Social networks: the new major media

A few days ago, I got an email from Sarah Wenger, with an infographic she developed about the power of online people. There is a line that says "Social media is becoming the new major media". This is basically right, I think we are all aware that Facebook and Twitter (for example) are the main way for the diffusion of news. Is this good or bad? This question, obiously, is stupid. Tecnology is not good and not bad: tecnology is just an instrument. The use people do of tecnology can be positive or negative.

In memoriam

I just read on the italian main press agency that Neil Armstrong, the first man that walked on the moon, died. This blog talks about tecnology, and I thought it's important to remember that the Apollo XI mission is the simbol itself of what the human kind can do using science, tecnology, and all the amazing power of our brain. Basically, in less than a century we came from a situation where flying was just a mere dream, to seeing a man walking out of Earth atmosphere and over the Moon.
Sometimes I ask myself if cavemen would have ever been able to imagine that in the future someone would be able to touch the very surface of Moon.
Fellini, in a movie, talked about some mad people that wanted to take the Moon and bring it here, on the Earth. Armstrong, Aldrin, and all the other men of Apollo program are maybe the people who went as near as possible to this dream.
In conclusion, thank you Neil, since you demonstrated what we are able to do with science (and also a little bit of courage).

KDE on the Raspberry Pi

As you may know, there is no Kubuntu for Raspberry, due to the incompatibility of Kubuntu ARM version with the little computer. I wanted to create an image for raspberry most similar as possible to Kubuntu, so I basically took the original Debian release and add some packages to have the entire Plasma Desktop. The result is quite nice, I think, and the system itself uses about 100-110 MB of the total RAM (there is also some swap on the card image). It's also quite speddy: the only problem could be that when you launch a new program, for some seconds the CPU load is 100%. You just need to wait a little and then eveything returns fine. The image can be downloaded from this link:
http://www.zorbaproject.org/raspberry/debian-raspberry-kde.img
and you can dd it on a 4GB SD card with the command:
dd bs=1M if=~/debian-raspberry-kde.img of=/dev/sdd
if your SD card is /dev/sdd, obiously.

Just a note: the username is "pi" and the password is "raspberry".

Have fun hacking with Raspberry and KDE.

EDIT: Now with screenshots:

I decided to shot photos with a camera, because it shows that there is no "trick" and what you are seeing is really KDE on a RaspberryPi.
If you want to look at other shots, here they are: https://picasaweb.google.com/109718345247929494628/KDEOnRaspberryPi

Raspberry Pis have arrived

Just writing to say that my RaspberryPi from Farnell and the one from RS Component have arrived yesterday.

I'm playing with them a little, doing some experiments, and actually they seems quite good, expecially for the price. The official Debian GN/Linux distro runs fast and without troubles. Actually, I'm trying to prepare a Kubuntu version for the RaspberryPi, but it will take some time, I think, to make it work smoothly.

If you want to give a look at them, you will find all the pictures in my gallery:
https://picasaweb.google.com/109718345247929494628/RaspberryPi

Internet ruining brains?

A reader send me an email, because he wanted to know what I think about an image he prepared. The graphic has an explicit title "Internet ruining your brain" (by the way: the image can be found at the address http://www.forensicpsychology.net/internet-ruining-your-brain/). Now, what to say about this work?
I can agree with the informations (and the graphic is nice), but I absolutely disagree about the opinion expressed:
sure, the internet is reducing our use of memory. But this is not a bad thing.

Meet the new Windows 8

Usually, if you say "linux" people think about a very hard to use OS. But is it true? Is Kubuntu really an OS for developers and nerds? I'm going to present "common people" Kubuntu, saying it's the new version of Windows 8: let's see what they think about it without any prejudice. And, since I'm a serious person, I'm filming it.
By the way: I got the idea because KDE has been awarded as best desktop environment of the year.
So, here is the result of my "investigation":

The result is that, on 14 interviewed people only one already knew Ubuntu, but everybody said that KDE is better than Windows (the medium vote reached is 8/10).
Well done, KDE.

KDE on Diaspora... why not?

Just a little ago, I thought about a question: KDE is free software. Diaspora is free software. So, why not share KDE related posts on Diaspora? Doing this is quite easy, and I'm gonna tell you how. Every one of you (everyone that have a blog) can follow these instructions to let people share blog posts on Diaspora.

By the way, if you don't know what I'm talking about, Diaspora is a free social network, built in an interesting way that allows you to have always control on you datas. For more info have a look at www.whatisdiaspora.com and register on joindiaspora.com.
A little info: on the official diaspora pod is not possibile, acutally, to create groups of users. It is, anyway, possible on another pod: https://diasp0ra.ca/. Also, on joindiaspora you can't simply register, since the number of users is limited. But on other pods the registration is immedate.

Some KDE developers are already on Diaspora, and there is also the official Krita account (https://joindiaspora.com/u/krita). But we could also create a KDE-offical account, and use it to share official announcements.
Another idea: it would be nice to put a little button "share on diaspora" in the posts of dot.kde.org.