Microblogging service Twitter is ever popular, and is a great way for keeping in contact with your friends in real time and seeing what they are up to. What makes Twitter what it is though, is the ability to update your status and receive messages on all sorts of devices, as well as the web interface.

Twitux is a native GTK/Gnome client for Twitter.

It is now apparently in Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian repositories, install it through the package name twitux, or you can download the source here. In my case, I’m installing through the Fedora repositories.

Read the rest of Twitux - a GNOME Twitter client

Popular blogging software WordPress (which we use here, for FOSSwire itself) has just had a major version update to 2.5.

The major new feature of this release is a completely overhauled admin panel and posting interface, which features a completely new design style and is designed to make the whole blogging process easier and faster.

At the time of writing, there isn’t an official post on the WordPress blog about the release, but the whole WP site has been given a visual refresh to reflect the new release.

You can download the new release from Wordpress.org.

There are lots of sites that offer streaming audio and video services these days. A lot of these use Flash video, but some older sites use other streaming technologies, including Real, Windows Media and QuickTime to deliver the content.

Downloading these streams so you can save them for later is almost always possible. It’s worth pointing out at this point that you should check as to whether you have the legal right to dump streams to your machine, but I’ll leave it to you to do this responsibly.

One of the ways you can dump this type of stream to your computer is to use the media player Mplayer.

With Mplayer already installed, you simply use the -dumpstream command line option to tell it to read the stream and save it to a file (by default, called stream.dump).

$ mplayer -dumpstream streamurl

streamurl in this example is the URL of the stream, which usually begins with rtsp:// or mms://. The hardest part of actually ripping a stream in this way is discovering this URL, as sites often don’t make this immediately available.

I’d recommend the Firefox extension UnPlug for this purpose, as it can often discover the stream URL for you, even if it is unable to do the whole ripping process. You can then copy and paste that URL into your mplayer -dumpstream command, and you’ll get the media file.

Again, though, do this responsibly and legally.