Christmas – Newtonmass – Grav-mass and Open Source

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – Christmas. At least for the Christians who celebrate the virgin birth of Jesus. For me, as an atheist geek, this is all a bit difficult – I have a Christmas tree in my living-room and as a teacher I enjoy my two week-holiday. But to be honest: I don’t buy the whole thing.

So, in secret, on December 25 I celebrate “Newtonmass”, or Grav-mass, an invention of Richard Stallman. Newton was born on 25 December 1642, in the Julian calendar. (So, in fact, he was born on 4 January 1643, but who cares: the Julian calender fits our purpose better).

Stallman is the pioneer of the concept of copyleft and started the free software movement. He defined the four freedoms:

1. Freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
2. Freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs. Access to the source-code is a precondition for this.
3. Freedom to redistribute copies, so you can help your neighbor.
4. Freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. Access to the source code is a precondition for this

Open source is in fact a Christmas message: share and work for a better world. Now, you should not limit yourself to software alone, there are more open source projects going on: in fact the free and
open source licensing can lead to:

• open source designs under free licenses
• open to do-it-yourself
• open to end-user dialogue
• open to peer-review
• open to collaboration
• open to cradle-to-cradle analysis
• open to viewing as an ecosystem of processes
• open to democratic participation
• open to new design ideas
• open to new economics
• open to the future

(with thanks to Bryan Bishop)

Interesting projects – all scattered around the Web – are:

• Product Hacking
• DIY Biology
• Oscomak: supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups
  chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations
  which lay the groundwork for humanity’s sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and
  eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space
  (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).

Airset – “Cloud Computing”

What Google started, is finished by Airset. Google has online applications for text-editing and spreadsheets, you can store your documents online, you can collaborate on a paper. That’s all fine, but now Airset offers a complete “virtual computer” a “personal webcomputer” – they call it “Cloud Computing”.

It looks great, but: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. So quanta costa? Hold your breath. As long as you store less than 1 GB Airset is completely free!

I recall the days when I felt jealous because one of my friends had bought a personal computer with a 1 GB hard drive, while I was swapping files to floppies and back to cope with my 512 MB. But now a 1 GB hard drive is nothing, not even fit for starters, a joke – something they have to add money to to have a right to sell it you. So, there is of course a premium service with additional file storage.

The price break down is as follows:

• 5GB for $2.00/month
• 10GB for $4.00/month
• 15GB for $6.00/month
• 20GB for $8.00/month
• 25GB for $10.00/month
• 30BG for $12.00/month
• 35GB for $14.00/month
• 40GB for $16.00/month
• 45GB for $18.00/month
• 50GB for $20.00/month

So, when I have a cloud computer with 50 GB storage the price is $24 x 20 = $ 480 a year. I think I have a better home computer with more storage capabilities (at least 250 GB) that will stay with me for 2 or maybe 3 years for this price. So what’s the deal?

I have an account @Airset – of course, I sign up with all web2.0 apps.  I have tried it, but until yet I haven’t found a way to store your files on your own computer or – better – on a mobile device like a thumb drive. With Google docs this is possible, with Airset it should be in my opinion.

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but I wonder if Airset will have the last word on portability and ubiquitous computing.

GTD: Mind Depositor

It never stops with blogging about Getting Things Done. Zen Habits had a blogpost full of humor about a GTD-addict; the most interesting statement was:

(…)you may be a productivity junkie if (nr 8 ) sex with your spouse is on your someday/maybe list.

Without bragging too much about my own performance as a lover I can safely state that this is not the case for me However, some other of the signs listed definitely apply to me, e.g. nr 2:

You spend significant amounts of time comparing GTD systems with other life “hackers.”

I have good reason for that: I’m always open to new ideas, to do things better.
Patrick Ng from Hong Kong has an interesting blog about GTD. He designed a new “hipsterPDA” template, you can download it from his website. I’m impressed, not in the least by his generousness for sharing, but for now I’ll stick to my own system.
Patrick Ng’s website is worth a visit for other articles too: it has a powerfull slogan:

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thoughts

and an article about the content of his bag. I just thought about writing myself a blogpost on “Me and My Bag”, but then I realised that this had been done before by other lifehacking geeks.

More on GTD: action management application RememberThe Milk is very popular among GTD fans. I have an account, but I prefer my simple D3 TiddlyWiki. Now you can spice up RTM with user styles. Hm, maybe I should give RTM another try; I’ll put that on my someday/maybe list.

