First of all I read this article in TidBITS, that piqued my interest in the BookCrossing project. Those who’ve been reading for a while will already know of my involvement in Project Gutenberg and I think it’s fits very well with that.
For those interested, you can view my [as yet very short] bookshelf.
More on this later I expect.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
This started as a comment on a comment of aland’s about my suggestion that he posted his piece on Sheffield Indymedia. It ended up being too long for a comment and turned in a blog entry. I hope all that made sense.
Mmmm. Not sure I agree with aland’s comment. IMC UK’s mission statement is the relevant document here.
First para reads:
The Indymedia UK website provides an interactive platform for reports from the struggles for a world based on freedom, cooperation, justice and solidarity, and against environmental degradation, neoliberal exploitation, racism and patriarchy. The reports cover a wide range of issues and social movements – from neighbourhood campaigns to grassroots mobilisations, from critical analysis to direct action. [my emphasis]
Now, I don’t think that arguing for better facilities for children and saying that Sheffield City Council should be doing what they take Council Tax for is outside this at all.
The Sheffield-IMC group have said that one of the good things about working on a small geographical area [rather than nationwide] is that we can have content that isn’t all big actions and demos in London, but is much more community based. Having a legitimate concern about the enviroment in the area where you live and your children play is intensely political as far as I’m concerned.
I would love to see reports of Tenants’ & Residents’ Associations [random example] activities on IMC-Sheffield, because it is people doing for themselves rather than being told what to do by bureaucrats and politicians. The great thing for me about Indymedia is that it is bottom-up, non-hierarchical and breaks the rules about what is political or not. It makes no sense to me to then have a “is it political [enough]” hurdle.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
After much hard work and four months’ planning, Sheffield Indymedia [or IMC: Independent Media Centre] is up and running. This is part of a relaunched UK Indymedia site, running new Open Source software called MIR.
I have also added the Sheffield site to our site cloud.
Just like burngreave.net, Indymedia is only as good as its content. Please feel free to contribute.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Saturday 26 July at 4.00pm (replacing Nicholas Nickleby).
Tickets are £3/£2 concs
Director: J T S Moore
USA (2002)
85 minutes
Sheffield Indymedia is showing Revolution OS—the inside story of the
computer hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and
Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement. Sheffield
Indymedia is part of Indymedia UK—a network of individuals,
independent and alternative media activists and organisations offering
grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social
and political issues.
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
Who else got a blue bin today?
Who’s excited?
Who wishes it wasn’t Onyx running it?
For more on Onyx by the good people at CorporateWatch:
Noxious emissions
Water privatisation
Originally posted on burngreave.net.
My thoughts so far on the various bits of software I’ve been playing with while experimenting with rss feeds. When I’ve got it all together, I plan to add this as a new section of the Mac notes page.
Mac OS 9
Amphetadesk
Free. Separate app which feeds to your web browser of choice. Worked OK under OS 9.2.2, but a bit buggy [especially when trying to quit].
bottomFeeder
Free. Applet for Visual Virtual Machine [a bit like Java]. Had quite a discussion with the developer who wasn’t at all Mac savvy. Worked OK some of the time and then would inexplicable stop, very basic, very slow.
Mac OS X
Amphetadesk
Free. See comments above. Seems much more stable under Mac OS X.
bottomFeeder
Free. See comments above. Haven’t tried it under OS X.
NetNewsWire
NNW Lite 1.0.3
free
min: Mac OS X 10.1.x
Used quite heavily. Very nice, but a few of its shortcomings did get quite irritating. I missed time and date info for incoming headlines. The checking options also seemed quite limited to me. Did the job and in my opinion the best of the free options.
NNW 1.0.2
$19.95, 30 day demo
min: Mac OS X 10.2
Same as NNW Lite plus date and author info, weblog editor, outliner.
Haven’t used this but the date and author info were something I wanted. I think if I were to get seriously into blogging, I’d be using Nisus Writer for writing, just I use it for everything else. Not worth the extra money.
Shrook 1.0.2
$19.95 [shareware I think]. The software doesn’t seem to be crippled in anyway, so it might be a time expiry deal. I’ll update if I found out.
min: Mac OS X 10.2
I really like this piece of software. It does everything NNW Lite does, plus provides date and author info, has more flexible scheduling options, and has a cool drawer visual widget that shows the rss feeds in reverse chronological order. This is really useful [and fits in with the way I read email for example]. Also imports NNW lists, which was very useful when I running both at the same time to compare.
If I had some money I’d buy it!
Originally posted on burngreave.net.