommissioned, I installed Gentoo on a spare desktop-machine at work and hooked it onto the internet as srv-ict-lxfgo.reference.be, hosting a couple of personal sites.
Nowadays I use Ubuntu on my netbook and Debian on my VPS-server. I’m not a hardcore sysadmin by any measure, but I know my way around a Linux-based system well enough to keep it up to date, secure and stable. And although Linux for the masses did not become a reality on the desktop (yet), Linux is a part of almost everyone’s life, with smartphones, wifi-routers and televisions running on the Linux kernel. So I guess 20 years of Linux does call for a celebration, even if “it is just a kernel“, no?

As found on the web (April 6th)

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frank posted Certified unsafe?.
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frank posted 2011-04-02 17:08:21.
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Unity launcher auto-hides in Natty Narwal

I just upgraded my Samsung n135 from Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition to Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwal” beta 1 and I’m a happy man:

  • the Unity launcher now auto-hides, which is no luxury on a 1024X600 screen.
  • Mutter has been replace by Compiz, so no more crashes when adding an external monitor.
  • Compiz replacing Mutter also seems to have a (very) positive impact on windowing performance.

But this is beta 1, there are bound to be some bugs and especially the launcher isn’t perfect yet;

  • sometimes only half of Unity launcher appears when it comes out of hiding.
  • I couldn’t make the it scroll down to see the icons at the bottom.
  • And non Unity launcher-related: the screen sometimes flickers while the brightness seem to be auto-adjusting (which shouldn’t happen as there’s no light sensor in my netbook) UPDATE: this got even worse after upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10, but there is a solution

Anyway, beta 2 is expected April 14th and the final release should hit the web on the 28th. Looking forward to a Ubuntu that’s perfect for my teeny weeny netbook. I’m curious to see how Gnome3”s Shell will do in comparison!