Author: Don

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Four Directions Blessing

Stand and face the North. “Oh, spirits and angels of the North, where fierce storms come from. Come to us and give us strength and courage. Teach us to be strong like the buffalo who turns and faces the fierce winds and storms head on. Come, spirits and angels of the North.”

Face the East. “Oh, spirits and angels of the East where the sun rises every day. Bring light into our hearts and minds so we may also resurrect every morning, acknowledging new life and creativity and renewed hope every day. Come, spirits and angels of the East.”

Face the South. “Oh, spirits and angels of the South where the sun shines the hottest. Bring warmth into our hearts and friendships and all our relations. Come, spirits and angels of the South.”

Face the West. “Oh, spirits and angels of the West, where the sun sets every night. Teach us to be at home in the dark and in the silence of the night, and teach us to let go and to trust as we sink into the unknown and await the sun rising tomorrow. Come spirits and

Sunset over the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Photo by Cynthia Greb. Used with permission.
angels of the West.”

Look Up to Father Sky. “Come, spirits and angels from above. Teach us to fly high with the eagle and so, seek wisdom and perspective in life. Come, spirits and angels from above.”

Look Down. “Come, spirits and angels from below. Where all plants find their roots in Mother Earth. Teach us to remain grounded and thankful for the Earth, our Mother, and to treat her with respect. Come, spirits and angels from below.”

Cross hands on the Heart. “Come, spirits and angels from all six directions, into our hearts. Gather in our hearts and make them full with blood that is red, full of energy and flowing with love, gratitude and generosity. Aho. Amen.” – Sister Jose Hobday – Franciscan Sister and member of the Seneca Nation.

This came from Matthew Fox

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Transforming Family Photos into Festive Holiday Cards with AI

There are several open-source tools available this year for creating holiday cards. If you have a wonderful photo of your family or grandchildren, but it was taken during a different season and you’d like to change the background, there’s a Python module called rembg that can help you with that. To get started, you’ll need to set up a Python virtual environment and install the necessary dependencies. I created a directory named rembg using the following command:

$ mkdir rembg

Then I setup a Python virtual environment.

python3 -m venv /home/don/rembg

Then I activate the environment with the following command.

source /home/don/rembg/bin/activate

Then I install rembg:

pip3 install rembg

I want to use rembg from the command line so I make the following additional installation:

pip3 install "rembg[cli]"

Then I install onnxruntime which is a machine learning accelerator.

pip3 install onnxruntime

Now I am ready to remove the background from the image that I have chosen. This is a recent picture of my wife and I taken in the fall of the year. I like the picture but I want it to have a festive background.

Photo by https://www.sissyhorch.com/

I make sure that my image is in the rembg folder and then execute the following command. The i switch means that I am operating at the file level.

rembg i grandparents.jpg grandparents_no_bg.jpg

In the command above I renamed the output file so that I would still have my original just in case I wanted to use it again. You can see below that the background has been removed from the image above.

I can create a nice background for my card with InkScape and add some festive lettering and use a Pointsettia I downloaded from Openclipart.org. The completed card is shown below.

Created with InkScape, OpenClipart.org by Don Watkins CC by SA 4.0

Rembg is open source with an MIT License. Onnxruntime is open source with an MIT License.

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Celebrating the Holidays with Open Source

The holiday season is upon us once again, and this year I decided to celebrate in an open source way. Like a particular famous holiday busybody, I have a long list (and I do intend to check it twice) of holiday tasks: create a greeting card (with addressed envelopers) to send to family and friends, make a photo montage or video to a suitably festive song, and decorate my virtual office. There are plenty of open source applications and resources making my job easier. Here’s what I use.

Inkscape and clip art

One of my favorite resources is FreeSVG.org (formerly Openclipart.org). It’s easy to find your favorite holiday, including Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, and more. The clip art is all contributed by users like you and me, and Creative Commons Zero (CC0), so you don’t even need to provide attribution. When possible, I still do give attribution, to ensure that FreeSVG and its artists get visibility.

Here’s an example of some clip art from FreeSVG:

A cartoon of a brown cornucopia with red apples, an orange pumpkin, and brown nuts spilling out

Using Inkscape’s Text to Path tool, I added my own text to the image, which I used on a card. With a little more preparation, I could also use the graphic on some custom cups or placemats.

