For the last few weeks we have been looking into different services for webinars, with the idea of using them to connect our YWAM leaders and teachers with a wide on-line audience. Our trial with AnyMeeting was quite disappointing and most other services out there are paid, or no longer active.

Two days ago we connected for the test of the AnyMeeting webinar service. There were seven of us that connected, or tried to connect to the service. People were registered from Brasil, Canada, Germany, South Africa, UK and USA. The results of the test were unfortunately, disappointing …

We had quite a few problems with AnyMeeting including:

I don't know if you guys have seen this yet but it's cool. It's a small computer. A very small computer. Here's the features:

• Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
• GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
• GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• 256MB RAM
  Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
• 10/100 BaseT Ethernet socket
• HDMI socket

If you have been following along with the discussions that we have been having on the International YWAMer you will know that there are a lot changes happening with the leadership structure internationally with Youth With A Mission. During this time there have been a lot of questions raised about what the changes mean for the mission.

In the beginning of the year my private webspace got hacked. I'm glad that it wasn't the webspace of our YWAM base for that I am also responsible. But out of this experience I learned some things and wanted to share them with you.

What happened?

I am planning to re-design the wireless network at our YWAM base and need some advice from people with experience and expertise.

We own a two story brick building at the far edge of the city where the only internet service currently available to us is ADSL over our single telephone line. We have a consumer grade D-Link DSL router

Tablets are all over the place. More and more apps are developed and the existing ones getting better and better. There are tablets (and phones) with dual core processors available. The platform and raw numbers might not be directly comparable to those of desktop processors. Still, we can see quite some process. It's almost everything one needs on the go.
The question come to mind, do we actually still need a laptop? I think, it's a question worth thinking about. Of course, a tablet can not replace all computing needs. But what is it, we need on the go?

After not having used Facebook, let alone any of the earlier expressions of social networking like MySpace, I thought I'll have a look at Google+. So far so good. What can I say, it works. Whether it's good or not so good I cannot tell, since I have nothing to compare it to, besides maybe having looked over the shoulders of those using Facebook.
Who here is using it, what do you think about it? How does it compare to other social platforms? What do you think is missing?

About a week ago the FTC (US Federal Trade Commission) has approved for Microsoft to take over Skype. Depending on who you ask, this is either good or bad news. Skype might be available on service where, so far, it's not. Integrated in some Microsoft software, most likely it will work very well with these. Also, added service to XBox will attract some people towards the platform.

I have seen a few ministry blogs out there running on free services. Some of these services, like Wordpress.com, occasionally put advertisements on these services if you are using the free services. While this might sound like a good deal, it’s not…

Don’t run contextual ads on your ministry web-sites!