For the past month the Yorba offices were home to a strange two-faced creature. As of today, the little guy left our offices to embark on the next stage of his journey around the world.
Here’s some vacation photos of the Travelling Gnome’s stay here in San Francisco.
For more on the Travelling Gnome, visit his website.
The strangest item on my desk — at the moment — is a PirateBox.
What is a PirateBox, you may ask? At first glance it appears to be a Jolly Roger lunch box plugged into the wall.
But it’s more than that; it’s a wifi network for sharing files locally. All you have to do is point your wifi-enabled device at the “PirateBox” network, open a browser and try to load any page. You’ll be directed to a list of files to download and given the opportunity to upload your own.
At the moment, it’s filled with an assortment of video game music, an important textfile about Pascal, and a free album by gangsta nerd rap superstar ytcracker.
It’s all anonymous, at least as anonymous as any unsecured wifi network can be. The device isn’t connected to the internet so you have to be in (or very close to) our office to use it.
I built the box using an router capable of running open source firmware, following directions on the official PirateBox wiki. The storage is all on a cheap USB thumb drive. Everything was installed and assembled at our local hackerspace, just around the corner from the office.
As far as hobby electronics projects go this one is pretty simple to do, relatively cheap (less than $150 USD) and occasionally exciting as unexpected new files show up.
One tangible reward with writing software is to see your hard work put to practical use. A great place to see Shotwell put to work by “average” users is at the “I use Shotwell as a photo manager” Flickr photostream. I put quotes around “average” because these photos were not produced by average users in any way — whether or not they’re sophisticated computer users, they certainly have an above-average command of light and lens. The next time someone says open-source software hasn’t produced anything useful for the “average” user, send them to this Flickr group’s page.
Browse the entire collection when you get a chance, there are some great ones. I’ve embedded below a few that caught my eye, but there’s plenty more to admire in the almost 400 photos (and counting) in the pool. I can’t say with any certainty how involved Shotwell was in the process of producing these fantastic images, but I like to believe it was more than a little…
Yorba has just released Shotwell 0.11.2, a bug-fix release. We recommend that all users upgrade. Features of this release include:
Download a source tarball from the Shotwell home page at:
http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/
Binaries for Ubuntu Natty are available at Yorba’s Launchpad PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~yorba/+archive/ppa
Today Yorba has released Shotwell 0.11.1. This is a bug fix release; we recommend all users upgrade.
Changelog:
Download a source tarball from the Shotwell home page at:
http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/
Binaries for Ubuntu Natty is available at Yorba’s Launchpad PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~yorba/+archive/ppa