Self Serving
Those folks following my Twitter stream know that I've been recording chapters of Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs for the LibriVox project. I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to works produced by LibriVox and decided that it was high time that I contribute something back for others to (hopefully!) enjoy. People have often remarked to me over the years that I have a good voice, so I'm glad to be able to finally put it to some use.
It's been fun recording, and the twins have both expressed an interest in trying their hand. Tayler learned pretty quickly that it's substantially harder than she anticipated, but hopefully she hasn't given up entirely on the idea: I'd love to have both of them record something for submission to LibriVox!
It's also been a lot of fun getting into the LibriVox community. I'm only taking baby steps, keeping in mind my limited free time, but I'm looking forward to participating more in the future, and also to recording more books. I intend to read The Chessmen of Mars as soon as I finish this current project.
All recordings submitted to LibriVox are in the public domain. This means that anyone, anywhere, can take my work and use it for pretty much any purpose. This sometimes causes consternation to some folks in the forums, as they seek to protect their work from creating financial gain for someone else. This doesn't bother me at all; in fact, I'm happy to contribute something to the body of public domain works. If my narrations provide a useful foundation to someone else's cool project, that's just fine by me! I have neither the time nor talent to produce much more than these simple recordings.
I'm not a professional speaker, nor a professional voice actor (though I'm not opposed to exploring either as a long-term career!), so it does little good to me to horde the rights to my recordings. If someone can use my recordings to provide narration to a movie they produce, for example, that's cool! Something better than either of us could have made on our own is now available for the world to enjoy! If someone wants to use my recordings as part of a mashup, I say go for it! I am 100% okay with people using my works as a springboard to something better.
In a similar vein, I release (almost) all of my photos on Flickr under a liberal CreativeCommons license, specifically permitting folks to use my photos in derivative works. The only stipulations I enforce are that you must credit me as the creator of the original photo and that you must make your derivative work available to others for modification in the same way that I made my photo available to you. (You may contact me privately to negotiate a specific license if you'd like to use my photos without being bound by these requirements.) Over the years, I've been approached by several people asking for permission to use my photos in small projects. One fellow wanted to use a photo for a holiday greeting card for a client of his; another woman wanted to use one of my photos as part of the cover illustration for a sci-fi romance novel she was writing. Several folks have used my photos on their websites -- including a Yahoo! news page. I think this is all perfectly wonderful: I'm not a professional photographer, so it does me no good to horde the rights to my photos. By making them available under a CC license, I make my photos available for others to use in creative, often useful ways. Schmap is using several of my photos in their map products, for example. This is a tremendous example of the benefit of CC licensing: I get photo credit for the photos I took, and tourists get the benefit of my photos in these maps to provide real-world photos of historical places. Schmap gets to focus on producing quality original content without worrying about exorbitant photo licensing fees. Everyone wins!
Another benefit, one which is entirely unexpected, is the sheer delight I experience when I discover one of my photos being used. I was floored when I found that my photo of Henry Rollins was used on the Henry Rollins Wikipedia entry. While preparing for my presentation to middle schoolers about Ukrainian culture, I was similarly stunned to see a photo from Ann's wedding being used to illustrate the Ukranian wedding traditions entry at Wikipedia! I'm amazed that someone, somewhere, found my photos and put them to such a good use. I earnestly hope that I can continue to create and share things that prove useful to folks far outside my own limited sphere of influence.
It's really neat to me, on a personal level, to have so many of my things being used in this way. I suppose, were I so inclined, it would provide a foundation for more professional endeavours; but I'm not particularly interested in going that route any time soon. Of course, if anyone from Pixar is reading this, please do not hesitate to contact me about openings for the John Carter of Mars film(s) being produced!
It's entirely self-serving of me to release my creations under liberal (or no!) licensing: it makes me feel good.
Small Daemons
My home network consists of two Linksys WRT54G wireless routers, a Linksys NSLU2 network storage device, a Mac Mini running MythTV, and laptops for each member of the house. All but one of these devices use 802.11 wireless networking.
