I’ll be speaking at the University of Utah this Monday, September 22nd, noon-1:30pm in the Collegiate Room in the Student Union. The title is “Free Speech, Free Software, Free Culture: The Movement for Cultural Participation”. (I’m always torn as to whether to title my talk something witty/silly, or to try to be serious and official-sounding, but I usually go with the latter because different people have different senses of humor and I don’t want someone to skip my talk because my attempts at humor on the advertisements didn’t agree with them.) I’ll also be giving a talk to some librarians beforehand about the Diebold case etc., and afterwards I’ll be doing a “how to start a chapter” workshop with the brand new Students for Free Culture chapter which is starting up there. Monday will be a busy day ^_^

If anyone is in Salt Lake City on Monday night, I’d be interested in meeting up for dinner… just leave a comment or drop me a line. And naturally, if you attend the University of Utah, please come to my talk!

UPDATE: Apparently my talk is only open to invited guests, perhaps because they are serving lunch. If you want to attend, please contact me so I can put you on the invited list.

Is anyone else on Identi.ca? It’s an open source, decentralized Twitter-like microblogging project, and it is pretty awesome. Among other things, you can post to it using a Jabber account such as Gtalk or LJ Talk, and it can send you your friends’ updates over Jabber as well. (I understand this functionality has been broken/disabled on Twitter for a while.) Anyone can install their own version of the software driving it, called Laconica, and friend people on other Laconica services (such as Identi.ca itself).

If you want to follow my posts or “dents”, just subscribe to skyfaller on identi.ca or use the RSS feed you can find on that page.

Hope to see you all there!

On a completely abstract level, if you had a choice between using proprietary software on OS X, or installing Windows in order to use some open source software which for some reason only runs on Windows, which would you do?

I suppose the answer might turn on how good you think OS X is (partially open source, prettier, easier to use, less crufty) and how much you hate Windows, but perhaps this question is more complicated than that?

Frequently I find myself waiting for the nightly builds of some open source program to fix some bug, or to add a feature that doesn’t exist in the stable version of the software. It would be wonderful if there were a good way to be notified when a bugfix or feature appears, either in the unstable or stable versions.

For instance, right now I need some open source software that can capture a screencast from the output of my computer screen. VLC is supposed to support this, but that feature does not work in the stable version on OS X. The next version of VLC, 0.9.0, will apparently have a GUI for recording output from an iSight camera or your screen, but although the GUI is there in the unstable builds, it doesn’t succeed in saving to a file yet. I would like to be notified when VLC supports recording screencasts on OS X.

For another example, I would like to start using Thunderbird 3 with the Lightning calendar/todos add-on… Thunderbird 2 has been boring and stagnant for a long time, and I’d like to help the Thunderbird 3 effort in any way I can, at least by testing the nightly builds. However, there is a showstopper bug which prevents you from switching back and forth between the mail pane and the calendar pane (it gets stuck in calendar mode), and until that is fixed Thunderbird 3 is unusable for me. I have subscribed to the bug so I get an e-mail every time someone submits a patch or makes some uninteresting comment on the bug, but really I just want to know when the darn thing is fixed so I can use Thunderbird 3 again. I don’t want to get all of this extraneous e-mail.

What I’m imagining is a sort of social networking interface, or perhaps a Digg/reddit voting interface like Ubuntu Brainstorm, for bugs/features, where you can get a feed for each bug / feature request, or “friend”/”favorite” them on the website. Then you can either track all activity on the bug/feature request, or simply get a single update e-mail when the bug is fixed or the feature is implemented. This would be really awesome as a global interface for all open source projects, but a more realistic goal may be for something like this to be released as an easy to use/install open source package which all projects use and thus the interface is at least familiar even if it is not a single interface/website for every project under the sun.

Will someone please create this for me? 😉

I’m trying to split up the bill from my last trip to Target between Karen and myself, and it is rather difficult because I’m having trouble decoding the cryptic labels on the receipt.

300PC ALUMIN = The poker chips+cards that I bought for the semi-weekly poker nights my law school friends have. They are in an aluminum carrying case.

GAIAM TANMAT = The yoga mat that Karen bought. (It’s tan.)

RISK BOOK = A Risk game in a box with a book-like form factor.

