Don’t Listen Alone the LUGRadio Story

Last year LugRadio wrapped up after five seasons, over 2million downloads and six live events. For over a year Tony Whitmore from the ubuntu-uk Podcast has been working on a documentary chronicling the history of the show, and packed with interviews, behind-the-scenes footage of how the show was planned, the studio, LugRadio Live USA and more. He premiered the hour-long documentary at LugRadio Live 2009 to resounding applause and acclaim, and it is now available online, and freely available under a Creative Commons License.

“Don’t Listen Alone: author: Tony Whitmore License: CC-BY-SA
http://ia341328.us.archive.org/2/items/Dont_Listen_Alone/dont_listen_alone.ogv

How to Free the High School kids of New South Wales

Author: threethirty Member 0 NumberedHumanIndustries
More info: http://numberedhumanindustries.com/members.html

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY)
More Info: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

G’day kids, I recently found out that no one trusts you, not your teachers, not your principals, not your parents…
but hey I do. Before you start wondering “So who is this bloke?” I’m one of those pain in the butt hippie types your parents don’t want you talking to, and why am I doing this? Because I’m 24 years old, in one year no one should trust me (never trust anyone over the age of 25) so I had better get this in now.

Ok so Lenovo and the Department of Education and Training provided laptop “personal” computers to you guys and your teachers. I put personal in quotes because that’s crap. They are not personal computers they are personnel computers, as in someone else has control over them. They have installed some of the same type of software on there that if it was put there under any other circumstance it would be called “Spyware”. This is not good no matter what they tell
you.

Two examples of the “innovative technologies” introduced by Lenovo with the IdeaPad S10e (which you all received) include “advanced network security and remote manageability tools”. Advanced network security tools prevent users (that’s you kids) from accessing unauthorized internet content and control access to NSW DET networks. This means not only can they keep you off of Myspace and Facebook, but they can watch what sites you are allowed to go to.

Remote manageability tools allow NSW DET to remotely monitor and manage the devices on demand, wherever they are located, maximizing their efficiency and effectiveness. This means that even when you are at home the DET can spy on you, fun huh?

The Lenovo IdeaPad S10e features ground breaking theft protection features such as hardware level reporting, retrieval and remote disabling functions and RFID tagging. The Lenovo IdeaPad S10e presents a zero value theft proposition thereby removing any incentive for them to be stolen and protecting the students and teachers that use them. This is all marketing speak, what it really means is that they can break your new cool laptop and RFID is a tracking system created by the manufacturing industry to track pallets. Guess what kids you are not people, you are property. And these are not features that will keep you safe. Anyone can track you with $100USD (yeah I’m an American) worth the hardware that you can buy online. The only way I know of to kill a RFID is to microwave it… and that’s a bad idea, it will kill the laptop and get you in heaps of trouble. But I do know what you can do. If you are worried about someone tracking you on your way to and from school and stuff like that, wrap the whole laptop in Aluminium Foil it will block all of the signals going in or out.

There is this thing called Linux. It runs on cellphones, servers, computers, all kinds of stuff. It also doesn’t have to be installed on your laptop to be able to use it. You can install it on a USB “thumb” drive, which is pretty cool.

If you go to http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ it will tell you how to install it on your thumbdrive. Yeah it
looks a little hard but I promise it isn’t, just follow the instructions and it will work. Just make sure you
download the Windows version of unetbootin. In unetbootin there are several different kinds (also known as distributions) of Linux listed. I have had great success with Ubuntu and Fedora, but any of the ones listed should be good also.

What this will do is let you use the computer without letting the DET spy on you, and wont mess up the computer so while you are at school you can do all the stuff they want you too with out getting in trouble. This works because it uses the thumbdrive as a harddrive so the bigger the space on the thumbdrive the more stuff you can install and store on there!

If you want some more tips and ideas on how to be a pain in the butt with technology have a look at Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother which you can get for free here http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

Good Night Sweet Prince II: The Reaper Stikes Back

As may of you know we had to have King to put sleep. (see Good Night Sweet Prince I : The Lost Hope) Well there is a new chapter in the book of epic pet own suckatude was finished today when Sam our St. Bernard died.  He was a great dog.  He was our first rescue dog.  When we got him he had never been to a vet and weighed 120lbs.  we got him up to a healthy 250lbs.  and he was a happy vibrant addition to the family, but over the last year he really started to age, he developed terrible arthritis.  We had gotten to the point where Robin and I would have to lift him off the ground so that he could go outside.  And then about a month ago he stopped eating, stopped even trying to get up, and when we picked him up he just fell to the ground.  We knew the end was near but could not find a way to get him to a vet, nor did we have the money to have him put to sleep.  So he suffered, at first not much, he would cry because he knew he wasn’t supposed to go to the bathroom in the house, but we would clean him up and comfort  him.  But last week he started seizing, and we knew that the time was coming.  as of last night the seizures were about every 1.5 hours and would last about 15mins.  And then today on my way home from school, as Robin was singing to him he took his last breath.  He didnt go out in the middle of a terrible seizure or even with a whimper… he just stopped being.

