Consilience

You know, I was going to participate with this meme. The main reason was that whenever I would read someone’s post with their picture I was at my desktop which doesn’t have a webcam and well, I’m too lazy to boot the laptop for it.

And now that I am on my laptop I would have completely forgot about the meme. Until now.

My buddy is going to start a long process of changing his server to LVM. This is the transcript of our conversation:

Pete: and it all starts with $sudo rm -r /mnt/sda1/*
Pete: That’s a heavy line right there.
Me: yeah.
Me: damn
Pete: Intimidating, I know.
Me: you should take a shot before you hit enter.
Pete: You’re right. You’re damn right.
Pete: F**k, maybe you should take a shot before I hit enter.

And so, to show my solidarity with conviction I decided to record my shot and send it to him. Now, here it is for you too.

Greg taking a shot of Jameson (ogg video, 300K).*

And here I am:

Now the meme part:
1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair… just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

* For some reason the video looks to be a little fast, sorry about that.

Welcome to the second installment of:

BIKE LOCK FAIL BLOG

For those of you just tuning in, see the first intallment: Seat Post.

Example 2: locking up your bike via your…

HANDLE BARS

Picture:

The Problem:

Cable simply passes around the handlebars and then through the bike stand.

How To Free the Bike

This picture includes my tri-tool already inserted into the bolt that secures the handle bars on the bike frame.  This tool is simply three different sized allen wrenches.  I carry this around with me at all times in case I need to tighten/fix anything on my bike.  Many people also carry (and should carry) a multi-tool with them at all times.

With 10 seconds of loosening, 5 seconds to remove cable, and another 10 seconds of tightening (25 seconds total) I could have a free bike!

In fact, I don’t even know if my tool is needed.  The cable is fairly long and even though the handlebars are themselve pretty long I think I could just pull the cable out around the ends of the bars and be done with it that way.  No tools required!

Lesson Learned

Don’t lock up your bike via your handle bars, nor your seat post.

Why I should have moved it

On this day, as you can tell from these next pictures, it was raining.  The spot this bike is in is my “usual spot” on campus, next to one of the Libraries.  This specific spot is right underneath an overhang thus during non-windy rain storms it protects the area from getting wet.  I don’t know about you, but I dislike a wet butt from a wet bike seat.

See how nicely their bike seat is protected?  Now look at what I had to do to try and keep my seat protected:

Good thing it stopped raining well before I wanted to head home and my seat had dried.  And no, I wouldn’t have moved it anyways, that would just be mean.

Till next time.

All Images CC:BY-SA Greg Grossmeier

In response to my previous blog post about cycling a commenter made the suggestion to somehow gather all of us cyclists in the Ubuntu Community and form a bond or relationship. I’m not sure what form this group will take or what resources it will want.

To make it slightly easier to do this I have taken a page out of the Ubuntu Smokers group and created a Launchpad team.

Say hello to Ubuntu Cyclists! All those who love biking in whatever form are welcome to join!

EDIT: We need a cool Logo and Badge! Anyone who has talent want to make one? That’d be great! Email me, greg@ the domain of this blog.

No, I’m not talking about bikers/cyclists in general. In fact, I am a complete supporter and advocate of using pedal powered transportation. It is my own form of transportation.

What I am talking about are those people who don’t know how to lock up their bikes.

Short Background

I go to a large state university, the University of Michigan, for grad school. I also ride my bike everywhere. In doing so, I see how other people lock up their bikes on a daily basis. I see everything from the over-protective (a cable lock per wheel, cable for seat, and a U-lock for the frame) to the apparent community bikes (not locked up at all).

The ones that make me think “this person should not be allowed to be in control of any security device, be it a bike lock, their home door lock, or a password” are the ones who come up with inventive ways of “securing” their bike.

Example 1

One such example, which I unfortunately did not have my camera at the time to take a picture, involved a roughly $1000 Trek road bike.

I stopped to get some soup from the best soup place in Ann Arbor (Le Dog on Liberty) and noticed this bike near the shop. After getting my soup I took a second look at said bike and just stood there for a moment; I couldn’t believe my eyes. This person had used a $10 cable lock (ie: easily breakable) to lock her $1000 bike. That isn’t the issue (although, never use those $10 locks, you will be sorry). The issue is the way in which they choose to use that $10 lock.

