I’ll get in trouble for this post in two ways, but people who get it will appreciate it. The first is how I view death. I’m overwhelmingly swayed by this passage from the ancient book called the Zuangzi (spelled Chuang Tzu in the translation below) on the death of a loved one. Chuang Tzu’s wife died. When Hui Tzu went to convey his condolences, he found Chuang Tzu sitting with[…] Keep reading →

In the midst of my series on Communication Skills Exercises, yesterday I worked with the brilliant, talented, and accomplished Nina Paley — free culture advocate, creator of Sita Sings the Blues, cartoonist of the insightful, funny, and subversive Mimi and Eunice, and friendly neighbor. We animated the Freedombox logos John Emerson and I worked on. She also does things like post blog entries titled “I am awesome,” suggesting an obvious[…] Keep reading →

I had heard of the Great Wall of China. Now I’m behind it. They block Facebook, Youtube, plenty of Wikipedia pages (like pages on internet censorship in China), and links to software to get around the firewall. There seems to be a paid service to circumvent it. I can’t say I understand the strategy behind blocking these sites. It seems counterproductive to my concept of what government is for —[…] Keep reading →

More Freedombox logo ideas, in collaboration with John Emerson. Click on them for larger versions. If you don’t know about Freedombox, I recommend learning about (and supporting) it, unless you like third parties like corporations and governments having access to your personal life.

Another reason to avoid proprietary software is that it allows its creators privacy on your hardware. That lets them spy on you, among other things. Who wants that? For example, here is a report that the iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device[…] Keep reading →

A friend and I were playing around with logo ideas for the Freedombox project based on this email solicitation from the Freedombox Foundation for T-shirt designs: T-Shirt Designs ————— One of the things we offered Kickstarter donors was a T-shirt. We are thus soliciting T-shirt designs. The theme of the shirt is Community Angels. It would be good to involve our current logo http://freedomboxfoundation.org/images/freedombox_large.png. Sorry, we don’t have a bigger[…] Keep reading →

I’ve written about mindmaps recently and my upcoming creativity talk on April 10. I thought I’d share the draft mindmap I’ve prepared so far for the talk. Freemind lets me export to a flash-based mindmap that you can navigate. You can’t edit it or see how I edit it to see how fun, useful, and effective it is, but you can see the output. It’s an incomplete draft — too[…] Keep reading →

Mindmaps and mindmapping software are awesome! I rarely like using computers for what I can use paper and pencil, but mindmaps and mindmapping software help organize complex ideas better. They’re simple, effective, and, best of all, fun. I can only speak for the software I use, Freemind. Besides basic mindmapping functionality, it has some bells and whistles but I haven’t used them yet. It’s also free software that runs on[…] Keep reading →

The New York Times wrote yesterday about Eben Moglen, whom I wrote about recently. “We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” he said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.” … If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of[…] Keep reading →