Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

Freecycle.org

Freecycle is basiclly made up of many individual groups across the globe. It's a grassroots movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns.

It sounds great but doesnt pull it off in the same way as for example meetup.com does. or maybe I was thinking of meetup.com but crossed with the concept of giving away stuff. Oh well maybe it will mature (saying that there's already 300 people signed up in London alone). I certainly dont want to be joining up to any more yahoo groups thank you.

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Installing Bit torrent on GNU/Linux

I found I could Apt-get Bit torrent using the stable Debian packages but never knew how to get it running till I came across this page.

First do a – apt-get install bittorrent
If you get no errors and all goes to plan, you can grab your .torrent file from where ever. if like me your using KDE or Gnome then find the file and open with. Then type bittorrent.
From a shell you can do the same by typing – btdownloadgui /home/yourusername/thefile.torrent.
You may get a error like me about a Python lib not being present you can fix that by – apt-get install libwxgtk2.4-python.

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GNU/Linux force upgrade for the second time

I come home from Berlin and switch on my workstation to find Windows is pretty messed up. Well actually I have a hardware problem where the memory shown is only 256meg not 1024meg. But I solved that and windows was still messed up. So I decided to make the real move to Linux and not to fix Windows. I mean why bother? I booted up knoppix 3.4 to check if I could see the Hard drives ok, and sure enough I could see them. So I installed Knoppix. I expect I will document alot of experience of trying to get Linux working like windows from now on.

My todo list for linux
Thunderbird/Mozilla Mail.
Gaim.
VLC.
SMB Client sharing.
SMB Server sharing or XBMSP sharing.
Bit torrent.
CD/DVD burning.
SSH access.
External access VNC or/and Remote Desktop Protocal.
Gatos Video Capture and TV view.
FTP client for XBMC.
XMLRPC client for quick blogging.
ActiveSync replacement for PocketPC and Smartphone.

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Blogging from the berlin underground

This blog is a little bit of cheat because I was posting the same thing from my ipaq on a Ubhan train. See I was on a Sbhan train going from Prenzlauer Allee to Schonhauser Allee and changed to a Ubhan train to Portsdamerplatz on the U2. Now I knew it would take a while, so throught I would see if my GPRS roaming was working via Tmobile in Germany. Well I was in luck it dialed up via bluetooth then the train went underground. Damm I thought looking at jabber trying to connect. Had a look at my phone to see if the signal was gone all together… And no it wasnt gone, actually it was on 5 bars, and the jabber had connected. Well it would seem to that berlin's BVG had installed mobile base stations underground or the undergrounds are so shalow you can still pick up a clear signal. So much so that I almost blogged this exact same thing from smthingme while underground, unfortually there was an rfc error of somekind. Typical, everything works except the thing which is usually very reliable.

Anyway I'm now sitting in the sony centre again with the free wireless and this time I'm not the only one. 2 other guys with PC laptops, one IBM thinkpad and some gateway looking laptop. The other guy has a Mac G4 12 inch powerbook. Tell the truth there is another guy but he's across the glass verge from me so cant see what he's got. I ordered a redbull about 10mins ago and guys is just coming with it. I got a cinema arrangement with Spiderman 2 in 5mins. Hoping the movie doesnt start at 5pm, anyway the seating is arranged, so its a matter of getting snacks and hitting the toilet. Its been good sitting here watching the tour de france and enjoying the wireless, cant life be more like this?

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Aggregation overload

Very recently i've noticed a serious drop in performance on my feeds (aggregation). And I know exactly what it is, i've too many rss feeds! I need to sort it out this weekend, as its not good in its current state. I'm going to go through all my feeds and make sure they all still exist and put them into thought out categories, rather than the adhoc method i've been doing up till now. I'm also hoping I will sort out about 40 rss feeds which do full text syndication for my personal pocketpc news reader. The ones i've currently got are a mixed bag of crap.

Flock is my aggregator and seriously nothings happened to the project for ages. It still doesn't support rss2 feeds let alone atom. So tempted to knock up my own in cocoon sometime soon, but then again Blojsom 2.7 will also have a aggregation plugin to go with the import plugin.

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RSS to Jabber

Smartphone with Agile messager running

Last night just before bed, I dropped past the jabber site because I wanted to get a new jabber client for my pocketpc. Saw that myjabber guys had released there own pocketpc version. But I couldnt find it so thought I'd see what else is out there.

