FSCONS

Microblogs

May 26, 2010

Twitter / kyrah

kyrah: "I don't believe in a lot of things. But I do believe in duct tape." #qotd

May 26, 2010 01:07 AM

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May 25, 2010

Twitter / bagder

bagder: Once again Google violates GPL by distributing Android 2.2 binaries with no source available (yet) #licensefail

May 25, 2010 09:37 PM

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Twitter / Micke_Nordin

Micke_Nordin: RT @frals : only ~30k downloads behind fm-radio in #maemo extras for that elusive top download spot for maemo5 #numberwhore #ego #fmms

May 25, 2010 09:15 PM

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Twitter / kyrah

kyrah: Taking over your car by attacking its computer systems: http://bit.ly/bfDjTL - This is some of the scariest stuff I've read in a while.

May 25, 2010 08:58 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

@catallman Collective intelligence sounds like a perfect #fscons topic. ;) (send speakers to http://tinyurl.com/2cjvf9g

by jonaso (jonaso) at May 25, 2010 08:52 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

@catallman Collective intelligence sounds like a perfect #fscons topic. ;) (send speakers to http://tinyurl.com/2cjvf9g

by Jonas Öberg at May 25, 2010 08:52 PM

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Twitter / kyrah

kyrah: First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell http://bit.ly/bsWQSQ Wow. Just wow. o_O

May 25, 2010 08:05 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: #stickcricket has a new update and it seems to have lost all the statistics. Do they not realise that is the point of cricket!

May 25, 2010 07:18 PM

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jonaso timeline

@mljungblad You mean if you have an idea for someone else? The find appropriate theme on http://tinyurl.com/yb73a4f and leave a suggestion

May 25, 2010 07:08 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

.@jonaso What if you&aposre not able to be at #fscons yourself? Can/should I still fill out the CFP?

by mljungblad (Marcus Ljungblad) at May 25, 2010 07:06 PM

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Twitter / Gnurkel

Gnurkel: @ChrElind prøver å se fremover. Hva om øst-tysklands overvåkning blir crowdsourset og vi overvåker hverandre? Et teknologisk tystersamfunn..

May 25, 2010 06:46 PM

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jonaso timeline

@mljungblad Fill out http://tinyurl.com/2fesmov :)

May 25, 2010 06:45 PM

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Twitter / kyrah

kyrah: WGT was incredible. Thanks for an amazing time, you weird and wonderful people! \m/

May 25, 2010 06:42 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

@jonaso I want a talk on technical presentations done right. Is it possible to submit such talk? Maybe a pecha kucha/ignite talk? #fscons

by mljungblad (Marcus Ljungblad) at May 25, 2010 06:41 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: @steinsky Its a very sad song, often mistaken fir a happy one.

May 25, 2010 06:35 PM

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jonaso timeline

@pawal Unwrapping the Black Boxes of Society

May 25, 2010 06:21 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: Some of the greatest maths art is made in Britain, but the participants are anonymous...the art of crop circles: http://bit.ly/a9eeFh

May 25, 2010 06:13 PM

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Twitter / Gnurkel

Gnurkel: Filma en som drev med koppespill i Brugata! http://bambuser.com/v/778218 og meldte ifra. Er filming utført av privatpersoner OK? #DLD

May 25, 2010 05:53 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

I have an interesting topic for #fscons, but no speaker. Should I submit a CFP for myself? :-)

by jonaso (jonaso) at May 25, 2010 05:34 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

I have an interesting topic for #fscons, but no speaker. Should I submit a CFP for myself? :-)

by Jonas Öberg at May 25, 2010 05:34 PM

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Twitter / magnushagander

magnushagander: What better way to recover from #pgcon jetlag than intense #postgresql training? #icanhasweekendsoon?

May 25, 2010 05:28 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

RT @FSCONS: FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu http://bit.ly/aFpPRU

by ffkp (FFKP) at May 25, 2010 04:45 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

RT @FSCONS: FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu http://bit.ly/aFpPRU

by FFKP at May 25, 2010 04:44 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

RT @FSCONS: FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu

by blondinrikard (Rikard Fröberg) at May 25, 2010 04:44 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

Congrats! €49k for “Some Rights Reserved for Nordic Artists” from 2 Nordic Culture orgs http://ur1.ca/03c7o via @fscons #cc

by mlinksva (Mike Linksvayer) at May 25, 2010 04:05 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

Congrats! €49k for “Some Rights Reserved for Nordic Artists” from 2 Nordic Culture orgs http://ur1.ca/03c7o via @fscons !cc

by Mike Linksvayer at May 25, 2010 04:04 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

RT @fscons FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu

by mlinksva (Mike Linksvayer) at May 25, 2010 04:01 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

RT @fscons FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu

by Mike Linksvayer at May 25, 2010 04:01 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

RT @fscons: FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu http://bit.ly/arLK3S

by ffkp (FFKP) at May 25, 2010 03:44 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

RT @fscons: FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu http://bit.ly/arLK3S

by FFKP at May 25, 2010 03:43 PM

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jonaso timeline

@smarimc For some reason I can't DM you, but anyway, I'm jonas@jabber.fsfe.org :-)

May 25, 2010 03:12 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu

by FSCONS (FSCONS) at May 25, 2010 02:26 PM

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Updates with "fscons"

FSCONS congratulates #ffkp on their €49000 grant for Creative Commons: http://tinyurl.com/3yw9wtu

by FSCONS at May 25, 2010 02:26 PM

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jonaso timeline

I think all my email contacts suddenly died. Only two mails needing attention today :)

May 25, 2010 02:24 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: @davidsteven At least the problems of BR have been divided up ;)

May 25, 2010 01:56 PM

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jonaso timeline

Tord Jansson skriver om #ffkp's bidrag från Nordisk Kulturfond: http://tinyurl.com/34ym3ng

May 25, 2010 01:19 PM

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Twitter / magnushagander

magnushagander: RT @Crad: The requested "DBAs Running with Scissors" photo from my Perspectives on NoSQL presentation at #pgcon http://bit.ly/cYXgXK

May 25, 2010 01:10 PM

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Twitter / magnushagander

magnushagander: The positions of the different board members for pgeu now available: http://bit.ly/9H9lfr

May 25, 2010 01:00 PM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

Live: First year of IKS for Midgard: Last year we became a partner in the European Commission -funded Interactive ... http://bit.ly/9Q5zK3

by FSCONS (FSCONS) at May 25, 2010 12:43 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: @SciencePunk Maxwell and the Demons

May 25, 2010 12:30 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: RT @glynmoody: Goodbye Becta – and Good Riddance - http://bit.ly/alkyiF how long will it take to undo the damage? #education #opensource

May 25, 2010 12:28 PM

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Twitter / Gelada

Gelada: RT @ErikDeBruijn: In a matter of hours... @bre @starkness Of course someone made a tiny open source violin. I <3 the internet. http:/ ...

May 25, 2010 12:18 PM

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Twitter / magnushagander

magnushagander: RT @DevrimGunduz: Microsoft confirms the 'F1' key as potentially deadly #stupid http://bit.ly/ciRgJY

May 25, 2010 12:05 PM

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Twitter / magnushagander

magnushagander: Seems someone changed the SSID of the office wifi without telling people (or at least without telling me). cute...

May 25, 2010 10:53 AM

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Twitter / bagder

bagder: our main haxx.se (curl, rockbox, libssh2, c-ares etc) server is soon going down for a few hours to get moved to a new provider, keep calm

May 25, 2010 10:38 AM

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jonaso timeline

@mljungblad Tackar :)

May 25, 2010 10:26 AM

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-"RT @fscons2009" -from:fscons2009 #fscons OR fscons.org OR FSCONS - Twitter Search

Unfortunately @doctorow was already booked for 5-7 November. Suggest more keynote speakers for #fscons! http://tinyurl.com/ygmc27n

by FSCONS (FSCONS) at May 25, 2010 10:15 AM

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Updates with "fscons"

Unfortunately @doctorow was already booked for 5-7 November. Suggest more keynote speakers for #fscons! http://tinyurl.com/ygmc27n

by FSCONS at May 25, 2010 10:15 AM

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jonaso timeline

Få kan vara så glada över regn som @collentine verkar :-)

May 25, 2010 09:24 AM

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Twitter / magnushagander

magnushagander: RT @jpargudo: Im very excited by PostgreSQL Europe new board: Dave Page and Guillaume Lelarge did rejoin! What a team :-)

May 25, 2010 09:02 AM

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Blogs etc

July 28, 2010

Stenskott » teirdez - teirdez

Till ljudet av Pervers politiker av Ebba Grön (hemma hos mig iaf, eftersom jag genomgår punkrenässans) kommer här ett inlägg om katalonska Partit Pirata (bildat 25 juli 2010 till ära av regionvalen i november!).

