Linux kernel on my TV and Nook, earthquake, Caligula and Ubuntu-Debian meetup

Tuesday, Jan 18th, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

It’s hard to believe January is over half over already, it feels like just yesterday that MJ and I were walking home from the NYE fireworks!

Work has been busy, but I’ve learned a lot in the past couple weeks about debugging problems with multihoming in Linux and how the packets move around with IPSec. I absolutely need to brush up on my networking skills though, so I think we’ll take some time in the upcoming weekends (I’m on call next weekend, he’s on call the weekend after – lots of time at home!) to teach me more. I was also once again able to take advantage of an extra public IP address and my old laptop to do some internet-facing testing with some of the applications, which reminded me that I need to sort out the problems which remain with my current computer setup. I would really like to have a second virtualization-enabled system and a linux demo and CD-burning system to travel with. I thought about doing this all with a laptop, but while reviewing the great ZaReason laptop I realized that I have a very hard time using a big laptop. Instead I think I’ll end up replacing my firewall with something beefier, and just get an external CDRW for my netbook (thanks again to Norm for letting me know how much cheaper they’ve become!). As for demoing at events? If I don’t want to toss the latest and greatest on my netbook booting from USB should be a viable option.

While on the subject of Linux, MJ discovered that, perhaps predictably, our TV (Samsung PN58C8000) uses a Linux kernel. While looking up some model number information for the TV he noticed on one of the screens a line that said “Press Red Key to see Open Source License.”

Upon pressing the red key, you learn that there is indeed a lot of familiar software on the TV.

GPL software: Linux Kernel, Busybox, Binutils, wireless_tools, xfsprogs, iptables
LGPL software: Glibc, ffmpeg, smpeg, libgphoto2, libusb, SDL, libiconv, libmms

Plus, a full copy of the GPL that you can scroll through. Very cool, you’re doing it right Samsung!

On January 7th I felt my first earthquake: Magnitude 4.1 – NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. Woo nc71506865! I was sitting at my desk and felt a bouncing like someone was stomping down the hallway, but no one was in the hallway – oh! I’m in California, maybe that was an earthquake! So I ran to the window and looked down at the street, where I quickly realized I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see, so I went back to my desk to see in #ubuntu-us-ca:

16:10 < akk> Woo, small earthquake.

And react (with a bit too much enthusiasm):

16:11 < pleia2> OMG!!
16:11 < pleia2> I FELT IT!!!
16:11 < pleia2> my first earthquake :D!!!

Then twitter was… atwitter with everyone else in the bay area talking about it too.

Then on January 11th Nova did a special on Deadliest Earthquakes which was thoroughly scary and made me wonder why we keep building our cities on major fault lines (then I remembered that California is astonishingly beautiful) and made me marvel that there isn’t more devastation when a big quake hits.

We brought Caligula and Simcoe to the vet on Saturday the 8th for a checkup. Simcoe got a clean bill of health, but the vet was concerned about Caligula’s teeth so she recommended a teeth cleaning and did a panel of blood tests to confirm that he’s healthy enough to go under anesthesia for the cleaning. Unfortunately the blood results came back with high levels of some proteins, so we decided to do a more thorough protein levels check to try and confirm that these levels were simply due to inflammation related to dental problems and rule out cancer as a possibility for those levels. Thursday the vet called me with results the, they couldn’t rule out cancer so the vet had a meeting with an oncologist Friday morning to review the results. I was pretty worried at this point, giving Caligula lots of hugs and confirming that the pet insurance we have would cover it (it will). Friday the vet called back with good news from the oncologist, the results ruled out certain types of cancer and it’s still possible that the elevated levels are due to his teeth problems. So we went ahead and scheduled a series of x-rays of his chest and abdomen for this upcoming Saturday, and planned that if those look good they’ll go ahead with the teeth cleaning the same day. Then on Saturday night he stopped eating. Caligula is a big cat and eating is one of his favorite things! When he still hadn’t touched his food come Monday morning I scheduled an appointment for that evening. He got his x-rays (look good so far, waiting on a more thorough review) and was sent home with some bland diet food, having been given anti-nausea medicine and antacid. He finally started eating again last night. We had to cancel his teeth-cleaning entirely to wait until his stomach settles down, but hopefully we’ll get that sorted in the coming weeks. Assuming all of that goes well, we’ll go for some follow-up blood tests in the coming months. What a worrying week! But things are looking positive for my big kitty.

