contents This is Brian's new home page.  Brian's old page was getting too old.  Many links on the old page don't work now.  What I'd really like is some free blog software that runs on Linux and that would allow me to publish the pages it creates to any site I want (namely this one).  It looks to me like most blog software forces you to use their website's software or webspace. Something like a blog plugin for Mozilla's composer would do, although stand-alone solutions might be better.  I want to install blog software on my desktop and upload resulting webpages to my website.  Is that so hard? I'm not looking to facilitate reader comments right now, because earthlink only gives me so much space.  So, e-mail me with software suggestions. Living intelligences (as opposed to spambots) should know that my e-mail address is 'bwcarver' before the '@' and 'earthlink.net' after the '@'. Brian


EFF.org



creativecommons.org




futureofmusic.org
futureofmusic.org




epic.org




greplaw.org



LawMeme




NewsForge



chillingeffects.org




Keeping Tabs on Your Reps
2002-11-26
I recently discovered a free and useful service for keeping track of how your Senators and House Rep. vote on key issues.  Congress.org has a thing called MegaVote that sends you an e-mail once a week letting you know how they voted and upcoming votes of interest. They also provide an option of writing your reps through a single convenient form. It seems like they just e-mail you the one time per week and do not send you a bunch of junk mail, so I've found it helpful thus far. Democracy doesn't work unless you educate yourself and then make your voice heard.

Distributed Proofreading and Free Books
2002-11-21
You may know of Project Gutenberg. They provide etexts of public domain works (for free). This means you can go to their site and read or print out most of "the classics" and increasingly, tons of other old writings. Someone has to scan these books and proofread them before they can be put online. For one individual or even a small group of volunteers, doing even a single book would take a really long time. But, what if a whole bunch of people just proofread one page a day? If enough people participated, you could get through hundreds of books per day! This is what is happening at Distributed Proofreaders. They are harnessing the millions of eyes on the internet and they just ask you to proofread one page per day. If you know how to read this, then you're qualified. Go help them out. It'll actually help you, by giving you more free books online.

While you're enjoying some free books, you should also check out The Freedom to Read Foundation. If you didn't know, librarians only look mousy and quiet. You try to censor something or restrict someone's access to something, and librarians are some of the first people to go ballistic. Michael Moore (author of Stupid White Men and filmmaker behind Bowling for Columbine) told a story on NPR a while back about how his publisher was going to scrap his now bestselling book (even after already printing 50,000 copies) because it was too controversial and critical of Pres. Bush (especially after 9/11.) He just happened to tell this story at a reading at a bookstore with a librarian in attendance. The librarian sent an e-mail describing the publisher's censorship plans to a list of other librarians. Well, they didn't take it well. The publisher calls up Michael and says, "What did you tell the librarians?!" Michael has no idea what they're talking about. "We're getting loads of hate mail from librarians!" The publisher couldn't take the heat. They published the book. They made a fortune. (It's now in its 34th week on the NYTimes bestseller list.)

Archives

October 2002



publicknowledge.org




eldred.cc




centerforthepublicdomain.org



bumperactive.com



fsf.org



digitalconsumer.org





slashdot.org




ACLU




ICANNwatch


Created 2002-10-02
by Brian W. Carver
Hits counted since 2002-10-05: BUSY
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