Katalonien är en region i nordöstra Spanien, och deras partipolitiska pirater har tidigare varit affilierade med spanska Partido pirata. Katalonien har dock ett eget politiskt ekosystem, och nästan samtliga spanska partier har självständiga affilialer i Katalonien. 80% av befolkningen i Katalonien vill ha ett helt självständigt Katalonien. När jag var där för att besöka Volcanica LAN i Garrotxa åkte vi förbi staden Terrassa något utanför Barcelona, och jag fick det snabbt berättat för mig att 98% av befolkningen där vill ha självständighet, och att runt 60% av befolkningen där använder Linux.

Det fanns två anledningar att Partit pirata ville bli självständiga: Partido pirata kan inte ena sig tillräckligt snabbt för att hinna driva bra valkampanj i de katalonska regionvalen i november. Katalonerna kommer inte heller inte vara särskilt benägna att rösta på ett parti med bas i Madrid.

Partit pirata vill ha direktdemokrati. Min värd, Kenneth Peiruza, säger att det är för att människor inte tror på politikerklassen där. Röstetalen ligger på runt 60% i Spanien, men dyker. Särskilt bland unga. Likt delar av tyska Piratenpartei tänker man sig en flytande demokrati, där varje medborgare i varje fråga har en röst men kan välja att överlåta sin röst i vissa frågor till en betrodd person.

En halv miljon katalonier av totalt 3 miljoner frivilligarbetar i någon form av social rörelse på fritiden, inte alltför sällan nästan lika mycket som de lägger på knegarjobb. En inte helt obetydande del av dem arbetar med kultur eller teknologi.
För dem är det mycket viktigare att ta över ett inflytande de tycker att politiker missbrukat än att få ett politiskt parti som försöker fixa det åt dem.

De katalonska piraterna vill ställa upp i regionalvalen men kommer bara ha en lista i Barcelona. Den spanska lagen kräver att alla nya politiska partier har 50/50-fördelning av kvinnor och män på sina listor, vilket grämer dem lite. Jag har blivit lovad av (en trolig toppkandidat?) Gemma Goldstein att få regelbundna uppdateringar från Barcelona om hur det går med valkampanjen!

Se också baskiska punkbandet Txakelpunk eller Sven Jerrings refereat av Sverige-Japan 1936 (fotboll).

Filed under: Allmänt, Pirate issues, Piratfrågor, Piratpartiet

by teirdez at July 28, 2010 09:07 AM

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Oscar Swartz :: Texplorer - Intervju: Barnporrdömde mangamannen

by Oscar Swartz at July 28, 2010 06:25 AM

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Open Source Ecology - Strings Attached: Open Source String Trimmer

When the ragweeds grow to 12 feet at Factor e Farm, I guess it’s time to mow the lawn.

In the usual bootstrapping fashion – today’s experiment was building and using an 8-foot diameter string trimmer powered by LifeTrac, with 1/2″ wire for the cutter. Did you ever wonder what it would be like to supersize a string trimmer? We do not recommend that you do this at home.

This video shows fabrication of the string trimmer, with assistance from our recently open-sourced 150 ton hole puncher – in practical use for the first time. The trimer is then taken into the field – for some powerful exterior trim.

Music by DLDN Instrumental care of ccmixter.org.

Supersized String Trimmer from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

The video shows how we took the hole puncher for its first field test in actual production, this time with a 3/4″ hole die for punching 1/4″ steel. We made the single-string rotor for the string trimmer from a spare soil pulverizer tine.We were taking it easy on the hole puncher until we are sure we’re not going to crack the dies from misalignment or other caveats. We still don’t have the stripper installed on the hole puncher, so we have to take the metal off manually off the punch element once a hole is punched.

A string trimmer is essentially a rotor with a string attached. We bolted the 1/2″ wire after punching the holes. The inner part of the rotor is stiff – made of 1/4″x3″ steel 24 inches long -  such that centrifugal force allows the wire to extend outwards instead of getting wrapped around itself upon startup.

The performance of the initial string trimmer prototype shows promising results. A number of improvements need to be made:

1. We used braided, 1/2″ wire. At he end of the day, the wire has unbraided, even though we weded the ends to prevent unbraiding.  This needs to be corrected – perhaps by running a bead of weld along its length to prevent wire separation. Another option would be using a chain for the cutting element.
2. The rotor starts to vibrate excessively when in heavy brush. This is an artifact of our existing quick attach plate, which has manually-insered pins for locking. Since the pin holes are oversized, small implements like the Unversal Rotor tend to wobble. This point will be addressed with our improved version of the quick attach plate with LifeTrac II.
3. Additional safety features are desirable. The spinning string is almost invisible, and awareness of this must be maintained to avoid injury. Some kind of safety guard should always be used – whether it be keeping distance, using the trimmer with tractor remote control – or more traditional ways such as additional guards on the tractor or on the trimmer.

It could be that the super-sized string trimmer should be replaced by a mower like this:

We have this brush hog, and it’s converted for use with LifeTrac by eliminating the PTO shaft and adding a quick-attach hydraulic motor from our LifeTrac infrastructure:

We have not yet tried this brush hog since modifying it this past winter, but it looks like we will use it soon unless we get the super-sized trimmer bugs worked out.

In summary, the super-sized trimmer is a low-cost, brute force way to go for rough mow-down of vegetative growth. It certainly works. It could probably be a quite effective in-situ shredder – for example for hay bales. One could scale this device to a large number of whacking strings, or chains.

We recommend the concept because it is a good example of using existing infrastructure. The basic trimmer costs about $20 to make – because the other components are part of the LifeTrac infrastructure already. It can also be scaled at negligible cost – perhaps up to 12 feet diameter for use with LifeTrac. This is significantly larger than the 5-foot diameter brush hog cut width. The super-sized trimmer practicality depends on the heavy, multipurpose build of the Universal Rotor – the motor for the trimmer. In the limit of a super-heavy build on the Universal Rotor – the string trimmer can gain extra scalability or flexibility. The purpose of the Universal Rotor is to accommodate all types of imaginable purposes.

Our existing prototype of the Universal Rotor is only Prototype I. We’ll be returning to an improved version thereof as soon as we get a chance. We’ve yet to run it as a tiller, cultivator, and post-hole digger, metal cutoff saw, tree saw, washing machine (though the honey extractor, interestingly, could probably double as a washing machine auger if automatic reciprocation controls are added), and possibly stump grinder. Outside of the post-hole digger and washing machine function, the other tasks require one to address considerable structural and other creative challenges.

Everything on this planet spins in one way or another, down to electrons. The Universal Rotor and open source string trimmer are a part of this important trend.

by Marcin at July 28, 2010 05:06 AM

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July 27, 2010

Henri Bergius - Aloha and the art of semantic web content

To bring CMS editing to the next level, the IKS project is working on a semantic HTML5 editor. This week we had a hackathon in Helsinki focusing on implementing our ideas with the Aloha Editor. In addition to enjoying the hot summer weather here, we accomplished quite a bit and in the end were able to present the whole pipeline of:

• Loading content from Midgard CMS to Aloha Editor
• Annotating our content with Google-compatible Person RDFa elements
• Saving the content back to Midgard
• ...and finally analysing the content with FISE to find more semantic information

The hackathon participants included developers from Nemein, Gentics, Infigo, Salzburg Research and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Some screenshots:

Editing content with Aloha in Midgard

Annotating persons with the Aloha RDFa plugin

RDFa annotation created with the semantic editor

Additional semantic information suggested by FISE

All the relevant code can be found from GitHub (see also the FISE Midgard integration).

by henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) at July 27, 2010 07:07 PM

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Open Source Ecology - Pipping and Growing

Here is an update on the first set of pips from Hexahatch v2.0.
Here is an update on the other peeps of Factor e Farm. In a few days, Sean and I will begin full fabrication documentation video on the next copy of The Liberator open source CEB press, where the funding basket for it is filling as we speak.

Open Source People from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

by Marcin at July 27, 2010 06:35 AM

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Stenskott » teirdez - teirdez

Jag har varit i Barcelona för att bland annat träffa en hel del sociala rörelser som på något sätt använder sig av eller opponerar sig emot den nuvarande spektrumpolitiken.

