On May 29th, 2010 the terabyte dinner device project invites interested parties to Revelation Space in The Hague, NL for a brainstorming and kick-off workshop to design the citizens answer to ACTA, internet monitoring, content filtering, net neutrality sabotage, criminalization of various behaviour and technology related to downloading and other dangers to the free exchange of content. We are taking the flow of information off-line again, out of reach of the content conglomerates. The return of the sneakernet, 2.0 stylee!

Invite some friends over for a nice meal, have them bring an external 1TB hard-drive each and hook them up to your Terabyte Dinner Device. Enjoy the food and the company, and when the evening ends each of you will have at least 750GB of new content, software or literature. All in crisp digital quality. And without leaving a trace that might implicate you for committing the horrendous crime of exchanging information.

At the eth0 summer event in August 2010 participants are invited to built their own TBDD, after which the first terabyte dinners may take place right there and then! Some of the more important design goals: easy to use (even your grandmother should be able to organise a terabyte dinner), using off-the-shelf components, easy to assemble, low energy consumption for terabyte picknicks in the park and a small form factor for maximum portability.

More information about the project, initiated by Revelation Space, the Hxx foundation and eth0, can be found on the revspace wiki.

If you are into embedded systems, electronics, product design, user interaction or just have a creative mind in general, please come over and join the revolution in content sharing!

When: May 29th, 2010, 14:00 hours.

Where: Revelation Space, The Hague, NL

Workshop page: TBDDWorkshop

With GUADEC 2010 getting on its way, it is about time for an update. The website is getting a new skin every day now, and the call for papers deadline is nearing. More on that below. We also expect to have registration open any day now. Visitors can choose between three levels of registration (EUR 0, EUR 100 or EUR 250), depending on their budget or expense accounts.

Schedule

The schedule outline for the conference has been drafted, and features a warm-up weekend and a number of parallel events that might interest the Gnome lover. Here it is:

sa 24 - training sessions
        GNU hackers meeting
        room for auxiliary meetings
su 25 - GNU hackers meeting
        room for auxiliary meetings
mo 26 - training sessions
        government sessions
        room for auxiliary meetings
tu 27 - GUADEC main conference program
we 28 - GUADEC main conference program
th 29 - GUADEC main conference program

More information about the GNU hackers meeting, training sessions and government sessions will be released soon.

If you are planning to get together with your team during or before GUADEC, please drop us a line (on the GUADEC mailing list) so we can accommodate your event in the room scheduling.

Call for papers deadline nearing

The deadline for the call for papers is nearing. You have until march 20th to submit a proposal for your presentation on the guadec website.

For a while i’ve been playing with microchip PIC chips. I have an olimex PIC-MCP-USB programmer which I use with picp under linux, and recently ran into some problems with 18F4550 chips. It would program just fine, but not erase the memory properly (took me a while to figure that out!). So I installed mplab on a windows machine, and sniffed the sequence of bytes going over the wire. Just for anyone who is fooling around with this as well, here is the proper picdevrc entry for the 18F4550:

[18F4550]       ; pic definition
        0       ; config word: code protect bit mask
        0       ; config word: watchdog bit mask
        4       ; Word alignment for writing to this device
        300000  ; Configuration memory start address
        200000 0        ; ID Locations addr and size
        f00000  ; Data eeprom address
        0       ; number of words in cfg bits with factory set bits
        0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 ; fixed bits mask
        WARP OLIMEX     ; bit map of supporting programmers

[18F4550:def]
        40 00   ; size of program space
        ff ff   ; width of address word
        ff ff   ; width of data word
        0f 0f   ; width of ID
        0f 0f   ; ID mask
        cf 3f   ; width of configuration word
        cf 3f   ; configuration word mask
        00 ff   ; EEPROM data width
        00 ff   ; EEPROM data mask
        00 00   ; Calibration width
        00 00   ; Calibration mask
        00 00   ; ??
        40 00   ; ??
        00 00   ; address of ID locations
        04      ; size of ID locations
        00 00   ; address of configuration bits
        07      ; size of configuration register
        00 00   ; address of data space
        01 00   ; size of data space
        00 00   ; address of internal clock calibration value
        00 00   ; size of clock calibration space
        03      ; additional programming pulses for C devices
        13      ; main programming pulses for C devices
        1e 0f   ; ?? ZIF configuration ??

