Movie week : Movies every geek should see (4 of 5) : The internets own boy.

Oct 16

The one thing that has upset the previous generations the most in the modern digital age, is that sometimes a 12 year old kid could come along and be better at something then everybody else. No matter if you had a Harvard degree, or 20 years of experience .. Sometimes some kid came along and did stuff that made your jaw drop. This was the case with Aaron Swartz , a bright kid who founded Reddit. Aaron was an exceptionally gifted person with his own views on freedom of information. This often clashed with a surrounding world that was not quite ready for his pioneering vision. Unfortunately Aaron is no longer with us .. and the sad story why this the case can be discovered in the full documentary below. A “must-watch” !

 

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Docuwiki : Take notes everywhere … seriously … every-where !

Nov 21

Greetings blog readers!  It is I, Matt, the stay-at-home g33kdad in Northern California.  I am writing today to discuss a topic that has been much on my mind lately and that is “note taking”.  I know, Y A W N, right?  Who cares?  You open a google doc, you jot some stuff down… or maybe I used a MS word doc for that… where did I save that again… is it in Evernote… oh, here’s some paper, i’ll just write it down… but, then I’ll just have to type it up later… and what if I want to work on it at my mom’s house…and if it’s stored on some company’s server somewhere, what kind of privacy is there… nevermind, I’ll just play xbox.

So, in the spirit of T. S. Eliot who wrote that immature poets copy while mature poets steal, I steal this from Allison Sheridan of the Nosillacast Podcast, “What is the problem to be solved?”

The problem, as I see it, is keeping track of information digitally (whether or not the information started out digital).  Now, unless you have been living under a rock for the recent past, you probably have an opinion on “cloud” services and computing. There are many different services available.  The ubiquitous choice seems to be Evernote. Evernote is a service that allows you to store your notes on an internet accessible server.  This gives you access to them from anywhere you have an internet connection.  There are apps for all the major mobile platforms and for most desktop operating systems. This is a very full-featured service and very powerful, as well.

Another option is to use Google Docs or another hosted word processor. This is a great option because the interface is similar to MS Word or other word processing programs and most of the formatting options you would have on the desktop are available in your web browser.

While these are good options, they have some flaws. They require a third-party to host your notes.  Having someone else handle the server maintenance and software is great, but you have to deal with privacy concerns.  You also have to deal with connectivity to that service. What if you have an internet outage or you find yourself somewhere without wifi. (Do you go places without wifi?) How do you add, edit, or read notes? Also, some services may not be designed for robust note-taking.

When it comes to third-party, cloud services, my personal feelings are these: 1. Any technology can be used to make my life better. 2. Any technology I don’t own or control can be used to make my life worse.  So I have to make a choice. Do I want the convenience of a service designed to meet the need? Do I want to keep all my notes in plain text on my personal computer? Is there another choice?

I have decided that a wiki is a very flexible platform for what I want to do.  In case you don’t know, a wiki (see: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/wiki) is a web-based platform for colabrative documents. Anybody who has a user account on a wiki can edit the content, their edits are tracked, and they are available to the public or to other users of the wiki, depending on the configuration.  Wikis have a simple formatting syntax that is easy to learn and use.  Wikis are also designed to store digital information. Links and rich-text and even multimedia can be stored and accessed through a wiki.

dokuwiki-part2-shot2

There are some caveats to this.  Wiki software is a web app that runs (in most cases) on a webserver. So you need to have access to a webserver to utilize a wiki. This can be a shared hosting account, a vps, or a small server in your home. The requirements are minimal. In some cases, wikis can be complicated to set up.

So, what do I do? I use a package called DokuWiki. DokuWiki is related to MediaWiki which is the software that powers one of the most famous wikis in the world, wikipedia.org.  It is a powerful package and works great for note-taking. There are many plugins available to change the syntax, provide for different content types and many other extensions. I have installed it on my home server and use it most every day for my needs. But there was a slight hiccup.  I still needed internet access to make notes.  Not a big deal when I’m on my home network, but even with dynamic DNS, I won’t have access if I can’t get to the internet.  Then, I discovered the “killer app”. There is a plugin called sync (http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:sync). This plugin uses XMLRPC to sync content between two dokuwiki installs. It can sync individual pages, whole namespaces (like folders or sub-directories), or even entire wiki instances.  Now, I run linux on my laptop and it was a 5 minute process to start a full LAMP stack on my daily driver. (a full LAMP stack is not necessary, lighttpd with php and SQLight is sufficient) I simply installed a local instance of DokuWiki and set up the sync profile to sync with my home server instance.  Now, if I’m out somewhere with no internet access, I can still access my wiki via “localhost”.  Then, when I get home or to a location with wifi, I run the sync and I have a backup of my notes! Excellent.

I have just scratched the surface of the possibilities of using DokuWiki for online note-taking. There are so many other uses for a wiki and I know that DokuWiki is so easy to deploy, I will be using it again.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article.  More to come! 

You can find more of Matt online at  @sahgeekdad on twitter or via  g33kdad.thestrangeland.net

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Point the Way Home: DDNS with Linode

Aug 02

Guest Blogger: Keith Murray

Earlier this year I switched my web hosting from my long-time account at DreamHost to a fancy new VPS at Linode. I really did enjoy my time with DreamHost, but what I wanted out of my hosting provider had changed somewhat. I was looking for full control of a machine in the cloud. Although DreamHost does offer a VPS option, the pricing options just didn’t compare with what Linode was offering.

I also took the opportunity to move my domain registrations over to Hover, but more on that another time.