Okupem les ones (övers. Ockupera vågorna) är en organisation som arbetat för att göra spektrum mer tillgängligt för sociala rörelser sedan 2001. Deras linje är att dela alla frekvensområden i tre: en tredjedel för offentliga institutioner, en för kommersiell verksamhet, och en för sociala rörelser eller fria initiativ.

De har en webb-tv, men sände tidigare radio och tv i etern. De har fortfarande lokaler i stadsdelen Gracia för mediaproduktion och allmänna experiment. Kvinnan jag träffar i Barcelona berättar att de startade med ambitiösa planer om att driva politisk lobbying och mediaverksamhet samtidigt, men att hennes liv långsamt tagits över av byråkratin och ansträngningen att göra mediaskapandet möjligt.

En annan grupp jag träffade heter Radio Contrabanda. De är en fri radiostation sedan 1991 och sänder nyheter, analyser och musik nästan hela dagen. Stationen drivs helt av volontärer.

De beskriver sin situation som ”kvasi-laglig”. Frekvenserna de använder är licensierade till andra aktörer som inte använder dem, eller inte använder dem till sin fulla kapacitet, men eftersom Spanien fortfarande inte genomfört någon ”non-interference” policy har de inte juridisk rätt att använda frekvenserna.

Det sista initiativet, guifi.net, är inte alls kopplade till mediaskapande. Deras verksamhet är att sätta upp accesspunkter för helt gratis och fri tillgång till trådlöst internet. Hittills har de lyckats få upp sina accesspunkter i stora delar av Barcelona, och i katalonska bergen har flera mindre kommuner samarbetat med guifi.net för att öka tillgången till internet bland invånarna.

Guifi.nets problem ligger vid peering: de har blivit så populära att de inte kan förlita sig enbart på sina noders trådburna uppkopplingar för att få tillräcklig hastighet. Men telekommarknaden i Spanien är en av de sämst avreglerade i Europa och marknaden domineras totalt av det gamla statliga monopolet Telefónica. Små aktörer som guifi.net får inte köpa tillgång till Telefónicas nät, eftersom de inte genererar tillräckligt med trafik och därmed blir ointressanta som affärspartners.
Ett politiskt dekret har dessutom fastslagit att gratis trådlös uppkoppling i städer inte är förenlig med kommunala satsningar på infrastruktur. Rogier Baig berättar att det fått många kommuner att tveka inför att vara med i satsningen, trots att han och det stora nätverk av volontärer som jobbar med guifi.net är fullt beredda att sätta upp nätet till hårdvarans självkostnadspris och underhålla på volontärbasis. Vi pratar ett tag om möjligheten att sälja hårdvara och underhåll av densamma istället för att sälja bandbredd.

guifi.net är kopplade till initiativet Open Spectrum Alliance som jag nyligen fick kontakt med. De har en nyhetstjänst där de publicerar artiklar och nyheter om vad som händer med spektrumpolitiken världen över. De bedriver också lobbyverksamhet i Bryssel för ett öppnande av spektrumpolitiken i Europa, motsvarande de ansträngningar som gjordes i USA runt 1995-2003. Däremot, berättade Robert Horvitz för mig tidigare i somras, är det kanske inte helt önskvärt med helt fritt spektrum – istället kan man tänka sig licensiering av kapacitet, eller, som Okupem les ones förespråkar, delvis licensierat, delvis fritt.

Om Barcelona känns avlägset finns annars Amsterdams fria TV, AT1, som jag träffade i våras.

Vill man läsa tankar om Indiens spektrumpolitik finns ett par riktigt bra artiklar av Shyam på CIS-India.

Filed under: Pirate issues, Piratfrågor, Piratpartiet

by teirdez at July 27, 2010 02:09 AM

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July 24, 2010

Open Source Ecology - Getting Ready To Build: A Better Future

Things have been spectacular with William so far. We have basically managed to scale our progress twofold. Since he’s been here, we’ve seen full product release of the open source CEB press, The Liberator, and we’ve had significant progress on the open source tractor, LifeTrac Prototype II. We also deployed the first prototype of the heavy duty, open source drill press, which we’re now using as part of our fabrication infrastructure. We just reported on Prototype I of the 150 ton hole puncher . We look forward to using these tools towards optimizing production runs of The Liberator. We also got the first working prototype of Hexahatch, the automated chicken incubator, in operation. Four pips hatched as of now, and we have 70 eggs in there at present. We also deployed Prototype I of a honey extractor. Plus, Sean is on-site for the summer gathering documentary material, and his LifeTrac II update is choice. Also, if you haven’t seen our Economy in a Box presentation, check it out for some of the most recent thoughts. People are beginning to talk about us in mainstream books.

This leaves us in a good position to start construction of Solar Village 2010. Design work is occurring in the background. We need to build another CEB press, since we sold our first one. We have had a number of apparently serious inquiries, but so far, no money has crossed the table. We suspect that people want to see real product come out of the machine – ie, houses. Maureen still has not used her machine, and we’ve been busy in the developments of the above paragraph. Plus, we still need to finish LifeTrac Prototype II, build Power Cube Prototype II, and build the Soil Pulverizer Prototype II – all in preparation for building, which we were hoping would begin on August 15. We just burned $3800 to procure LifeTrac II parts, and we’re out of cash. We’d like to announce here that we are returning to the crowd-based funding baskets – with which we had decent success in our previous session of village-building adventures. Now this is Take Two on CEB construction, where Take One was a great learning experience. Now we’ve got Will with experience in brick laying, we’ve got mature technology on the CEB press, and Prototype II is forthcoming on both the Soil Pulverizer and LifeTrac. The CEB Build is straightforward, now that we have Full Product Release. This means that we can predict how long it will take to fabricate – about 2 weeks. We already have the hydraulic cylinders. The $2500 covers the balance of materials – minus some outsourced labor costs which we can now avoid because we have the hole puncher ready to use. The price structure for materials was around $3600 for The Liberator Beta v2.0 – and now we expect about $500 savings by doing hole punching in house. We do not expect to change anything on The Liberator build, as it’s a stable release. We may omit the soil sensor, since we found out that for practical considerations, activation of the hopper shaker works best when it is pre-set – such that the hopper is shaken after every brick pressing cycle.

Another note on The Liberator build is that if we are building one, it takes about the same amount of time to build two machines at the same time. That’s the nature of flexible fabrication ergonomics. Thus, if you know somebody who wants to buy one, send them our way.

The soil pulverizer Prototype II budget covers primarily the structural steel for the rotor and bucket, plus a larger PTO motor. The improvements in Prototype II include: (1), improved motor coupling to attain quicker slip-on attachment of interchangeable motors without using coupler pins; (2), 60% increase in torque on the motor over the former 6.15 cubic inch motor; (3), smaller bucket and reduced pulverizer width to improve weight balance and structural robustness, and (4), height control stops to maintain the pulverizer at the correct soil depth. Points (2), (3), and (4) are intended to address stalling of the motor – a problem which we had frequently when the pulverizer was moving forward too fast or going in too deep. Overall, these improvements are intended to combine for a more robust device that requires less skill to operate – such that it is more user-friendly and such that it can attain widespread use. It is worth mentioning that nobody else that we know of is utilizing the same soil pulverizer strategy – relegating this function to dedicated, stationary soil pulverizers. Our experience with Prototype I of the Soil Pulverizer has demonstrated that the design like ours – with integrated digging, pulverizer, and dumping functionality – is indeed sound. We believe that it can lead to a simplified CEB infrastructure – both in the equipment requirements and ergonomics of brick pressing. See further discussion on this point in our Soil Pulverizer blog post. Because we have demonstrated the feasibility and attractiveness of our approach, we don’t really understand why nobody else is using the same. We suspect that the flexibility of our modular design of LifeTrac make our approach feasible.

