April 26th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Guardian seems to understand the Nokia 770, as shown by this review.
“If you want something that is lying around the house, or by your bedside, for instant use when needed, then this is for you. It could come of age during an era of omnipresent Wi-Fi, enabling anytime, anywhere access to the web for everything from word processing to blogging and video sites.”
“Previous attempts to sell internet tablet computers have failed despite massive accompanying hype. This one has two things in its favour. It is tailor-made for the cloudburst of web applications we are promised and, being based on open source, it can call on a volunteer army of Linux enthusiasts to write programs for it.”
Indeed, programmers have been jumping aboard. See for yourself on the Maemo Wiki’s Application Catalog!
Posted in Maemo, Open Source | Comments Off on Guardian Reviews the Nokia 770
April 26th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
NeoOffice is the best and most actively developed OpenOffice.org-derivative for Mac OS X. Version 2.0 Alpha is now available, but the project also needs funding! If you can spare $25, join the early access program, get a copy of the Alpha before everyone else, and help support the developers of this essential program for Mac OS X.
Posted in Mac, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Support NeoOffice
April 25th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Appleseed is the way that social networking will inevitably evolve: it is an open source, distributed social networking platform. Just as anyone can set up an email server and send emails to users on any other, when this project reaches fruition, anyone will be able to set up a social networking server and befriend users on any other.
In addition, its modular architecture will allow users and developers to create plugins for it (like Firefox’s extensions), that will surely make it grow in many unexpected directions. I’d like to see filesharing (in particular, for open source programs) and bookmark sharing (like del.icio.us) implemented as modules.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Appleseed Project
April 24th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
We arrived at Swarthmore just in time for the very end of Lawrence Lessig’s talk, which I had really wanted to see. Everyone felt that it had been very informative and interesting! Hopefully I can find a transcript somewhere.
We also had the Pirate Party (pictures coming soon)! I learned about Electric Sheep for the first time, which was projected on a screen as a visual backdrop for the party.
Saturday included a number of sessions of interest, and in the evening I presented Wikipages in a “Lightning Talk.” There was a high level of interest among attendees. We also learned about the free culture aspects of games, whose rules apparently cannot be controlled by patent or trademark. Nelson taught us “Stairball,” which has recently been invented at Swarthmore. (See Adam Lizzi’s website for more.)
I also sold three copies of The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org, and found a high level of interest in OpenOffice among attendees (of course!).
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Back from Free Culture Summit 2006
April 21st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Bruce Byfield writes OOo Off the Wall: Combining Documents with OOo.
He explains that the use of styles in OpenOffice Writer makes a feature like WordPerfect’s “Reveal Codes” unnecesssary, and he demonstrates a workflow of combining documents into a new file that maintains consistent styling throughout. This is a pretty neat trick!
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Byfield: Combining Documents with OOo
April 20th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
OpenSourceParking.com has just launched.
“OpenSourceParking.com is a domain parking service that helps Free Software and Open Source. Domain parking provides a place-holder web page for an undeveloped domain name. Now you can do some good with those undeveloped domains!
Microsoft has been paying the large domain resellers to move their “parked” sites to IIS on Microsoft Server. Moving the parked customers of a single large reseller, GoDaddy.com, caused a shift of 4.5 Million domain names, or 5% of total server share from Apache to Microsoft IIS in the Netcraft report. This is an “appearance” change only, because the sites involved have no content. But managers believe figures like those in the Netcraft report, and act on them. It’s time for the Free Software / Open Source community to fight back.”
Posted in Open Source | Comments Off on “Open Source Parking”
April 17th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
A wiki for the 770, including links to many other useful sites, lists of applications, etc.
Brighthand.com’s thorough review of the 770, back before it was available on the market.
Internet Tablet Talk is a blog dedicated to the Nokia 770.
Perhaps most importantly, planet.maemo.org is the Maemo developers’ planet. (A planet in this context is a collection of blog feeds from people working on a common project, all presented chronologically on one page.)
Posted in Maemo, Open Source | Comments Off on Nokia 770 Links
April 14th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The next step in Firefox’s web domination is a community-organized video ads contest, Firefox Flicks.
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source | Comments Off on Firefox Flicks
April 13th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
KOffice 1.5 is now final.
KOffice is a competitor to OpenOffice, yes, but it is also a strategic ally: it has transitioned to using ODF as its default file format.
The press release states, “The spread of the OpenDocument file format is widely regarded as one of the most important developments in the whole IT industry right now. It will give users world-wide the possibility to control their own documents and also ensure that all documents can be read at any time in the future.
KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument.”
Congratulations and thanks to the developers on this major release!
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, Uncategorized | Comments Off on KOffice 1.5 Released
April 11th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
In an email to several OpenOffice project mailing lists, RKVS Raman announces that OpenOffice.org 2.0.1 language packs are now available in 7 Indian languages.
The languages are:
- Assamese
- Gujarati
- Hindi
- Malayalam
- Marathi
- Oriya
- Urdu
Several different groups and many individuals helped in the translation efforts. The source and binaries can be downloaded here.
Posted in Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 7 Indian Language Packs for OpenOffice