I’ve been posting this on diaspora, twitter and facebook yesterday, but it deserved a blog entry, so here we go:

Off book is a series of short documentaries of specific topics, which further understanding and analyses our culture at a very current state.  The two videos I’d like to show here, are about the power of videogames and also hacking culture.

Off Book: Video Games

This video shows very greatly, that video games undeniably are culture. The variety and the ways you can interact with them are unique and outstanding.

Off Book: Hacking Art & Culture with F.A.T. Lab

This one is about how F.A.T. Lab has been trying to come up with projects that ride the wave of todays media making processes and how to question monopolies.

There are some more videos on PBS arts vimeo channel and I can also recommend them, because they are interesting peeks into other worlds.

The wordpress developers call it distraction-free writing or zen mode.

It’s what a couple of simple plain text editors have done on the desktop for years. Besides a couple of important features, this is the new cool thing in WordPress 3.2 codename Gershwin. So for everybody who wonders what it looks like, here it goes:

Zen writing with interface on top which appears when the mouse is moved to the top.

Zen writing with no interface, just for typing.

Clients

A client is an application you use twitter through. A great example for that is tweetdeck, because it has multiple columns and you can get it on Windows and MacOS, because it is written in Adobe AIR. I like to keep track of my friends timeline, my mentions and a facebook newsfeed. The fourth column changes between different lists and searches.

Link shorteners

If you’ve been tweeting and including links in your tweets, you may have noticed that links take a big chunk of the overall tweet length, which is limited to 140 characters after all. Link shorteners will be your friend. There are multiple services for that out there, I personally use bit.ly, because it’s widely spread and easy to integrate to tweetdeck or available as a plugin for Chrome/Chromium.

Analysis

There are different tools for analyzing your or others accounts. A service which is fairly new and very powerful is Klout. It calculates how you impact twitter with your tweets upon how much reaction like mentions or retweets you produce. It also analyzes your style, if you mostly tweet links, mention other users and so on. There is a ranking plugin available for Chrome to see other peoples Klout score directly on the twitter website.

Connect

I can only recommend you chain your facebook profile to your twitter account and let your friends there know what you’re posting on twitter. Just go to the twitter application.

These were the first five days of How to Twitter. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment Thanks to everybody who followed through so far!

Today I set up a GPG installation on a Windows 7 machine and I ran in to a problem. My problem was that Thunderbirds extension Enigmail, didn’t recognize the Cryptophane frontend. Cryptophane is a Windows frontend which makes the handling of keys, en- and decryption of files very easy for everybody. When I tried to make mail encryption work in Thunderbird, I got the following error message:

Unable to locate GnuPG executable in the PATH.
Make sure you have set the GnuPG executable path correctly in the OpenPGPG Preferences.

Failed to initialise Enigmail.
Send unencrypted message?

How to fix?

First I thought, I had to use another GPG frontend which would work with Enigmail, but in the preferences of Enigmail, there was a lot easier solution.

1. open Thunderbird
2. open OpenPGP -> Preferences
3. mark “override with”
4. click “Browse” and find your Cryptophane installation directory (for example: C:\Program Files\Cryptophane\GnuPG\gpg.exe)

Done!

Clementine right now is a ported Amarok 1.4 (which right now is at version 2.4) and it happened to become my audio player of choice a couple of days ago. Before that I’ve been using Songbird on Mac OS X but as I consider it slow I was looking for an alternative, because iTunes certainly is NOT an option for me. iTunes does not support my favourite formats and the way Clementine and Amarok handle the music library and playlists is much more what I like. The library at the side and the main window is the playlist.$

Clementine is right now at 0.6 and there is also a Windows binary available for download. I’m mentioning it for Mac OS because there’s just not that much variety on this platform as on Windows or Linux.

Features i value most:

• clean and fast interface and library
• last.fm connection support
• Growl integration (notifications)
• support for many audio formats like MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC