Correspondent

Ahuka


Host ID: 198
website:
email: zwilnik.nospam@nospam.zwilnik.com
episodes: 17

1242 - What's Wrong With Free, Anyway? | 2013-05-07

In looking at the distinction between free of charge and free as in freedom, some interesting issues emerge. I argue that free of charge is often not what we should be lookiing for if we want good software options. But because I like going the long way around behind the barn to get anywhere, I start off in the Music business.

Links to things I mentioned


My web site is at http://www.zwilnik.com/.


Remember to support free software!


1190 - 03 LibreOffice Writer Introduction to Styles | 2013-02-22

Some useful sites


My web site is at http://www.ahuka.com/.


Remember to support free software!


1149 - 02 LibreOffice Writer Default Template | 2012-12-27

Some useful sites

  • http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/documentation/
  • http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications
  • http://gofree.com/Tutorials/
  • http://en.libreofficeforum.org/

My web site is at hhttp://www.ahuka.com/.


Remember to support free software!


1144 - Who Owns Your Files | 2012-12-20

Indie and Creative Commons

  • Soundcloud - This is a music and audio sharing site, primarily.
  • Free Music Archive - Lots of CC-licensed music.
  • Jamendo - One of the premiere CC music sites.
  • Bandcamp - I just learned about this site from my friend Craig Maloney, who does the Open Metal Cast. This site has Creative Commons music from bands who want to build a relationship with their fans and sell them music. Good artists like Amanda Palmer are here.

e-Books

When it comes to books, you really are at the mercy of the individual publishers. Most music labels have finally come to accept that no DRM is the best way to go, but must book publishers are still being dragged into the 21st century kicking and screaming. But there are some good places to find e-books that respect your freedom.
  • Project Gutenberg - This is the granddaddy of the DRM free book sites. Project Gutenberg makes available books that are in the Public Domain, i.e., where the copyright has run out. These are mainly older books, but a lot of classics are in here. They make books available in all of the major formats.
  • Baen Books - This publisher specializes in the harder Science Fiction, but they really understand the new media landscape. They not only offer most of their books DRM-free and in multiple formats, but they also have the Baen Free Library, where they offer selected books free of charge. The hope is that with the first taste free, you will want to buy more. And it works. I went there to see what they had, discovered that they had the entire collected works of one of my favorite authors (James H. Schmitz) for sale, and bought the lot of them.
  • Tor/Forge - A major publisher in the Science Fiction and Fantasy fields, they just moved to going DRM free a few months ago. They did this because other publishers had been successful in so doing.
  • Angry Robot - Along with Baen, a pioneer in selling DRM-free books in the Science Fiction and Fantasy fields.
  • Avon Romance - A major publisher of romance novels, they just announced that they are experimenting with DRM-free ebook sales.
  • O'Reilly Media - The premiere publisher of technical books, they pretty get everything right. They sell e-books without DRM. When a new edition of a book you already bought comes out you can "upgrade" for a nominal fee (e.g. I upgraded my Kevin Purdy "Android" book for $1). And with older books that they think are no longer worth in print, they are removing the copyright and making them freely available.
  • ManyBooks.net - This site has a lot of overlap with Project Gutenberg, but also has some newer works that have been made available, such as Charles Stross's Accelerando.
  • Fictionwise - Although heavy on the Science Fiction and Fantasy, has a lot of offerings in other genres as well. Reasonably priced and DRM-free.
  • Cory Doctorow - Cory was one of the first authors to make a point of offering all of his works not only DRM-free but free of charge in e-book formats from his Web site. But you know, when the book he co-authored with Charles Stross Rapture of the Nerds came out recently I went to the Google Play store and bought it.
  • DriveThru Fiction - An interesting site that also has Comics and RPG games available.
  • Apress - A publisher of technical books that also offers reduced-price e-books if you have already purchased the print title. This is something I'd like to see more of.
  • Packt Publishing - Another technical book publisher with DRM-free books.

Audiobooks

This is where there is still a big disappointment. Audible, which is by any measure the clear leader here, insists on DRM on all of their books, which is why I refuse to get an account. Audible is now owned by Amazon, which sells music tracks as MP3 files without DRM, so there was hope when they bought Audible that we could get DRM-free audiobooks, but that was not the case. Fortunately, there are alternatives.
  • eMusic - This is the same site I mentioned above for DRM-free musci tracks. They also offer a subscription plan for audiobboks, $10 a month gets you one book. Selection is not as good as Audible, but their list is growing all of the time and I have had no trouble finding books there that interest me. I recently listened to Walter Isaacson's biogrpahy of Albert Einstein through a book I bought here.
  • Podiobooks - This site offers audiobooks in serialized form, much like podcasts offer you a file every week. Heavy on the Science Fiction and Fantasy at this point, but worth checking out. Scott Sigler and J.C. Hutchins are both available here, for instance.
  • Scott Sigler - Scott used free content to get his name out, but still offers free audio versions on his web site even though he now has a publisher.
  • Cory Doctorow - Cory in addition to offering free ebooks also offers audiobooks that are DRM-free on a "name your own price" basis. Among the readers on his books are Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Spider Robinson, and Leo Laporte. He even sells files and CDs in Ogg format if you prefer to get your files that way. Due seriously gets freedom, but if you know anything about Cory Doctorow you know that.

