TEDTalks download script and MythTV metadata

Published on February 4, 2008 in Open content and Open source. 20 Comments

I have been watching TEDTalks off and on since a friend of mine introduced them to me a couple months ago. They are videos of presentations done at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an annual conference that “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers”. I would highly recommend browsing through them if you have a minute; there is some really good food for thought (and action) in there. All of the TED videos are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) license, which allows them to be freely redistributed as long as they are not modified.

To make them more accessible to me, I downloaded all the TED videos and put them on a computer running MythTV. Read on for details on how I did it and links to scripts that will automate the process for you if you have a MythTV setup or if you just want to download all the TED videos.
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ABM Locator 0.1 released

Published on December 11, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

With the help of Stephen Paul Weber, I have created a web-based tool that plots Canadian automated banking machines (ABMs) using Google Maps, which is called ABM Locator. The first version of this tool (0.1) has just been released. I suggest viewing the live demo if you’re interested in seeing it work.

You can get the source code from the Download section of the ABM Locator project page or check it out from Subversion (also on the project page). Please send any comments, questions, bug reports, etc. to the mailing list.

USB magnetic stripe reader instructions

Published on November 13, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I have released instructions and code for connecting a magnetic stripe reader to a computer using USB. These are an answer to a common problem that people wanting to get into the magstripe reading scene face: a gameport or parallel port is required for interfacing with a magstripe reader and many computers these days don’t have either.

The project that got me interested in reading magstripes is Stripe Snoop. I highly recommend it if you’re interesting in finding out what information is encoded on magnetic stripes, such as those on credit cards, debit cards, hotel access cards, etc.

I couldn’t have done the project without Dean Camera’s help. He created the MyUSB library that the project uses to do the USB communication. The library is GPLed, which is why I used it instead of the Atmel-provided library, which has a much more restrictive license.

Open content awareness event

Published on November 1, 2007 in Open content. 0 Comments

This past Monday I was involved in an event to promote awareness of open content. I have setup a web page that documents a bit of what went on, which includes links to all of the music and videos used for the event. If you are interested in getting some free music (all Creative Commons-licensed) or would like some ideas for an open content awareness event of your own, I would highly recommend checking it out.

574 days of time diaries

Published on October 15, 2007 in Open content and Open source. 2 Comments

I have published a log of all of my activities between October 20, 2002, and May 15, 2004, on the 574 days of time diaries web page. The page has links to the raw data and some summary tools I wrote along with an online summary generator that you can use to see where my time was spent for a given set of days. The main reason for publishing this information is so that researchers can use the data in studies that require time diaries or similar types of information. For more details, see the web page.

XO Giving: helping children in developing nations

Published on September 25, 2007 in Open source and World issues. 0 Comments

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop per Child project, has announced that you will be able to buy pairs of XO laptops (the laptops they are selling to developing nations), one for you and one for a child in a developing nation, starting November 12 for “a brief window of time”. You can find out more at xogiving.org. I would highly recommend supporting the project through this. The OLPC project looks like a really good way to get education to children. For some background information on the project, check out Negroponte’s talk at TED.

I will definitely be getting one. Hopefully others in the area will get them as well so we can try out the interesting wireless meshing capabilities and sharing features that the laptops have.

It is important to note that an XO laptop is not designed for everyday use by the average adult. The web site suggests that you give your XO laptop to an interested child you know. I’m interested in seeing just how much of my usual computing I can do on this device, but probably not everyone would be interested in taking the time required to figure out how to do the things they normally do on it. For those that are considering using the XO laptop for everyday tasks, it appears that the XO laptop will come with a standard set of desktop applications, including a word processor, web browser, and basic graphics editor (see the application list for more details).

For the technically-inclined people out there, I think the XO laptop would be a very interesting piece of hardware to have for tinkering. It’s got a 433 MHz x86 processor, 512 MB RAM, and 1 GB flash (its only non-volatile storage). For more, see the full specs.

The announcement was also covered by Slashdot and the Associated Press.