[18F4550:defx]
        05 00 1f 1f
        83 00 00 85
        c0 0f e0 0f
        40 0f 00 00
        cf 3f 1f 3f
        87 00 00 e5
        c0 0f e0 0f
        40 0f 00 00

(please circulate)

The guys and girls from ETH0 would like to bring your attention to the following. After co-organising Hacking At Random 2009 we are back in the saddle and making preperations for the next events. In 2010 ETH0 will bring you 2 events, these are:

- Our week-long outdoor summercamp, somewhere in August 2010
- A 3-day indoor party-conference, January 16 and 17, 2010

For both of these events we are looking for open source projects, developer groups, hackerspaces, interesting individuals, writers,
coders, DJ’s and VJ’s, builders and hackers who think they can add something interesting to our event. We are looking for people who want to do hands-on workshops, hold lectures, give demonstrations or presentations, teach and learn, talk with interesting people and make an impact on our visitors.

If you feel that this describes you, or if you know someone we must contact, head over to www.eth-0.nl / wiki.eth-0.nl and contact our Program Committee (Mail: program@eth-0.nl)

Eth0 2010 Program Committee
Jeroen Dekkers
Mark Janssen

–
Support the new hackerspace for Den Haag — www.revspace.nl

BOSTON, Mass — November 30, 2009 — GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

The conference will lead up to the GNOME 3.0 release in September 2010. Keeping with the 3.0 theme, the three primary themes for GUADEC 2010 will be Government, education, and end users.

The Hague was one of several locations proposed for GUADEC in 2010. It was chosen in part due to the excellent facilities at the bid site, as well as easily accessible site for those traveling to GUADEC. The conference will be held at the Haagse Hogeschool, the higher vocational education institute in the region with an existing affinity for open source.

“Free Software is of great importance to culture in the digital age,” said Kees Vendrik, Green MP and advocate of open source and open standards in the Dutch public sector. “It offers a fertile feeding ground for education, innovation, and the economy at large. My party is delighted that the GNOME conference is coming to The Netherlands and we believe it will inspire our governmental bodies to put policy into practice.”

The core team of the winning bid consists of Vincent van Adrighem, Koen Martens, Sanne te Meerman, Fabrice Mous, and Reinout van Schouwen. Each of the core team members are well-rooted in the FLOSS community at large, with network spanning the most active FLOSS organizations in The Netherlands.

“We are very excited and honored to host GUADEC next year,” said Reinout van Schouwen. “With the upcoming release of GNOME 3.0, we’re confident that the conference will be one of the most important ones in the history of the GNOME project. We would like to invite the Free Software communities in our country and abroad to take advantage of this opportunity and show the world that open technology offers solutions for everyone!”

GUADEC is now in its 11th year, and follows a successful joint conference, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (GCDS), in 2009 with the KDE Project. As planned, GUADEC 2010 will be hosted on its own, but the door is open to another co-hosted event in the future.

Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, said that GCDS was “a great conference, and an opportunity to work with our friends in the KDE Project on areas where both desktops can benefit. We hope to build on that experience this year with GUADEC.”

See the GUADEC Website for more information about the conference. Registration details and information on the call for papers will be up by January 6th. Look for another announcement at that time with more details about the CFP and tracks for GUADEC 2010.

About GNOME and the GNOME Foundation

GNOME is a free-software project whose goal is to develop a complete, accessible and easy to use desktop for Linux and Unix-based operating systems. GNOME also includes a complete development environment to create new applications. It is released twice a year on a regular schedule.

The GNOME desktop is used by millions of people around the world. GNOME is a standard part of all leading GNU/Linux and Unix distributions, and is popular with both large existing corporate deployments and millions of small business and home users worldwide.

Composed of hundreds of volunteer developers and industry-leading companies, the GNOME Foundation is an organization committed to supporting the advancement of GNOME. The Foundation is a member directed, non-profit organization that provides financial, organizational and legal support to the GNOME project and helps determine its vision and roadmap.

More information about GNOME and the GNOME Foundation can be found at www.gnome.org and foundation.gnome.org.
Media Enquiries

GNOME Foundation Executive Director
Stormy Peters
Email: gnome-press-contact@gnome.org
Phone: +1-617-206-3947