Giveaway of the Day

Giveaway of the Day is a recent discovery. Every day they offer, for free, a software title that isn't normally free. Some of them are poweruser tools that most of us probably won't use, but often they're very useful home-type apps. They're only free for a day, so the best way to stay on top of them is to set up an RSS feed and read it every day.

[NOTE: I've been suspicious of the utility of a few of these, but generally, reading the comments from other people is a good way to weed out the ones that aren't worth the time to download.]

Try this out

Via Parent Hacks: Tux Paint is a free, open source drawing program for children. Runs on just about anything you're likely to have around the house. Maybe even your Newton!

References

Here are some of the sources I'm reading BEFORE I start messing around with repartitioning my hard drive:

• LinuxDevCenter.com -- Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop (an oldie but a goodie)


• Illustrated Dual Boot Site (this one is actually currently being updated for the just-released version of Ubuntu! Wow!)


• Dual Booting Ubuntu Linux and Windows on a Toshiba Laptop (very detailed)

Ooh... fun weekend reading! :-)

We need backup!

After a couple months' delay for moving, I've finally gotten around to step one in my Open Source Home project: backing up the hard drive where all my important stuff (e.g., baby pictures, games, and ebooks) reside in preparation for installing Ubuntu. [Actually, I backed up the entire laptop to another machine before moving, just in case, but I've added some things since then.]

Backing up really isn't difficult at all. I'm using Windows XP, which comes with a very simple backup utility. Or at least, it's supposed to. For some reason, XP Home didn't come with the backup utility installed, but it was on the original disks. Windows XP Backup Made Easy">This document from Microsoft gives detailed instructions on how to retrieve it from those disks, and at that point everything should be fine and dandy.

Unless...

Your version of XP, like mine, came from a group distribution, where a licensed retailer (in my case, the computer store at the university where I worked at the time) makes their own copies of the disks and distributes them with the machines they configure. For whatever reason, the retailers themselves were sold disks that didn't have ntbackup.exe in the /valueadd directory, where the Microsoft documentation says it should be, so the "restore" disks they sold their customers didn't have it either. And so I searched and searched, but ntbackup.exe was nowhere to be found on my disks.

Fortunately, that's exactly the kind of thing I use Google Groups for. If you're not familiar with Google Groups, it's a great resource for any kind of weird problem you might have and can't find in a standard search engine query, because it archives Usenet posts, as well as its own user-created groups. This time, I discovered the reason my disks didn't have the backup utility on them: a lot of educational users (and people who bought some brands of PCs with XP Home preinstalled) were reporting the same thing.

More importantly, I discovered that a lot of people were getting a copy of ntbackup.exe from this page. Between my Google web search and my Google Groups search, I found an awful lot of legitimate-sounding people who recommended this site, so I decided to give it a try. I can't tell you with absolute certainty that you won't get a virus or blow up your computer if you download the file from this site, but I will tell you that nothing like that happened to me and I've been using the file I downloaded for a very long time.

Backing up with the Backup utility is VERY straightforward. From the Start menu, you can choose All Programs-->Accessories-->System Tools-->Backup and then use the wizard to back up either your entire computer or just the files, directories, or drives you choose. You can back up to another place on the network, a different drive, or external media such as a CD or flash drive.

So now I've backed up what I wanted to back up and I'm ready to take the plunge. Next time: using the System Restore disk to (gulp!) repartition my hard drive.

Phone home

Via Lifehacker: a Wired feature on open source phones. There's only one that looks to me like it would be viable right now for the average home consumer, but they're fun to look at.

Some vacation!

Well, I intended to be back a little earlier than this, but moving is HARD! We left a day late, then the moving van was actually lost for several days, and now we're unpacking. But things are coming together, so it won't be long now before I discover just where I packed the laptop I've earmarked for this project and the System Restore and Ubuntu CDs I feverishly burned in the last few days before our move, planning to, oh, I don't know, sit in a hotel room somewhere in Ohio and reformat my hard drive.

This foolishness has inspired me to start coming up with some rules for the Open Source Home project, and here's the first one:

OPEN SOURCE HOME RULE #1:

Don't try to do too much too soon.
It's tempting to rush right in and start erasing data and installing software, but I need to keep in mind that my laptop is rather unstable and it won't take much to push it over the edge. Before I do anything at all I need to back up the hard drive (even the stuff I think I don't need) and really prepare the machine for what I'm going to do to it. So tomorrow next time I'll go over backing up the hard drive, even if your particular version of Windows (like mine) didn't happen to come with a Very Important Backup Application that's SUPPOSED to be standard in Windows, but isn't, necessarily.

Vacation, already?

I'm going to have to take a brief vacation from my brand-new blog. What? you ask. Who do you think you are, the president of the United States?

The thing is, we're gearing up for a cross-country move, and I've really got to get the packing done. But I'll be back as soon as we're all set up in our new digs. In the meantime, if I see any interesting links (like this one, 40 Free Windows Apps For You at Technology Bites, via Lifehacker) I'll post them. It's not like I'm going to totally quit reading my email and RSS feeds for a week, after all; I just don't see myself having time to sit down and write a full post any time soon. So I'll see you on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line in about a week. Have a good one!

