Things are looking great so far with this hairbrained project of ours.
Fabulous, actually: Bolt | Peters is super interested in the project and wants me to work on it for some percent of my total time at work. Which is fan-freaking-tastic! Thanks BP!
If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out [...]

There has been a lot of excitement recently around a couple of developments in touch screen interfaces: First there was the insane presentation at TED 2006. Secondly, of course, the iPhone made everyone all hot in the pants for it’s touchable goodness.
In Malawi, the NGO Baobab Health Partnership … adapted Linux to $100 [...]

“When I go to a restaurant, and look at leftovers on my plate, I don’t see food, I see information. If the restaurant were Google, they wouldn’t just take that plate and scrape it off into the trash. There would be a camera in the kitchen, photographing every plate coming back, with analysis of what [...]

I’m getting into an excellent free pdf called “In the Shade of the Commons,” a publication from the Waag Society, which bills itself as a small group of enthusiastic idealists … with a mission “to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality [...]

Linux and open source computing is going to have a great 2007. In spite of a few hiccups in some communities, and the astonishing lack of penetration into the mainstream brain, it is obvious that we are seeing more and more people getting it.
Just check out IBM’s Linux praise page if you want an [...]

I think that Tux Magazine started a couple of years ago.
For a number of reasons–not all financial–the model we had built for TUX was not sustainable. At this point, a group of us who were involved in TUX are tossing some ideas around. Where it will go we are not sure but let me assure [...]

Many Debian developers denounced the Dunc-Tank proposal. Some even demanded that Towns be removed as leader because he supported Dunc-Tank. Their objection was that by financially supporting developers, Debian would become a two-class system and that, in turn, would be destructive to the Debian community.
Linux-watch.com just posted this article commenting on recent delays in the [...]

I missed this writeup from a little while ago. It is a good description of what Geekcorps is doing in Mali. Some of their really interesting projects are the Water Bottle Antenna, which provides a powered wifi antenna for about $3 (compared to $100) and the Desert PC which is basically a fanless, [...]

Ever since the introduction of Microsoft Office 2003 it has been possible to distribute documents that can only be used in the way that you want them to be used — such as limiting who can copy, print or forward the information. This type of control, however has been easy enough to defeat with a [...]

Great, reveling post about the remaining difficulty of running Ubuntu (the “sexiest” open source Windows-killer yet) in Ethopia by Andrew Heavens over at Meskel Square.

There is one thing that the bright-eyed fans of Ubuntu and its kind never tell you. That is that if you install it on to an old Windows machine in a [...]

Just found this nice, basic, summary of the various Linux distributions.

Linux is an operating system that was initially created as a hobby by a young student, Linus Torvalds, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Linus had an interest in Minix, a small UNIX system, and decided to develop a system that exceeded the Minix [...]

This is where it’s at folks: free programming and web design books. Make your computer do impossible feats of inhuman strength with this collection of languages and techniques, from old-school Fortran to Web 2.0 hipster-standards AJAX or Ruby.
I’m loving this collection and (hopefully by mid spring) I’m going to gather all of my favorite [...]

Last night I was trying to do something that I thought would be pretty simple: display a bunch of recent weblog posts on one page.
There is a great online community of folks in the biofuels blogosphere, and this page would give a quick summary of their myriad, nerdy, wonderful events and research.
So the [...]

The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit based in Amsterdam that has been doing great work distributing Free/Open Source technology to the global NGO sector.
This morning I was reminded (via Worldchanging) that they are working on creating several different “best of” software compliations for NGOs– kind of like that lovely old mixtape you have [...]

Rosetta is a web-based platform that does exactly what I thought needed to be done: it makes open source software translation really easy for lots of people, and it makes it easy to collaborate on a translation project.
Instead of having to edit .po files manually, this web interface allows you to easily just … [...]

I love this podcast (and I adore the entire IT Conversations series). Here’s a link and a blurb.
IT Conversations: Jonathan Schwartz - The Participation Age

The free and open source software movement is moving, rapidly. The open sourcing of Solaris has added lent enormous weight to this community based development culture. The community behind free [...]

This is minor news in most contexts: Google Earth (the software power tool that feels like a toy) has been released for the Mac.
Aside from the obvious usefulness of this release, this signals a money-where-their-mouth-is confirmation thae Google isn’t just reinforcing Microsoft’s monopolistic dominance.
Google has offered a wealth of opportunities for open source, [...]

All state-collected geographic information should be shared, for a myriad of reasons. Now you can add your name to a growing list of folks that agree.
Geodata is a public good. Open access to it, under a ‘Commons’ (ShareAlike) license, is the best way to see its full benefits realized by industry and citizens. At [...]

This report details how budget-strapped organizations working in the developing world are able to use open source software to accomplish computing task that would otherwise just be too expensive.
From the introduction:

The emphasis on openness in open source software has fostered the growth of a world-wide community of developers contributing to the evolution and improvement of [...]

Things are back in order here. Again, WordPress rocks. Thanks to all the good people there who work on this project and make a wholly excellent open source blogging platform.

Sorry for the lack of post in the last month. We’ve had several large projects at Nonprofitdesign.org, and (more relevantly) I’ve had a major database snafu. I’m switching to WordPress, an elegant, open source platform based on php. I should’ve done it a long time ago.

Yes, it is.
Open source software is free. It is supported by communities of developers, not corporations. And it is ready.
Sure, sometimes, it doesn’t work. Development can stop abruptly on a project, and support can be limited — because it’s free.
But often, open source software is better than the overloaded, buggy programs put out [...]