Ask Paul: June 23 (Premium)

Happy Friday after a depressingly long week. Here's another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Thurrott logo merchandise
j5 asks:

Where's the Thurrott.com merch?

It's funny you ask this: I was just discussing this with my wife and we've started investigating the best way to do this. Long story short, it will happen.

I know we briefly offered at least coffee mugs for sale back in the day, but I think the issue was that the supplier was using fragile cups (not mugs) that would often break in transit. But now that we're more involved in the business side of Thurrott.com, we're going to make it happen.

I remember back in the day there was a picture on your site of you drinking out of a coffee cup that had the Thurrott logo on it. I always thought that was a cool cup because your logo is different from other tech logos out there.

Yeah.

I may have told this story, but that photo comes from a February 2007 trip that we took with the kids to Rome. We were walking around near the Roman Forum when it started to rain and so we ducked into a café to stay dry, and my wife and I got coffees while the kids had ice cream. And as I do, I started taking pictures of the rest of the family, but this time we ended up all taking pictures of each other for whatever reason. And the one my wife took of me was sort of perfect.

My cup of cappuccino was huge, and it reminded me of the scene in So I Married an Axe Murderer in which Michael Myers' character says when getting a humorously humongous cup of cappuccino, "I believe I ordered the large cappuccino." (We actually owned an even bigger cappuccino cup than the one in the movie and used it to hold keys and other items.)

Anyway, that image became my logo at the SuperSite for Windows. We used it everywhere, including on the mobile app we had for Windows Phone and iPhone, and we had different versions over timex, including a stylized version that looked like a drawing. (This was the only SuperSite logo/design that I did not create myself. I think it looks terrible.)

When I moved to Thurrott.com, we had to find a new logo and it was our original designer, Sean, who came up with the design we still use. I still like that logo a lot.
Currently on Twitter
DKRowe asks:

The section on each article page with the heading "Currently on Twitter" does not seem to be populating with content for the last week or two. Is that a victim of the API changes they made?

I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't even notice that. Will try to figure that out ASAP. I'm not sure what's causing it.
Linux
andrew b. asks:

Any more Linux adventures lately? I know you were liking Zorin, I'd  be curious to hear your opinion of a desktop experience less similar to Windows, like the default Gnome environment found on Fedora.

No, sorry. I've been consumed with a series of big projects lately, including the books and whatever is happening here on Thurrott.com. But I hav...