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Web + Anthropology

JonRob — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:12:32 +0000

I’ve found another very cool video which I wanted to link too. It’s by a professor of anthropology and, well you’re best of watching it for yourselves:

Hope you enjoy it

Rescheduled

JonRob — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:17:05 +0000

It was only a matter of time before I slipped up with something on my podcast – yesterday it happened. The recording software seemed to die on me about 5 minutes before Mark Shuttleworth was due to call! Fortunately I realised because going through an entire interview and then having nothing to show for it would have been far more embarrassing.

Turns out that only one part of the software had gone wrong and the raw output was being saved so I could have gone ahead and done the interview anyway…oh well you live you learn Add to that the fact Mark was very nice about it, as was his secretary, and now I’ve got a new date (the 15th March) to do the interview.

Fingers crossed, with some thorough testing on my part and perhaps some investigation in to other recording methods as a backup, it will all go well! The questions I’ve got to ask him will all still be relevant in another couple of weeks and it also gives me some time to sort out the next set of guests.

Jon

Put your money where your mouth is!

JonRob — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 21:54:28 +0000

Gizmondo are attempting to make March the month where we all get together let the RIAA feel where it hurts – their wallets. They’ve been constantly pushing to remove more and more freedoms and the only way they’re able to have such influence is because of the money we give them: Gizmondo are saying enough is enough and next month we’re to show them how much we dislike it!

You don’t even have to stop buying music as there’s loads of music that comes without DRM – well go check out the Gizmondo post for more details! They have everything you could possibly need there: a RIAA radar to let you know what not to buy and loads of info on how to continue supporting the artists you love

Moved!

JonRob — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 11:19:44 +0000

It sometimes seems I move blogs more often than a series goes in to re-run on TV…This time, however, I’ve managed to drag all my blogger content over to my new WordPress account which is quite exciting! The only reason I’m mentioning this is because there are a few posts that refer to blogger and people might feel a bit confused by this (you’re all so fragile!) – plus I quite like this new theme.

What does get to me a bit is that themes and websites as a whole always seem to use very small fonts(?) I might try and play with the DPI settings on my computer and see if that improves things at all.

VCRs and Guns

JonRob — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 19:33:00 +0000

I’m reading the book “Free Culture” by Lawrence Lessig at the moment and just read a brilliant example about the problem with copyright laws; I thought I’d share!
In case you can’t see it clearly, the caption reads “On which item have the courts ruled that manufacturers and retailers be held responsible for having supplied the equipment?”.

The story is that Universal Studios (I think) went to the courts protesting that Sony was responsible for damages caused by the record feature on their new VCRs because, amongst all the legal uses, it enabled people to illegally copy content owned by Universal. Guns, on the other hand, kill people and yet their manufacturers’ and retailers’ aren’t, or have never been, held responsible for murders involving guns.

That ruling was overturned but it’s a pretty funny example of the complete lack of common sense surrounding “creative property” law. I’m not sure what the British situation is on all of this as most of the material I’ve been reading is by American authors but I plan to find out soon…

Playable/Bootable

JonRob — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:21:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to make a DVD that would both play in an ordinary DVD player and also boot in to a GNU/Linux live CD when in a computer. Apparently nobody else has wanted to do this because I haven’t been able to find any documentation on the net but I have eventually figured out the rather obvious solution! I guess anyone else who wanted to do this probably knew more about mkisofs than I did but just in case there’s ever any one else who needs to know how to do this, and doesn’t know more about mkisofs than I do I’m going to document it very quickly here. (Also for my own future reference!)

mkisofs -dvd-video -pad -l -r -J -v -V “KNOPPIX” -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table -b boot/isolinux/isolinux.bin -c boot/isolinux/boot.cat \
-hide-rr-moved -o /mnt/hda1/knx/knoppix.iso /mnt/hda1/knx/master

This example obviously takes Knoppix as the Live CD you’re attempting to make but it should work for any live distribution that uses isolinux. The only relevant option to change is the -o, which should point to where you want the iso image to be created and the option following that, which specifies the input folder – i.e. where all your files are which you want to be put in to the iso image.

Hope this helps someone,

Jon

New episode coming!

JonRob — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:17:00 +0000

I’m interviewing Mark Shuttleworth on the 26th of this month (February) so feel free to send in any questions you have for him! The format will be slightly different as I’ve only got one guest for this episode but the rest is the same, i.e. Mark answering your questions! I’m expecting to mostly take questions on his work with Ubuntu Linux (as he is the founder of the project!) but if people do send in questions about his space trip and such like maybe I’ll ask those too.

Oops, almost forgot to put down the contact details. Either send the questions to yourquestions@questionsplease.org or leave a voice mail at 0121 286 9845 (+44). Feel free to visit the site, questionsplease.org, to find more information, another way to get in touch or to find past episodes for download

I know I haven’t been posting so much to this blog lately but my blogging over at Free Software Magazine has been taking my writing attention and also I’ve started on a new project – more details of that one to follow soon!

Jon

From London to China…by train!

JonRob — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:11:00 +0000

I wish I was using WordPress now really, unless anyone can tell me a way to get asides on Blogger?!

Well anyway, that’s not what this is about. There’s an interesting article on BBC which is a correspondent describing their journey to their new posting in China, by train, from London! It’s a good read and a really cool thing to do in my opinion…

See why I want asides now? How short was that!

Free as in Freedom!

JonRob — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 10:31:00 +0000

This is a double post:

firstly, you have to check out wikisource and wikibooks! We all know and love wikipedia but how many of us know about these sister projects? Wikibooks aims to create textbooks and books in the same way wikipedia was created and wikisource is similar, at least I think it is, to project Gutenburg.

Secondly, I found Richard Stallman’s biography at wikisource recently and am reading it there at the minute. It’s called Free as in Freedom and is really interesting – not normally in to biographies either.

A movie about trusted computing…

JonRob — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:04:00 +0000

Ok this is really cool…well I thought it was. For a start it’s just a cool movie with cool animation and soundtrack. Secondly it’s a good introduction to “Trusted” computing and makes it quite clear how trust has nothing to do with it. I wish I could upload it to here, infact…Never embedded a video on my blog before but it’s cool so hey!

Here’s a link back to the original as well so you can see if there’s more there that interests you (you can find the video’s original copyright info here too). Also, for anyone who refuses to play proprietary formats I’ve converted it to an ogg theora file and hosted it at my website but please only use this if you have no other way of watching it – I host my podcast here and don’t want to lose all my bandwidth to this video!