Not long after Sony Ericsson put an easy-access Facebook app on its phones, Microsoft is getting into the social media act as well by coming up with a Facebook app for Windows Mobile users.

You can already get a nice mobile version of Facebook through your phone’s Web browser, but this new app from Microsoft, available for download today, promises a richer experience. …

Let me kickstart a new series here on Techgoondu – Goondu DIY, which gives a look at what goondus like us get our hands dirty with. By the way, it’s also disguised as a guide, so if you want to get your hands dirty, keep following these pages!

First off, I’m going to share my experience with FreeNAS, the freeBSD-based, open-source NAS software for turning your old PC or new, low-powered Atom-based PC into a NAS (networked attached storage). Since NAS is all the rage now, why not build your own, right?

Well, actually, it’s not for everyone. If you want storage, then a D-Link DNS-323 or QNap TS209 II, both of which I’ve tried and used, is a better bet. But what if you want to download fast over Bittorrent while sharing your files with your friends online and also to serve the media to your PS3 or XBox in the living room?

Then you need a proper server! This not only offers NAS functions, but also provides much faster BT downloads than the pitifully slow BT clients on regular NAS boxes.

Popular with many DIYers online, FreeNAS is the free software you might want to install onto your server to offer features that are essentially as good as regular NAS boxes. Why FreeNAS? 1) It’s free 2) It’s powerful 3) It’s relatively easy to run 4) It has low hardware requirements. Here’s my experience with FreeNAS… …

If you have been anywhere near the internet these few days, you know the airwaves have been plastered with news of the H1N1 swine flu virus.

Besides getting information from typical news outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian, or official sources like the WHO (World Health Organization) and CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention), the internet is buzzing with bottoms-up grassroots efforts to track the spread of the virus.

From the 2009 Swine flu wikipedia page, to swine flu alerts on twitter, there’s lots of ways to keep informed — or to feed our paranoia, depending on how you look at it — about the spread of the virus. There’s even a Singapore-based swine flu website (www.swineflu.sg) that does a great job of tracking the virus.

I was scheduled to go Las Vegas last Saturday for about a week for work. But I ended up canceling the trip because of the swine flu, not because I feared getting the disease — the chances of that happening are vanishingly minuscule — but because of potential travel disruptions should anything happen.

Just over the weekend the Hong Kong authorities decided to quarantine the Metropark Hotel in Wanchai based on one confirmed H1N1 case, disrupting tourists and travelers, seven Singaporeans included. Singapore itself has taken a decidedly strong stance on the issue, enforcing a home quarantine order for travelers returning from Mexico or US, beginning today.

Not a fun time to travel at all, I think. Still, I’m curious. Would you travel?