Category: general

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general

Why the European Copyright Directive is a threat.

The new European Copyright Directive is a threat for all internet creators in the EU and a warning for all outside the EU.  Article 13 of the directive will inevitably lead to upload filters. With this directive the EU parliament has demonstrated that the interests of the big IP holders are more important to them than representing the EU citizens.

Having said that I wonder if the Fediverse could be the answer to this threat? For those who don’t know the Fediverse is an ensemble of interlinked servers used for sharing information through e.g. social networking or file hosting. Contrary to centralized services like Google or FaceBook nobody ‘owns’ the Fediverse. Even better every user is able to create his/her own server and become part of the ensemble. Even with upload filters installed on central services information will flow freely through the Fediverse (That’s unless upload filters will be installed on ISP level but that will make the EU internet the equivalent of the Chinese internet).

Want to read more. Click the link below.

The EU must respect citizens as content generators and not regard them simply as people who steal content generated by the elite.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/xnet/civilised-societies-don-t-call-it-censorship-but-copyright#comments

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general

Why I use open source for my DIY projects and you should too

Logo of the open source initiative. By Open Source Initiative official SVG - Simon Phipps, former president of OSI, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1853734

Introduction

I’ve been a user of proprietary products for a very long time without giving it much thought. In fact I’m writing this on an iMac with OSX as the operating system. I own this iMac for at least 5 years and it is a nice machine but as time went by something kept nagging. I used to believe that for good reliable software you had to pay money. If software was free (as in gratis) it was probably unstable, user unfriendly and unpolished that it wasn’t worth any money. At least that is what I thought.

Continue reading “Why I use open source for my DIY projects and you should too”
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general PC

Create an instructable (at Instructables)

After having built the OpenELEC mediastreamer I felt the urge to create an instruction for the community. This blog isn’t very suitable for that. I have been looking at Instructables for a while now. Sometimes I landed on their website when I searched for something to make or I just browsed the instructables to get inspired. I started to get fascinated by the whole Instructables concept. I deciced to create an instructable on a OpenELEC media player first because I couldn’t find one for x86 based systems and second to get experience with the whole instructable thing. The Instructables website is inseparable from the makers community which I feel very much part of.

Logo of Instructables with the friendly yellow robot.

When you are familiar with blogger.com you probably feel right at home when you create an instructable. Text entering, uploading photo’s and creating links are similar to the way blogger.com works. Instructables guides you through with a step by step approach which is so characteristic for the website. There are also some nice features to edit or annotate your photo’s.  Because of the uniform approach of Instructable it is not possible to alter the look of your pages very much (at least I couldn’t find it) but I guess this is an advantage for the reader. You can however add personal information to your instructable pages.

Creating an instructable is a lot of work. You’ll need to create good step by step instructions and excellent photography that match these instructions. When I finished my first draft I wasn’t satisfied with the photo’s of the media streamer that I had made previously. I therefore decided to make new photo’s of the already finished media streamer. I reopened it, took out some components and took photo’s. This session alone took me several hours. I published my instructable yesterday and the traffic to these pages has very good.  Much better than YouTube where it is very difficult to distinct yourself in the endless supply of video’s. Even better, with Instructables you are right in the middle of the makers community whereas with YouTube there is no specific area for makers. All in all I’m very happy with my first instructable and are pretty sure there are more to follow.

Your photo’s have to match your instructions. I therefore decided to make new photo’s of my already finished media streamer.