A cartoon of a brown cornucopia with red apples, an orange pumpkin, and brown nuts spilling out, with the words "We Give Thanks" in an arch over the top

Word processing

LibreOffice Writer can be used to create greeting cards and posters for use around your home or distributing to your friends and family. Create a database of your family and friends using LibreOffice Calc and then use that resource to simplify making mailing labels with the mail merge function.

Creative Commons pictures and graphics

There’s also art on search.creativecommons.org. Mind the license type: give proper credit to anything requiring attribution. This image (“Thanksgiving Dealies”) came from the Creative Commons image search. It’s by Martin Cathrae and is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, so it can be adapted, reused, and shared under the same license.

A candlelight centerpiece using pumpkin shells as flower holders for small red and yellow floral bouquets.

I took this same image and added some of my own text to it with GIMP. You can use Inkscape to do the same thing. 

A candlelight centerpiece using pumpkin shells as flower holders for small red and yellow floral bouquets, with the words "Happy Holidays" at the top left of the image

Creative Commons offers plenty of image options that would make for a festive background during your next video conference.

Videos and live streaming

You can also incorporate images like these along with some of your own and create a short video clip using OpenShot video editor. You can easily add narration by recording a separate voice track using Audacity. Sound effects can be added in Audacity, saved to file, and imported into a soundtrack on OpenShot video editor. Find legal background music to add to your video.

Livestream your holiday gatherings with Open Broadcaster Software. It’s easy to use OBS to present an engaging holiday show for your friends and family using the software, or you can save the program as a Matroska or MP4 file for later viewing.

Reading material

Project Gutenberg is an excellent source of free holiday reading material to share. Dickens’ Christmas Carol is one such resource that is easily read on the web or downloaded as an EPUB or in a format for your favorite eReader. You can also find royalty-free reading materials, like “The Feast of Lights” from Librivox, in mp3 format so they can be downloaded and played in your favorite browser or media player.

Holiday fun

The most important aspect of the holiday season is that they’re relaxing and fun times with friends and family. If you’ve got family members curious about computers, take a moment to share some of your favorite open source resources with them.

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Beyond Code: Ways to Contribute to Open Source Projects

I have been using open-source software for almost twenty-five years now. I was a user and an evangelist for open source for the first fifteen years that I used open source software. I didn’t see myself as a coder so how could I give back to the community. That changed in 2011 when I began writing for Opensource.com. I felt guilty that I didn’t do more to support the community.. I failed to realize that there is much more than coding and evangelizing that contributes to an open source community.

Here are some ways you can contribute to open source without being a community evangelist or a programmer. Documentation is one of the most important aspects of any project. It may not be intuitive how to use the software. Take WordPress and Drupal for example. It’s become easier now that you can spin up a virtual machine or a Docker image but there are still many nuances that are not intuitive and that is where good documentation plays an important role.

User testing is another way to contribute. How does the software operate on a variety of different platforms and operating systems. Providing feedback on usability and bugs. Community support by participating in forums and wikis by answering questions and provide support to other users. I have been a Linux user since the late 1990’s and in the early days before the World Wide Web existed the chief method of support was joining listservs and bulletin board. Now there are more resources for users but community support continues to be a great help even for experienced users.

Financial contributions help maintain and develop the project. One of the ways you can support open source is through the Github Secure Open Source Fund. I am a Linux Mint user and I have made regular contributions to the project. GnuCash is another project I contribute to. Consider contributing to podcasters like LateNight Linux. You can support Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances.

Advocacy is one of the principal ways I support open source. You can too. Advocate for the adoption of open-source solutions in organizations, educational institutions, and among peers. There are still many folks in communities around the globe that know nothing of open source and the benefits of using open source software. Thirty-three years after the advent of Linux a majority of the folks I come in contact with everyday have never used it nor do they understand the tremendouse personal and professional benefits they might enjoy as a user.

I advocated for the Chautauqua-Cattaraugus Library System to move away from a proprietary library system. The system adopted Koha which is supported by Bywater Solutions. The library system saved over $60,000 per year and were ready for the pandemic when libaries were forced to close their doors. Moving from an expensive client-server proprietary system to an open source one that needed only a FireFox browser to navigate was a game changer. I learned about Bywater and Koha from an open source using library director.

Consider sharing your open source experience by writing and sharing your journey with technology blogs like Allthingsopen.org. You might consider sharing your journey with others. Volunteer at meetups, workshops and hackathons and open source conferences. Offer others your open source journey at public libraries. There are many ways to give back.