My web site is at hhttp://www.ahuka.com/.


Remember to support free software!


1136 - 01 Introduction to Office software | 2012-12-10

LibreOffice

Some useful sites


My web site is at hhttp://www.ahuka.com/.

Remember to support free software!


1093 - Separate Presentation from Content - 2 Office Software | 2012-10-10

Alfrescohttp://www.alfresco.com/


Ohio LinuxFest is September 28-30 in Columbus, Ohio. Go to https://ohiolinux.org/ for more information.


My web site is at hhttp://www.ahuka.com/.


Remember to support free software!


1088 - Penguicon 2012 | 2012-10-03

Penguicon is at http://www.penguicon.org/CMS/

LoCoCast is at http://lococast.net

Indiana LinuxFest is at http://www.indianalinux.org/cms/

Science Fiction Oral History Association is at http://www.sfoha.org

Hurrican Electric is at http://www.he.net

Washtenaw Linux Users Group is at http://www.lugwash.org


Follow my blog at http://www.zwilnik.com/


To submit a talk for Ohio LinuxFest, please go to https://ohiolinux.org/callfortalks for more information.


Remember to support free software!


1073 - Separate Presentation from Content - 1 The Web | 2012-09-12

The W3C page on why you should do this: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/G140

The The Universal Usability page: http://universalusability.com/access_by_design/document_structure/separate.html

Wikipedia has an article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_presentation_and_content

CSS Zen Garden shows how the look of a page can change with the same content : http://www.csszengarden.com/


Ohio LinuxFest is September 28-30 in Columbus, Ohio. Go to https://ohiolinux.org/ for more information.


My web site is at hhttp://www.ahuka.com/.


Remember to support free software!


1063 - Freedom and Licensing | 2012-08-29

Linux Action Show is at http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/linuxactionshow/

Free Software Foundation is at http://www.fsf.org/

Linux Format Magazine is at http://www.linuxformat.com/


Follow my blog at http://www.zwilnik.com/


To submit a talk for Ohio LinuxFest, please go to https://ohiolinux.org/callfortalks for more information.


Remember to support free software!


1013 - Saving Programs From TiVo | 2012-06-20

kmttg, which I use to download from TiVo, can be found at: http://code.google.com/p/kmttg/

The Java Runtime Environment should be in your distro's repositories, but you can also get it at: http://java.com/en/download/index.jsp

tivodecode is available at the kmttg site as above.

curl, mencoder, and ffmpeg should all be found in your distro's repositories.

Handbrake can be found at: http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

Comskip can be found at: http://www.kaashoek.com/comskip/

AtomicParsley can be found at: http://atomicparsley.sourceforge.net/

kdenlive can be found in your distro's repositories or at http://www.kdenlive.org/

And finally, all of the information in this program can also be found at my web site at: http://www.zwilnik.com/?page_id=138


To submit a talk for Ohio LinuxFest, please go to https://ohiolinux.org/callfortalks for more information.


Remember to support free software!


0983 - Freedom is not Free 5 - Get Involved | 2012-05-08

Rounding off his series on "Freedom", Ahuka finishes off with "Get Involved" Remember that you should check out the following link https://ohiolinux.org/node/187, and http://www.zwilnik.com/

0981 - Review Indiana LinuxFest 2012 | 2012-05-06

Indiana LinuxFest is at http://www.indianalinux.org/cms/

My web site is at http://www.zwilnik.com/


To submit a talk for Ohio LinuxFest, please go to https://ohiolinux.org/callfortalks for more information.


Remember to support free software!


0973 - Freedom is not Free 4 - Money | 2012-04-24

In the fourth of his series "Freedom is not Free" Ahuka discusses how you can contribute money to support projects.

https://ohiolinux.org/node/186

0957 - Freedom is not Free 3 - Documentation | 2012-04-02

https://ohiolinux.org/node/186
http://www.zwilnik.com

0943 - Freedom is not Free 2 - Bugs | 2012-03-14

http://how-to.linuxcareer.com/guide-to-bug-submitting-and-bug-tracking-in-linux
https://ohiolinux.org/node/186
http://www.zwilnik.com

0933 - Freedom is not Free 1 Introduction | 2012-02-28

Richard Stalman Free Software foundation

Richard Stallman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms, is an American software freedom activist and computer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and he has been the project's lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and various tools in the GNU coreutils. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.

The Free Software Definition

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Free as in Freedom

Free as in freedom oggcast - http://faif.us
Free as in Freedom is a bi-weekly oggcast, hosted and presented by Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen Sandler. The discussion includes legal, policy, and many other issues in the Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) world. Occasionally, guests join Bradley and Karen to discuss various topics regarding FLOSS.
You can email feedback on the show to oggcast@faif.us, or join bkuhn and other listeners in our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net.

Free Software Foundation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF is incorporated in Massachusetts, USA.
From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community. Consistent with its goals, only free software is used on FSF's computers.

How you can support free software

  • Bug Reports
  • Documentation
  • Financial Support
  • Advocacy


0901 - Ahuka: Intro and How I Got Into Linux | 2012-01-16

Another hosts steps up to the plate and introduces them selves to the Hacker Public Radio elite. Today it's the turn of Ahuka who opens with the now traditional "How I Got Into Linux" show.

His website is at http://www.zwilnik.com

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