Last Wednesday I hosted another Ubuntu Hour + Bay Area Debian Meeting. The Ubuntu Hour fizzled out on account of the coffee shop closing early, so the 4 of us who showed up just hung out on the sidewalk for 30-45 minutes. We had 7 people come out to the Debian Meeting (dinner) at Henry’s Hunan. Lots of good discussion about Debian and Ubuntu and I got to talk about some of my multi-homing adventures of earlier in the week. Photos were taken and my excitement for the upcoming release of Squeeze was captured:

(Which reminds me, they just announced today that they now have a target release date: the weekend of 5th and 6th February!)

Plus, two things of note came out of this meeting. The first was that one of the attendees mentioned that they saw my name in the The Official Ubuntu Book (5th Edition). Really? Neat! So when I got home I had to check, and it indeed was the case:

How exciting!

The second was that we had a great discussion about ebooks. I’ve been on the fence about ebook readers for a long time and when fellow Ubuntu California Team member Robert Wall picked up a Barnes and Noble Nook the other week I asked him for a review, which I got at that Debian dinner. His praise (which included discussion of how useful the Calibre ebook management software in Linux is) tipped the scale for me, on Sunday we headed down to Barnes and Noble and I got a black and white wifi Nook. I love it already, and I plan on finally finishing some of the great ebooks I have (most notably, Confessions of a Public Speaker, which is delightful but reading on a computer screen just doesn’t do it for me). I’m also the newest fan of Project Gutenberg, I will finally get to finish Moby Dick! As far as Linux compatibility goes the device is great, it mounts as standard usb device so you can simply copy files over, or use Calibre to send to the device (which it correctly sees as a Nook). And finally, I’m delighted to have another Android device – Linux kernel on my TV! Linux kernel on my ebook reader! Now I just need to buy a sturdy carrying case so I can travel with it.

Filed under: animals, life, tech

2010

Thursday, Jan 6th, 2011 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

Philadelphia (from Camden)

2010 began with New Years in Philadelphia with MJ, on his final visit before my move, and our friend Nita.

I then had my final weeks in the Philadelphia area. This final Philadelphia winter turned out to be the snowiest winter in recorded history. What a send off!

In February my apartment was converted to box land and on February 16th, MJ, the cats and I bid farewell to Philadelphia and flew to San Francisco.

My life with MJ in San Francisco these past 10 months has been amazing. Insert all the mushy stuff here :) I miss Philadelphia and certainly miss my friends, but I haven’t for a moment regretted my decision to move out here to be with him.

Conferences! Surprising to many these days, I hadn’t actually been to a tech conference until the spring of 2008. In 2010 I went to 4.

Open Source Business Conference (San Francisco)
Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (San Francisco)
Ubuntu Developer Summit (Brussels, Belgium)
OLPCSF Collaboration Summit (San Francisco)

Plus various Geeknics, LUG meetings, Ubuntu Hours and other Linux events. I’ve never been so active in a local community, and while I have to admit that it was a lot of fun, by the end of the year I was seeking to reclaim some of my free time to get back to core project work. Finding a balance is challenging when there is always so much cool stuff going on, but it’s certainly a wonderful problem to have.

Travel! I hit Silver on the USAir Dividend Miles program. While travel has always been on my list of things I wanted to do, it’s always taken a back seat to more pressing needs. This year I was exceptionally fortunate to get sponsorships and other opportunities that allowed me to travel quite widely and modestly (sponsorship to Belgium, hotel paid for in Dublin).

