I’ve just came home from my presentation at the Linux Audio Conference in Utrecht. I got the impression it went pretty good. The audience participated and people asked me some pretty interesting and hard questions. All the presentations were also streamed and I presume the video will be made available online later on.

My presentation on Creative Commons can be downloaded here: 2010-05-02-Bjorn-Wijers-Burobjorn-Linux-Audio-Conference (PDF file)

Ps: The Linux Audio Conference continues until the 4th of May. I will give another talk/workshop on Tuesday morning (4th of May) from 10:30 AM untill 12:00, in which I will look into more depth at openness (media, hardware etc) in general and not just Creative Commons.


dd if=/dev/zero of=test-size25M.bin bs=25000000 count=1


Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. From neither the perspective of the author nor the general public do any valid arguments exist (whether historical, economic, social or otherwise) in support of an exceedingly long term of copyright protection. While the author should be able to reap the fruits of his intellectual labour, the general public should not be deprived for an overly long period of time of the benefits of freely using those works.

Source: http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org/node/8

Just signed the Public Domain Manifesto. Please read it and consider signing the manifesto as well to show your support of the Public Domain.

Questions such as: how do we interact with our environment? Are we able to make more informed decisions if we have more information available? Will this have an impact on human-human relations and what kind of impact?  My ambivalent thoughts on this device thus far may be best summed up in these two quotes:

“The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed”

William Gibson (science fiction author)

“Resistance is futile”

The Borg (a race of aliens in the fictional universe of Startrek)

We live in interesting times.

ps: I embedded the movie at the rear of this post.

Stephen Fry celebrates GNU's 25th birthday

I just watched a small endorsement err, short film made by British multi-talented Stephen Fry on Free Software. Although I find his use of plumbing as a metaphor to compare software with a bit strange, it does seem to get the message across. Personally I like the analogy of science versus bad science better. In any case its a nice short clip to introduce Free Software to those not aware of its existence.

From the press release:

The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to “good science” and contrasts it with the “kind of tyranny” imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense (http://gnewsense.org) and free software generally, for freedom’s sake.

Happy Birthday GNU!

xsetwacom set stylus mode relative

Et voila a Wacom stylus behaving like a mouse. Nice!

ps: Check my xorg.conf

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection


I’m offline until the first of augustus. Its time to sleep, read and relax a bit. So if you send me an email….keep in mind it will take some time before I’ll answer…Now where did I put my swimming trunks?