There are lots of posts on how to make a password protected WordPress blog. I followed quite a few unsuccessfully (like this one).

Then I found a very simple way to password protect your self hosted WordPress blog:

Install the Absolute Privacy plugin.

The Absolute Privacy plugin lets only registered users of your blog view your blog posts. You can either create a login for each individual or you can create one generic login and hand out that login and password to everyone.

The disadvantage is that if people don’t have a login, it doesn’t send them to a place to request an account. You can however redirect them to any page you wish. So you could make a page that let’s people know how to contact you for a login.

First off, if it's really, really old, you might need to recycle it.

However,
if it has at least 256MB or 512MB of RAM (or could have, if you bought
more memory), there are a number of things you could do with it.

1. Use it in front of the TV or in your kitchen. Install Linux on it.
   It will cost you nothing to try. You burn a Linux image onto a USB
   drive or a CD, put it in your old computer and install. You then have a
   working system. While it may not be fast, I bet it would still be good
   to look up recipes in the kitchen or movie actors in front of the tv.
   We have an old laptop that regularly overheats and has to be plugged in
   sitting on the coffee table in front of the TV just to answer random
   questions. (Or take a quick peak at email or Facebook.)
2. Donate it. There are lots of places that will take a computer with enough working memory. Kids on Computers is one. Your local school system might be another. Your local user linux group may know of others.
3. Give it to a kid. My 9 year old has a hand me down computer. As
   long as it runs some kind of flash player and can surf to lego.com,
   he's happy.

What else would you do with an old computer?

I really like how sometimes a small change, or a new technology meant to solve one problem, can end up making a huge difference in other ways.

For example, a service called M-PESA allows people in Africa to pay each other via text messages on their cell phones. Households using M-PESA in Kenya have increased their incomes by 5-30%! How? They are using the phone account as a bank account. It enables them to have emergency savings which means when something goes wrong they don't have to sell the cow or their livelihood. From the Economist:

the service is used by some people as a savings account. Having even a small cushion of savings to fall back on allows people to deal with unexpected expenses, such as medical treatment, without having to sell a cow or take a child out of school. Mobile banking is safer than storing wealth in the form of cattle (which can become diseased and die), gold (which can be stolen), in neighbourhood savings schemes (which may be fraudulent) or by stuffing banknotes into a mattress.

Do you have a similar story about how technology or free software has improved life in a developing country in unexpected ways?

I was talking to a friend today. A friend that emails, blogs and uses web tools like ebay and paypal. I said, "hmm, that's strange, my browser isn't working. Twhirl is working though." I meant to imply that since my browser was frozen, I was checking my internet connection to see if it was an internet or Firefox problem. To which he responded, "My Firefox at work is working." Sensing a fundamentally different understanding of how things worked I asked a bunch of questions. (From my viewpoint, I had already established the internet was working, so his Firefox could have no bearing on my Firefox, but obviously he saw things differently.)

Turns out, he views Firefox as an internet service, not as an application that displays web pages through an internet connection. The fact that twhirl had internet connectivity did not mean that my other services would work. And all my other services were Firefox services because they all ran in the browser. He saw those services as Firefox services, not web services.

He did not seem to think of Firefox as an application. It was a web service.

So I'm not saying his view is common. But I'm also guessing that if I polled 100 random people on the street, many would not see the world my way and a few might see it his way. As we figure out how the desktop, the browser and the internet work together to deliver a seamless user experience, we need to keep in mind that most of our users will not see those as three separate things. They may see them as one thing or ten things, but they are unlikely to understand how they all interconnect at the technical level.

(And I do think the desktop, the browser and the internet have a lot of work to do to deliver a good user experience. Keeping my mail in the cloud is awesome, using Gmail in a browser window is not so awesome. It should act more like a desktop app, allowing me to open up multiple windows without extra toolbars, stash things on the desktop, etc. But that's a topic for another post.)

So that is why I'm fundraising for a usability study.

Photo by Votemann.

At the Maemo Summit, Harri Kiljander shared a
list of the features that are important to Nokia tablet (N800) users.
Currrent users are developers who are very happy with their tablet.
(9 out of 10 of them would recommend it to someone else.) From what I
understood target tablet users are young, socially connected, into
technology fashion, and mostly from developed countries. (He broke it
down a bit more into several different types of users.) His list of
user interface features in order of importance:

• stability
• performance
• ease of use
• efficiency
• consistency of user interface
• personalization
• usage with fingers
• aesthetics: look of graphics
• one hand usage
• sound effects

People had lots of questions. In
particular a few people seemed surprised that sound was last. (I’m
not the target user, but for the record, I’ve turned off all sound in
my devices that I don’t use with headphones except my cell phone
ring.)

Email etiquette is like any other kind of etiquette – it depends on what culture you are visiting. Just like table manners vary from country to country, email etiquette varies from community to community.

For example, when I joined OpenLogic, I went home the first day and watched my inbox. I actually got quite worried that something was wrong with the email server – I wasn’t getting any email! After 200-300/day at HP, getting no email for an entire evening was a huge shock. It took me a while before I quit checking my inbox so frequently and figured out how I was supposed to be getting work done.

Likewise, mailing lists can be a huge shock to non-mailing list users. Jean Anderson gave a talk at the Women in Open Source Conference last year and she spent a good part of her talk explaining how mailing lists work. As she spoke, I realized how foreign and scary they must seem to people used to traditional email:

• Hundreds if not thousands of people are going to read your email – your stupid question email!
• Your email will live forever. In public.
• You’re going to get 10s if not 100s of emails a day!
• And if you don’t cc the whole list, you’ll be rude and things won’t work effectively. (I actually had to be reminded to cc the list last month. I had gotten used to immediately taking the issue offline!)

So I think email etiquette depends on what community you are part of. Instead of a single etiquette guide (Chris Brogan’s post is what prompted this post), we should have community email etiquette guides. I know I’ve been readjusting my behavior as I adjust to the GNOME community.

(For the record, I’m a huge email and mailing list fan. I think there are phone people, email people, txt people … I’m an email person.)