February: Philadelphia to San Francisco (one way – the move!)
May: San Francisco to Brussels
September: San Francisco to Philadelphia
October: San Francisco to Dublin
November: San Francisco to Las Vegas
November: San Francisco to New Hampshire

For a total of almost 40,000 miles. I have come to the conclusion that (in spite of crazy TSA stuff) I love to fly and I find no shame in being a tourist. Plus I’m infinitely grateful that I’m finally in a position to travel, having the monetary means (including sponsorship opportunities) and flexibility with work so I could travel outside the constraints of typical “2 weeks per year” American vacation time allotment (the conference in Brussels? I was able to use PTO, not vacation time. Philly trip? I worked from the hotel all week.). We also took advantage of a long weekend over the 4th of July to drive to Las Vegas.

When we weren’t traveling or doing local Linux things, we were playing the tourist in our own beautiful city. I love San Francisco, I fell in love when I first visited here in 2008. I love the climate, I love that it’s such a tech mecca, I love the touristy nature of it, I love the food, I love the cable cars, I love the Giants and the A’s! Loving all of this probably means I’m not nearly cool enough to be here, but I do feel at home here. And without a doubt, nothing beats being near an ocean again. The Pacific on a crisp day brings me back to when I found solace in late night walks to ocean in Maine as a teenager and I find a peace that has been elusive for years.

San Francisco (from Alcatraz)

2010 was, without a doubt, one of the best years of my life so far. May 2011 be just as grand.

Filed under: EOY, life, reflection

Under the sink organization

Tuesday, Jan 4th, 2011 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I have to admit, going out and doing things all the time hasn’t left us a lot of time to get down to getting the condo done, we still have boxes around and there are a few major tasks we need to complete before we can call it “done” (as “done” as any home ever is). I’m aiming for the end of February to have the important things done, or at least scheduled, here’s hoping for a box-free March.

Over the holidays we did get one thing tackled: under the sink organization. The Container Store launched their 30% off elfa sale and we took advantage of it.

First we tackled under the bathroom sink. We went with the Cabinet-Sized elfa Drawer frames with baskets, a narrow and an extra narrow 4-runner fit perfectly under the sink. I wish I had a before picture, but it looked something like this: #$#%^$#^%. I could never find anything!

Then it was sorting out under the sink. We actually did the trash can a few weeks back, and as I mentioned then we went with the 8 gal. Undercounter Pull-Out Can. We also needed something for the recycling, so during the elfa sale we also picked up and extra narrow Cabinet-Sized elfa Mesh Easy Glider. The top of the runner easily comes off with the basket, making it super easy to take out the recycling. Win!

Today we received the replacement for the light/fan combo for the bathroom, which we hope to get installed in the next couple weeks. Tonight we’re heading down to Ikea to look at some stand-alone under desk drawer options. Tomorrow morning we’re having an upholstery guy come out to take a look at one of our chairs. Woohoo progress!

Filed under: life

Looking for a quick way to help Ubuntu Weekly News?

Monday, Jan 3rd, 2011 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter has been in a state of flux since the Editor in Chief had to step down. I worked with Nathan Handler over the weekend to get Issue 218 out the door today covering much of December and it gave me a taste of how challenging and time-consuming the task was (and made me hugely thankful that the former Editor so thoroughly documented it all). It also made me realize that it could be more succinctly divided up into small sections that volunteers can take – we just need to do a better job of documenting that so we can give pieces out easily when volunteers come along.

But until that documentation is complete, what can you do today? You may not have noticed, but we had to drop the “In The Press” and “In The Blogosphere” sections for this latest issue because those weren’t so easy to read back for the past month and find. Here’s where you come in.

See a great or interesting blog post (outside of Ubuntu Planet) or news article about Ubuntu?

Add it here: http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/UWN-Ideas

You may also drop by #ubuntu-news on irc.freenode.net and give us links, or send an email to our mailing list at ubuntu-news-team@lists.ubuntu.com (emails from non-subscribed addresses are moderated, but we check the moderation queue regularly) or send an email to editor.ubuntu.news@gmail.com

Feeling even more energetic? Include a blurb about the article that we can use in the UWN!

Thanks everyone!

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Ubuntu Hour, Ubuntu upgrades at CACS with Partimus

Saturday, Jan 1st, 2011 by pleia2 | 4 Comments

On Thursday I wrapped up work and MJ and I headed down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour at Antonio’s Nut House.