They looped the cable around the seat post and then through the bike stand. Let me say that again. They looped the cable lock around the SEAT POST and then through the bike stand.

If you can’t readily see the issue with this, let me explain. First a picture:

CC:BY – by “faster panda kill kill”

Look at the seat. See the seat post (the metal tube that goes from the seat to the rest of the bike frame)? They had simply looped the cable around that and through the bike stand. Anyone, and I mean anyone, could just grab that cable, lift upwards at an angle, and the bike would be completely free.

This is what I will term from now on as a “DSSTS,” or Dip Shit Simple To Steal.

The Future

I plan to start taking pictures of people who lock up their bikes in interesting yet idiotic ways; in fact, I already have one example but I do not have my camera cord with me. With these pictures I will produce a Bike Lock Failure blog post as time permits. If you have some examples please feel free to email them to me; greg@ this domain.

Note to Planet Ubuntu subscribers: I will be putting these forthcoming blog posts into a category which will not be picked up by the planet, if you want to see them, subscribe to my main feed.

With the recent slashdot article decrying the Terms of Service which were touted as disrespectable (implied) just as the TOS for Chrome which were changed I wanted to talk about something I find important.

The Problem

While the idea of granting Google a license to use in whatever way they choose all the pictures you upload to Picasa or all of the text on your Blogger blog sounds scary, there are good reasons to do so.

The good reason, which was pointed out by many in the comments on , is that unless you granted Google a license under those terms they really couldn’t legally display or host your pictures or blog posts. I would like to take this moment to describe a better way of doing things.

The Suggestion

Aside: IANAL.

Any web service you use which allows the creation of user material (blogs, photo hosting, microblogging, etc) should also all you to set what license you want your material to be under. Ideally they would give you more chooses than just “Copyrighted” and “Public Domain.” Other chooses, like the Creative Commons family of licenses, would enable not only user freedom for online services but also to promote the adoption of Open and Free Content Licenses that we all appreciate (probably, we are Open people).

This is instead of just giving permission to Google (or whatever web service you are using) to use it as they wish. My suggestion also lets other people know what they can and can not do with your content in clear terms (in the case of CC licenses, the GFDL is a bit more complicated).

What you can do.

So, if the web services you use don’t support assigning a license to your content (which means that is it is then under full copyright restrictions, as per the law in the US) see if you can either add it yourself in the case of open source projects or request it in the case of proprietary ones. I’m looking at your Facebook.

For the Open Source web services, you can take a look at some software libraries Creative Commons has developed (LicenseChooser.js and libLicense) to save you time to make it license aware.

Aside 2: I am employed by Creative Commons.

Thanks to Asheesh I am now a happy user of Tiny Tiny RSS. It has fully replaced my use of Google Reader. I feel a little bit cleaner/freer now. But don’t ask about my use of Google’s IMAP and Jabber servers. They are on the long term TODO list.

Anyways, what is Tiny Tiny RSS? It is a web-based Feed Reader, a la Google Reader. However, it is Open Source (GPL) and you (or a group of friends) run your own instance on your own server.

Yes, that means you will need some server space (or some web-accessible computer) and the ability to install software.

So far, my review of it includes:

• Good interface – clean and straight forward.  It is Google Reader-esque also.  Good if you like Google Reader, bad if you don’t.
• Really customizable (ie: lots of settings).  However, don’t worry; the defaults are usually pretty good.
• Does one thing that Google Reader doesn’t, and I have been missing since I used Liferea: not to display the same article if it is in multiple feeds.  This happens, for instance, if you subscribe to more than one planet (like planet.ubuntu and planet.debian and planet.gnome); you will get the same post from Jono twice since he is on Ubuntu and GNOME and the same post from Mako twice as he is on Debian and Ubuntu.  Those are only two examples of the many.  This is a big plus for me.
• Open Source, of course!
• Has a “publish article” feature which is what Google terms “Share.”  It produces an RSS feed that you can give people or put on your blog/homepage of articles which you find interesting and want to publish/share with others.  I am using it on my blog right now (only one shared article at this time).
• The bad thing I encountered at first: I was a bit confused when setting it up on how to get it to behave how I wanted; All unread articles, oldest first, every feed.  Seems pretty easy, but I guess I was just reading the settings wrong at first.  Either way, I have it set how I want now.

If you are curious to try this before you install it check out the live demo.

Is anyone else out there using Tiny Tiny RSS?  What are your opinions?