free software

To this day, I've never used WhatsApp on my phone. On the topic of security and privacy, WhatsApp has a long and checkered history, worthy of a special page on Wikipedia. For instance, earlier this year the company found themselves in the news again when they gave their users an ultimatum: hand over your data to Facebook or stop using WhatsApp. That's the kind of demand that sends people running. Nevertheless, people around the world continue to use WhatsApp.

In this tutorial, I explain how to install WhatsApp in Anbox on Debian 10 (Buster).

During COVID I have been creating slideshows with audio to send to meditation groups in my local prison system. I have developed a process that I find to be quick, useful, and reliable. Nearly all of it happens on the GNU/Linux command line. It's not fancy, and this kind of thing certainly is not for everyone, but I thought at least a few others might find it helpful.

TidalCycles (or just "Tidal") is a programming language used for live coding. I'll leave further details about Tidal for another post, but essentially Tidal facilitates creating music with code. While the Tidal community hopes to make installing Tidal on GNU/Linux easier, I struggled to get Tidal working on Debian stable.

Recently the Drupal Association announced accepted sessions for DrupalCon New Orleans. While it looks like we can expect another great DrupalCon (this will be my 7th straight North American DrupalCon), one particular session on the program about the sale of Drupal modules caught my attention. Although I have tried to stay focused on preparing my own sessions, I have had conversations with other people in the Drupal community about “paid modules” that have led me to the conclusion that confusion about this topic persists. So here I would like to offer a perspective on why these kinds of plans consistently fail. Specifically, I hope to expand the scope of this frequently discussed issue and suggest why so many paid module initiatives fail: the Drupal community protects its free software with the same vigor that other communities protect artistic freedom.

Many of us who build websites for a living need to log the hours we work each day. It can be easy to occasionally forget a day. There are some interesting solutions to this problem, such as time trackers like Toggl or Freckle or email reminder applications such as Boomerang for Gmail.

I worked at a public radio station for eight years and I sometimes thought it would be fun to have my own show. So perhaps there is a bit of irony since I no longer work in public radio and I am finally going to get my own show! The newest member of Lullabot's podcast family is Hacking Culture, featuring in-depth interviews with free software advocates.

Few musicians or music scholars would doubt the value of a well-researched, historically-informed scholarly (a.k.a. "historical" or "critical") edition or music score, such as those produced by G. Schirmer, Bärenreiter, A-R Editions, G. Henle Verlag, and others.

A few days ago I offered my version of an introduction to open-source music and suggested a few reasons why I think public media organizations should be proponents of open-source recordings and scores. Here are 10 more reasons why this would be a good idea for public media:

In June 2010 I attended Flashbelt in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This annual conference focuses “around Adobe Flash and related technologies." Two of the speakers that I found most informative, Jeremy Thorpe and Wes Grubbs, seemed to focus not so much on Flash, but on their use of a “related technology” called Processing.