The Power Cube II budget covers the structural steel, hydraulic filters and bypass, hoses, quick couplers, and battery. We already have a 17.5 hp gas engine. Any engine size can be used, but we’re choosing a small one for reasons of cost and easy sourcing. Indeed, if you have a large lawnmower, we suggest ripping out the engine and upgrading to a more flexible LifeTrac Power Cube. Improvements over Power Cube I include: (1), a frame-integrated hydraulic reservoir and gas tank; (2), addition of a pressure bypass in case of accidental hose disconnection; (3), 2 sets of quick-attach fingers for moving or attaching to the quick connect plate of a tractor, so that the Power Cube can be moved or attached to one tractor with another tractor – instead of using hoists and human muscles; and (4), quick-attach hydraulic pump, so that larger or smaller pumps can provide either more fluid or more pressure, as needed. Point (1) eliminates the bulky hydraulic reservoir and gas tank of Prototype I, allowing for looser packing of the remaining components into the cube lattice. The overall improvements, in addition to the safety feature, focus around a much more transparent-looking design with easier interchangeability of the Power Cube between different devices. Power Cube II should also be easier to fabricate because of the additional space. Note also that we intend to replace the gasoline engine with a modern steam engine after we deploy the latter. We believe that the steam engine has not only caused the industrial revolution, but also that it carries tremendous significance for decentralizing power and producing decent(ralized) electricity. The steam engine may be powered by local biomass pellets, or solar concentrators – both of which are non-strategic resources. If you do not believe that deployment of a modern steam engine is an extremely worthwhile endeavor, then you are probably under the influence of centralization propaganda. The decentralization aspect of steam engines comes more from access to fuel, not from ease of fabrication – because a good steam engine is only slightly easier to fabricate than an internal combustion engine.

Finally, the LifeTrac II budget involves completion of quick-attach plates, fabrication of steel wheel tracks for added traction, and outsourcing wheel coupler lathing, since our open source lathe has not reached practical functionality. Improvements on LifeTrac II include: (1), monolithic design, as opposed to articulated design, for ease of fabrication; (2), dual loaders, for doubling implement-handling capacity; (3) quick-connect wheel motors, such that these can be used on other devices as needed; (4), quick-connect hydraulic control valves – such that these can also be used in other applications; (5) quick-attach Power Cubes as the engine units – feasibility of which we have already demonstrated; (6) stackability of Power Cubes, where 1-3 Power Cubes (18-54 hp) are a good match for the tractor, and up to 6 can be attached to the tractor for up to 250 horsepower (not practical, but possible, with larger Power Cubes); (7), wheel tracks for extra traction, which was not possible in the articulating LifeTrac I, (8), improved quick-attach plate coupling mechanism for automatic locking of implements in place with a lever, and (9), cross-ties on wheel-mounting plates for added strength, which may be required for forceful skid-steering. The above improvements for flexibility make LifeTrac II a true life-size lego set – for real equipment. Complete with the dual-loader, is this a flexible dream machine – possibly to rise as the Peoples’ Tractor?

In summary, the Tractor-CEB-Soil Pulverizer – and the infrastructure for their fabrication – is an important product package that should be taken to Full Product Release as soon as possible. Only the CEB has reached Release status, so there’s much work ahead. If we get more people like William to join us, we can really put the operations into high gear.

Our prospects are looking good. We have already had initial discussion with one of our partners on setting up an open source flexible fabrication facility for producing tractors, CEB presses, and soil pulverizers. Fabrication of these constitutes a small but robust economic development package relevant to addressing the agriculture, housing, power, and fabrication issues of resilient community development. We are in discussion on this package with high level officials of a particular South American country, which is apparently interested in genuine progress – free of IMF-type swindles. We are leaving the details of this out deliberately, as there are no promises here and the discussions are young. We know from experience that open source economic development is a high-risk endeavor, and there are many dead ends on the path to glory. However, it is quite encouraging that there exists at least one political leadership on this planet that is willing to even consider the type of economic transformation that is the substance of OSE. If we don’t score at this time, then it’s only a matter of time – as our work is based on creating the substance of prosperity, free of compromise.

The stakes are high. We are positioning the tractor-CEB-soil pulverizer package with the above in mind. The recent additions of the open source drill press and hole puncher to the open source Fab Lab, RepLab, are substantial progress towards closing the industrial divide between and within nations. Our initial negotiations as above may lead to a first, economically-significant instance of open business model replication. Careful documentation would be built into such a package, as such documentation is somewhat lacking at present for lack of resources.

People – the above is worth supporting. Contribute to these projects, and you can certainly feel good about contributing to the generation of significant results. Thanks for your support in advance, and we look forward to an exciting Take Two on CEB construction.

Guitar improvisation credits: Up the Dark Mountain We Go, by Lucas Gonzalez

by Marcin at July 24, 2010 08:02 AM

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Open Source Ecology - Open Source 150 Ton Hole Puncher

Our infrastructure for flexible fabrication along the lines of the Open Source Fab Lab, RepLab, is evolving nicely. We reported recently on Prototype I the heavy duty, open source, drill press, and here we are reporting on Prototype I deployment of our 150 ton hole puncher. Both of these are critical to fabrication ergonomics optimization for resilient communities in general, and, in particular – for Factor e Farm’s present fabrication of The Liberator open source CEB press and the LifeTrac open source tractor. For comparison, see earlier notes about our off-grid flex fab facility in a blog post from 2 years ago.

Here is a video on the hole puncher, with explanations.

Open Source Metal Hole Puncher – Prototype I from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

The implementation required a high level of attention to the  extreme heavy build and die positioning precision requirements – much more than anything we’ve done with the open source tractor, automated CEB press, or other devices. This is our first device that required at least some consideration of structural engineering – beyond brute-force overbuild. The local fab shop helped on the design. You can download the dxf design file at our design repository.

Regarding the hole puncher, the video showed the first hole punched – a humble 1/2″ hole in 1/4″ steel. The machine is designed for punching 1.5″ holes in 1″ thick steel, which we will test after procuring a larger die set. Future work involves adding a metal shear blade – a big scissor for trimming slabs of 1″ steel up to 12″ wide. In case you don’t know why this is relevant – a combination ironworker machine like this is the center of any flexible fabrication shop. This is especially relevant to lifetime, Design-for-Disassembly (DfD) products such as ours – which focus on holes and bolts instead of welding as the principal method of achieving lifetime DfD.

Imagine if we could also produce our own dimensional metal sections. Imagine down the road – with our induction furnace, we’ll roll our own steel from melted scrap and build new civilization – in a workshop of about 2000 square feet in size – at the cost of scrap steel plus pelletized biomass as fuel. Does that sound too simple?

Regarding the present cost of the hole puncher — our bill of materials for the hole puncher is:

1. Hydraulic cylinder:  $285
2. Main frame materials – $315
3. Materials for dies and holders – $62
4. Main puncher pin and guides materials – $170
5. Welding gas and wire – $50

Total came out to $882 in materials, plus $200 for outsourced labor because we don’t yet have our open source lathe. The labor was metal cutting and lathing of the main pressing pin – which consisted of a 1.5″ threaded shaft drilled into the press pin. For comparison – comparable ironworker machines with metal shearing and other functions included cost about $18k. Once again, ours is another major stride at cost reduction.

If we had to list the 10 key tools of a flex fab workshop, these are: acetylene torch, MIG welder, drill press, lathe, CNC torch table, 3D printer, hole puncher/metal shear, plus induction furnace, hot metal working, CNC mill, and small mill/drill for making circuits. We’ve built everything to date here with a torch, welder, and drill, while outsourcing lathe work. This shows that a small tool set can do a lot, even without the more advanced components. Access to induction furnace/hot working would allow us to reinvent civilization from scrap steel, in ample supply from anthropogenic detritus.

Note that all these Top 10 should be open source for the world to become a better place. Distributive economics are founded upon open-sourcing the means of significant production – especially of machines that can make other machines.

To pump this topic further to a level of geopolitical consequences – our basic claim is that for post scarcity, resilient communities that exist on the smallest possible scale for purposes of internalizing responsibility – the main enabling feature is open source, flexible fabrication. The hippies running off into the woods didn’t get this point right, and various modern branches of technological utopians have not gotten the point about appropriate, modern technology – ie, advanced technology without design-for-failure bells and whistles.

There is a number of progresssive economic movements at play – which go by names such as relocalization, post-scarcity production, transition towns, transhumanists, resilient communities, Venus Project, sustainable development, or ‘ousting invading colonials’. Self-determination is a common thread, and we see that effective means of open source production are the foundation for self-determination.  Nobody that we know of has an explicit plan for what an appropriate technology base for the future may look like, though Community for Tomorrow proposes explicit, tangible solutions that are closest in nature to the ‘opensource the entire, critical infrastructure of society’ message that we propose.