One of the WRT54G routers lives in my bedroom, connected to the DSL modem there. This router runs the wonderful OpenWRT firmware, providing me a good old fashioned Linux command line with which to administer the router. I use iptables rules to enact network address translation, allowing all the computers in my house to have access to the internet.
The NSLU2 is the only device in my network that lacks built-in wireless networking. I could purchase a USB wireless adapter, but these aren't as cheap as I'd like, and the NSLU2 only has two USB ports, both of which I would prefer to use to connect to USB hard drives (though currently only one is in use). The NSLU2 instead connects to my other WRT54G, which in turn is running the dd-wrt firmware. This router acts solely as a wireless bridge, allowing wired-only devices to access my network and the internet, and provides no other services. I run Debian on the NSLU2, giving me a fully featured operating system on an itty bitty platform.
All of these Linksys products run Linux, and can be classified as "embedded systems" because they have very specific limitations with respect to storage and memory. As such, certain tradeoffs need to be made. The WRT54G routers have 16 and 8 megabytes of RAM, respectively, and they run the entire system in memory so there's no room left for extraneous services or wasted space. The routers, for example, all use Busybox to provide basic UNIX utilities without using a lot of space. The default installation of OpenWRT provides the Dropbear SSH daemon, which is a substantially smaller package than the more traditional OpenSSH. Dropbear works great, though, and provides everything I need to connect to and administer the routers.
The NSLU2 isn't as limited when it comes to storage, since I can (and do) use a USB hard drive to store an entire Debian installation; and it has (by comparison) a whopping 32 megabytes of RAM. Still, I need to be careful about memory usage so as not to cause the system to thrash swap space or have the kernel OOM killer forcibly terminate services. Taking a cue from the OpenWRT installation, I replaced the standard OpenSSH server on the NSLU2 with Dropbear, in order to free up more RAM. I also installed dash instead of bash as my primary shell, in order to eek out a little extra memory. dash lacks all of the handy features I like from bash, but I use the NSLU2 for pretty specific backup purposes so I don't miss the features all that much. I disabled all the unnecessary (for my use) services, like nfs-common, portmap, openbsd-inetd, etc. I replaced Exim4 with SSMTP. Finally, I installed thttpd. My intent with this is to use the NSLU2 to store large media files I might like to link from my blog without having to worry about bandwidth usage on my blog's server: serving the files from my home DSL line has no bandwidth cap, whereas the VPS hosting my blog does have a bandwidth cap.
For the past little while I've been contemplating OpenVPN on one or more device in my network. I find myself growing more and more uncomfortable using unencrypted wireless networks at coffee shops and hotels, and would like to be able to tunnel my connections through a secured channel to a host under my control. I've had tremendous success with OpenVPN at my previous job, and I advocate it all the time to people looking for VPN solutions. Its set up, while not hard, is non-trivial, and truthfully I worried about the resource drain the OpenVPN daemon might put on my limited resource Linksys devices.
During a conversation with Matt in #habari, I provided the link to using SSH as a SOCKS proxy. Duh! There was the answer I was looking for! So last night, I installed the full-blown OpenSSH daemon onto one of my WRT54G routers. I configured it to listen on TCP port 443, so that it wouldn't interfere with the currently running dropbear (should something have gone wrong, I still wanted to be able to access the system!) and because the proxied traffic will largely look like requests to an HTTPS website to the casual eye (and most firewalls). The two applications I most frequently use (Firefox and XChat) both support SOCKS proxies, so I was quickly in business. I defined the SOCKS proxy in XChat, established an ssh connection to the router, and watched as XChat reported
* Looking up irc.freenode.net
* Looking up localhost
* Connecting to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 2600...
* Connected. Now logging in...
I installed the FoxyProxy Firefox extension, and added my localhost proxy to its configuration. It was hard to test with certainty from home, but this morning at work there was no doubt: after selecting the localhost proxy from the FoxyProxy menu, I visited WhatIsMyIP and saw my home IP address displayed! Success!
Not every application I'll ever use supports SOCKS, so this might not be as robust a long-term solution as OpenVPN would have been, but it allows me to minimize the number of running services while re-using familiar applications.
