This is a rewrite of an article that first appeared in the Internet Showdown issue of New Internatoinalist magazine. I have expanded some sections and rephrased others.Perhaps the most important reason to use Free Software is that it allows you, not a corporation, …

I recently featured, with Hazel Healy and Amy Hall in the New Internationalist podcast. I talked about privacy, the battle for a free internet and Free Software amongst other stuff. You can read more in the December Internet Showdown issue of New Internationalist magazine.The blurb from …

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 …

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 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. …

Update 2011-01-31: Well, life got in the way of getting this out in January, let’s see if it will come out in Feb! I’m currently coding a project using the Catalyst Framework. The project is called feedmash and is partly inspired by paper.li along with the UK Indymedia agg …

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 …