When I started ham-blogs.net about 4 years ago, blogging was fairly new to the Ham Radio community. There existed a bunch of radio blogs but most of them disappeared the the depth of Google. This has changed. Nowadays ham radio blogging has become much more popular. Cheaper webhosting costs and blogging plattforms like blogger.com surely helped. Actually the trend seems to change over to micro blogging like Twitter etc.
Today I decided to shut down ham-blogs.net. Why do I do that? Mainly for two reasons:
Ham-blogs.net has lost one of its unique features: give ham bloggers a start in the “abyss” of blogosphere. Google does much better as it did in 2006 and therefore a dedicated directory is no longer necessary.
Lack of time: I was no longer able to take care of the daily care of the directory. As of today it was already a little outdated and it won’t get better in the future.
Yesterday I had to install a Logitech Quickcam Messenger webcam on a Windows XP machine. As always, the original installation disc was not available, therefore I went to the Logitech website and downloaded the latest webcam driver package (QC1150) assuming that this package includes drivers for ALL logitech webcams. Wrong! Once installed, the computer didn’t recognize the webcam. Bummer!
As always, doing some research helps. Obviously Logitech dropped support for older webcams in their newest driver package. Solution: Install an older version e.g. Quickcam 8.4.8 (30MB) which is available as a FTP download.
These drivers are no longer offered on the webpage! Worse: they don’t even mentioned that support for older webcams has been dropped (or they managed to hide this info).
As you might have noted, I reactivated my Twitter-Account. Until then I never completely understood why somebody would want to expose his “private life” to the world. I admit that blogging is similar , however you won’t find status updates like “Good morning all – I just woke up” from my side. Maybe some weather stuff, but that’s it.
Recently I came to appreciate Twitter as some sort of “micro-blogging-service”, which is useful when I found something interesting on the net which is worth mentioning but not important enough to write an extensive blog post.
With the help of Twitter-Tools (which already works nicely with the newest Wordpress version 2.9.1) it is possible to “stream” your Twitter-post to Wordpress-Blogs in order to have some sort of archive. IMHO search engines still have not yet managed to digest the flood of information produced by Twitterers all over the world.
Since a few weeks I created a daily digest of my tweets. This is too much as it totally clogs up the blog. Starting today a digest will only be created once a week on Sundays.
Until further notice IARU Region 2 will use its Twitter account exclusively for matters related to the situation in Haiti. You may want to visit regularly of follow them on Twitter if you have an account. Alternatively you can subscribe to the timeline RSS feed or just visit the website.
Recently I saw a very nice comparison chart of instant messaging apps for newer iDevices (e.g. iPhone or iPod Touch). Beside the chart, the website also offers a “guide” about Instant Messaging Apps.
Please note that prices are no longer up to date as they were skewed by Holiday Sales.
It’s difficult to tell which App is the best. In the community there is a big fight going on if Beejive or IM+ is the best (paid) application.
I am currently using IM+ and so far I am happy. One important thing to mention is that IM+ push notifications for Skype will only last 1 (one) hour. All other push services will be active up to 3 (three) days.
Just an example of the incredible force of a bushfire. The bushfire threatened Port Lincoln on December 23, 2009 and took down the clubrooms of VK5ALE Amateur Radio club (Lower Eyre Peninsula).
