FSFE Newsletter - October 2011
Laundruino - The laundry hack and laser sharks
FSFE Fellow Michael Clemens has a solution for all of you out there who want to know when their laundry in the washing machine is done. In his article he explains how to build get a "Laundruino", based on the Free Software microcontroller Arduino, which informs you of the status of your laundry cycle.
During his research for a radio interview (German) about a teenager who built a Free Software earthquake detection system for under 100 EUR, your editor was delighted to find many similar projects, such as how to make free hardware based simple robots, weather stations, a blimp, an installation to make high speed pictures and 3D-makerbots.
These creative and educational guides are the result of people sharing blueprints and source code, and are made possible by the fact that the authors are able to change how these computers work. They can modify them, and share their knowledge and ideas with others. With Free Software and free hardware, people can really understand the technology that surrounds them, and change it to meet their needs. And who knows, maybe soon your editor's dream of sharks with lasers will become reality.
Euro 2012 champion to speak at FSCONS
Guido Arnold from FSFE's Education Team presented the results of the Euro 2012 qualification in Free Software and Open Standards for September 2nd , September 3rd and September 6th . On November 12th, he will give a presenation in FSFE's track at FSCONS about the developments of Free Software in education and how to participate in the team's activities.
Something completely different
- "In Facebook you are not the customer, you are the product", writes our President Karsten Gerloff in his article on recent announcements by Facebook, and decentralised social networks.
- Check out the latest Fellowship Interview with Stefan Kangas, who talks about Fripost as a new community developing Free, privacy-preserving email services in a reliable way.
- A selection of interesting blog entries from our planet aggregation:
- Two Fellows doing analysis: Henri Bergus introduces us to business analytics with CouchDB and NoFlo, and Paul Adams analyses SVN commits in KDE.
- "Dr. Danz" wrote a daily journal about the KDE-telepathy sprint: day 0, day 1, day 2, and day 3.
- Read Henri's view on who is winning the war between tablets and laptops, and share your views with our mailing lists.
Get Active: New merchandise - Laser sharks with Fellowship logo?
We want to think about some new merchandise, and we would really like your fresh ideas. So please help us brainstorming; send proposals for t-shirt designs and other merchandise ideas to discussion@lists.fsfe.org, or if you prefer, directly to me at the address below. It does not matter if your ideas are crazy or unrealistic. Send them in and help us to be creative.
Thanks to all the Fellows and
donors who enable our work,
Matthias Kirschner - FSFE
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