Congratulations to Microsoft for buying Skype. They simply destroyed the compatibility with Linux.

Update: I actually seems to be working now. However, it's not brilliant at all, the quality is unacceptable for any standard, in my opinion. The sound tends to be very unnatural, and it gets stuck for a few times every single second, so you must sometimes guess what the person at the other end is saying. Furthermore, the video gets behind for about 7-10 seconds after just a few minutes of talking. I talked with a lot of  friends from twitter, and they all complain about Skype. I have no idea where Microsoft is heading towards. 

 Who has not heard of Skype? It's probably one of the most known and popular service for voice and video chatting over the web, and it's been a wonderful product a few years ago. The times in which the quality of both sound and video were great have disappeared a long time ago, and all that's left today is a poor service, with quality which is below any acceptable level and disastrous compatibility (given the fact that mobile and Linux usage have significantly increased over the last few years).

Skype's decay has actually started before it getting acquired by Microsoft, but Microsoft only made everything worse. Before the Microsoft story, Skype was somehow working for me. I am using Linux most of the time, because not only I enjoy it the most, but my University courseworks and tasks require me to use Linux for almost every single module I have on my course. So I had to use Skype under Linux, which used to work quite decent, I might say.

However, over the last few months, it's been getting worse and worse, and now it is completely unusable under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (after being bought by Microsoft, coincidence?) . From the very beginning, video quality was a total mess under Linux, as the colors were completely out of their place and I always had a lot of shadows of different colors going on in the place where my image should have been (my image was still in the background, with all that going on on top of it). But recently, it started to crash frequently, mostly when I was trying to answer a call (calling worked just fine). And it still used to be decent, even like that!

But now, it reached the point when it signs in, and that's virtually all it can do. There are no connections going on at all between me and the other contacts, no matter what device/OS they use. All contacts appear as offline, I appear offline to them, I can't call, they can't call, so it's completely useless, and this has been happening for about a month now.

I gave up any chance that Microsoft will even think about fixing something, the last update they launched has done nothing good (it seems to have broken anything which was working), except bringing compatibility with MSN (which by the way, I heard they are planning to close and use Skype as their main messaging service). I just suppose they are probably trying to close down the compatibility with Linux because their recently-launched Windows 8 seems to be a flop, and Linux seems to be gaining more and more market share (or simply "users", because it doesn't really have market share as it's open source).

Therefore, the only chance of getting a Skype conversation is through Windows, but the situation is not exceptionally good even there, while doing Windows-to-Windows video calls (but this is another story). Microsoft's own software doesn't work good on their own operating system, so there is nothing new here. They simply deserve their Windows 8 to fail so bad that they will be motivated to do much better software, which works exceptionally at least on their own software!

Don't get me wrong, I am not asking for a flawless product from them for Linux. All I want is one which just does its job, on software it used work on.

The best alternative out there: Google hangouts. Unfortunately, its interface is sometimes confusing for some users, but quality and compatibility wise, it is absolutely perfect. Recommended trying.

Chrome 20 might be the most unreliable browser to use on Ubuntu.

I'm a big fan of Google's products, and of course that this includes Chrome, but Google's lightweight browser is not worth being considered as the best one from all the available ones, at least on Linux. Ubuntu (because that's the OS I use most of the time) comes with Firefox for this: even though it is not as fast as Chrome, it is rocket-stable and fully usable (free of bugs). But Chrome has been having bugs since a long time ago and it has some even now. And what's worse, Chrome 20 "features" more bugs than ever.

First of all, there are huge issues with Flash. Most of the content from YouTube still uses Flash (please note that YouTube is also owned by Google), and one of the most used ways make a video start again is to refresh the page. And I have to do this because I simply can't click on anything that's Flash related, for I-don't-know-what reason. Moreover, Samsung's Chromebook computer, which runs on Chrome (there's nothing else to choose) has the same problems with Flash.

Then, there is the Blogger platform. You can write everything you want (just like I do now), but you can't put a title in the article (note: the article is going to have a title put on Firefox, just because Chrome can't do it for a reason or another). And here we are talking about two Google products. Blogger, a Google product, can't be properly used on Chrome, Google's browser. I am sorry, but this is something incredible, and Google should have taken action long time ago on this subject.