Indeed, modern discussion of appropriate technology has degenerated to the applications of third world aid, or has disappeared altogether. The more integrated point of view on this would be to discuss closure of the industrial divide between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ worlds – or not causing the problems of wealth disparity in the first place. Post-scarcity economics are a practical outcome of appropriate technology, as the waste cycle is replaced with lifetime design. We discussed this somewhat in our last blog post

by Marcin at July 24, 2010 02:05 AM

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July 23, 2010

Ministry of Love (without imported items) - crossroads (what to do) - lovely video installation

July 23, 2010 11:10 AM

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Henri Bergius - Frankencamera aims to make cameras open and programmable

Frankencamera, or fCam, the open source computational photography platform from Stanford's Camera 2.0 project was unleashed for the Nokia N900 this Wednesday. PhysOrg has a story outlining the significance of this:

Computational photography refers to the ways computers can extend the capabilities of digital imaging by combining multiple photographs taken with different camera settings to create an image that could not be taken in a single shot, or with an ordinary camera.

Some of these new ways of combining images can be done in Photoshop or another such program, but until now they could not be done inside the camera, Levoy said. That's because commercial cameras are closed to development by all but their manufacturers. Frankencamera, on the other hand, brings computational photography directly to the camera, by making the camera a programmable platform.

I installed fCamera and the HDR photo assistant from Maemo extras-devel yesterday, and the results (taking .DNG RAW images, automatically generating HDR pictures) seem quite impressive. Here is a quick example from our office. Sun is shining outside and the office is not lit:

For comparison, here is the same setting with the regular N900 camera application:

It will be interesting to see what developers will come up with, now that all these camera capabilities are available through an open API!

by henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) at July 23, 2010 11:05 AM

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July 22, 2010

daniel.haxx.se - C-ares, now and ahead!

The project c-ares started many years ago (March 2004) when I decided to fork the existing ares project to get the changes done that I deemed necessary – and the original project owner didn’t want them.

I did my original work on c-ares back then primarily to get a good asynchronous name resolver for libcurl so that we would get around the limitation of having to do the name resolves totally synchronously as the libc interfaces mandate. Of course, c-ares was and is more than just name resolving and not too surprisingly, there have popped up other projects that are now using c-ares.

I’m maintaining a bunch of open source projects, and c-ares was never one that I felt a lot of love for, it was mostly a project that I needed to get done and when things worked the way I wanted them I found myself having ended up as maintainer for yet another project. I’ve repeatedly mentioned on the c-ares mailing list that I don’t really have time to maintain it and that I’d rather step down and let someone else “take over”.

After having said this for over 4 years, I’ve come to accept that even though c-ares has many users out there, and even seems to be appreciated by companies and open source projects, there just isn’t any particular big desire to help out in our project. I find it very hard to just “give up” a functional project, so I linger and do my best to give it the efforts and love it needs. I very much need and want help to maintain and develop c-ares. I’m not doing a very good job with it right now.

Threaded name resolves competes

I once thought we would be able to make c-ares capable of becoming a true drop-in replacement for the native system name resolver functions, but over the years with c-ares I’ve learned that the dusty corners of name resolving in unix and Linux have so many features and fancy stuff that c-ares is still a long way from that. It has also made me turn around somewhat and I’ve reconsidered that perhaps using a threaded native resolver is the better way for libcurl to do asynchronous name resolves. That way we don’t need any half-baked implementations of the resolver. Of course it comes at the price of a new thread for each name resolve, which turns really nasty of you grow the number of connections just a tad bit, but still most libcurl-using applications today hardly use more than just a few (say less than a hundred) simultaneous transfers.

Future!

I don’t think the future has any radical changes or drastically new stuff in the pipe for c-ares. I think we should keep polishing off bugs and add the small functions and features that we’re missing. I believe we’re not yet parsing all records we could do, to a convenient format.

As usual, a project is not about how much we can add but about how much we can avoid adding and how much we can remain true to our core objectives. I wish the growing popularity will make more people join the project and then not only to through a single patch at us, but to also hand around a while and help us somewhat more.

Hopefully we will one day be able to use c-ares instead of a typical libc-based name resolver and yet resolve the same names.

Join us and help us give c-ares a better future!

by daniel at July 22, 2010 09:52 PM

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Magnus Hagander's PostgreSQL blog - PGDay.EU announced and call for papers

PGDay.EU 2010 has finally been announced. It will be in Stuttgart, Germany, on December 6th to 8th. More details available on the conference website.

We have also sent out our call for papers. If you have done something interesting with PostgreSQL, please go ahead and submit a talk! We are currently looking for talks in both English and German!

by nospam@example.com (Magnus Hagander) at July 22, 2010 05:57 PM

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Henri Bergius - Recent performance improvements for Midgard 8.09

Midgard 8.09 is an industrial CMS that is now in Long-Term Supported stage, with the community maintaining it until 2013. As we all know, performance is a feature, and with a CMS framework that has lived through many changes including transitions from PHP4 to 5.2 and from Classic Midgard era to the modern APIs, there is a lot to do.

For the next 8.09.10 release we decided to put quite a bit of efforts into performance tuning, with some excellent work done by Content Control to simplify ACL handling and cache navigation information. As you can see, the result is quite impressive:

What is left to be done is some work with the multilingual content database queries. After that we should be good to go with what is probably the fastest Midgard1 ever.

by henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) at July 22, 2010 11:35 AM

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July 21, 2010

Karsten on Free Software - A Free Software week in the Basque Country

With sights like the old town of San Sebastián and the Guggenheim museum at Bilbao, the Basque country in northern Spain is certainly worth a visit. But the reason that I and FSFE staffer Rainer Kersten spent a week there had nothing to do with old houses, art or pintxos. (Well, *almost* nothing to do with pintxos.) We went there to meet with people from the vibrant community of Free Software activists, to give talks and to build links between the local and the European level.

We came into town from RMLL at Bordeaux in Rainer’s 2CV, a car that by now is something of a minor celebrity in its own right. After settling in with the mayor of Baskooge at San Sebastián, the first stop was a meeting with the regional government on Tuesday in Vitoria.

This meeting was organised by the Technical Office for the Support of Free Software (SALE), which was recently set up by the government, and is run by a number of experienced Free Software people. The Basque government sent some rather high-level representatives, with two Directors General present at the meeting, as well as the director of EJIE, the publicly-owned company to which the government has outsourced its IT work.

Most of all, the government representatives were curious to hear what is being done with Free Software elsewhere in Europe. I presented some example cases, such as Munich, CommunesPlone, and the huge @ndared project in Andalusia. The Basque government just embarked on an effort to open up government data and make it available online. But they don’t yet have a strategy for using Free Software as a motor for regional economic development. This clearly was a new perspective for them, and I made an effort to get the point across that local companies prosper when the public sector moves to Free Software.

After the formal meeting and the obligatory three-hour lunch, we drove back to San Sebastián, arriving just in time for the first Fellowship meeting there. There were Free Software activists with impressive experience, such as a teacher who has succeeded in migrating her school to GNU/Linux.

On Wednesday I had a couple of interviews with a regional radio station and a newspaper, and then it was time to move the base camp to Bilbao.

After a live radio interview [mp3, sorry] there on Thursday, I gave a talk [20100715bienvenidos_al_mainstreambilbao.pdf] about the role of Free Software for regional businesses and the public sector in a technology park. It was really well attended, and we got great feedback. From there, we went directly on to a networking meeting with regional Free Software activists at Deusto University in Bilbao, where Txipi organises a yearly Free Software summer school. We talked about what people in the Basque community are doing, and how linking up with FSFE can help them become more effective.

After so much work, it was time to relax a bit with friends, and those who would soon become friends. We had a Fellowship meeting in Bilbao, where our crowd of fifteen or more people quickly overloaded each bar we went to. The meeting only wrapped up when the waiter took the table away from underneath our last caña.

After too few hours of sleep (again) it was Friday morning, and I headed to the airport for my flight home. It was a great week in a wonderful region. We met a lot of people who have been active for Free Software for a long time. We also came at an exciting point in time, when both the government and local businesses are wanting to emulate the successes that Free Software has brought elsewhere.

by gerloff at July 21, 2010 06:57 PM

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Henri Bergius - Zeitgeist does location: what did I do while in Brussels?

Zeitgeist, the desktop activity logging engine is now becoming geo-aware. From Seif Lotfy's blog:

It allows you to ask Zeitgeist stuff like

• “Get me the recent files I edited at university”
• “Who do I contact most when I am at School?”
• “Which pictures did I take in Brazil?”
• “Where was I when an Email came in?”
• “What files did I open during the conference?”

As I've been advocating since 2006, location is important for making applications smarter. While you might not remember where you stored some file, you probably remember where you were when working on it. Then Zeitgeist's location features, powered by GeoClue, will be able to get it for you.

