We have not had a chance to record TechBytes in a while, but today we officially turn one and in the next episode we are going to discuss this. Happy birthday to TechBytes.

oday I received an early Christmas gift of sorts — a package from a fellow advocate of GNU/Linux called Kari Laine. It will provide a lot of geeky-type fun for a home project I Intend to write a review about at a later date.

The company behind Entrypt Key is apparently based on England, but the product was sent to me from Finland Interestingly, I first studied Shannon’s entropy quite thoroughly while I was starting my Ph.D. in 2003. My work was an extension inspired by Jorma Rissanen‘s Minimum Description Length (MDL), which built upon entropy research. He is Finnish.

Setting everything up is a project on its own, possibly taking an hour if not a whole weekend (depending on how deeply one dives into it). The installation process seems simple enough and the instructions are clear. The fun begins when it comes to studying the theory and application, which promise to secure one’s environment by generating good random passwords without depending on something more common like system clock or mouse movement. Some go further to reduce predictability, e.g. using observation of a lava lamp. Very exotic.

Entropy key should be aimed at geeks like myself, who like to learn how things work and also have some associated equipment and gadgets, e.g. to set servers up in a more professional way. It would make a great gift to science/computer science enthusiasts.

More information can be found in http://www.entropykey.co.uk/

XPERIMENTING with beards is something I rarely ever did. Only once in my adult life did I stay unshaven for longer than a fortnight as it just tends to get itchy after a while. I cannot even grow a good beard because I don’t have enough facial hair. But anyway, after some claims that I was being too conformist I decided to try something different for a change. I’m not sure if I like it. It just doesn’t quite feel like me. Here are photos that I took some minutes ago.

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Summary: Rusty joins Tim and Roy for a show that covers issues of the day rather than issues of the week

IN LAST night’s show we spoke about Putin mandating GNU/Linux for government use by 2015 and some related topics including Microsoft’s subversive actions against Free software in government. We played “Rule the World” by Inch Chua and then said a few words about the Linux Foundation and Nokia, which comes back to Linux in a sense. “Precious” by Minipop was played followed by discussions about Android and CyanogenMod. “El Tigeraso” by Maluca was then played followed by a discussion about servers, the release of ownCloud 2, and finally a few worlds about Bristol City Council and open source. “Take This One From Me” by It’s True closed the show.

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Summary: Rusty joins Tim and Roy for a show about issues of the day/week

Rusty is back for another splendid show which suffered a few sound issues in the first segment. We start the show with wonderful news about Tim’s newly-born daughter and then talk about Steve Jobs’ death as well as Richard Stallman’s reaction to it. We then speak about Apple’s anti-Android strategy and take stock of Android’s success, noting that Microsoft’s patent trolls at Intellectual Ventures launched recently a lawsuit against Motorola — an issue that antitrust regulators turn a blind eye to. “100 mph (in 2nd Gear)” by Gemma Ray gets played followed by a discussion about Ubuntu 11.10, Unity experiences, and PCLinuxOS 2011.6, which introduced Tim to KDE in a much better way. “Everyone’s Got ‘Em” by White Ghost Shivers is then played and we begin a segment about KDE and tablets, later to mention India’s low-cost tablet, Microsoft in tablets, and the general shift in form factors. “Government Name (Spontaneous Lover)” by Rockwell Knuckles is then played, ending with a discussion about social networks such as Diaspora and Google+. The whole show closes with the song “El Rogadero” by Banda de Turistas.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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Summary:The latest episode which covers Nokia, Google, Diaspora, and much more

THIS latest episode was recorded around noon for a change. It was arranged at short notice with time constraints and Roy being very slightly ill (speech/voice problems). But nonetheless we covered the news of the day/week by speaking about Nokia’s return to Linux in low-end phones, Chrome being flagged as a “virus” by Microsoft, then playing “Reality Check” by One Be Lo. We spoke about Microsoft’s latest patent ‘deal’ with Samsung and mentioned Amazon’s tablet among other tablets, as well as their general role in today’s computing scene. “Quejas de un Bandoneonista” by Zona Tango was then played, we spoke about Diaspora and other social networks and finally we closed the show with “A secret search” by Papercutz.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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he “where life takes me next” theme often implies a major transition in one’s career. For me, there was never such a transition. No transition was ever sharp and usually there was a lot of overlap in transition, which is actually a good sign of stability and balance.

I have been thinking a great deal about time management recently. As I already spend a lot of time outside the house I find myself struggling to blog unless I do so on a portable keyboard whilst away. Moreover, with work commitments changing all the time it has become clear that even less time than before will be available for blogging. One possible solution is to increase the use of audio, which requires no proofreading and is generally quicker to produce once everything is streamlined. This is likely to be a direction of choice. But here is the other major point.

Android has been gaining a lot of power recently. Android is not a startup, it is part of a massive and well-funded company called Google. In some ways (ignoring DRM and other impediments), Android is the Linux dream come true, to paraphrase Chris DiBona. The question is, need I — as a Linux advocate — bother helping Google when they are perfectly capable of helping themselves? I think not. In some way, I accomplished what I had aimed for over 5 years ago when I became very serious about GNU/Linux advocacy. Now that it has become more mainstream (with hundreds of millions of phones running Linux), I do not feel so necessary. I will definitely continue in my quest, but it is mostly likely that I shall concentrate on patent reform, technology rights (not in the “rights holder”sense), and whatever seems like a high-priority issue at any given time. To work with the exact same goals for 5 consecutive years makes little sense because everything changes all the time. Novell is dead, for example, so how relevant is a call to boycott Novell?

Battling for justice has always been thrilling and the exhilarating experience I’ve had running half a dozen blogs is not a thing of the past. In moderation I shall carry on posting analysis on a daily basis, potentially moving a bit in one direction or another as priorities shift based on contemporary events.

In my eyes, the great thing about blogging is that it can be done at any age, so I might still be blogging (or equivalent) in 50 years from now when I’m in my 70s. Unlike physical exercise, the peak for one’s writing abilities is not in the early 20s; so although I no longer compete and win trophies for the former activity, the latter activity I can do for a long time to come and do quite well, hopefully. I am not a strong believer in academic publishing because it is an ageing medium.

It is worth noting that blogging might not be all that relevant in 10 years. The Web is only about 20 years old and nobody can reliably predict what will come next (if it was predictable, then it would have happened by now). These days the Web is a combination of high authority sites like Facebook, a search engine (mostly Google), and many pages that are blogs, wikis, news sites, etc. To a certain extent video too is making progress and TechBytes is an attempt to keep up with what people favour for information digestion. Originally it was intended to be a bit of an experiment, but as the crowd grew and the audience provided feedback, Tim and I realised we should take it more seriously and recently we started organising the shows a little better. In a month from now the show will turn one. It is an important milestone which demonstrates maturity and adds certainty to the long-term future of the show. This morning I made the following banner for OpenBytes, placing more emphasis on the audio part.