Free For Friday: The Hacker's Diet

I discovered The Hacker's Diet sometime in 1997 or 1998, and realized immediately what a gem it was... for some of us. I was also a member of Weight Watchers Online for over a year, and was very successful with it (it actually shares some of my favorite characteristics of The Hacker's Diet, but not the "free" part). However, in participating in the online forums, I realized that there were maybe 10 other people in my favorite forums who had the necessary objectivity to follow The Hacker's Diet (not including the one where online members help each other and newbies solve technical problems with the interface; they were quite geeky, so they were the people the HD was written for).

Mainly, the reason I say that is that the core of the HD is weighing yourself daily and charting it in a spreadsheet. Most dieters get hung up on the numbers and find it truly nerve-wracking to see them fluctuate wildly from day to day. I find it liberating: once you start seeing those numbers as nothing but data, they lose the "135 good, 145 bad" notion held by most of us who grew up buying magazines like Cosmo because they promised that their latest, greatest diet would make us lose five pounds in time for the 9th-grade prom. And it's oh so satisfying to enter each day's weight in your PDA and watch over time as the line on the graph goes down, no matter how slowly.

There are other parts of the HD that I'm not so crazy about, such as the advice to lose the weight by any means you can and then just work to keep it off. I do believe that Weight Watchers gets it right when they say to learn the habits that make your weight loss stick for the rest of your life (although IMO, they completely negate that by using stupid gimmicks like Points™). But then, the HD's subtitle is "How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition," so it's not like it's advertised as being a plan for healthy eating.

By and large, this is a wonderful resource, with some nice free software to go along with it (just click on "Computer Tools" in the left-hand menu). I used Eat Watch, the Palm app, on my dear old Sony Clie for many years, and it's simple to use without having a lot of silly features you don't need. I've never liked Excel, so I haven't used the spreadsheet since I first discovered this, way back when Windows 95 was all the rage. But now there's a new online version that does the same thing, but actually has more room for comments.

And of course, the computer tools are open source.

Is all open-source software free? Is all free software open source?

Well, no, and no. Most open-source software is free, but not all of it. The simple definition of "open-source software" is software whose developers provide access to the source code—the program itself, not just the part we see as users—and allow other programmers to modify it and re-release it. But some open-source software does cost money, so it's not necessarily "free" software.

Free software, according to the Free Software Foundation's definition, should also provide access to the source code, but should not cost anything. The FSF's basic philosophy is that "free software" is more analogous to "free speech" than "free beer." They do believe that software should be free-as-in-beer (it's a commodity that you don't pay for), but more than that, they believe that it should be free-as-in-speech (it shouldn't be locked down or suppressed, but rather let go to do what it needs to do).

But not all developers who don't charge for their software are members of the FSF, or necessarily subscribe to that philosophy. In fact, I'd bet that a fair number of freeware developers aren't even aware that the FSF exists, and have never considered releasing their source code. They just want to put out a cool game or productivity app, and don't want to charge for it for whatever reason—maybe it's just a programming exercise that turned out well, or a class assignment, or a demonstration of a fledgling programmer's work that might help land a job programming totally non-open-source software for Microsoft. A lot of freeware developers for Windows and Mac, particularly, don't make their source code available. Other developers are deeply devoted to the principles of the Free Software movement, and write their programs according to those principles. Most people who are developing software for Linux tend to keep it free and open-source.

So not all open-source software is free, and not all free software is open source. The terms are often used interchangeably, but they aren't really the same. It's true that most of the applications I'll look at here are free, because I'm really cheap. But I love the sense of community and sharing that the open source model supports; it's even catching on outside the programming world, in such areas as sewing and cooking. For my money (or not), open source is the way to go.

Welcome!

Welcome to Open Source Home!

I have set a goal for myself of moving all of my computer-based home management—everything from tracking finances to storing recipes, from creating my Christmas cards to organizing my address book, from producing home videos to streaming music to every room in the house—to free and open-source software*.

Inspired by Mer and Dani at Living Behind the Curve, I'm going to start by setting up my laptop with Ubuntu, and then go from there. I'll chronicle my open source adventure here, and you can follow along and laugh, or maybe—just maybe—get some inspiration to try it out for yourself.

I will admit that I have a bit of background in this: I used to work in a university IT department that had a strong commitment to open-source software, and I did my first successful Linux install (an early Red Hat distribution) in 1999. I had practically no knowledge of UNIX at the time, but I was still able to get it up and running with a lot of online help from the open source community, which is probably the most generous group of folks on the Internet when it comes to sharing their knowledge and experience. I want to contribute back to that community by showing other home-management software users like myself how cool and empowering it can be to be able to make your computer work the way you want it to, all on your own.

So again, welcome! I hope you'll find something of value here.

* "Free" and "open source" aren't always the same. I'll talk about that in a later post.