This is especially cool since Zeitgeist is coming for Maemo as well. My laptop is quite mobile, but the N900 is even more so.

by henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) at July 21, 2010 05:16 PM

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July 18, 2010

Ministry of Love (without imported items) - David Harvey summarising what's going on (and what's going wrong) in 10 minut...

July 18, 2010 11:13 AM

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July 17, 2010

Ministry of Love (without imported items) - (Image)

July 17, 2010 07:29 PM

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daniel.haxx.se - poll vs select

I’m a person working a lot with networking and development around it. I mostly do this on Linux, often involving drivers or otherwise very close to the operating system and C and the core libraries.

The other day I once again fell over some random inaccuracy about poll compared to select and instead of trying to whine on some IRC channel or complain on their mailing list, I decided I would instead strike back by writing up and presenting a web page of my own. It details as much as possible about poll vs select and related event-based functions. I want it to become a placeholder for everything that is relevant to say about poll and select in a comparison aspect and when comparing them to event-based alternatives like libevent and libev.

So the next time I face someone not quite understanding this whole situation or perhaps when someone reiterates something that isn’t quite true, I have a resource to point to.

Not to mention that I think this new poll vs select page fits in nicely with my other “X vs Y” articles and docs pages I’ve written the last few years.

If you find flaws, or miss details or have questions about this page. Please do not hesitate to comment here, or to mail me about it or tweet me on twitter or whatever method you prefer. I appreciate your feedback!

poll vs select

by daniel at July 17, 2010 02:56 PM

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July 16, 2010

GNU Hackers Meetings - News - GNU Hackers meeting in the Hague - 1 week to go

by Brian Gough at July 16, 2010 07:59 PM

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July 15, 2010

Open Source Ecology - OSE License for Post Scarcity Economics

While there are many open source licenses available, we feel that none of them address a practical and tactical approach towards creating a post-scarcity civilization – in mindset and in practice. Therefore, we are publishing v1.0 of the OSE License for Post Scarcity Economics. The license is intended to define the general intent behind our work, and it is intended to make our logic transparent – especially to those new to open source culture. We also feel that the possibility of the open source economy is greatly under-appreciated and therefore, its impact is still in its infancy. While open source culture is well-understood in the software community, most people are not aware of the possibilities with respect to physical products and infrastructures. This may soon change, with progressive writings such as those of Juliet Schor’s Plenitude. Our license is intended to promote the transition towards an open source civilization, with the open business models that we are beginning to demonstrate as the substance behind such a transition. Comments and discussion on the license are welcome.

Introduction, Philosophy, and the OSE License for Post Scarcity Economics

Completion of The Liberator Beta v2.0 marks the first Full Product Release of Open Source Ecology (OSE). Herein we clarify our intentions and strategic issues behind this product, and future releases, such that any user or beneficiary of OSE’s work, as well as any third parties, may understand our work and intent more completely.

OSE is a non-governmental organization formed for the purpose of active development of resilient communities and economies. We are best described as an open source product development or an open source economic development entity, working for the interest of all of humanity. Our particular approach is addressing the issue of effective production, as a foundation for creating post-scarcity economies. This implies thorough evolution of macro-social psychology towards the acceptance of a post-scarcity mindset – namely, that we can all get along, and that ‘there’s enough for everybody’. To date, civilization has failed in addressing these fundamental points. While addressing these points requires the maturing or evolution of people on psychological and spiritual fields, we believe that addressing the physical needs of humans effectively can be a direct route to promoting such evolution. This belief constitutes a motivation for our approach of developing effective tools of production. We believe further that if material constraints or physical needs were removed as the fundamental struggle of humans, then humanity would begin to have a chance to evolve – to freedom.

With the above philosophy in mind, OSE has set out to open-source key tools for producing the infrastructures for living and working. Our open source work starts with open-sourcing designs for the tools of interest, and it continues to the open sourcing of the actual business models for their production. Our aim is replication – or productive enterprise being replicated by a diversity of producers. This is the essence of free enterprise, defined as non-monopolistic production by a large number of stakeholders. We aim to encourage competition, and not to suppress it. Our aim is the distribution of economic power to many people, along the lines of Jeffersonian democracy. We believe that scarce resources are not necessary to fuel advanced civilization, as human needs and societal advancement can be fueled by widespread, local resources – under the assumption of human wisdom in their life and in their technology choices.

We set forth these principles as our underlying motivations. We can only encourage adopters of our work – and those who replicate open enterprise – to contribute their improvements, and especially their business models, back to the commons. We do not require it, however, as we do not believe in coercion – defined as acting against one’s own will, even if it is done contractually. We have produced our designs by standing on the shoulders of giants before us, and we do not claim any of our work to be original. We also feel that to claim originality as such is arrogance of ego, and that those pursuing patents to protect ‘their’ inventions are lacking in human spirit.

We believe that ‘sharing’ is accomplished most directly by sharing not the ‘fish’, but by sharing the ‘fishing pole.’ In particular, that ‘fishing pole’ is the open product design – the tool that allows one to reproduce the item of interest by using that tool. Even beyond the ‘fishing pole’ are ‘instructions’ on how to produce the ‘fishing pole’. The analogue of these ‘instructions,’ in the economic sense, is the open source business model. If we  were to apply ancient wisdom of ‘sharing’ to the digital age – then we would share open source business models.

That sums up our beliefs on a tactical approach for bringing about post-scarcity economics. We are using this work to bootstrap-fund further product developments, and all of our energy goes to such development. Our goal is to produce significant contributions to open source economic development. We are positioning our marketing strategy to underscore this point. If you support our work, you are contributing directly to the above stated goals. Our leadership prides itself in its integrity, honor, and commitment to effective development of post-scarcity economics by developing open source versions of key, economically-significant tools for the advancement of civilization without geopolitical compromise.

If you like our work, consider buying our products. If you are not interested in our products but want to see more open source product designs becoming available for addressing pressing world issues, then consider subscribing to the True Fans by going to Support OSE at http://openfarmtech.org. We also need help with documentation (CAD, fabrication drawings, technical writing), Product Release CDs, branding, marketing, publicity, general resource development, and many other tasks outlined at the Remote Collaboration wiki page. If you have these skills and if you are interested in moving our work forward in alignment with our values, please contact us.

We also believe that achieving post-scarcity economics is not a far-fetched goal. The number of goods and services that humans need is well-bounded, and likewise, the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is well-bounded – with only 40 key technologies. These technologies are sufficient to build further technologies and infrastructures. Since these are generative in nature, we believe that open-sourcing them is sufficient to create advanced, post-scarcity civilization. It will take about US$2M total to develop all the tools within a 5 year period as of the present date. Once that is done, our work is done, and we can move on to more interesting pursuits as well, knowing that the world is in good hands on the material front.

We are interested in helping you directly with enterprise replication, under the condition that you also contribute to open source product development of enabling technologies for post-scarcity, resilient communities.

We believe that giving our business models away helps us, as opposed to hurting our efforts. On the practical side, we know that we can always produce and capture the high value of effective production – and we have competitive edge because of primacy. We do not intend to compete with remote efforts, simply because it is wasteful to transport things over long distance. We are not threatened by monopolies, first because we are not for sale, and second, for practical reasons of transportation costs, quality of service, ethics, and primacy.

We provide our products under the OSE Label. This is branding intended to verify the desirable features promoted by OSE, or OSE Specifications. The OSE Label shall provide transparent documentation and a score, provided on the label, with a respective logo for each product release. The qualities documented on the label include: localization of production; availability of documentation (plans, fabrication procedure, open business model, user manual, product release CD, etc); lifetime design (design for disassembly, modularity, interchangeability of parts); systems design; ecological soundness; etc.). We are open to others producing under this label as well, if the producer is able to meet OSE Specifications to a degree equivalent or greater than our own product. The OSE Label certification will be administered by OSE or a collaborating organization.

We also hereby declare that all hacker spaces are authorized resellers of our products.  This is a means for other allied efforts to earn from our efforts as well. The details will be negotiated on a case by case basis, so please contact us if you are interested in helping this work.

We believe that ‘saving the world’ is a tangible concept which requires that we simply become responsible for production – as a prerequisite to other forms of responsibility – to the point that we generate widespread access to post-scarcity means of production.  This is a heavy task for a world indoctrinated with dependence, illiteracy, alienation, and impotence – but we also believe that this can turn around completely within a generation. We believe that getting to the point of developing the entire infrastructure for post-scarcity, resilient communities is a 5 year task requiring a budget under US$5M, and that new economies and means of exchange are around the corner for our taking if we choose to do so.