Making a living authoring public domain works

Published on August 5, 2007 in Intellectual property. 1 Comment

There are a couple models for paying authors of public domain educational works that I think would work reasonably well. (For reasons why educational works should be released into the public domain, see A case for public domain educational material). The first is the street performer protocol, which I discussed in a previous post. The other, which is more tailored to the specific problem of how authors of public domain educational works are paid will be described here. I call this model the Educator Donation Model.

Virtually all educational institutions use hard copies of educational works in their classrooms. This is likely to remain the case for some time because of people’s preference for reading educational material from a book rather than on a screen. As a result, educational institutions will continue to purchase printed educational works from publishers even if all the educational works they use are in the public domain since it is still relatively expensive to print a class set of textbooks oneself.
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A case for public domain educational material

Published on August 5, 2007 in Intellectual property. 0 Comments

I recently spent a weekend in Ottawa, which involved a 6-hour bus ride each way. Naturally I took along my laptop and several textbooks to study from during the bus ride. While lugging the 20-30 pounds of textbooks and electronics from the bus stop to where I was staying, it occurred to me that it makes no sense for me to carry around textbooks and a laptop when the textbooks could be electronically stored on my laptop with no additional weight cost aside from the initial weight cost of my laptop. Why can’t I do this? It’s simple: most textbook publishers do not provide electronic versions of the textbooks they publish because doing so would make it too easy to illegitimately copy a textbook, which means the author would not benefit monetarily from that copy.
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Working conditions in a Taiwan factory

Published on June 17, 2007 in World issues. 0 Comments

In my usual perusing of tech news sites, I found this article with a slide show of pictures from a tour of a motherboard factory in Taiwan. There were several things that stuck out to me. The first was how the article’s author was amazed by how much manual (non-automated) work went into building motherboards, which he describes in the first couple paragraphs.

The second was the sign shown on this page of the slide show. For those who don’t like clicking on links, the sign has the following four lines: “Be more responsible”, “Complain less”, “Be more attentive”, “Make lesser mistakes”.

The third was how monotonous some of the tasks were. One of the pages says “Workers here add the same one or two components to every board that comes by, all day long.” It seems to me like some of this should be automated.

Lastly, I was struck by how focused on their task the workers were. Another page says “Each worker sat next to another. There was no talking, no interactivity.”

I suspect that a factory like this in North America would have trouble finding employees. I’m not sure exactly why it’s easier in Taiwan, maybe a combination of different culture and more relaxed laws.

In any case, I think the slide show is good food for thought. I would suggest you view the entire slide show so you have a more rounded view of the topic than the points I’ve specifically picked out here.

Approaching issues without dichotomizing them

Published on May 22, 2007 in Discussing ideas. 0 Comments

In the readings for one of my courses, I ran across a particularly relevant article discussing the way we often needlessly dichomotize an issue and reasons why it can be very unwise. The article is actually the first chapter in Deborah Tannen’s book “The Argument Culture: America’s War of Words”. The name of the chapter is “Fighting for Our Lives”. I located the chapter on a University of Wisconsin-Madison web page. Unfortunately, this particular copy of the chapter omits references, but I doubt those would be too hard to find.

The basic premise of the chapter is that we should try to avoid looking at issues from opposing sides when doing so does not make sense. Some examples of debates I’ve heard on numerous occasions that should probably be discussed in a less argumentative form are “Which is better: Windows or Linux?” and “Which is right: intelligent design or evolution?”.

I think the reason that we sometimes tend to create debates or opposing sides is because it’s easier and, in the short term, more productive (arguably) to focus people’s energy on a clearly-defined side than it is to have people channeling their energy in different ways trying to better understand the problem. A good example of this is the tactic of Oceania’s leaders (from the book “1984” by George Orwell) to promote intense hatred for the current enemy of the state (Eastasia or Eurasia) in order to focus people’s attention on defeating the enemy rather than on determining why they were at war. This likely applies to current-day wars as well.

It’s a good idea to keep this article in mind when discussing ideas that are in danger of being forced into opposing sides. I think it’s best for all of us if we try our best to fully understand a situation rather than take the easy out of debating it for the sake of proving ourselves right.