Blog

Teachers and Social Responsibility

There’s some really nice software for teaching game making as a way to teach young students programming and mathematics. Squeak is also the programming environment that serves as Croquet’s foundation. My research is here. But there’s more.

Kay and Papert consider Croquet and Squeak just one part of the two parts necessary to help humanity. They hope that Nicholas Negroponteâ’s $100 laptop effort, which they co-developed with him, will help distribute such learning, discovery, and communication software for youth around the world to use to supplement and improve the students own learning environments. In turn, they hope that these students discoveries and powerful ideas can be self-published by the same interconnected software to be made available to the rest of civilization.

What great news. Bill Kerr joins the Free Software Foundation.

New Poll and some notes about GNU Emacs

I’m using a different WordPress plugin for my poll, its called Democracy AJAX Poll. It uses AJAX and I think its nicer. The last poll I had was “What is the best system, Free software or proprietary software and out of the 28 votes, 21 of you voted for Free software and the funny thing is out of 7 votes for proprietary software, my good buddy Mike made 6 of them, lol.

I’ll leave the default Poll for a while, someone rated my site and said their grandma could do better, so that’s good.

I’m happy about using GNU Emacs regularly again, Its easily the best editor I’ve ever used, I think it would be a great teaching tool. I’m using it to write and publish this post, I also use it in combination with MVS to edit my wiki and Wikimedia projects. Here’s the links for people interested in those things.

There’s so many other things I use GNU Emacs for that its just too much effort to start listing them all off so I’ll try to keep my notes on the wiki.

I’m also running Erbot. We’ve been having a bit of fun with it on IRC.

Artistic Expression – Blender short film

Maybe I should have spent more time on this, the main thing was to try and express myself. If anyone wants the .blend file, just leave a comment.

I’ve moved on to making my first 3d application with blender, here’s the test application for windows, its just to make sure it works before spending more time on it, feedback would be nice.

Edit 2019: I deleted this film, it was so old and basic.

BadVista campaign

Bad Vista

The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) software alternatives.

Fight DRM

DefectiveByDesign.org is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors. The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market. DRM products have features built-in that restrict what jobs they can do. These products have been intentionally crippled from the users’ perspective, and are therefore “defective by design”. This campaign will identify these defective products, and target them for elimination. Our aim is the abolition of DRM as a social practice.

Continue reading BadVista campaign

Eben Moglen: A message about the Free Software Foundation

From www.FSF.org:

Watch a video appeal from Eben Moglen, Board member and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation, covering the Novell and Microsoft deal, GPLv3, the FSF’s campaign against DRM (DefectiveByDesign.org) and software patents. You can help us save bandwidth by downloading from Internet Archive and Coral Cache.

From the video:

Freedom is more precious than anything else we have and we need to protect it while we still can.

Codev2 and Eben Inspiration

Lawrence Lessig updated his book “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace“. Download Codev2.

Recently we read Eben Moglens speech “Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture” and now lets check out his keynote address, titled “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” presented at Plone Conference 2006 on October 25, 2006 in Seattle, WA. You can read the transcript by Geof Glass on his blog “Eben Moglen on Free Software and Social Justice“.

Continue reading Codev2 and Eben Inspiration

Spoken Wikipedia

I was looking at Wikipedia bots and stumbled across the rss feed for Spoken Wikipedia.

The WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia aims to produce recordings of Wikipedia articles being read aloud. See Spoken articles for articles that have already been recorded, and Requests for instructions on how to request a recording of a particular article.

I modified bashpodder to try and make it easier for my friends to download all the files. If you use a graphical interface then after you download spoken wikipedia.tar.gz, you can probably right click on it then select extract then go into the wikipedia_spoken folder and double click spoken_wikipedia.sh or open a terminal and copy this command.

wget http://ia310142.us.archive.org/1/items/Blogs_01/spoken_wikipedia.tar.gz ; tar -xzvf spoken_wikipedia.tar.gz ;./spoken_wikipedia/spoken_wikipedia.sh

From then on just run ./spoken_wikipedia.sh when you want to continue downloading. It will continue where it left off so maybe run this one before bed. This is another nice thing to distribute in your local area.