When I first started doing podcasts under the TWiT banner it was little more than a hobby. How that hobby has grown, from two audio-only shows in April 2005 (The Tech Guy radio show and "this WEEK in TECH") to over 15 shows plus 40 hours a week of live video streaming. TWiT is now a full-time business employing seven people at the TWiT Cottage in Petaluma and a dozen more contractors all over the world.

The best thing about TWiT is the community that surrounds it. I'm always looking for ways to give the community more ways to participate. That's why we have two chat rooms and two forums and now, an official TWiT Wiki. We'll be dumping every bit of information we can scrape up into the wiki, and I hope you'll help. The software is Mediawiki - the same software that Wikipedia runs on - so it should feel pretty familiar. You'll need to create an account with a verified email address before you can edit pages. That's to discourage spamming; I promise to keep the email private.

A happy holidays to all of you from all of the TWiTs. It's been an amazing year. When we began 2008 there were just two of us at TWiT LLC: Dane and me. Now, with the addition of Frédérique, Colleen, and Tony, there are five, and we hope to add two more staff members in the next few months.

Something went wrong when we posted Security Now 163 today - the show was cut in half. I've pulled it down for now and I'll repost it first thing tomorrow morning. Please accept my apologies.

UPDATE: It's been fixed. Download away!

On Friday evening we had a catastrophic failure of the web server that hosts TWiT Live, the TWiT Army Canteen, Leoville.com, and this site. The RAID 5 controller died, and when it did it marked all the disks unusable. Support personnel at Softlayer, our hosting company, weren't able to recover the disks, so they did the only thing they could do: replaced the controller and reinstalled the operating system. We're in the process of restoring all the sites. TWiT.tv

Ever since we started this thing three years ago listeners have been asking us when we'd do some video shows. The problem has always been that there's not much to see. I'm in Petaluma and the TWiTs are spread all over the world. We did a few live TWiTs on video but they were less than satisfactory. The audio was terrible, it was difficult to get everyone together, and it wasn't very compelling visually.

I'm leaving tonight for Australia on the Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop Adventure 2008: Tasmania!

You might have noticed the new album art here. Thanks to the great Lori Lebeau-Walsh for those. Lori did the FLOSS Weekly, Jumping Monkeys, and Radio Leo album art some time ago and she volunteered to redo all the rest to give it a more consistent look.

The host portraits that the album art is based on are by the amazing Nitrozac from The Joy of Tech. She'll do one for you, too, by the way, for a very reasonable cost.

The network is slowly getting caught up after the holidays with one exception: The Tech Guy shows. The shows that aired while I was on vacation (417, 418, 419, and 420) were pre-recorded and won't be released online. I do have recordings from 421 on and we're putting them up piecemeal - and a little out of order. We should be caught up in the next few days. Thanks for your patience!