AUTO OPEN = An umbrella which has a button that automatically opens the umbrella and automatically collapses it if you press it again (sadly you still need to manually retract the umbrella after collapsing it, but it’s still cool). You’d think they could say “umbrella” on the receipt, though.

So I’ve figured some of the items out. But what about:
ENERGIZER
ENERGIZER
ENERGIZER

I’m guessing we bought 3 packs of batteries, but couldn’t they be a little more descriptive? Like, what kind of batteries were they?

Or, for the grand prize of un-descriptiveness:

MERCHANDISE

Yes, merchandise. I bought merchandise at Target, big surprise. BUT WHAT KIND OF MERCHANDISE WAS IT???

The mystery remains.

I have been very disappointed in my law school grades the last two semesters. My highest grade 1st semester was a B+ in Torts, and my highest grade this semester was a B+ in Criminal Law. This is unacceptable.

I have decided that I will not shave my face again until I land at least one grade of an A- or above in a law school class.

This could be a relatively brief beard-growing episode, since I am taking a class on Copyright at the law school this summer. My final exam is in 5 days on July 10th, and hopefully I’ll have my grade back around the beginning of the semester. I could get an A in that class and terminate my beard after about a month.

Or I might not get an A until the end of the fall semester, which could mean growing my beard into January or beyond. But hopefully it will end sooner!

Wish me luck.

More posts to follow about the details of beard growing when I find time to research it.

If you or any of your friends are looking for an apartment in the DC area, check out my Craigslist ad for a room in my 2BR/2BA right next to the Virginia Square metro on the orange line. Constructive criticism for the Craigslist ad is also welcome, it’s never too late to make it better!

I still can’t believe what a useless POS iMovie ’08 is, and I can’t believe that Apple hasn’t fixed it by now. It was released in August 2007, it’s been almost a year and Apple has released several point releases for OS X since then. Would it be so difficult for Apple to open iMovie ’08 up to 3rd party add-ons so that people can put back in the features that Apple removed? The loss of slow-motion/fast-motion is really killing me.

Oh well, back to iMovie ’06 HD. I guess Microsoft isn’t the only company that releases “new and improved” products that are actually downgrades.

UPDATE: I just realized what iMovie ’08 reminds me of: the Matrix sequels. It has lots of potential, but none of it is realized; it has plenty of good ideas, but the implementation of them is horrible.

SPARC is looking for some open source webcasting software to replace the proprietary software they are currently using, Infinite Conferencing. The crucial functionality they need is:
(1) Slide delivery – They need to be able to conduct a powerpoint/slideshow presentation over the web in a user-friendly manner, without having to download any plugins. I am unclear on how Infinite does this, Jennifer suggested that it might be ActiveX, but that would only work on Windows/IE and she also claims to have used it on a Mac, so that can’t be right.
(2) Text chat – IRC + web portals should be good enough to handle this?
If we could do those two things in an open source fashion, they could just a conference call on a phone line to handle the audio portion, and ditch the proprietary software. Of course, it would be nice to handle that and other things online as well, so other useful features would include:
* Group VOIP chat / online conference calls
* Video option
* reliable
* easy to install + use.

Any ideas folks? C’mon lazyweb, I’m counting on you 😉

I am trying to make a video using free stock footage from the internet. It is very difficult! For some reason I thought it would be easy, because I frequently use free stock photographs from e.g. Flickr when putting together presentations, and I have no trouble finding high-quality, Creative Commons-licensed photos. Video is clearly different, unfortunately.

Here are my requirements/preferences for stock footage:
(1) Downloadable in high resolution/quality – This is problematic, because most video on the internet is in low-resolution Flash formats. Even when it is possible to download the flash file (which frequently takes some hacking), the video is too low-resolution to use for serious video-editing. Ideally I would like the video to have a resolution of 640×480 or higher.
(2) Freely licensed – Ideally I would like to use public domain or CC-licensed footage, with a license that permits me to make derivative works. This basically reduces my options to the Internet Archive and a few video-sharing sites such as Revver, most of the stuff on YouTube and its ilk is not freely-licensed.
(3) Actually relevant to the topic I am covering – It is actually rather difficult to find footage illustrating a particular concept/idea… the current state of video search is pathetic.

Does anyone have any ideas for websites / sources that meet these criteria?

I’ve had some success with the Internet Archive, but it has been a long and painful process, and I wish I could find some other options as well.

My trials and tribulations with the Internet Archive.