It’s sometimes tricky when writing for a technology blog or column. Tricky because the very nature of the internet means that technologies can literally appear and disappear overnight. You don’t want to be giving advice to jump aboard a bandwagon, only to find that the wagon has no wheels and isn’t going to be around for much longer. Micro-blogging has been around just about long enough to show it has wheels of some sort. But we wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about it yet.
Micro-blogging could best be described as blogging for people who don’t have the time to write a full blog. Or, you could just look at the words in the title and figure out that it is really just writing a very small amount for your blog post. In fact, this small amount of words is actually enforced by most of the major micro-blogging sites.

Take Twitter as an example. Twitter is one of the current hot Web 2.0 properties. The site allows you to subscribe for a free account, start making posts and subscribe to other people’s Twitter updates. However, these posts – or ‘tweets’ cannot be any longer than 160 characters. This is a deliberate choice; you’ll note that 160 characters is also the limit of the standard cell phone text message.

Where is the Catholic/evangelical value in a site like this? Well, if you’ve read some of our other columns, you’ll see we’ve talked about using blogs to flood the internet with good, Catholic content. The barrier to entry for sites like Twitter is even lower – surely everyone has time to write 160 characters about God? And, with communities forming around those you ‘follow’ on the site, it’s yet another way of bringing the community of the Church into the 21st century.

As we’ve started to tweet a lot now on Twitter, we’re getting some interest from all over the world. So, we thought it best to put this page up and let people know a little bit more about Catholic.geek, this site, and what we’re planning to do in the future.

Catholic.geek is a micro-community. We say that because there are only a handful of us at the moment, and we’re dedicated to all things Catholic and geeky and kiwi (as in New Zealand). So, those three things together make us quite a small minority.

The blog posts to this point have been reflections of our regular column in the national Catholic newspaper – the NZ Catholic – and so are often aimed at a non-technical audience. However, our plan is to expand the site and make it more of a traditional blog with thoughts and commentary ranging from technology overviews through to interesting ways that technology and geeky things can be used to better spread the Good News of Christ.

We are based in New Zealand and, no, we don’t have pet sheep. (Actually, for the record, I think Australia has more sheep per capita than NZ anyway. ) We’ve also got a few ideas of projects which we’ve put up on the site to see if others out there want to join us to help.

So, we’d love to hear from you – wherever you are – and if you have any feedback, send it through.

Otherwise, thanks for dropping by, subscribe to our RSS, and maybe we’ll see you on Twitter?

About this time last year, we talked about New Years resolutions with your computer. These are still important, and well worth revisiting. However, thanks to the web, I don’t need to rehash them here – go to http://www.catholic.geek.nz/Blog/?p=70 to see last years tips and tricks.

This time round, lets to talk about keeping your PC up to date. Across the board, computer software has a habit of being released with a small smattering of bugs and hiccups in the software. As such, they need regular updating. This is especially important when you’re connected to the internet – unfortunately there’s plenty of malicious people out their just waiting to take advantage of any holes your computer might have in its armour to take control.

Windows users should visit update.microsoft.com and install all critical updates on a regular basis. You can also set your PC to automatically go out and check for updates, and to then install those updates on a regular basis. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306525 for some instructions on how to do this

Apple users aren’t immune – check the Software Updater under the Apple menu on your Mac to see if there’s any patches out there for your system.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to protect your computer, Microsoft have some great tips that are well worth having a read through – check out http://www.microsoft.com/protect/default.mspx to read more, and remember – security starts at home!