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The Tech Trap: How Edtech is Failing Our Schools

I’m a technology user and fan. I was a school district technology director for twenty-six years, but at the same time, I witnessed a growing trend to look to classroom technology as a substitute for good teaching and learning. My ed tech journey began in 1981 when the first Apple II’s arrived in our school district. I was fascinated and spent many afternoons and evenings tinkering with them. In those early days our district struggled to provide one computer per classroom. We had a mix of Commodore 64, Apple II and Apple II clones.

Our district was a small K-12 rural district in Western New York State. We had a much larger athletic budget than a technology budget. Nonetheless using Title 1 funding our school district had a computer lab twenty-five Apple IIe computers where I taught keyboarding and Apple LOGO classes to students in grades 2-6. Many of my pupils are now in their upper 40’s. Our technology budget dramatically increased after No Child Left Behind and when I retired thirteen years ago the district had hundreds of desktops and laptops which were cast aside in favor of iPads and white boards connected to ceiling mounted projectors.

In the years prior to the technology glut I became interested in open source software which leveled the playing field for our students many of whom came from low income households. The interest in open source led to exploration and experimentation wtih Linux as a primary desktop operating system. This met with skepticism by some and outright hostility by others. Since retirement I’ve volunteered in public libraries where technology budgets are slim and demand is high. I have noted that there are a number of disturbing trends in primary and secondary schools.

There is a trend for schools to accept the latest educational trend even when it doesn’t address educational needs. This leads to wasted resources and distraction from core learning objectives. Schools are quick to adopt 1:1 models without adequate training and long range planning leading to misspent funds. Then too there are privacy concerns as student laptops and mobile devices equipped with cameras are misused. Add to that how are the staff and student creative works being stored and is there work being harvested by the ever growing machine learning market.

Technology is sometimes implemented to achieve short term learning goals like reading fluency and test scores without improving critical thinking skills. In addition not all students have access to high quality broadband at home thereby exacerbating the digital divide. The commercialization of education has led to profit over pedagogy, with schools becoming customers rather than partners in the learning process.

Many organizations face significant vendor lock-in due to a general lack of awareness about alternative solutions. For instance, instead of relying on Office 365, they could consider using Nextcloud, which offers a comparable suite of tools while also helping to avoid vendor lock-in.

There is often a lack of rigorous evaluation of ed tech products, leading to the continued use of ineffective tools and technologies.

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Essential Linux Commands

I started using Linux in late 1990’s when there were few books around that explained the basics. One of my favorite hand guides back then was the One Page Linux Manual. It had lists of many basic commands that I needed to navigate the files system. Here’s a list of some of the most basic commands than any new users needs to get started using Linux divided into useful categories. Happy learning!

Basic Commands:

  • pwd: Print the current working directory.
  • ls: List files and directories.
  • cd: Change directory.
  • mkdir: Create a new directory.
  • rmdir: Remove an empty directory.
  • rm: Remove files or directories.
  • cp: Copy files or directories.
  • mv: Move or rename files or directories.
  • touch: Create an empty file or update the timestamp of an existing file.
  • cat: Concatenate and display file contents.

File Permissions:

  • chmod: Change file permissions.
  • chown: Change file owner and group.
  • ls -l: List files with detailed information including permissions.

Process Management:

  • ps: Display information about active processes.
  • top: Display real-time system usage and processes.
  • kill: Terminate a process

System Information:

  • uname: Print system information.
  • df -h: Display disk space usage.
  • free -m: Display memory usage.
  • uptime: Display system uptime.

Networking:

  • ifconfig: Configure network interfaces.
  • ping: Send ICMP echo requests to test connectivity.
  • netstat: Display network connections, routing tables, and more.
  • ssh: Securely connect to a remote system.

Text Editing:

  • nano: Simple text editor.
  • gedit: Text editor for the Gnome environment
  • less: View file contents one page at a time.
  • grep: Search files for a text pattern.

Compression and Archiving:

  • tar: Archive files.
  • gzip: Compress files.
  • bzip2: Compress files with better compression.
  • unzip: Extract compressed files.

Package Management:

  • apt: Manage packages on Debian-based systems.
  • dnf: Package manager for Fedora.

This cheat sheet covers the most commonly used commands to help you get started with Linux.

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Navigating the AI Revolution: Balancing Innovation, Privacy, and Open-Source Alternatives

Everywhere you look, whether in print or on the web, the rage is AI. I’m part of the group that sees potential in machine learning and how it might reshape our educational systems. All the major tech companies have embraced it, and at the same time, many folks are sure that it spells the end of authentic authorship. In addition to some of the slop created with artificial intelligence, there is a growing concern for our privacy. Some people allege that their original works are being used to train large language models without permission.

In the past couple of years, I have asked folks in higher education and K-12 if their institutions have policies stipulating how teachers and students can use this emerging technology that continues to proliferate. With few exceptions, such policies do not exist. There are the Luddites who refuse to acknowledge its presence, some who believe in ubiquity but have very few policies, and those who stipulate no policy.

Most major operating systems and many of their applications now incorporate AI features, making it challenging to avoid them. However, there is a solution: high-quality, freely accessible software. This solution consists of open-source software that does not include artificial intelligence algorithms. The best part is that you don’t have to give up your existing operating systems unless you choose to. If you decide to switch, I recommend considering one of the major Linux distributions, as they can help extend the life of your hardware and software.

LibreOffice is a comprehensive office suite that includes a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet application (Calc), and presentation software (Impress). It allows you to save your work in open formats, ensuring you always have access to your documents. When using proprietary software, those programs save your work in formats that are inaccessible unless you continue to purchase a license for that product. LibreOffice uses open documents, which ensure that your job is always accessible to you. LibreOffice is also available on Linux, MacOS, and Windows and is open source.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a fully featured alternative to proprietary photo editing software and includes embedded AI capabilities. Gimp is used for image manipulation, editing, free-form drawing, converting between various image file formats, and other specialized tasks. The software is extensible through plugins and supports scripting for enhanced functionality. It is open source with a GPL v. 3 license.

Inkscape is a free, open-source vector graphics editor available for Unix-compatible systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS. It provides a robust set of tools and is widely used for creating artistic and technical illustrations, such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagrams, and flowcharts. Inkscape uses vector graphics to ensure sharp printouts and renderings at any resolution, unlike raster graphics, which are limited by pixel dimensions.

Blender is a robust, open-source software suite for 3D modeling and animation, extensively utilized across diverse industries such as animation, visual effects, art, and 3D printing. It provides a comprehensive array of modeling, texturing, sculpting, rigging, animation, rendering, compositing, and motion-tracking tools within a single, versatile application.

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux. In addition to recording audio from various sources, Audacity provides extensive post-processing features for all types of audio. These features include effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out. Audacity can record multiple tracks at once. Audacity natively supports importing and exporting WAV, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and other formats compatible with the libsndfile library. However, due to patent licensing restrictions, the FFmpeg library required for handling proprietary formats like M4A (AAC) and WMA is not included with Audacity and must be downloaded separately.

VLC is a free, open-source, and portable media player and streaming server created by the VideoLAN project. It supports desktop operating systems and mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, and iPadOS.

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Empowering Writing with Markdown

I’ve long been a writer, but writing and publishing have been challenging. Pencil or pen and paper and then endless sheets of paper for rewrites. My writing took off when my parents sent me to college with a typewriter. Lots paper and ink were used, but the writing process became easier. Then came word processing. What a gift to be able to write, revise and rewrite without killing anymore trees or using more ink.

My journey with word processing began with FredWriter and AppleWorks. These tools allowed me to write with ease, highlight text, and cut or copy and paste. The ability to save changes to disk for later use was a game-changer. As time passed, I encountered MacWrite, MaxWrite, Microsoft Word, StarOffice Writer, Libreoffice Writer, and many more. Each new tool brought with it an evolution in the writing process, making it better yet more complex, a journey that never ceased to intrigue me.

Most of the writing I do is for the web and it’s not easy to convert from from Writer or Word to HTML. But it does not have to be that way because in 2004 John Gruber created Markdown. Finally a writing format easily accessible to all that can be created in the most inelegant text editor yet transformed into beautiful written content for the web. Markdown is easily mastered and could be taught to students as early as third grade.

In addition to providing an easily accessible word processor at minimal cost, students can also be introduced to the basics of programming. Markdown converts plain text into structured HTML, making it a simple tool for creating complex documents that can be easily shared with teachers and fellow students.

Markdown’s versatility is a game-changer, making it accessible to everyone, including students with varying technical skills. With a minimal learning curve, students can quickly start using Markdown to format text, create lists, insert links, and embed images. The fact that Markdown can be shared across various platforms, from mobile phones to PCs, regardless of the operating system, empowers students to use it for a wide range of tasks, from note-taking to essay writing and presentation creation. 

Learning Markdown also increases students digital literacy  by familiarizing them with basic concepts of markup languages and text formatting. It bridges the gap between plain text and more complex coding languages providing a foundation for further learning and web development.  Platforms like Github and Gitlab rely on Markdown for documentation. Markdown is used in scientific documentation and most of the output from ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot and other LLMs is provided in Markdown format. 

You don’t need a wordprocessor to create Markdown. You can use Wordpad on Windows, TextEdit on MacOS, gedit or vim on Linux. You will need to use the following tags and save your work with the .md file extension.

Headers:

# Header 1
## Header 2
### Header 3
#### Header 4
##### Header 5
###### Header 6

Emphasis:

*Italic* or _Italic_
**Bold** or __Bold__
***Bold and Italic*** or ___Bold and Italic___

Lists:

Unordered lists:

- Item 1
- Item 2
  - Subitem 1
  - Subitem 2

Ordered lists:

1. First item
2. Second item
   1. Subitem 1
   2. Subitem 2

Links:

[Link Text](http://url.com)

Images:

![Alt Text](http://url.com/image.jpg)

Block quotes:

> This is a blockquote.

Code:

Inline code`code block`
Code block: 3 back ticks on the line before the code and three back ticks on the line after the code.

Horizontal rule: 

---

For more information on formatting be sure to consult this excellent guide on Github. Happy writing!

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Joplin is My Go-To Note-Taking App

I spend much of my day on the go whether walking around the village where I live or traveling nearby. During those walks and drives I’m often listening to podcasts or just thinking about content I read on blogs and other sources of information. I have found it useful to have an app where I can jot down a few notes or paste web content to refer to later. Sometimes I emall intereting articles to myself but more and more I use my favorite note taking app which is Joplin.

I love Joplin because it’s works across all of the platforms I use. That includes iPhone, MacBook or Linux desktop. Joplin is an open-source note-taking and to-do app that allows you to organize your thoughts and ideas efficiently. It supports markdown and syncing across devices and offers various features like tagging, searching, and encryption.

Joplin is available on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Before I started using Joplin my notetaking was limited to the an assortment of different applications depening on which platform I was using. Joplin aims to remain independent of any specific company or service, such as Evernote, Google, or Microsoft. Its synchronization system is designed to avoid relying on any particular platform. Joplin supports synchronization with various services, including Joplin Cloud, Nextcloud, S3, WebDAV, Dropbox, OneDrive, or the local filesystem. Synchrornization occurs in the background whenever it is running or when you click on the ‘Synchronize’ button in the Joplin interface.

It is easy to install Joplin as project has excellent documentation regardless of your particular platform. The project also provides extensive documentation on how you can use Joplin on your particular platform.

Joplin is open source and has a AGPL license. The project maintains a news site where you can discover the latest news about the application. You can follow Joplin on social media: Mastodon, LinkedIn, and X, You can support the project on Patreon.

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Enhancing My Resume with AI: A Journey with Microsoft Copilot

A few days ago a friend sent me a message about an opportunity to work as a Maker Space coach at a local university. After discussing the opportunity with my wife she suggested I apply. I completed the online application and then toward the end of the process i needed to submit a resume. There used to be a way to use your Linkedin profile to generate a resume. They don’t offer that service anymore. I am a Canva subscriber and there is an appllication that is supposed to work but alas it wasn’t working tonight. I asked ChatGPT to create a resume with the link to my LinkedIn profile. ChatGPT won’t perform this. That’s when I tried Microsoft Copilot.

I asked Copilot if it could help me create a resume. It suggested that I drag and drop my resume into the conversation space. I searched my drive and found a resume I had written seven years ago for a graduate school application. It was a PDF. Copilot would not work with the PDF but suggested that I could use a JPG or PNG. I opened the resume document and took a screen picture of it and saved the file as PNG. Then I uploaded it to Copilot. I just a few seconds Copilot read my resume and printed it out on the display. Using Copilot I instructed it to add the new additions and corrections to my resume and it did a wonderful job of that. It was incredibly easy.

Copilot provides all of it’s output in Markdown. I decided to convert the Markdown to PDF so I copied and pasted the output into my favorite MarkText which is my favorite Markdown editor, saved the file and then exported it to a PDF. I uploaded the PDF with my application and submitted it. If you find yourself in a situation like I did tonight I suggest you try using Microsoft Copilot and open source tools like Screenshot on Linux Mint and Marktext