I’m stoked about the latest OpenMoko release and looking forward to getting my hands on the latest freerunner released last week. Over on the CC blog, Tim “thwang-roflcon” Hwang, blogged about the effects of releasing the OpenMoko case plans under CC BY-SA license. Enjoy!

Great news coming out recently that our good friends over at the awesome open source mobile phone project OpenMoko have been seeing rapid success with releasing their CAD design files for the FreeRunner phone under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Their open design approach has spurred adoption, becoming the basis for the Dash Express car navigation device, and a popular platform for other projects such as the Debian-based WEphone. It’s gaining a lot of traction, and it looks like we’ll be able to look forward to even more successes on the open design front in the near future. Might have to pick one up for myself…

This follows in the line of similar recent adoption successes seen by other businesses taking the strategy of making their CAD files open to the public like the award-winning OpenBook project that makes designs for their laptop available for anyone to use. We’re hoping that these examples set the stage for companies to take up the business opportunities available in CCing their product schematics.

Originally from More on OpenMoko CAD Designs

Ok, the title pretty much says it all. Lu bought me a new 250 gb backup drive for locking down my backups while on the road (and I already have a halfway solution at home thanks to advice from readers). I’m curious what is the best option for syncing up my 80 gb thinkpad x61 to a partition on this drive, which can act as a daily backup, and be used in the event of something bad? I run gentoo on my computers currently, and want to just do more than just rsync to this drive in that I want the content encrypted.

Please help me lazyweb! Another option is to pay for a service like mozy.com or carbonite, but I want to stay in commandline realm and where I don’t need network access..

Originally from Dear Lazyweb, Need Simple Encrypted Backup Method to USB on Linux

AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.

Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.

Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!

I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?

Originally from Photos from Guangzhou China Town Demolitions and Linux Photo Sharing Question

If you want to test the latest livecontent DVD, you can just use qemu and the iso disc:

qemu -kernel-kqemu -cdrom ./ccLiveContent-2.0-1202964485.iso -boot d -m 512

I don’t think I have kqemu working or something because its still super slow running on my thinkbook X61 with 4 gb of ram…hmmmm…

ShareThis

Originally from ccLiveContent DVD and QEMU on Gentoo

The woes that have struck Second Life and Facebook remind me of the topic Linksvayer and I have talked about, needing an EXPORT [1] of your data from these closed projects and,or, relying on one’s own infrastructure for social networking, identification, and personal data.

I don’t want Google, Flickr, Upcoming, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, LinkedIn, or any other web-based service to lock down my data, even put it on their hard drives, nor keep any of my personal data anymore. I want my media and data on my servers, secured with my own security methods. These services should just provide their good proprietary methods for searching through, connecting with, etc, and my data is safe from their “government spy chips” (that is a bad inside joke from the EFF’s presentation at cc salon). No really, I just have like a gazillion usernames, passwords, different logins, media spread out (which is good), and travel patterns that take me through countries that might demand this from these capitulating companies who are shown and proven to fail their users with security exploits, lazy coding tactics, and philosophies that don’t jive with those of the software they primarily base their businesses on (ahem, L.A.M.P).

If these companies relied more heavily on user supplied systems, then if the users’s own system is hacked, then that is not on the company, as it would be an interchange for many external profiles (including user data, credit cards, etc).

This is one of the reasons (beyond getting paid from Creative Commons, because I worked on CC stuff before I got paid to do this) I really enjoy hacking on ccHost, an Open Source web-based media sharing software. This software allows anyone to run their own YouTube video sharing, Flickr photo site, etc on their own infrastructure.

I should write about this in a magazine with large press. Its time to up the Open Service ante. I know I have passwords and other personal data spilled out on the web because of these companies with flawed philosophies.

Footnotes

[1] This should probably be more of an export and delete, and, or export, delete and redirect.
[2] Yes, please everyone, lets remember that these sites are companies with closed applications and not the open service saviors that go hand in hand with the values of open source.

UPDATE: Linksvayer keeps me in check while my brain is in overstimulation because of my new power station I just purchased (more in a second about that).  I updated the post to reflect the non-cocoa/aqua nature of the Evolution release (oops).
Chuck your Outlook and use (Novell-funded) Gnome’s Evolution (which now has CalDAV support!)

Its has always amazed me how brainwashed people, aka consumers, get from purchasing products in the name of “good design” and “ease of use” when the companies they buy their products from harm the communities they take their code from without reciprocity. And by company, I mean Apple. And, the aforementioned communities are Free Software, Open Source, and on-line music purchasers. Like Linksvayer, I’m not shocked by Apple’s latest moves and it reaffirms my committment to not buy their one button mouse products (I need three). Bring on the flames, it only increases my Google rank and gets me to laugh when I read the posts

Come on, stand up, boycott Apple, aka switch, until they give back to the Open Source communities and rip out that DRM from their products. Think Different.