Skype has lots of users, especially in the business world, but a lot of other folks seem to have strong opinions on it. Adverts, user interface design, bandwidth usage, privacy, the critiques seem to run the gamut. Seems to me its the only IM service with an official client that actually looks like a Windows application without sporting an atrocious looking window style. The buddy list also has only one ad right at the bottom, and even then its not there all the time.

Played with Unity, the new desktop shell in Ubuntu. It places a notification bar along the top of the screen from left to right, and an application dock / taskbar down the left side of the screen. Clever looking on first boot. Some thoughts: In almost all apps, the menu bar is hidden by default, but there are seldom sufficient controls exposed by the application to justify this - the menu bar is required for a great deal of the functionality in various Linux applications which is not exposed by the default toolbar buttons.

Ran across an offer for a Windows Phone the other day. $0 on a contract extension. Since I have multiple cell lines one of which was recently extended, to me it amounted to a virtually free phone. After an hour of quick research I had decided. Right now: No Windows Phone currently has a front camera or videoconferencing app No official instant messengers. Absolutely none. Web messengers only, like the iPhone in 2007, or sketchy third party ones.

Microsoft Lync Launch - The Next Generation of Unified Communications Recently Microsoft launched their latest unified messaging system - the successor of Office Communicator 2007, it features full telephony via SIP and instant messaging via Jabber/XMPP, making it capable of communicating/federating with a large number of existing open systems. The really dishy part? It comes in at around a third the price of the traditional enterprise PBX. I had been working on just such a thing myself a few months back and it’s good to see I was on the right track with where the Industry is going.

With the introduction of Amazon EC2 micro instances I’ve decided to move my personal server from Burst.NET into an EC2 instance. Huzzah! Amazon provides a rather interesting service with EC2, giving an account holder the ability to spawn numerous virtual machines on demand for experimentation, deployment and migration purposes. Impressed!

A good talk by Eben Moglen on the implications things like Facebook have on our privacy and personal security. Particularly interesting This speech was made before Facebook newly updated its privacy policies and extended its reach to sharing your personal information with almost every major media outlet online. Worth a watch - skip ahead to 2:05, that’s where he begins to speak.

As part of my ongoing exploration and mastery of the Windows command-line, here’s a tip on how to change motherboards without having to reinstall or repair Windows. This article is for advanced users only, and will render your computer unbootable if you do it wrong. You get one shot at this. The fate of the free world depends on it. No pressure or anything. If there are corrections to this or addenda / hints and tips from other Windows experts please do post them in the comment section.

Among Linux distributions, Ubuntu is the undisputedly most well-known for its user-friendliness (with a tip of the hat to Fedora, though Red Hat aren’t spending as much time advertising it as Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, does). In most cases when I’m not being a gearhead with Gentoo, and want to use Linux as a sensible desktop environment, Ubuntu is my choice. Canonical have put a lot of good engineering work into it and that’s shown by its ever increasing popularity among Linux users.

Found this on Google code while working to convert 400+ HTML files as saved by Mozilla Firefox. Firefox creates an HTML file and an associated directory containing the stylesheets, images and other content, so it was easy enough to run this against all the HTML files and get a good rendering of all the items to PDF format. As a bonus tip, if you’ve got a bunch of PDF files in named subfolders, (“Apple Custard/Index.

Ran into this a couple of weeks ago. If you have someone who ran Pages and needs to convert their library of documents to Word format, do the following. This requires iWork ‘09. Open script editor and paste in the script listed below. Save this script as an application Drag all your Pages documents on top of the script application. Word documents will be created in the same directory as the original document.