Ohio PodGeekFest 2008
Pat just alerted me to the fact that the first ever PodCamp Ohio is on the same day as the 36th annual ComFest weekend! As usual, FreeGeek Columbus expects to have a table at ComFest, at which I'd like to volunteer some time: it's always fun to interact with the public, explain the FreeGeek principles, and advocate responsible computer recycling. As most folks know, I volunteered for ComFest in 2006 and again in 2007. I served beer both times, and had so much fun that I signed up for two shifts this year!
That means that I'll have a very busy weekend: slinging beer Friday, June 27 from 8 to midnight at the Jazz bar, up early for PodCamp Ohio on Saturday, June 28. Hopefully I can sneak in a quick nap and then an hour or so at the FreeGeek booth. Finally, more beer slinging at the Jazz bar Saturday night from 8 to midnight.
Things are complicated even more this year because I expect a delegation of Habari folks to show up for PodCamp Ohio, and staff a table there (Habari is a gold sponsor of the event!). Hopefully we can all meet up Friday afternoon for some socializing before I dash off to quench the thirst of thousands of ComFest attendees. And hopefully my Habari friends won't vote me off the island when I disappear again on Saturday night to dispense more beer! Actually, I hope that my Habari friends will join me at ComFest, an original Columbus event, and enjoy all the free music and good times.
So, whatever your pleasures might be, there's a strong chance Columbus can satisfy you on the last weekend of June, 2008. ComFest runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday and is always a good time. Look for me at the Jazz bar on Friday and Saturday night! PodCamp Ohio runs morning and afternoon on Saturday, June 28, and should be a great opportunity to learn about blogging, podcasting, and social media -- as well as provide an excellent chance to meet folks passionate about these things. If you're going, look for me at the Habari table! Finally, if you're going to ComFest, look for the FreeGeek Columbus booth and tell them I said hi!
April Fool's Day 2008
Yesterday was April Fool's Day. On the whole, I didn't see too many really funny gags. My favorite was the Dog to Unicorn Transformation Kit, though a close second was an email from the Electronic Frontier Foundation announcing that the administrator account credentials for the Wikileaks website had been published to Wikileaks. The irony of that made me laugh out loud.
As usual, I procrastinated until the absolute last minute on my own April Fool's joke. With help from the gang in #habari on irc.freenode.net, we quickly put together a website for the first annual HabariCon conference. It was fun to post blog entries to that site in an attempt to make it at least plausible that this really had been in the works for some months, though I don't think any of us had any expectation that we'd actually fool anyone. (Though we were sufficiently convincing to at least make people think twice!) Special kudos to miklb for the site themes, and so many of the graphics! Thanks also to Caius and Arthus for sponsor logos.
We set up a Twitter account for HabariCon, and the group in #habari made a point to post to Twitter throughout the day to keep up the ruse. I think it was probably more fun for us to do than for anyone to watch. :) The presentations were particularly fun to brainstorm, as we made a specific point to prepare sessions that were absolutely antithetical to the Habari community model we espouse.
In the process, I registered the iPony.org domain name for our fictitious Platinum Sponsor, and am now left wondering what I'll do with it. I'm sure something will come to me.
I expect I'll leave the HabariCon and iPony sites online for a few more days before making archive snapshots of them. We do hope to have an official HabariCon at some point in the future, but the official domain for that endeavour will be at .org, and not .com.
HabariCon 2008
I'm heading off to the iPony headquarters in just a few minutes to get the registration table ready for today's big conference. I can't believe I haven't blogged about this before!
Today is the first annual HabariCon, "the Habari convention uniting the user and developer communities in friendship and collaboration"!
This should be a fantastic event, and although I'm a little disappointed that registrations closed so quickly, I'm excited that so many people were able to confirm their attendance so early! If you weren't able to register, don't worry: we'll have plenty of updates throughout the day, and we'll be sure to post final details about tonight's party as soon as we know them.
Today's presentations are supposed to be recorded, so we'll make sure we do all we can to get the session audio online as quickly as possible so that everyone can follow along at home!