It ended up being a great venue for the meeting, we got a booth right near the door, it was relatively quiet, the food was good and we had plenty of space for our attendees (8 of us in total, but we had room to expand should we have had more). I had the opportunity to finally meet Jessica Ledbetter, who has recently joined several projects in the Ubuntu community that we work on together. It was also worth noting that of the attendees, half of us were women, and among those ranks we had a sysadmin and two programmers.

Friday I had the day off from work, so I got up bright and early to meet up with Christian Einfeldt and James Howard of Partimus at the Creative Arts Charter School on Turk Street here in San Francisco.

The plan for the day was to complete the installation of Ubuntu 10.04 on the 31 lab computers which were running 8.04. James had the PXE server which hosts the installation isos for the lab systems prepped (including the required ldap and nfs configurations), and had made the appropriate changes in gconf so the files in the home directories on the NFS share would not cause problems between gnome versions.

Our first step was to boot up all the machines in the lab to confirm they were all working and then grab a replacement for the one machine which wasn’t booting properly. From there we brought them all down and then booted them off the network to launch the installers in batches of 4.

Installers running:

While the installers ran Christian had a couple of folks come by who had an Ubuntu system at home which was failing. It turned out to be the harddrive but the system itself was quite old so Christian had a new system prepped for them. I was able to use DSL (available via PXE from James’ server) to get the drive mounted on the old machine, and luckily was able to salvage the user data.

I also took the time there to use the tools above to salvage another computer from the storage closet and get it prepped with Lucid to be a drop in replacement should any other systems fail. It was then that I realized that I need to rebuild my travel toolkit… until I remembered that I already did, I just need to remember to bring it with me! My friend, and fellow old hardware salvager, Jim Fisher also had some suggestions for a couple of cheap kits that will do the job and be even easier to manage, including this 27-Piece PC Tool Kit w/Pliers, Screwdrivers, Nylon Zipper Case.

I ended up heading out around 3PM after the Lucid upgrades were complete. One of the things James implemented during the upgrade was switching from Firefox to Chromium as the default browser for the lab systems at the request of one of the teachers. He’s also going to be seeing about getting more RAM (most of the machines have 512M, they’d like to increase that to 1G) and 10 or so graphics cards to use in some of the spare systems which need new cards from one of the local hardware recycling groups.

In all, a very productive day!

Filed under: computers, events, partimus, tech, ubuntu planet

Christmas at the Zoo and Oakland Museum Pixar Exhibit

Monday, Dec 27th, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Thanks to holidays both MJ and I had Friday off from work. We took a leisurely start to the day and headed over to the Metreon to grab some lunch to enjoy overlooking Yerba Buena Gardens. For a park that is just a block from where we live we don’t go nearly enough. We came home to a package from my friend Dan, which was a delightful gift of hot chocolate mix and assorted goodies, including pink (peppermint) marshmallows! Thanks again Dan!

I was also treated earlier in the week to a gift from my friend Alex, an R2D2 USB hub, pictured here on my desk with my Squeeze stuffed toy, Android toy, and with my Nexus One plugged into it. Droid with Droid! Thanks Alex! It ended up being quite the useful gift since I’m always swapping around my USB devices.

And in the spirit of things, I also launched a contest on wallaceandgromit.net to raffle off a couple of Wallace and Gromit calendars I received from a publisher in the UK last week, awesome!

We spent much of the rest of the day Friday relaxing and catching up on some TV episodes, dinner ended up being leftover spinach lasagna I had made the previous day.

Saturday was Christmas, but neither of us actually celebrate the holiday, so we made plans at one of the few places in town open that day, the zoo!. They had a series of special holiday themed feedings throughout the day for their “Winter Goes Wild” event which runs for a couple weeks surrounding Christmas.

We hopped on MUNI and arrived at the zoo shortly before 1PM, just in time for the tiger holiday feeding! They put boxes and toys in the tiger cages and gave the tigers the opportunity to “open” their presents and get their treats.

