It happened unconsciously somewhere in the recent past, but for a while now I have been ignoring traditional media. Ignoring is not the right word: it implies an active deed on my part, but it is nothing like that. Somehow, traditional media just lost me, or I lost traditional media. Newspapers, television broadcasts, they are just no part of my life anymore. Somehow, they have vanished. Gone over the horizon. And it has been an improvement, to say the least.

Sometimes, I hear people talking about ‘the news’. Stuff that happens miles and miles away. I remember the days I used to care about all the injustice in the world. The troubled days, I must add. It was such a burden. Today, I hear something about a revolution here, an oil-spill there, but it has no meaning anymore. I can let it pass without getting worked up over it. As long as there is no oil on my doorstep, how does it influence me?

Even though I live next door to the Dutch parliament, the political arena is reduced to a virtual reality. An amusement show that has no bearing on my self. No matter what they do, what they decide, I will always be me. Wilders, a demon to some, a saviour to others, is merely a clown on the stage of this comedy. He does not bother me. Is not real.

It may come across as a little ego-centric, to say the least. But stop and think, the reverse is actually true! Who am I to think that all those far-away injustices concern me. Who am I to think I have anything to do with it, that I somehow have a role in bringing about, changing or correcting those circumstances. How ego-centric is that??

The important news will come to me anyway, through the people I know. The real world that surrounds me. And then I will be able to act, to change reality. That which I cannot change is not a part of my reality. And that which I change, is my reality. Always and constantly.

I perceive, I act, I change.

I have no past, no future, just the here and now.

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