Category: Open Source

  • Backyard hydroponics update

    My backyard hydroponics system is producing, better than expected! I’m very happy about that. Here are some pictures: So far we’ve harvested and eaten: lots of lettuce, including some delicious kinds you won’t get in the grocery store Monte Carlo Salanova Rouxai a few radishes some dill, for tzatziki some basil, for pasta sauces some…

  • My DIY backyard hydroponics system

    And we are … live! Here it is, in all its glory :-) A few months ago, considering the deteriorating state of our planet, I decided I want to know more about how food grows (or fails to grow). So I started to read up on hydroponics. And a few weekends ago, I started building.…

  • Local network services for IoT devices could be a game changer

    Peter Hoddie, principal and prime mover at Internet of Things startup Moddable picked up my recent piece on why we need an Indie IoT and expanded on it. Some choice quotes: Johannes describes an “Indie IoT.” His vision is appealing. He believes users should be in control of the devices … in control of the…

  • When things go (not quite) web native — thoughts on Mozilla IoT

    Updated 2018-11-07 with a few clarifications from Kathy Giori on the Mozilla IoT team. The Internet-of-Things landscape is a mess. Everybody is trying to build the dominating IoT castle in the cloud, collecting (and almost never giving back) as much user data as possible; user wishes and needs be damned. It’s no surprise that consumer…

  • Are companies people? For free/open-source licensing purposes? Should they be?

    Free and open-source software is great. For example, large companies gain the following freedom: “The freedom to distribute copies [to some other large corporation for free] so your large corporation can help your neighbor large corporation”. Governments have this freedom: The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to other governments. By doing this…