One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is progressing and the folks at OLPC have put together another video with interviews of the people behind the project. If you’re unfamiliar with their work, you can search for “OLPC” on this blog and find their other video. As before, the new video is licensed to to share under [...]
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an important project which makes and distributes inexpensive laptop computers for children in poor countries. The machines run a GNU/Linux operating system and use free software for almost everything. The machines require very little power (no more than a child can generate through a crank, as I understand it) [...]
The most recent edition of “Questions please…” features an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, head and chief sponsor of Canonical and the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. The license for the recording is as follows: Verbatim copying and redistribution of these entire recordings is permitted worldwide and without royalty provided this notice is preserved. Thanks to Questions Please… [...]
Gervase Markham’s blog has a post about OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument format which I found interesting. A few of the respondants make points I tried to rebut, but my response (below) doesn’t appear in the list of followups there. “My least favourite feature is that you can’t open a word document without it bugging you to [...]
Ultra-groovy Lizzie pointed me to the BBC article on RFID’s march through Europe. It is a rather one-sided article; it reads more like an advertisement for RFID. If you haven’t already thought of the social consequences of increased tracking, you might benefit from a piece which educates readers on multiple frames of debate or one [...]
GNOME (the free software desktop project) is working with Google’s Summer of Code again this year. Starting today, students can apply to work on GNOME desktop projects and get paid by Google. Visit GNOME’s Summer of Code 2007 and Google’s Summer of Code pages for more information. To advertise this project in your campus, find [...]
Electronic Frontier Foundation has busted a patent, this time patent #6,614,729 (copy at Google Patent Search). From the EFF: The patent covered a system and method of creating digital recordings of live performances. Clear Channel claimed the bogus patent created a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert digital recordings and threatened to sue those [...]
When you use The Internet Archive to host your video files, it will offer to make derivative files in alternate formats. Recently, Ogg Vorbis+Theora was added to the list of formats IA will make for you. This means you can get all sorts of videos in a format anyone can play anywhere using a variety [...]
The 9/11 report is a US government work and therefore is uncopyrighted. It was born into the public domain and should remain there forever. You may deal in the document fully without any restriction due to copyright law. Some bloggers (Techliberation.com, BoingBoing.net) noticed that the 9/11 report distributed from 9-11commission.gov has Digital Restrictions Management applied—copying [...]
If you’re interested in writing GUI applications with Python, check out this beginner’s video guide to using Glade with Python and GTK+ (large video, small video, PDF slides, OpenDocument slides, code samples). Also interesting, a talk for beginners about doing work on websites. The videos are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license.
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley