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FOSS Force

WordGrinder: Distraction-Free Writing From the Command Line

WordGrinder is an old fashioned command line program that doesn’t try to do a lot of things. Its purpose is to get the job done, and stay out of the user’s way while doing it.

WordGrinder not MS Word

A few months back while perusing the latest news from the open source media, I came across an article listing five favorite command line tools, or some such nonsense. It turned out that one of the items on the list was a command line “word processor,” WordGrinder, which the article’s writer claimed to be an uber-easy way to write from the command line.

As it happened, I’d been looking for that very thing, so I immediately looked in the Mint/Ubuntu repositories, found it, installed it and took a look. Unfortunately, at the time I was busy, facing a couple of deadlines, so when I couldn’t figure the first thing out about it in five seconds or less, I closed the terminal and went to Bluefish to finish an article I was writing, while vowing to return to look further into WordGrinder as soon as I finished.

Growing Young FOSS Programmers With Help of Scratch and Al Sweigart

If your young child is showing an interest in learning computers, an introduction to Scratch and these instructional videos by Al Sweigart might be in order.

The Screening Room

Scratch Cat
Scratch Cat, the programming language’s mascot.

Talented book author Al Sweigart is a name familiar to many in the FOSS community. He writes books for kids and for adults — including the recently released Scratch Playground. Scratch is a free visual programming language developed at MIT Media Lab as an introduction to computer programming.

His zeal and talent for explaining is remarkable. I’ve been enjoying the “60 Second Scratch” screencasts (explanatory videos) he has been uploading to YouTube in the past two weeks. For example, check out this little gem:

No, Evil Hackers Aren’t After You

Humankind has outgrown the need to have monsters hiding under our beds. Now we let them hide in our phones, computers and microwave ovens.

Roblimo’s Hideaway

NSA hackers

OMG! I think I see a giant camera lens on a long stalk sticking out of my microwave oven! It uses X-rays in addition to visible light, so it can look through the kitchen wall into my home office and watch me type. That’s right. Type. Maybe pet the dog a little or something like that. No contact with the Russian government. No secret conversations with Barack Obama or other members of the Deep State who are bent on overthrowing America’s elected President.

GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath on Open Source

Did you know that the software Stephen Hawking uses to speak is open source and that it’s available on GitHub? Neither did we.

The Screening Room

Octocat GitHub

At the Computer History museum, GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath explains how GitHub has grown far beyond its original scope of being a tool just for nerds.

Should the U.S. Army Have Its Own Open Source License?

Should the U.S. armed forces begin releasing software under an OSI approved open source license rather than as public domain?

Roblimo’s Hideaway

Army software open source license

This question has generated many pixels’ worth of traffic on the OSI License discuss email list. This post is just a brief summary of a little of the discussion, which has been going on for some weeks and shows no sign of slowing down.

There are currently 80 Open Sourse Initiative-approved open source licenses. It’s nice that the Army (I’m a veteran) wants to not only write software licensed as open source, but OSI-approved open source software. (Go Army!)

But does the Army really need its own special OS license? Should the Air Force have a different one? Will the Navy want a Coastal Combat Open Source License, along with a separate Blue Water Open Source License? That might sound far-fetched, but Mozilla has three separate open source licenses, Microsoft has two, and Canada’s province of Québec also has three. So why shouldn’t the U.S. Department of Defense have a whole slew of open source licenses?

Storytelling in the 21st Century

Some words for thought from this week’s video on nteract: “Open science isn’t truly open and open source isn’t truly open.”

The Screening Room

Safia Abdalla Plotcon 2016 nteract

In her PLOTCON 2016 presentation, Safia Abdalla, an open source enthusiast in Chicago, starts off saying, “The need (for human beings) to write and draw things is not new. The desire to communicate with each other has existed since the dawn of our species.” She goes on to say, “I think we’re long overdue for a renaissance that’s going to help us to communicate with each other as people…. Interactive notebooks and nteract will play a key role in the New Knowledge Renaissance.”

An Introduction to Open Data Kit

With just a little imagination, you could easily make yourself a pretty cool mobile app using Open Data Kit.

The Screening Room

Open Data Kit

Open Data Kit is a free and open source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. The flexibility that open source offers means that the use cases for these tools are very broad. Check this introductory video about ODK tools which explains a rural medicine use case.