This license is written with the intent of good faith, integrity, and commitment – towards transparency within the process of creating post-scarcity economies. By accepting these terms, supporting OSE work, or by getting involved with the work of OSE, you are accepting to return the same intent.

by Marcin at July 15, 2010 05:58 PM

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Maxwell's Demon - IMG_3393

Following on from the “How do shapes fill space?” exhibit at the RSSE last year, the Science Museum accepted our offer of some of the zometool models. There were three classics, the 120-cell, 600-cell and 24-cell, but one more unique model. A patch of icosahedral tiling:

I then decided to build a second (larger) version, and being an idiot this week when I am packing to move house, seemed like a sensible move (look for evidence of packing below!). So I built this yesterday and it was picked up today. I do not know if/when it will be on display, but at least it is now in the collection. For the construction I made a 3d model on the computer and then copied it in zome. The outer shape is essentially a dodecahedron, however the tiles inside do not have this symmetry, so the model as a whole has no symmetries.

As it was sunny I was able to get some nice photos, like the first one I showed, but this is of most interest because of the great shadow that it made, so here is a close up:

by gelada at July 15, 2010 05:23 PM

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July 14, 2010

Open Source Ecology - LifeTrac II: Frame

Here are some additional details from Sean’s video documentation work regarding the frame of the open source tractor – LifeTrac – Prototype II. William discusses some of the details on the frame, which was introduced in a previous post. From Sean’s videos so far, I like this one the most so far for its aesthetic qualities. You can read more about LifeTrac Prototype I here.

by Marcin at July 14, 2010 05:48 PM

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July 13, 2010

Open Source Ecology - Honey Extractor Tractor: The Craziest Thing Done with LifeTrac So Far

LifeTrac, our open source tractor, features extreme flexibility by design. We just used LifeTrac as a honey extractor. We mounted our universal rotor on the front-end loader, and used it to extract honey from comb. The process starts with a hot knife to open up the comb. We made the hot knife from a heat shrink heat gun coupled to a tube with a sharpened blade of 1/8″ steel welded to the tube, and the hole of the tube was reduced by welding on a bolt washer. The blade gets hot and cuts the comb relatively well, though this is not as user-friendly as a standard electric knife because your hands get too messy with honey all over, so the heat gun risks getting flooded with honey. We request help with the open-sourcing of a hot knife if anyone has explicit ideas on how to make one. While a fed dollars in parts, hot knives run for $90 at the store.

The honey extraction process involves centrifuging combs of honey, which are opened with a hot knife as above. See our operation in action:

Open Source Honey Extractor from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.

Here’s an operational performance review.

We built this first honey extractor prototype to handle 2 frames at one time. This sounds like inefficiency, but in practice, it works as well as an extractor of, say, 12 or more frame capacity. Why? Because we can start and stop the extractor literally immediately – as the 20 horsepower motor has no problem spinning up and slowing down with a small load – almost instantly. This means that each set of 2 combs takes a total of about 20-30 seconds of extraction time. We could have built a 4 frame extractor, or more, but the 2-frame is faster in extracting than a single person can feed the extractor with uncapped comb.

We produced about 8-9 gallons of honey in a 2 hour run, with 2 people. We extracted directly into a 55 gallon storage drum.

Thus, the 2-frame version suffices, and it would probably suffice to extract honey as fast as 2 people with hot knives can uncap the comb. Thus, we are confident that the caliber of our $25 extractor setup rivals the capacity of honey extractors in the $1000 range. This is another major score for cost reduction via integrated, open source design.

Our design for the extractor rotor assembly involves a 1/4″ wall, 2″ tube with metal grate welded to it, plus sides and bottom made of 1/4″x2″ steel. The rotor is connected to our Universal Rotor with a coupler. Both of these are already part of our LifeTrac infrastructure, and we just demonstrated the heavy duty drill press powered with the same interchangeable rotor.

by Marcin at July 13, 2010 09:08 PM

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July 12, 2010

Open Source Ecology - Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

Here is a short video where Juliet Schor – author and Professor of Sociology at Boston College  -  discusses her new book, Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. Factor e Farm is included for about one minute, as an example of the concepts that she is discussing. We are just posting about 3 minutes of her talk, for context regarding her comments about us:

We posted the full video in a former post. We note for our readers that – while Professor Schor states that we are a resilient community -the more accurate way to describe us is that we are a resilient community in the making. We are far from that goal.

We contacted Juliet Schor by email some time ago regarding collaboration, but so far we’ve had no response. If you have any leads on how to reach her, let us know.

While we are on the topic of our audiences’ perceptions – we frequently receive comments that we are ‘not really resilient/autonomous/sustainable’ because we can’t do things like ‘clean room technology or production of metals.’ Let’s set this point straight: we are very limited in our ‘sufficiency’ all together. We depend wholly on industrial feedstocks, such as metal and hydraulics components, and while we produce some food on the farm, our food still comes from the store. We are off-grid on electricity via solar panels, we harvest our own rainwater, and we can produce biodiesel – but all of these are not truly resilient solutions because the infrastructure used to build these is also largely from the store. Our orchard will be dripping with fruit soon, though it’s still young; and we may have plenty of chicken soon.

What we do here is the open-sourcing of key infrastructure technologies. We have a long way to go before full technological recursion allows us to not only make components, but also the feedstocks. We also emphasize that our commitment to full recursion is a fundamental goal – up to things like smelting metals from clay and semiconductors from sand – not to mention full agricultural resilience up to combines, and energy resilience up to full fuel sufficiency via pelletized-biomass/modern steam engines. These are all proven concepts, which if open-sourced, become economically feasible as the foundation for resilient communities. We don’t really believe that any technological process cannot be done on a small scale – including full-blow semiconductor and microelectronics production utilizing local sand as a feedstock and utilizing our own eenrgy – as the extreme example of what can be done on the scale of a 40 acre farm. RepLab is our main strategy to achieve these goals. Subscribe to support our work.

by Marcin at July 12, 2010 07:07 PM

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Karsten on Free Software - Vive la liberté: RMLL in Bordeaux

I spent the weekend at the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre in Bordeaux, France.This is the biggest Free Software meeting in France, and the community is tremendously active. There are lots of groups doing great work, from April via Aful and user-operated ISP French Data Network, and I met many impressive, smart and dedicated people.

Benjamin Bayart, the president of French Data Network, asked me an interesting question: Outside France, are there any other user-operated ISPs in Europe? A quick poll of FSFE’s booth staff didn’t turn up any, so I’m passing the question on to you, the lazyweb. If you know other user-operated ISPs, please tell me in the comments.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t come earlier and attend the talks taking place during the week. But the public show of Free Software projects this weekend was right by the river, bringing in lots of people who just wanted to have a stroll. As is the custom with traditional French villages, it was very well organised and tightly run by a competent and respected village chief:

From here, I’m going on to the Basque country in Spain, where I’ll give a number of talks and we’ll have Fellowship meetings in San Sebastián and Bilbao. Hope to see you there!

by gerloff at July 12, 2010 02:04 PM

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July 11, 2010

Oscar Swartz :: Texplorer - Varför tar kvinnor betalt för sex?

by Oscar Swartz at July 11, 2010 06:16 PM

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Open Source Ecology - June Agriculture Walkthrough at Factor e Farm

Here is a video produced by Sean, on the agriculture overview of Factor e Farm:

The bottom line is that resilience in food is not difficult to come by, but it presently requires more energy than we have with 2 full time people – engaged fully in open source equipment development. We are prioritizing technical development, such that appropriate-technology mechanized agriculture makes food provision effective. Our next priorities in terms of the type of generalists we’d like to have at Factor e Farm is 2 more flexible fabricators and the open source agroecologist. The flexible fabricators should generalize in power electronics and CNC controls, and the agroecologics should generalize in agricultural and processing equipment development.

by Marcin at July 11, 2010 05:55 PM

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Ministry of Love (without imported items) - music snob re-education camp

music snob re-education camp

July 11, 2010 11:31 AM

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July 09, 2010

Open Source Ecology - Open Source Chicken Incubator – Working Prototype Complete

Last year, we have begun work on the automatic, open source chicken incubator – Hexahatch. It did not work well, primarily because the big rotor was too heavy. This year’s design – Hexahatch v2.0 – was changed to a simpler, still-air design, with a flat disk as the rotor for turning the eggs. We finally have a working prototype, after replacing a faulty thermostat and after upgrading the motor to a stronger one. See the incubator in action:

Here is an explanation of the build and issues involved:

You can see the initial CAD drawings at our project management site, and the key parts list on the wiki. If you would like to build Hexahatch II, we are confident that the design is sound, though it has a couple of bugs. We will build another prototype prior to product release. We need to build a more attractive, tighter box – which has no problems now in the middle of summer – but in early spring, it will probably leak too much heat – for those concerned with energy use in off-grid operation. The biggest challenge may be obtaining the 1/8″ steel disk. We cut ours with an acetylene torch. The motor chosen has ample torque, and the electronic timer works well. The only thing not shown in the video which must be fixed for proper operation is putting padding on the cross-bars. We had an egg break when moving against these bars.

