The Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in 1985 to promote software freedom. In the 30 years since it was founded, it has battled for the rights of users to control the software they run, rather than the makers of that software — still an critical fight today.The FSF’s newly rel …

I recently got hold of a tablet, mostly for reading PDFs on, but I realized that the preinstalled android OS didn’t let me have root access. Which is deeply immoral. I ought to be able to do what I want to the devices I buy. It took me ages to work out how to get root on it, so I have writen …

Update 2012-02-26 I updated this module in a few ways. It now uses the Drupal presave hook rather than the form_alter hook -- meaning that if there is a postcode and no lat/long it will always look up your postcode. That is a much better way to do it in my opinion. I’ve also changed the defau …

I don't know if you heard about it but Fabrice Bellard recently made a Javascript PC emulator that could boot a full linux with emacs and vi and even a c compiler. Which is insane. I wanted to check it out, but the core Iceweasel on Debian Squeeze (3.5) isn't up to the job, Fabrice has coded it t …

Backtrack Linux has become increasingly useful to me over the last few months. The latest release Backtrack 5 came out on 10 May, so I, of course wanted to have a play. Just a little background on Backtrack. Its specifically aimed at security professionals and hackers and has everything that you …

This should be an unusual blog. I’m attempting to combine a belated shoutout for nor’s collaborative porn project, OpenSauce with a howto guide to making rsync work on windows. Lets see how it that works out. Nor's radicalx project has previously inv …

Richard Stallman is something of a legend. He singlehandedly launched the Free Software movement, and the GNU project and has been campaigning for software freedom for almost as long as there have been usable home computers. I jumped at the opportunity to see him talk at the Institution of Engineer …

I’m a huge fan of the Vimperator Firefox plugin. It works just like you'd want it to and doesn't break much. Well, it breaks one useful thing, which is the almost universal ctrl-c/ctrl-v cut and paste shortcuts. So, I was well chuffed to find a Vimperator cut and paste tip on superuser. I̵ …

Its true. By default Icedove (that’s Thunderbird to non-Debianists) puts the newest emails at the bottom of the message list. This is wrong and evil (I may be exaggerating). It took me a while to find the proper solution and then a bit longer to figure out I needed to delete the .msf …

I like to make sure that I always have a listing of all the files I have on my Debian boxen. Fortunately dpkg has a quick way of doing just that. # dpkg --get-selections > /path/to/mybackup.txt I run that once a day or so as a cron job dumping to a file, that file will be in my usual rsync backup. …

This is my essay for a course I'm studying online with the University of Gotberg, in Sweden. I'm trying to draw parallels between the 'DIY Culture' concepts like direct participation, gift exchange, and mutual aid and Free Software practices. Essentially the Free Software culture can be seen as an e …