Tiger opening presents video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C82TQcQaWXk

Another tiger opening presents video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65d2Ft6AXrI

After the tigers, we headed to the Lemur cafe for some lunch. It was drizzling out prior to lunch, but while we were eating it turned into a downpour. They ended up cancelling the 2PM lemur feeding and we went to find some indoor exhibits. On our way to the rainforest indoor exhibit we walked through the soggy Austrailian part of the zoo where we got to see Koori, the 25th animal in the Zoo’s 25 animals of Christmas event, she was sleeping.

We also walked past the kangaroos, who were very bouncy and I ended up taking a very short video which, while quite poor, does give an indication of how rainy it was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7vc-8Sqv7E

The polar bears didn’t seem to be particularly enjoying the weather either.

At 3PM they did the otter feeding, which consisted of a keeper coming out with a few bags of snow and sprinkling their food on and in it so they could enjoy digging it out. I uploaded a short video of the very excited otters here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYQ2sKgVQtE

3:30 was the penguin feeding, and thankfully a break from the rain.

The zoo closed at 4 so we headed out around there and caught the MUNI home. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Fang, a Chinese restaurant just down the block from where we live.

Sunday we jumped on BART and headed across the bay to FINALLY see the Oakland Museum’s Pixar: 25 Years of Animation exhibit.

This exhibit is an expansion upon the Pixar: 20 years of animation which started touring in 2005. The expansion must have been quite large, since they had a significant amount of work added to the exhibit to encompass the movies released in the past 5 years, including Toy Story 3 and UP! (two of my favorites to date). I’ve been meaning to see the exhibit since I first heard about it but kept finding my weekends filled up (or tickets sold out when I actually went to the museum in October!). I am very glad we finally made it out to see it, the exhibit was amazing. It closes on January 9th, so if you’re in the bay area and want to see it, hurry! We wrapped up our day out with a late lunch at Pacific Coast Brewing Co where I was able to enjoy their Holiday XXII Imperial Blue ale and a glass of their root beer.

I uploaded some more photos from the long weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157625559744573/

This week is another short work week. Thursday night I’m planning to head down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour. I’ll be spending Friday at one of the local Partimus-sponsored schools working to upgrade the systems from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04. New Years night itself? No plans yet. We should probably do something about that.

Filed under: animals, life

Ubuntu-California.org Launched!

Tuesday, Dec 21st, 2010 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working with James Tatum to launch a website for Ubuntu California at ubuntu-california.org. This is a project which has been discussed several times over the years: Does the team need a site? What would it contain? Where would it be hosted? Who would be responsible for it?

In meetings over the past couple months it became clear that the team wanted an aggregation of member blogs (planet) and was seeking to find a more consolidated way to share photos from events, so we put together a team moved forward with the site. The primary domain itself will be used as an easy address to give folks who are new to the team and serve as a portal for our other resources. We went with WordPress for this since it’s a simple CMS for our volunteers who wish to help out with content on the site and we are using the ubuntu-website light-wordpress-theme. More notes about the technical specifications of the site can be found here.

Yesterday we launched our basic site!

ubuntu-california.org

James and I are currently working on the planet and the team is going through discussions regarding our photo options (gallery2 is open source and can be installed on the Linode, but Flickr and Picasa have loco directory support). It would be great to hear what other teams have done to keep their event photos organized. In the future we’re also looking at Google App Engine options in a portion of the project led by Aaditya Bhatia if we wish to have some custom applications for the site.

The site is hosted on a Linode (donated to the community by Linode, thanks again!) which I am currently the primary sysadmin of and also hosts ubuntupennsylvania.org and ubuntu-us.org. The domain name itself graciously provided by Eric Hammond.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Review: ZaReason Strata Pro 15 Laptop

Sunday, Dec 19th, 2010 by pleia2 | 17 Comments

With the exception of my netbook, I have never owned a new laptop. In the recent past I’ve tinkered with the beloved old Pentium 2 Inspiron 7000 series laptops, of which I ended up with 3 of in varying states of disrepair, and my current laptop is a Pentium 3 Compaq Presario, which primarily runs Debian with fluxbox and I use for testing (most recently drop-kick testing of DRBD and even managed to get Ubuntu 10.04 installed on it for fun, even though it’s a bit slow). But none of this helps me when I want to give someone a spiffy Ubuntu demo at an event or for work, so when a work opportunity presented itself where I needed a demo system, I was fortunate enough to be in contact with the folks at ZaReason who were happy to loan me a review and demo version of their Strata Pro 15 with the specs I requested.