Hexahatch II holds about 100 eggs and maintains them at 100-103 degrees Fahrenheit for 21 days, the time needed for them to hatch out. We’ve had the temperature steady at about 101-102 degrees, while the environment varied from 70 to 90 Fahrenheit. Hexahatch II may be used for continuous hatching, as eggs ready to hatch may be placed inside the incubator off the rotor. New eggs may be added continuously, such that one may hatch out up to 5 eggs per day on a continuous basis. All in all, the 100 egg capacity allows on to multiply as few as 5 super-laying chickens to a population of 1700 in one year.

Has the burden of the sitting chicken not been removed by the addition of this technology to Factor e Farm? While hens will continue to sit and hatch out chicks, we now expect the population of chicks at Factor e Farm to be sufficient for eating chicken in the middle of winter. To date, we never had enough chickens to eat, as numerous predators ate them before we did. That is why we now have 2 rat terriers for vermin protection, which we will report on at a later date.

Practically speaking, it may now be nearly effortless to raise, say 200 free range chickens in a season, and have them for winter food, assuming the rat terriers are doing their job in taking care of predators.

by William at July 09, 2010 11:01 PM

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Losca - Unboxing and Tinkering Dell Latitude 2110 with Ubuntu 9.10

This entry includes a few photos of my Dell Latitude 2110 which shipped with Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix. Mostly it's however a critical view on the software shipped. Critical simply because I investigate it quite closely to see how it could be improved especially when sold to end users in non-English countries in the future. The device itself is great, as is the Ubuntu shipped with it. The laptop has the 1.83GHz Atom N470 which is quite nice together with its integrated and battery saving graphics. I also chose 1366x768 resolution for the screen and 16GB SSD for storage. But anyway, this is not a review of any sort.

Currently Dell Latitude 2110 netbook is the only laptop available with Ubuntu in the Dell Finland's web store. A few others have specifications that list Ubuntu as a choice, but in the actual customization view there is no Ubuntu to be selected. So this is the only one, and also only for corporate customers - the web site even says "big companies". In reality though this is reflected in one and only place - there is a mandatory "Company" field in the order form. However, not even the company ID ("Y-tunnus") is required. I did use a company name there, but I wonder if they would care if one would just put "-" or "Ubuntu Finland" or anything there...




Software Observations

I boot it up, and was greeted first with a Dell EULA. Next up was familiar (Ubuntu 9.10 era) Ubuntu logo, white on black. Some churning and a set up wizard was presented:



It worked nicely otherwise, but even though I selected Finnish as the language, it first suggested US keyboard by default. This is in contrast to what normal Ubuntu installer does - offers Finnish keyboard as well.

After that the Ubuntu Netbook interface appeared, and I checked around a bit. Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix shipped with Latitude 2110 seems quite default. No extra repositories. Extra software however is installed, noticed by simply looking through Ubuntu menus: they include Dell Recovery Media creation tool, Citrix Receiver and Vmware View Client.



Digging a bit deeper, I checked the package selection with Synaptic. The reason there are no extra repositories is that packages are installed without repositories. The following packages were "local or obsolete" after refreshing the normal Ubuntu repositories:

Local/main:
- alsa-driver-hda-intel-dkms (git.20100301)
- dell-recovery
- realtek-rts-pstor-card-driver-dkms
- vmware-view-client

Local/non-free
- ctxusb
- icaclient
- libmotif4
- libmrm4
- libuil4
- libxm4

The great thing is that seemingly most of the customization is indeed done via packages. Great job with both that and correctly separating archive entries depending on whether the software is free or not. The packages themselves are located in the recovery partition of the hard drive.

Some more package observations:
- adobe-flashplugin is installed by default from Canonical partner repository (and the repository is enabled by default)
- besides it, no extra non-free software is installed, that is nothing from multiverse and only bcmwl-kernel-source from restricted
- also, nothing from universe

Language Problems

I didn't expect a fully Finnish laptop since the language of Ubuntu couldn't be selected when customizing the order, and I didn't get one. It's clear there is no effort yet put to actual localized offerings, but still it was possible to choose (any) language with the first boot of Latitude 2110.

Language problems are quite ok at this point since the device is not being sold as a localized home user product yet. Nevertheless, it's good to list issues that need to be fixed before localized devices can be sold. At least in Finnish, dunno how's the state of for example Inspiron 10 devices shipped in Germany and elsewhere to also end users via web.

Number two problem regarding languages software was (number one being the wrong suggested keyboard) that full Finnish support was not offered to be installed (and it wasn't installed by default). Since the selection of language was possible during first run, suggesting download of or automatically downloading language support should be done. Normal Ubuntu does it also in Ubuntu 9.10 just nicely also in the cases that installation is done without Internet connection / full language support, so somehow Dell has unfortunately disabled that feature or not allowing it to run. The hook that checks the language support and shows a message is included in language-selector, the message itself in file /usr/share/language-support/incomplete-language-support-gnome.note.

I ran Language Selector manually, which fixed the problem and indeed works fine nowadays in Ubuntu. However, I also noticed that in Language Selector "For my menus and windows, use" had "English (United States)" selected, so only the second item had Finnish selected. It seems therefore that the setting up of the language during setup wizard doesn't do a complete job anyway for the new user created at least. Only after selecting it manually did the language tool correctly download and enable all the needed support for my language.

The Only Big Problem

Now for the only big WTF during my tinkering:

/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00secure containing lines:

APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "true";
Aptitude::CmdLine::Ignore-Trust-Violations "true";

This simply leads to eg. synaptic package manager complaining about all upgrades being unauthenticated, and elsewhere possible well needed warnings are simply not shown. I have no idea what's the basis for shipping this kind of security hindering settings with the laptop.

What Next

After these observations and being quite happy with a laptop that has Ubuntu straight out-of-the-box (which also saved 80€ of money + taxes compared to default OS), I created a recovery ISO image with Dell's tools and then I let Update Manager upgrade Ubuntu to 10.04.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was smooth enough already, but I also upgraded latest Intel graphics drivers from xorg-edgers. My only irritation is the Broadcom WLAN driver 'wl'. It works just fine in 10.04 LTS. The irritation is the amount of battery eating wakeups it generates even when there is no traffic going on. AFAIK it's a non-free driver from the vendor, and once again it's one of those that works in principle but is miles from being a well behaving kernel driver. It seems the free b43 driver does not support the BCM43224 chipset (14e4:4353) yet, so unfortunately I'm currently stuck with this driver. Luckily the laptop (and Ubuntu) is otherwise so great on using power, that I still get 5+ hours of battery usage at least (haven't measured much yet).

I'm very happy with what Dell is doing. I do hope the consumer sales would soar (and become available in Finland in the first place via the consumer retail channels there already exist). I also hope the language support bugs would be fixed - it's not tremendously hard, I could probably fix and test all the problems myself if I'd be given the task. Maybe the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS offerings will already have some of it working better. All in all the Dell Latitude 2110 with Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix was a problem-free ride, and had I simply used it in English it would have worked out-of-the-box smooth as butter.

by noreply@blogger.com (Timo Jyrinki) at July 09, 2010 10:13 PM

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Images

January 01, 1970

Recent Uploads tagged fscons - thank you

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - Werner & Stian

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - Mirko

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - laptops beer and discussions

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - next talk in five

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - taking notes

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - we were there

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - Social event: Pre-registration mingle

blondinrikard posted a photo:

This is *one* way to mingle ;-)

by blondinrikard at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - trust me

Wrote posted a photo:

by Wrote at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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Recent Uploads tagged fscons - The FSCONS elk!

blondinrikard posted a photo:

Look closely in the middle. What's wrong with this picture? Weirdest thing that happened during FSCONS 2009!

by blondinrikard at January 01, 1970 12:00 AM

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