Subscribe
Desktop Porn
Wed Feb 17Propaganda
Small print in big fat letters
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
Jun
28
I stumbled upon an idea by Judge Richard Posner on how to save the newspaper industry: let’s extend the copyright law to “bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. Therefore, I’m linking to his blog while I can! There are a couple of benefits for him in this.
- His blog gets traffic via my blog. Not much but hey, someone might click. Now they can.
- He is properly referenced so that my readers can check what I’m disagreeing with, and also read his point of view.
It seems (at least the under the current legislation) also appropriate to mention that I found Posner’s blog via TechCrunch. Therefore, I’ll also link to their article.
Neither copyright owner was asked for consent before I linked to their content. That’s how the Web works. If someone doesn’t like the Web and the way it works, maybe they shouldn’t use it to publish their copyrighted content in the first place.
In the very same sentence, Posner also suggests we should extend copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. I don’t understand why a copyright law extension would be necessary for this. As one of Posner’s readers notes (in case this isn’t obvious enough), we already need the copyright holder’s consent. The thing is, if you upload your materials onto the Internet and make it freely available to Web surfers, certainly everyone already has your consent to access it.
UPDATE Jul 6 – Simon Owens emailed with some figures on how much traffic he got from a single link on the notorious “leecher” of news content, the Huffington Post. One link, 37,000 eyeballs. ‘Nuff said.
Feb
16
I was hoping that my latest Wordpress upgrade would be the last manual one, and what do you know, it was! Today I saw a notification on my Dashboard about a new WP version being out, so I proceeded to click the “Upgrade automatically” button. Lo and behold:
Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip
Unpacking the core update
Verifying the unpacked files
Installing the latest version
Upgrading database
WordPress upgraded successfully
That’s the way I like it. Thanks to the wonderful Wordpress hackers for making my life so much easier again!
May
3
Share your Ubuntu story!
Tagged with community, evangelism, marketing, ubuntu, web | 2 Comments
This morning, I found an email from Karol in my inbox, telling me about a promotional Ubuntu website he designed. It is slick!
The site is a place for Ubuntu users to share their story. Why do you use Ubuntu? Tell your story about security, stability, desktop sexiness and all the other reasons to choose our favorite Linux distribution for your daily business and pleasure use!
Dec
18
Looks like it’s been 10 years today since Jorn Barger first called his site a “weblog”. Of course, his weblog is still around. Collectively, the Web is infinitely lazier than Jorn, so the term shortened to just “blog”. As far as I know, blags are currently written by xkcd geniuses only, so the title of this post has to be taken as an acknowledgement of the great historical continuum.
Jul
25
Mounting a Nokia Phone a Little Bit Easier
Tagged with bluetooth, fuse, howto, mobile, nokia, obex, ubuntu, web | 34 Comments
I have been using p3nfs to mount my Nokia 9300 and later the E70, and it has worked pretty well. However, all this time the fuse and bluez hackers and Nokia’s open source team have been busy behind my back and provide a couple of alternative solutions.
The easier of these is using fuse and obexfs. I initially found this tip on Google Groups, and later David’s more thorough HOWTO. Here’s the drill:
- Find out your phone’s Bluetooth MAC address if you don’t know it already:
hcitool scan - Find out the OBEX FTP channel it uses
sdptool search FTP - Load the fuse kernel module:
sudo modprobe fuse - Make a suitable mount point for your phone:
mkdir ~/Phone - Mount
obexfs -bXX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX -BYY ~/Phone
(where XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX is your phone’s MAC and YY is the OBEX channel) - Unmount when you’re done with your file transfers:
fusermount -u ~/Phone
That’s it!
Image: Browsing my phone via Bluetooth,
WebDAV and a Web browser
The other method is more exciting and far more geeky. It doesn’t actually involve mounting your phone’s filesystem at all, but making its contents available by running a web server on it. I’ve known about Nokia’s mobile Web server for some time already, but was inspired to try it out recently by Mikko’s comment on a blog entry of mine involving phone/linux synchronizing.
You can selectively make all your phone’s information available on the Web for yourself, for a group of friends, or globally. Register on mymobilesite.net, download the Mobile Server software, and away you go. It works very well, but eats far too much RAM to be running permanently at this stage (it’s advertised as beta). For temporary access it’s a viable solution though, and here’s the strong point: no setup is needed on the receiving side, all you need is a computer and a Web browser! I will certainly keep an eye on the server’s development and play with it more in the weeks and months to come.