Winter cat booth
January 26, 2013
Cat-box in its finished glory (minus the final reused courier package foil wrap)
When about two days ago, I was merrily going around my life I saw something strange. I was throwing out the trash. When I opened the trash shed, a stray scared cat jumped out of the trashcans. On top of that there is -12°C ( 10°F, global warming my ass ). Few weeks ago I saw on facebook some photo of someone making a booth for stray cats. I forgot how that person made it, but I decided to make one myself with what I had at hand.
Non-commercial open patent license
January 30, 2012
I was thinking about some stuff and I have some pretty nifty ideas about some devices that might help a lot people out. I also come from a Linux crowd where we just share ideas under GNU GPL and other licenses that allow freedom of usage of any software to anyone as long the modified software is released under the same license.
I am also a vegan, who sees non-human animals as peers upon which I don’t assert control ( tho I understand the need of other humans to stick to their own beliefs, even if they do not reflect reality of the world they’re in, and I don’t want to push my view onto others ).
What I want to know if there is some court-proven license that would guarantee me basically something like GPL but in the physical non-imaginary real-world. Some license that would allow me ALL of the following abilities:
- invention belongs to all of the sentient beings (human and non-human) capable of making sense of my invention who would:
- use it for non-commercial purposes ( something like Creative Commons CC BY-NC )
- use it for benefit of self or ‘own close ones’ ( group of beings where at least once per month each participant physically hugs at least 80% of other participants of that group )
- the document describing my invention would act as a prior art in the current patent system. In case I would want to patent it later on I would like to effectively block others from patenting my invention
- I am the keeper of the for-profit usage of my invention, giving out licenses to others to use it in a commercial way
- after deciding that I made enough money from my invention I would like to raise non-commercial restriction so others would like to have their fun as well
I am aware of existence of very liberal licenses in the arts and imaginary world of so called ‘intellectual property’, i.e. WTFPL or Creative Commons or GPL. However I want some sort of license that would allow me same degree of freedom in the real world of physical inventions and detachment from monetary flow.
Basically I want to release my invention blueprints in a way that regular people would benefit in some rural communities, and money-uped corpos would not hijack my invention to keep statusquo with scale of production unless I would allow them on one-by-one basis.
Then It dawned on me.
Why just release it instead on a dual license:
CC BY-NC so non-commercial usage would be permitted. And for commercial usage go with simple honor system as in: “I would like you to pay $X, but I’m okay if you pay as much or as little as you want for commercial license” – something like Radiohead did recently with their pay-what-you-want album. That way I wouldn’t have to worry about controlling anything and flow of money would be secured, and it will figure as prior art because I will trumpet it all around and It’s non-commercial license :)
I guess I will go with this scheme as soon as I will get prototype working :)
Making Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 behave like 10.04
January 2, 2012
My Ubuntu 12.04 behaving exactly like 10.04 :)
Like many others you chose to install new Ubuntu 11.10. And like many others, after about one minute of using it, the bling wore off and you were shocked how crappy it really was.
Although the new system is shiny and glam, from the usability point of view the new Unity interface simply sucks. The Gnome3 Shell that is advertised as an alternative is not that nice as well. This was the reason that many people abandoned Ubuntu for more sane systems like Mint. Many people like me simply like to have a system to get stuff done, and not to interact with. Gnome 2 based systems, like Ubuntu 10.04 were perfect for that goal.
So now, after you cried a river on how the new Ubuntu made you feel bad, time has come to dry your tears. There is a way to make new Gnome3 based ubuntu look and play nice – exactly like your good ‘ol desktop ( or like mine, on the photo on the right :P ).
Here’s what you have to do: Read the rest of this entry »
Snuggle up in positive media
November 15, 2011
There is not much of real support in the modern media for people who choose to pursue goals of personal health or personal independence.
Mass media landscape seems to be more focused on pursuing one thought – that you need to accommodate and then exchange tokens to get happiness. Also for some reason media don’t tell that happiness can come from within you when you will tell yourself ‘enough’ and start figuring out what your really need in life.
The situation with contemporary media reminds me of an old native-american tale, in which the mass media are represented by the first wolf:
A Cherokee elder was teaching his grandchildren about life.
He said to them, “A fight is going on inside me… it is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, hatefulness, and lies. The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, humbleness, kindness, friendship, generosity, faith, and truth. This same fight is going on inside of you, and inside every other person, too.”
The children thought about it for a minute. Then one child asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”
The Cherokee elder replied…
“The one you feed.”
The main goal of positive media is promoting the mindset that it is okay to feel what you really feel and share that feeling with others to encourage their growth and to communicate about what is really important in life. With this article I hope to give some food for thought for the latter wolf :) Read the rest of this entry »
Extreme Grass Grow Watching
November 4, 2011
Wheat grass grow setup (cat is optional)
Once upon a time (this summer) I stumbled upon a recipe for vegan cocktail that required wheat-grass. I did the recipe without it, but still I was puzzled what it is. I searched local shops for wheat grass, local markets, only thing that was around was wheat-seeds. So why not growing it on my own? :) Read the rest of this entry »
Recording TV in Ubuntu commandline
October 28, 2011
There are times where there is actually something on tv. That one tv show about organic gardening, reruns of ALF, some classic Jackie Chan flick, record straight from your webcam or whatever else you would like. You can use your PVR box to do so, but by doing so you give up one of your freedoms. Freedom to VCR anything out of TV and keep it in your possession to use at own will :)
Recording system at work
Nice, cozy and happy Ambiance / Radiance themes from Lucid 10.04
August 15, 2011
UPDATE: Due to the drop of the gnome2 desktop in 11.10 this tutorial is not enough to restore 10.04 workflow in this and other gnome3 based systems. You have to install some new packages to make new gnome3-classic look and act like 10.04. Here you will find detailed and through info on how to do this. This current blog entry only deals with restoring 10.04 look and feel to 10.10 and 11.04 desktops.
After installing Natty 11.04 I found the Ambiance / Radiance themes a bit dry and cold when compared to the 10.04 ones. I followed this tutorial and then I decided to make a nice new .deb out of the whole process so you too can just one-click-install it on all your systems and be done with it without any mangling, file conflicts related to the original .deb nor other strangeness. Read the rest of this entry »
Twitachu
June 26, 2011
So. Gwibber drills a hole in your HDD with gwibber-service, eats 100% of your CPU while you only use it passively anyway to display tweets in the notification area. And you’re on laptop so you run out of battery quite fast. What to do about the whole situation? Twitachu to the rescue :) Read the rest of this entry »
Undelete for ext3 filesystem
April 22, 2011
So, you’re happily hacking away, making a script to mass rename your data into more convenient name format and then, when you think it’s all done, you let it run. It renames one by one, all your precious data files into file called rec, each time deleting previous file named rec at the rename time. Bugger. What now? Read the rest of this entry »
Sending mail from command line
April 2, 2011
There may come some situations when you need to send a mail to yourself. Say you don’t like cron’s default mail sending behaviour and want a custom topic, and so on. It can be anything but for example let’s take crontab’s entry to send out every 2nd hour an email with fortune cookie type of info. Read the rest of this entry »