I went with all the basic specs you see on the product page, with the exception of going with a 40G SSD drive rather than the 160G standard SATA disk. It came preloaded with Ubuntu 10.10 which I used in this review.

Since I live just 20 minutes from the ZaReason Berkeley office I was able to pick up the laptop myself and have a lovely chat with Cathy Malmrose about ZaReason itself. The company has really done an amazing job of selling Linux laptops and the passion for the business of putting Linux systems in the hands of everyone shines through when you speak with her. They really strive for affordable, high quality hardware that will last and superior support to back up all their products. If you call ZaReason for support with your system you’ll be sure to talk to someone who can communicate with you on your level (new to computers, no problem! experienced? they won’t make you wait through some useless troubleshooting script), you probably will even be able to speak with the person who built your actual machine.

First Impressions

The CPU is an i3-330M which has virtualization (a must for any systems I buy now, with the exception of netbooks). The 2G of RAM has been more than sufficient and so far the 15.4″ LCD display @ 1366×768 pixels has proven to be nothing short of stunning. The size of the laptop is unusual for me, as I’m so accustom to my netbook which is less than half the size, but I am quite liking the full size keyboard – complete with a number pad, which I love already (I used to do accounting work so I’m a number pad wizard, inputing numbers via the regular number keys when doing budgeting at home is painful so I simply don’t do it on my netbook). Number pad aside, I found the keyboard layout to be easy to get used to with no unpleasant surprises and I found it to be a pleasure to type on. I’ve already made use of the hibernation, sound and image brightness keys, which all work as expected. The single button below the touchpad took some getting used to, you just press one side or the other for left or right click.

Keyboard:

Twice the size of my mini9? Yep!

While on the topic of size, the laptop is pretty slim. In a comparison it’s actually a tiny bit thicker than the thickest part of my mini9, but my boyfriend’s 15 inch Mac Book Pro certainly is slimmer (from top: mini9, macbook pro, strata pro 15):

Battery Life: Test 1, standard usage

Now, one of the questions I see raised most often during reviews is battery life, so I figured I’d do a couple tests related to that. My first test had me doing what I feel is pretty typical usage, which includes:

Wifi (WPA) on
Screen brightness all the way up
Always running: Standard Ubuntu Gnome desktop w/ compiz cube, terminal w/ ssh, Google Chrome
Put an SD card into the internal reader and copied over 50 images into ShotWell
Played 10 minutes of a DVD (was doing a trial to see if DVD playback worked)

Standard usage, which on this trial included: chatting on IRC over ssh, tweeting, reading blogs, writing emails in gmail, editing Google Docs, editing Ubuntu Wiki, updating a couple websites

Results: Predictably playing a DVD kills the battery life, but even with that 10 minutes of play and all the rest, I ended up with 2 hours and 45 minutes of battery life.

Battery Life: Test 2, DVD playback

Wifi (WPA) off
Screen brightness all the way up

I decided to go with wifi off in this test because my use case would be something like wanting to watch a movie on an airplane without power or wifi. So, did I get through a movie?

Results: Test it with Raiders of the Lost Ark, at 115 minutes. The battery lasted for 91 minutes. Spinning up of the drive, plus increased power required to handle all the DVD decoding is no doubt to blame here, playing a ripped movie would probably be far more successful. An extra battery may also be a worthy investment if you intend to do this, and ZaReason makes that pretty easy to do when you buy the laptop with an “Extra Battery” drop down on the ordering page.

Conclusions

While I love the number pad, my only major gripe with this laptop is the size. I am accustom to curling up on the couch with my tiny netbook and hacking away, which was tricky with this. I’d probably go with the 13″ if I were to buy one myself. I never quite got used to the single button for the mouse, but given the size and work I ended up being able to do on this laptop I frequently just plugged in my little USB travel mouse. The hardware itself has the solid feel of my old Compaq that I’ve found lacking in a lot of sub-$1000 laptops I’ve tried in the recent years.

