So Open Source Bridge was a month ago, and I had been so bogged down and frazzled thinking about an planning for toorcamp 2014 that I didn't have a chance to collect my thoughts/bookmarks.  Until now.

So yeah, this is a series of thoughts random, poorly organized thoughts and bookmarked tabs from the conference.  In no particular order...

• Aaron Parecki gave a great talk on OAuth and "IndieAuth" and what it means to an open and free web.  There's this thing called web sign in, and they have a wiki on how to set it up.  I want to get this going on noisybox.net. There are a bunch of important reasons why this is mostly rad, but it can also allow you to do powerful things like using 3rd party tools...like...
• Quill.  Post content to your own website, securely, using a 3rd party tool.  Shows the power of these open interchange technologies, and formats...like...
• Micropub.  An API spec for doing time-based content posting (blogging, microblogging) with 3rd party tools, but to your own site, in a way that you are fully in control of.  It's kinda deep and complicated and gnar, but it's damn sure the best thing I've seen in this direction...
• Mesh technologies, especially after certain leaks, are hotter than ever.  They still don't live up to their expectations/misunderstandings yet, but have real potential for grassroots and emergency response situations.  The Mesh Potato seems like a fun device for experimentation, if not already antiquated.
• Not only are tons of nerds using Python for data analysis and visualization, but there are mature OSS product suites that help with this stuff.  Also data dorks often use iPython notebook to facilitate sharing and exchange of bad-assery.  Reminds me of a cool mashup of sketchpad.cc and etherpad and pastebin, but Python.
• The Internet Archive is still kicking ass.  They could stand to be more redundant (DR) though.  No seriously.  They also have detailed APIs (change the "details" in any item url to "metadata" for an example), an s3 compatible API, an rich suite of open source cli tools for interacting with their APIs.  They also run openlibrary.org, an amazing lending library for digital book content.
• I learned a little about Camlistore, which is a complex personal storage system.  I think the goal is to provide a framework into which you can store and index the stuff you create online (blogs, tweets, photos, recipes, fanfic? all the things?) and have it be robust and searchable and have many other advanced things.  I'm having a hard time trying to grok how it might fit into my own personal storage needs, but I sure do get the sentiment.  It also reminded me about Tahoe-LAFS and the interesting things that can be done with that.

I'm sure I've only captured a fraction of what I found fun/interesting/inspiring!  Until next year...

Another victory for open source. I've been trying to stay fairly cutting edge again at home -- with my Debian unstable and pretty up-to-date kernel builds. I'm usually surprised at just how easy things are now...

But my crappy little phone stopped automounting for some reason when I plugged it in. I managed to search and find this bug thread which suggested a similar problem and a patch for Nokia phones. A few minutes later I had downloaded the patch, applied it, and then tweaked it to match the manufacturer/product IDs of my silly phone.

It ended up looking something like this:

UNUSUAL_DEV(  0x0474, 0x0749, 0x0000, 0x0481,
        "Sanyo",
        "Sanyo Mass Storage",
        US_SC_DEVICE, US_PR_DEVICE, NULL,
        US_FL_FIX_CAPACITY),

One kernel compile and reboot later and it worked like a champ.

Of course, all this begs the question "Why did it happen in the first place?"...which is another topic completely. Having the ability to take ownership and fix the problem to get work done (until the upstream [kernel]) is priceless. You'll never get that same experience with your closed source OS.