Make, a community of tinkerers and open-source affectionados, has published a list of gift suggestions. Some of their projects look really cool. Among them:
- Making your own battery-powered iPod charger
- Making some open source beer: a joke based around the “free as in speech” - “free as in beer” distinction
- Playing around with free planetarium software (for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X)
- Making a persistence of vision display for your bike wheels (parts less than $40)
They are also selling a neat Leatherman warranty voider, in case you know a geek that does not yet have a multi-tool. (I have two: a Swisstool X and a little SOG Crosscut on my keychain). Their philosophy of “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it” is increasingly relevant in a world where manufacturers are allowing fewer and fewer things to be done by those who purchase their products.
I have long been a huge fan of open source software. The blog runs on Redhat Linux, using Apache Server, and both WordPress and MediaWiki are open source projects. All of these pieces of software can be used for free, even more usually, your right to take them apart and rebuild is limited only by your creativity. Wikipedia is probably the best website ever created, and it is all about collective effort and shared information.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
On Flicr, you can see some photos of the bike kit in action.
as a recent convert to ubuntu linux (yes, for real), i should make clear that, while i wouldn’t go back to my pirated copy of windows, making decisions to go “open-source” on major things (such as your o.s.) can be frustrating, especially at first.
Mike,
Ubuntu is great for fixing broken Windows installs, but I would never in 100 years replace Windows with it. Endless frustrations about drivers and software support are definitely not things that I need.
Linux for webservers; Mac OS for personal computers.
Celestia may be a better free astronomy program than Stellarium.