Update on FreeGeek-Richmond and Software Freedom Day

Well, I had my shindig pretty well planned out,and then I found out that the room we are moving FG-R into has a minor mold problem.  So we won’t have the room ready to go before September 19.  Which sucks but does not ruin my spirit.  So instead of getting the people to come to me I’m going to the people.  I will be up at the crack of dawn or so; on my feet or, on a bike riding throughout town with my SFD balloons attached to mysellf and my bike.  I’m gonna try to focus my efforts on WalMart and downtown.  So if you see me give me a friendly hong and hang out for a bit and get yourself an ubuntu cd.  I hope to be uploading media all day (wimax woot!) See you then!

Good Night Sweet Prince I : The Lost Hope

We had to take my Pug, King, to the vet to be put to sleep.  He had a problem where his anus would become distended and would require surgery, and it seemed to happen once a year.  We could afford a $300 surgery once a year but yesterday it happened again and we just can’t afford it twice.  It also have become obvious now that the surgeries aren’t really helping so… we have to put him down.  Robin was really upset that he would think we were taking him to get better and instead we were taking him to his death.  So even though I know he can’t understand me I explained it to him.  Knowing he can’t understand you doesn’t make it any easier. He is/was the best dog ever. he was well behaved, funny, and even, happy.  Even through all of this he never lead on like he suffered which makes it so much harder.

I wish this wasnt the best picture I have of such a sweet dog

Dearest Freepers, Birthers, and Morons of all stripe

I saw this today on http://www.democraticunderground.com and would have laughed but really this isnt funny, its true and im bloody tired of it.

You didn’t get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn’t get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy.

You didn’t get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

You didn’t get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.

You didn’t get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.

You didn’t get mad when we spent over 600 billion(and counting) on said illegal war.

You didn’t get mad when over 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the Abu Grahib photos.

You didn’t get mad when you found out we were torturing people.

You didn’t get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.

You didn’t get mad when we didn’t catch Bin Laden.

You didn’t get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.

You didn’t get mad when we let a major US city drown.

You didn’t get mad when the deficit hit the trillion dollar mark.

You finally got mad when.. when… wait for it… when the government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, are all ok with you but helping other Americans… well fuck that. That about right? You know it is.

You people have all lost your fucking minds. You are selfish, greedy, obnoxious, narcissistic, and frankly… stupid. Your pathetic little misspelled protest signs are embarrassing. Maybe you ought to find the smart person in your midst and let them make up all the signs, cause man, you look like a bunch of idiots. Also you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny.

Now please shut the hell up!

here is the direct link to the post http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×6296630

People other than me are doing HTML5 video

I’m not sure who got to it first but Dailymotion, Youtube, and my site (http://NumberedHumanIndustries.com) are the only sites that are using the HTML5 video tag.

Dailymotion’s page is at http://openvideo.dailymotion.com and as far as I can tell is using the Vorbis/Theora Firefox 3.5 compatible spec.

Youtube’s HTML5 site is at http://www.youtube.com/html5 and is using H.264 and doesn’t seem to work in Firefox 3.5

My HTML5 page is http://NumberedHumanIndustries.com/video and it is Vorbis/Theora and works in Firefox 3.5

If you know of any other pages that are using are using the proposed HTML5 video tags please comment here, email me three [at] threethirty [dot] us, or @threethirty on identi.ca

Thoughts on RMS’ “How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software”

I have just read RMS’ “How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software” http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pirate-party.html and I’m still formulating my opinion on this but in general I am ABSOLUTELY  against the way copyright is done currently.  When Copyright was introduced to America it was a “Creators Monopoly” and only lasted 14 years.  The originators thought that was more than ample time for you to create something,  make back the money that it cost you in creation, and fund you next idea.  I also think that is more than enough time.

No matter what DRM is evil and douchbaggary

More thoughts to come [as soon as I have them ]

I really want to see @doctorow and @lessig weigh in on this

How to change the pics in matrixview screensaver

I love the matrix view screensaver, but i can only look at Neo for so long before I wanna change the pics, and Jons_Collasius on UbuntuForums is the person with the solution.

He/She/It/Other says that you need to edit /usr/share/applications/screensavers/matrixview.desktop (I needed to sudo) so that it looks like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=MatrixView
Comment=Assimilation of Matrix GL by Alex Zolotov (http://knoppix.ru/matrixgl.shtml) Ported to Linux by Tugrul Galatali – .
TryExec=matrixview
Exec=matrixview -r –image /path/to/your/pictures
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Screensaver

I used a folder in my Dropbox folder for this so that i can have all of my boxen show the same awesome pics.

HTML5 video tags have a power level over 9000

My brother showed me this post at hacks.mozilla.org on how to do the much bitched about html5 video tags. So I totally had to do it, and I did.

Here is my page http://numberedhumanindustries.com/video

The cool thing is that you can have it degrade codecs and and even all the way to flash. The first (intro) video is this way, but the rest are theora/vorbis file (yeay freedom!) So here is a little howto.

First You need a place to store the vids that you can link to. If you have dropbox you could put the vids in your public folder and link there.

To have a just theora/vorbis vid (because you love freedom) the code looks like this:

</video

To have a theora/vorbis vid that degrades to mpeg4 the code looks like this:

Now if you need it to degrade all the way to flash (puke) then it would look like this:

ok that is the long and short of it. Not bad at all but you need to have Firefox 3.5 and some versions of Opera/Chrome/and possibly Safari with some extra codecs that screws the whole idea.

**EDIT: ok so I’m not smart enough to get the code to show up so just check out the mozilla hack page I was just copying from them anyway