So, will I buy one (well, the 13″ version) for myself? My daily computing life is spent between my super powerful desktop and my little netbook. My desktop is used for work, virtualized installs, major image manipulation with inkscape and photo editing with the gimp. My netbook works well as a “sit on the couch and IRC + internet + email + minimal hacking” machine, which is much of what I do in my off-work hours. That said, I do have a hole in my computing world which influenced borrowing this laptop in the first place – nothing to really show off Ubuntu on for customers or at Ubuntu events, nothing to burn CDs on at events, and I have to admit that it would be nice to have a second machine with virtualized hardware so my development machines were more portable. We’ll see where my needs and budget lead me.

Questions? I should have this laptop for at least another week so if you have questions or want me to take some specific pictures, ask away!

Filed under: computers, tech, ubuntu planet

Partimus on TV and fundraiser

Thursday, Dec 16th, 2010 by pleia2 | 3 Comments

I was recently brought on the board of the non-profit Partimus, which provides repurposed computers running free software (currently Ubuntu and related apps) to students and schools which need them. The organization currently has six deployments across the Bay Area.

Following a press release last month (Albert G. Stoll, Jr. | A Law Corp. partners with other businesses and Bay Area residents to support mission of Partimus) Partimus was contacted by ABC 7 San Francisco to see if we were interested in joining their “Voice Box” studio audience for an episode of 7 Live. Christian Einfeldt quickly accepted and sent out invites to several Bay Area Linux lists. Having never taken the opportunity to be part of a studio audience and excited about Partimus being mentioned on traditional media, I took the afternoon off on Monday the 13th and headed down to the TV studio to join everyone.

Front of the studio (but we entered around back)

We arrived around 2PM and were let in to the studio at 2:15. From there we were briefed about the show and eventually walked into the studio.

The studio itself was split into separate sections, the stage itself, the “Voice Box” which is also on the stage, and the other studio audience section behind the (robot!) cameras.

Voice Box seats

The show is primarily pop culture, local news and light tech. In this clip you can see Sunshine Best (world traveler, chef, and she’s an Ubuntu user!), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) and Beth Lynn Eicher (of Ohio LinuxFest fame) talking about increasing bridge tolls and the differences in cultural stigmas for men and women attached to showing emotion in public.

But if you check out this video of the whole show and skip to 39:45 (it can be tricky to skip, I let it load first) you can hear the promo that host Brian Copeland gave us! Or you can just read my transcription here:

“As I mentioned earlier in our Voice Box today we have the non-profit organization Partimus. Now Partimus aims to help bridge the digital divide in public schools by bringing in Linux-powered computers to schools that otherwise would not be able to afford them.

**Cheers from the audience**

And you can help! This Wednesday December the 15th they’re having their first fundraiser “Share the Joy” from 5 to 6 at the Creative Arts Charter school in San Francsico. So for more information visit their website, Partimus.org.”

After the show we were able to talk to the hosts and explore the set a little.

Sameer Verma and Ryan Singer talking with host Jennifer Jolly; background: Mark Terranova talking with host Brian Copeland

Mark Terranova, me, Jono Bacon on stage in front of 7 Live backdrop, photo by Norm McAllister

Mark Terranova posted more photos here: http://zareason.posterous.com/pictures-of-partimusorg-friends-volunteers-ou

Several of us then headed up to the ZaReason up in Berkeley for a Partimus board meeting (and pizza!). The board meeting got a lot of organizational things taken care of and gave us the opportunity to tie up any loose ends before our fundraiser.

Wednesday night was our fundraiser! It was hosted at the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco and by fortune of a quick bus ride I was able to arrive a bit early to help set up. The attendees of the fundraiser ranged from those of us involved with Partimus itself, to teachers who were there to talk about how great Ubuntu has been in their classrooms to folks from the law firm to local business people interested in finding out more about the efforts of Partimus. It was a great event, I had a lot of interesting conversations about mainstream use of Linux, how I use it at my job, and particularly how we’re able to use it for deployments by Partimus.