In case, just in case, the continuous stream of GTD blogs will dry up one day, David Allen has recently published a follow-up to GTD: “Making it all Work“. It’s about “the matrix of self-management”

A quote from the last chapter: “Pay Attention to What Has Your Attention”:

If (..) you really want to effectively identify and incorporate those higher-horizon commitments, you must start with what’s taking up the space in front of them. More often than not that’s 22 e-mails you’ve been avoiding, the sitter you need to arrange for your kids for tomorrow night, and buying cat food. If you don’t deal with those effectively, they will undermine your recognition of the bigger stuff or at least diminish your ability to focus on them clearly.

That brings it back to what GTD is all about: The purpose for being productive is to have more time for doing the things you actually want to do with your life.

Flowcharts

Webcomic site xkcd had a comic on flowcharts: “Understanding Flowcharts” last week.

This reminded me of some interesting Flowchart applications.

First of all, there is Dia, an open-source diagram-crating program, based on Visio, a commercial Microsoft program.

Then there is a web-based application, “Lucid Charts“. Of course I have signed up for an account to give it a try:

A similar web-based flow-chart maker is Gliffy, this offers a free basic account and a premium account that is a little more expensive than Lucid Chart.

Of course you can also use the free Dabbleboard for flowcharts.

Flowcharts are a way of organizing your thoughts. Earlier I wrote about the Wellington Grey flowchart on Slashdot publishing.

Pownce

Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. I wrote about the application earlier on this blog, but I almost never used it. Blogging company Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, TypePad and Vox, acquired Pownce. So I migrated my account to Vox; I probably will never use this service either

The Day of the Triffids

The BBC is to remake the John Wyndham classic “The Day of the Triffids”. Could be interesting! I read the book when I was still at school, that must have been 1976-77 or so.

After this book I also read Wyndham’s “The Chrysalids” and “The Midwich Cuckoos”. Now, older and wiser, I consider Wyndham as a “soft” sciencefiction writer, but I found his short story “The Wheel” very impressive.

Boardgame Geek II

Chess! The Royal Boardgame! So I play chess, or at least I know the rules. To train my brain – “use it or lose it” – I like to solve some chess puzzles as a daily diet. Preferably at Chess.com and Chess Problems.
Hans Ree’s Chessblog at the Dutch NRC-Handelsblad website discusses and analyzes chess problems – so you don’t have to think for yourself. Of course there are more Chess links: here are mine at delicious.
Chessvibes is an interesting website with chessnews and Chess Today is an internet chess newspaper. Unfortunately not free, but there is also a chesstoday.com website where you can feed your hunger for more chess news than you can ever possibly read on one day. Unfortunately paid for by ads, which make the site ugly.
You can play chess everywhere on the web, e.g. at chess.com, but recently I discovered a new online chess game, FlashChess. Also playable on your own computer. If you’re looking for a strong chessprogram, there is an old version of Fritz and other programs on this website. Other free downloads are here and here.
Did I forget a chess website? Of course this is not a complete list, but there are also websites about websites: The Best Online resources to Learn & Play Chess and – in Dutch – the “schaak-startpagina“, a collection of chess-links.

Juice firefox add-on

A great new firefox-add-on is Juice: Discover. Organize. Share.

Juice is an intelligent discovery engine that integrates seamlessly with your browser.
Highlight and move a chunk of text, and Juice directly delivers a set of rich, relevant content to you.

As you see on the screenshot I’ve selected from my own recent blogpost on the movie “Entre les murs” the text “entre les murs” I dragged and dropped it into Juice. As the Juice website tells us:

Juice will start performing its tricks.

Data-mining is fun with Juice, together with some other great add-ons like Evernote, Delicious, Readeroo and Zotero.

Juice’s rocking webcast from Linkool Labs on Vimeo.

Boardgame Geek

As a child I liked to play Stratego and Mastermind. Later I learned to play Draughts and Chess. Recently I learned to play Go at the 321go-website. And, inspired by a blogpost at wiskundemeisjes I learned about Hex.

Unfortunately I’m a bad player: too impatient to take my time to think and of course I hate it to lose. So I’m glad all these games are also @MYComputer; at my desktop I can play whenever I want and save the game when my attention is drifting to another topic of interest. I continue the game – or not – if, when and where I want and nobody will notice if I lose.

Links:
Mastermind software.
Online Mastermind game
Stratego software
Harm Jetten’s draughts program
3-2-1-go
Free Go Programs
Hex Wiki
BoardGameGeek website