With my Linode account managing the DNS for my domains I was able to point a a single subdomain back at the IP of my home network, effectively giving me a nice publicly accessible domain from within my network. This worked well until my ISP changed the IP address I had. Admittedly this doesn’t happen often, but it always seems to occur when I actually need to make use of this remote connection, and with no knowledge of my new public DHCP address it’s pretty useless.

Enter DDNS.

With some modifications to a script I found on GitHub I was able to quckly set up job to check my public IP address and update the DNS records at Linode using the Linode API. I hacked apart the original script and put together my own DDNS update script, suitable for automating.

By scheduling the script to run using a simple crontab entry I can rest assured that every night, while I’m asleep, my server will be connecting to Linode to point the way home.


Keith Murray is a software architect and developer who blogs about technology and science at kdmurray.net. He can also be found on twitter as kdmurray.

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“Geek nostalgia with bulletin board systems” by @mcvries

May 20

At the age of 17 I owned my first real personal computer. A 8086 XT Pc. It had a whopping 20 MB hard disk and a “color” screen. Monochrome “amber”, the referred to as the only color the screen could display. Booting took minutes, installing software took tweaking and knowledge, and all in all it was new, exciting and fun. And it was beige, of course. Back then … everything was beige.

One day, rumors started drifting my way :  Other students told me about BBS’ s, mysterious computer systems hiding behind a telephone number. Managed by ‘SysOp’s’, another kind of super computer human who ‘controlled the system’. Most of them were underground and mysterious, some of them were a professional service. Some of them might have been pirates on a ship in the middle of the Caribian .. or maybe not.

I was intrigued. Intrigue turned to marvel, marvel to desire.  A Modem had to be bought, installed and put to dear use. And so a journey began. With a modem installed the previous day, a terminal client on a floppy and a telephone number scribbled on a piece of paper I came home and sat down on my throne. Somewhat nervous I started the application and configured a new ‘Remote Host’. The telephone number of “De Digitale Stad” (The Digital City) in Amsterdam was entered and squeaking and whining a connection was made. “De Digitale stad” was connected to “The Internet” and therefor I became empowered with “The E-Mail” (Exclamation Mark to be inserted while reading this.) To actually use e-mail I had to use mutt, a text based email client. And after probing and prodding, I composed the first e-mail in my life.

After pondering and correcting, contemplating I came up with the body : “Test” (Poetry, pure and simple !). Lovely,  but  to whom should I sent it ? The only email address I knew was my own. Well,it was just as good as any ! (I was an interesting person to talk to..so why not ? )  The brand new address was carefully typed in the correct field and the “ctrl <s>” was pressed.  ZOOMM …  my first digital message began it’s way into cyberspace. (Pause a second … or two ) And there it arrived back to me ! Well that was quick! Marvelous new technology ! I yet had to learn that the message probably never even left the server, but the excitement of it all, the possibilities at my finger tips! I could e-mail with someone across the ocean! At no extra cost. Huzzah ! 

Since I didn’t really knew anybody across the pond and my curiosity wasn’t utterly fulfilled with the services on “De Digitale Stad”. And so  I searched for some other BBS’s and found them. Lists with telephone numbers were exchanged again during school hours, with notes on how good and worthwhile they were. Connecting through a telephone line at 2400 baud gets you about 240 characters per second if I recall, and that was exactly what you got: Characters. In full color, where available.

 And boy , those menu’s were filled with options: downloading .JPG’s, downloading .mod’s (the Camemans MP3), and chatting with other user(s). The  plural of “User” only applied if the sysop had more than one landline. This was however rarely the case on any of the BBS’s I visited. 

And of course there was the magical ability for ‘uploading’. Uploading to get credits, credits to allow downloading. What I downloaded I uploaded somewhere else to gain even more credits! Meanwhile, through the messaging boards I got to know people, learned about computers, learned how to set up a BBS myself and after a while people called into my system. Dropping files, typing messages, submitting stories, manuals, hacks and books. We were “surfing” at the cutting edge of technology!

But in a world which is always connected, offering enough bandwidth to stream HD movies and connect to thousands of online friends those systems were sure to fade away. Or were they?

Well, if you would start a telnet session to towel.blinkenlights.nl you will see an ascii version of starwars. Telnet to miku.acm.uiuc.edu and you will see Nyancat which is all nice, but telnet to xanadubbs.ca (open a shell and just type : “telnet xanadubbs.ca”) and you will end up in a secluded world, a singularity in CyberSpace, a BBS. Not searchable, but menu driven and ancient to the touch, it will be a journey back in time.

At quadrilion times the speed “we had back in the day..”. And rest asured :  there are many more like it. No longer through a modem, no longer at a bitrate a professional typist could  defeat with one hand, but the “feel” is as authentic as it ever was.

Hosting a BBS  yourself ought to be do-able, just have a look at lunduke’s post here Hmmm, I just might start one myself and when I do, I’ll scribble the address on a note here.

 If you want to get a feel of how it really was, go to the Internet Archive here and watch the documentary. Make sure to keep an acoustic 300 baud modem in mind when the gazillion of bytes you need so much to be transformed in a HD movie take a bit longer to arrive at your enormous hard disk, than you would like. You live in a future we couldn’t foresee back then. Enjoy it.

@mcvries

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kw408 : Cross platform IP-TV with WEEPEE.TV

Dec 26


We close of the year (and season 4 of Knightwise.com) with the video coverage we shot at the “Softlaunch” event of Belgians first ‘Internet only’ TV-Content provider : Weepee.tv. You Cable-Cutters can watch and learn what it is, how to get it, how it works and what other geeks might think of it. Will this be the death of classic television for geeks or just a fab ? Find out in KW408.

Shownotes.

Weepee.tv 

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