And there are other, not so serious, but still annoying bugs. On 9gag, portions of the bar from the top of the screen spread across the entire screen while scrolling. On YouTube, the same thing happens with the bar located just below the videos. And more that this, while watching something, you can't see what you type when you search for something else (on YouTube), it just displays what was searched before (it still searches, if you write something and tap enter you'll see it will return what you wanted, but it's annoying).

Of course that these aren't the only bugs, but with these I have to deal day by day. My girlfriend complains that she can't enter full screen while watching some TV series on the internet (don't know whether it's Flash or not), but there clearly are some issues Google have to take care about.

I can't simply give up using Chrome because, as I've told, I'm a big fan of Google's products, and I have more computers, so I need sync across all of them (bookmarks and stuff). Owning a Galaxy Nexus is also a strong reason for using Google's products. And I don't even want to give up using them, because they make the life a lot easier (Gmail, Picasa, Drive, Contacts, Calendar, Maps etc), I use them a lot and they help me everyday, but the idea is that some of the bugs really have to be fixed sooner or later.

I don't know if they are present only on Linux, because I rarely use Windows, and when I do it, I don't usually have a lot of time to spend on YouTube, 9gag or such websites. 

Twitter API changed (again), most third-party clients are failing to authenticate.

Twitter announced on its official blog that starting from August 31st, its API is going to be changed. All third-party clients/applications are now logging on via OAuth, a new method of authentication that doesn't require them to store your username and your password anymore (this has the purpose of increasing users' security). This new change requires some changes in all third-party clients/applications, changes that the guys from Twitter say that they have been done.

They say that most clients, such as Echofon, TweetDeck, Twitterific, Seesmic, and Twitter for Android, iOS and BlackBerry are already authenticating through OAuth, which is not true. TweetDeck, Seesmic and Twitter (all on Android), are all refusing to sign in. I've last checked a few minutes ago, and there is no update into the Market (for any of the specified apps) to fix this problem. Bad, very bad, Twitter!

If it's necessary, I can make a video for Twitter (or for any other company providing third-party clients for Twitter), proving that the mentioned clients cannot connect at all.

Is Facebook down at this moment? Some users report so.

There are some users currently (1:50 PM GMT time) reporting that Facebook is down, via Twitter. It is not clear, however, what's happening, because there are other users reporting that Facebook works just fine for them. I have to mention that Facebook works for me quite well. Downrightnow.com, which is the website that monitors lots of services and reports if a service or another is working or not, is currently displaying Facebook as "Likely Service Disruption".

This state comes from users that reporting both on Twitter and on downrightnow that Facebook is down, while the Facebook officials didn't confirm (yet) that their service has any kind of problems.

If you want to see the progress of Facebook, just follow downrightnow.com. If you are an user of Facebook, please leave a comment telling us either if you have problems in accessing Facebook, or if works fine for you.

Nexus One's internal memory is quite insufficient.

I've occurred problems related to insufficient internal memory after over a month of using the phone. I came from an iPhone, so I never look how many applications I have, as soon as they are "fitting" me. I've been able to install many applications, because they are specially designed to occupy as less as possible, because it is known that Android 2.1 (and previous versions) doesn't support installing applications on external SD cards. First time when my Nexus informed me that it was running "low on space", happened just a few days before media got the 2.2 update (which I also got, manually).

In case you didn't know, Android 2.2 allows installing applications to SD cards (or more exactly, moving them after installation on SD cards). But this is just a theory, as there are applications which doesn't allow moving themselves to the SD card. Actually, there are only a few applications which have this possibility. I mean, I have about 90 applications and I was able to move only 2 of them on the SD card.

The Nexus has 196 MB internal storage memory, and I have free only 13 of them. I know that I have a game which occupies pretty much of that memory (about 25 MB), but because I like it I don't want to delete it (and I can't move it to SD card). Of course, if I need more storage for the phone, I will remove it (and other applications if needed).

Google didn't bring something which helps much here (with 2.2 update). I think that they must now make pressure on developers, to design and update their applications with supportability for SD cards.