The Amp Hour #10 — Open Hardware and Self Publishing
Posted by Chris Gammell on September 27, 2010 in Radio Show |
Most of this week’s discussion revolved around open hardware. The summit definitely provided some interesting conversation points, explained below. If we missed any links, please leave them in the comments!
- Open hardware
- The open hardware summit was awesome! (writing for EEtimes at ESC Boston was cool too!)
- Videos aren’t all online yet but Limor Fried’s is on Adafruit (one of my favorites).
- I also really enjoyed the talk by John Wilbanks, VP of science at Creative Commons
- Not-so-open hardware
- Nokia pundits lament not having a product visionary.
- They’re really saying they want a Steve Jobs.
- Interesting historical footnote: lots of people at the open hardware summit had some of the most closed source products on the planet. Irony.
- Self Publishing
- WordPress.org is where you get the open source software, WordPress.com does hosting.
- Silicon chip magazine — The last electronics magazine from Australia.
- Microsoft Live spaces will not host it’s own blogs anymore and they’ll be pushed to WordPress.
- Low Power design
- Tascam DR-07 isn’t winning any awards with Chris
- The Akihabara Electronics Market in Japan
Anything else we might have missed? Let us know in the comments!
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Again, thanks Chris and Dave for a good show to listen to while I ripped apart a project.
I just wanted to say, that Dave got the Nokia rather right. It is really funny to hear English speaking people to try to say words in Estonian or Finnish. Usually people try really hard and fail, so they say something like “No Kia”.
My favorite word is Õun (apple) or any other word with letters that do not exist in English or in any other language, so I can see peoples faces when they try to pronounce that.
Dave, what conference are you attending in October?
How many lectures did Adafruit give? I need to watch the one with the Arduino history!!
Is the bunnie Huang video available? He is a genius!!
I talked to one of the people taping and they said the higher quality videos should be up on the summit page soon. Limor only gave the one lecture but Phil Torrone was on a panel as well.
I’ll be at the Renesas Devcon conference in LA.
http://www.renesasdevcon.com/
Freebies vs Boobies: Freebies win beause you know you will go home with the freebies, but you know you have NO chance with the babes, and they will have killer put-downs. I would guess most aren’t the best at conversation either.
You know, I gotta agree with Chris on booth babes. I immediately discredit booths which employ these tactics. Like Chris says, I really think this is “underhand and low”. The worst part is, if you need to talk to them about technical things, they are usually clueless. Its really disappointing and I think reflects badly on the organization.
There is of course an Open Hardware mobile phone, the OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner.
I liked the topic about self publishing. What do you think? Is there any benefit in blogging personal projects if you don’t have anything spectacular to show?
Great show with all interesting topics.
Yes, definitely. Even getting ideas that seem mundane or simple to you may strike up conversation with others and inspire them or lead them to suggest future things for you.
Absolutely! People generally like to read about what other people are up to. And if you make something and publish it, you have helped someone else who might want to do the same thing but is having a problem. And vice-versa. Furthermore, after a few months or so, you might find that tens of thousands of people read what you’re up to every month. You can make lots of new friends and associates as well – the Internet makes the world a lot smaller place – as demonstrated by this radio show!
I have often wondered about the prior art. I am not sure publishing it on a low traffic website would be enough since I could easily change something that was published 5 years ago. Or even make an article today and date it to be 5 years ago.
Great content guys, much better than having tunes playing in the background.
To get defensive publishing right you should ask a lawyer specialized in that area. The idea is to make a publication in a way a court would later accept it as prior art. Sou you need to fulfill legal criteria, a lawyer should be able to tell you which.
There are publishers specialized in publishing articles in specific magazines or databases, so they can later count as prior art (and there are, of course swindlers on the market, claiming they do such publishing, but just take your money).
Many large companies have own magazines and other publications, where the corporate lawyers make sure they are set up in a way they can later count as prior art. The companies use this to publish marketing but also sneak in their defensive publishing.
It’d be a cool idea to start a magazine called “prior art” and just have it filled with open hardware ideas. It’d be like reading an inventor’s dream notebook!
Dave, your understanding of what Open (Source|Hardware) means seems to mirror what people were saying around 10 years ago.
Nothing in the Open Hardware framework demands that the product has to be designed by incompetent rabble, in fact I’m willing to bet that most OH is designed in exactly the same way as non-open designs, by a small handful of people, the interesting bit happens when other, unrelated, folks pick up the design and build on it.
With regards to hosting, it’s worth mentioning ZoneEdit.com which allows (limited) free DNS services for your domain. So, if you bought a domain and the registrar didn’t provide DNS, you can use ZoneEdit to point your domain to wherever you like. For instance, pointing example.com to your webspace provided by your ISP. ZoneEdit will also provide “cloaking” so that you don’t see the underlying domain is different. For instance example.com can point to myisp.com/~myusername but the end user will be none the wiser.
If you are looking at registrars for registering a domain, and you want to point your domain to a free host, look for “cloaking” services.
Cloaking at ZoneEdit
http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/faq.html#faq36
Also, the benefit of services such as zoneedit, and some registrars allow you to forward emails as well. So, if your domain is example.com you can forward any emails directed to xyz@example.com to any other email address. This means you can have any email address you want without setting up a specific mail box and have them forwarded to your own current email!
… hope that makes sense…. but plenty of options for hosting for free, next-to-nothing or slightly-more-than-next-to-nothing!
/SockThief
EDIT: MailForwarding @ ZoneEdit
http://www.zoneedit.com/doc/faq.html#faq37
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