I have decided to deactivate my facebook account. It isn’t done yet, so this message gets through and I am also waiting for the download of my information. The reason is not a concern about privacy. I am sure that facebook is doing all kind of evil stuff with the information I provide them, but my guess most of this is used to present me with ads to make some money for them. I think that facebook is probably the site with the best privacy settings out there. Every other site I am using from small forums over job sites to other network sites like xing or linkedin, doesn’t provide anywhere near the privacy options that facebook provides. And none of them in under the scrutiny that facebook has to face all the time. ...

Another brand new toy. After my last trip to the UK for bikesoup I decided that it was about time to get a proper laptop. So far I only have a netbook, which is very convenient when size and weight matter. But for getting work done it is just to small, the main problem is the screen size and resolution. I had a look around for good full sized laptops and the only brands producing something with the quality I had in mind were Apple and Lenovo. The advantages of the Apple over Lenovo are better built quality, battery life and easy to buy locally. I choose the Lenovo, because you can order it with more gadgets, swappable batteries and mostly because it isn’t an Apple as I despise where the company is going and I already had bad experiences with Linux and iPods. This is the configuration I finally got. ...

I was planning to buy an ebook reader for a while. I mean it is 2010 and if we don’t have flying cars at least everyone should have a robot and not read from dead trees. It took me a while because I wasn’t able to decide on a brand and when I decided on Amazon I couldn’t decide on which Kindle to get. My girlfriend took the decision off me by giving me a Kindle 3G+Wifi for my birthday. So here is a quick review. ...

I have been one of the many converts to git and try to use it whenever possible. So far this has been mostly for smaller project, open source projects, Fedora and a little bit at work. bikesoup is my first bigger project using git. I started with initial development on the master branch and created feature branches which got merged back into master. Before going live for the first time I created a live branch. This is pretty much what you would do in subversion too, maybe with the exception of any feature branches. ...

Yesterday one of my side projects went live: www.bikesoup.co.uk . Last December Anthony approached me about doing the site and I agreed to work on it in my free time. It took a while, but this included finding a designer ( d2tstudio ), going through the process of finding a feature set for the launch and the programming. And all of this while I started my new proper job at Softonic, which means I didn’t really have as much time to invest in it as I would have liked. ...