Anyway I saw a news story about getting realtime rss feeds in jabber. And it pointed to the jabber.at site. Basicly in the vein of smthingme and other bots like smarterchild and myownbuddy, you can talk to it via set commands and tell it to subscribe you to different rss feeds. Which it will deliver to you every 30 or so minutes.

And I must not forget to mention I'm now using the excellent Agile on my pocketpc and smartphone. I actually think its better than imov, topicim and myjabber. Plus its free, and supports almost every single mobile platform out there.
Interesting links to check out later – http://edgar.netflint.net | http://www.pmbrowser.info/thinkbot.htm | http://www.niemueller.de/software/eggdrop/jabberbot/ | http://www.google.com/search?q=jabber+bots&sourceid=opera&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

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Blojsom and Jabber make it into OSX 10.4 Server

So I woke up this morning and looked at my email before rushing off to work, and Miles had sent me a email pointing out that Blojsom and Jabber will come as standard in OSX 10.4 server, which is going to ship end of 2004 or start of 2005. Article here then during mytrain journey to the BBC via Cannon street, I see a link to Blojsom in a slashdot arcticle.

I'm so loving all this, but I'm sure David and Mark are laughing there arse's off. Good one guys looking forward to the Jabber version of Somethingme very soon?

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testing somethingme im to blog service


Somethingme logo?


So I can finally let out the big secret of the blojsom team. They've been working on a IM to blog service and this is my first blog using the service.
They've been working hard on this service since the days of Blojsim which only worked with blojsom 1.x. Mark always promised to get it working for all blogs not just blojsom, now they've done the job. Excellent work. I'm looking forward to using this on my ipaq to drop down quick thoughts into my bookmarks. And I'm rubbing my hands with glee about SMS and even MMS to blog. Allowing me to blog from my SPV as well as a GPRS connection. Tell the truth that will really open blogging up to a whole new generation of bloggers. Very cool, very cool.

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ebooks prices like these make you want to steal them

A work friend recommended Neal stephenson to me yesterday evening. The book he was recommending was Cryptonomicon and the Snow crash. Now I was quite willing to buy the ebooks because I highly prefer reading on screen to reading a book. But have you seen the prices! Oh my, check out this one…

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson costs 8 dollars and you can get some second hand versions for half that. However, if you want the digital acrobat version that will be 10 dollars! Even the microsoft reader which by the way is crap and i hate alot to read from, is 10 dollars. And I'm willing to forget that digital distrubution is cheaper and easier than the book. And I was almost willing to pay the money for the ebook because 10 dollars is about 5 pounds here. But then I read this.

Format: Adobe Reader
File Size: 5776K
Printable: Most publishers do not allow Adobe e-books to be printed.
Mac OS Compatible: This title requires Adobe Reader 6.x, which requires Mac OS 10.2 and above.
Windows Compatible: Yes
Handheld Compatible: Adobe Reader supports transfer of e-books to PalmOS devices, but not to Pocket PC or Symbian devices.

Format not a problem could tag it later too I guess. File size sounds large but its got drm so i guess its got space for that. No printing, who cares not bothered. Requires Acrobat 6? why? But this did it for me! Adobe Reader supports transfer of e-books to PalmOS devices, but not to Pocket PC or Symbian devices. What the hell! So if I bought this ebook I wouldnt beable to transfer it to my ipaq for reading on the train?!
And to make things worsts, the microsoft reader version only works on pocketpcs and tabletpcs, which i do have but why cant i look at it on my windows xp pro machine?!

Its no wonder why people are so pissed off about ebooks. I for one will wait till it hits the newsgroups now, on pure principle. Because this takes the living piss… I'm going to scream!

I'm thinking of buying the audio version which is cheaper and then converting it to text later on for reference. Sometimes I wonder about the world we live in today.

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Xlink results – two thumbs up

Xlink Kai: EVO 7 - global network gaming - teamxlink.co.uk

In a follow up to my earlier post about the xlink experiement. I finally got a copy of Topspin for the xbox. I mainly used the KAI client to connect and then just loaded up topspin on the xbox. First time I connected to xbox live and it moaned because it couldnt access it. Then I tried system link in the multiplayer mode, bang it worked. I was able to see someone ready with a game to play. So I joined and I was playing within a couple of minutes. General impression was it was a little slow and the game quitted when I tried to change the camera angle. But the second and so on games afterwards I had were awesome. I'm so tempted to try out the Wimbledom 2004 tournament – shame its now closed now.

I basicly now use Xbox media centre to see if anyone on my contact list is around, then I switch to a KAI if I need to play a game. If there was a way to type in xbmc i would use that instead. Rememeber if you do sort it out, my user name is cubicgarden.

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