At long last, one is no longer beholden to DropBox or hacking away on command line with rsync for a convenient cloud file storage and synchronization service!
While DropBox is a great service, it’s not free past 2GB and it’s also prone to security flaws. Simply put, when you give your data to a 3rd party service you increase your risk of compromise.
Owncloud is not quite as easy to setup as DropBox, but given their consistent development it wont be long. In the mean time follow the steps below to achieve a proprietary DropBox service hosted by you (or a friend).
Download and Install ownCloud file server / storage on your Apache or windows server (very simple to setup).
Find a webDav client that syncs to a local folder. On Mac CyberDuck works great, and it’s also available on Windows. Android has a few webDav apps, as does iPhone.
CyberDuck or the like wont run in the background so either create a startup script to get it going, do it manually, or wait until the ownCloud Desktop plugin is released.
As a bonus, the web interface to ownCloud includes a media player (and I imagine a video player might be forthcomning), giving one the ability to carry their media library with them.
In the field of solar concentration there are essentially two options… a parabolic reflector or a fresnel type reflector. Parabolic troughs and dishes are great but often constructing one can be difficult. Furthermore there is a huge advantage in the simplicity of the flat layout of Fresnel lens.
I wrote the following scripts (fresnelSim.r and reflective_fresnel.r) in R to help calculate what angles and distances to place the reflecting mirrors at given a Focal length and mirror size. And I made a nice screen cast to help explain it!
The tea party wants to slash government spending and lower taxes. Thankfully I have some good ideas that even the leftest of the liberals can agree with to help the tea party along in their quest. However, I say, why stop with government? Let’s cut spending across the nation and with all the money we save lets spend time investing in our communities and fun!
Finally got my barrelponics project really working well and thought I’d post a video of it working away. Haven’t gotten any plants in this year, or fish for that matter. But as spring is springing it’s going to be about time. Can’t wait.
The green movement is often chiefly characterized by solar panels, CFL’s and Global Warming. But it’s so much more! I’ve been working with hydroponics recently and have started reading a great online magazine, Urban Garden Magazine.
This article is a great summary of what being green should stand for, with economic theory to support itself as well!
The interesting thing about local, grain-based currencies was that they lost value over time. The people at the grain store had to be paid, and a certain amount of grain was lost to rain or rodents. So every year, the money would be worth less. This encouraged people to spend it rather than save it. And they did. Late Middle Ages workers were paid more for less work time than at any point in history. Women were taller in England in that era than they are today—an indication of their relative health. People did preventative maintenance on their equipment, and invested in innovation. There was so much extra money looking for productive investment, that people built cathedrals. The great cathedrals of Europe were not paid for with money from the Vatican; they were local investments, made by small towns looking for ways to share their prosperity with future generations by creating tourist attractions.
And you thought being green meant you could just get new light bulbs
Another term for trickle down economics should be hand me down economics.
Is the economic reality we want for ourselves really one in which a few select folks get all of the big opportunities and then hire us little folks to make their dreams come true?
Mine isn’t. I want to work with, amongst, and against other thriving and competent creative, driven and smart people. I want to be rewarded for my ingenuity and dedication, and also to be able to extend grace and mercy to those who have fallen behind.
I don’t want trickle down economics, I want cell division economics. Wealth is not a zero sum game… properly invested wealth begets wealth.
And ultimately freedom is the most wealth we can have… how can freedom be trickled down? Freedom economic, mental and spiritual must be given from one person to another, one generation to the next. It’s not to be hoarded or lorded over others, but given freely so that one’s own freedom and wealth are increased all the more.
Which is better? To be free amongst slaves? Or to be free amongst peers?
Leisure is the basis of culture…. and happens to be one of the best works of philosophy in the 20th century. In it, Josef Piper says that what we spend our non-work time on is what shapes our social, spiritual, and economic structures.
I happened across this page at the Bureau of Labor Statistics today (yes yes, I know, strange huh…) and was fascinated by the portrait of America that it painted ala Josef Piper.
For all the many hours, words and thought spent on cultural analysis by the amateur and paid professional, the Preacher and the Politico, there can’t be a better resource to encapsulate American culture.
From, the BLS here’s what I’ve learned about my people (and myself):
There is nearly 2 times as much free time in a day as work time.
We are lonely, but don’t know it… we spend about 3 times as much time in front of the TV as we do with friends.
We know that education is the key to greater freedom, greater income and probably greater happiness… and yet we spend nearly 30 times as much time zoned out in front of a TV as we do engaged in reading material[1].
We love athletes, covet their bodies and worship the sexuality and heroism they represent… but can only manage to spend about 15 minutes a day achieving such perfection.
Flexibility and freedom with work happens in greater degrees with more education.
Men work a bit more in the office, Women work a bit more at home… but both work a lot at the office and at home.
Imagine what our culture could be like if we exchanged a bit of our TV fanaticism with reading while running/biking at the gym. If Friends the TV show was replaced with real friends. And if a love of wisdom through reading, education, conversation and formal training were to nudge into our work and leisure lives replacing toil with meaningful work.
TV is our people’s major leisure activity and the love of watching it is also the basis for our culture… which is, isolation from community and self, ignorance and disengagement. And unless we actually do something about it the consequences will continue to be:
Less freedom and flexibility with work
More obesity, lower quality of life, earlier death
Less wealth
Less meaningful civic and social activities
So yeah… anyone join me in an anti-TV revolution? (Don’t worry…you don’t have to throw your TV out the window, you simply have to turn it off every now and then.)
Not saying that TV can’t be educational, but that most education happens when actively engaged in the subject… reading is a great way to get that egagement [↩]
Imagine that when you go into work tomorrow your boss offers you the opportunity to continue doing your job but in only half the time and for half the pay.
“I’ve been listening to these tea-party guys and it makes perfect sense!” he says.
“The problem is, you’ve been sucking on the teat of the company cow for far too long. Your lack of efficiency is the result of being paid too much with no competition. You Mr. Greentheo have gotten accustomed to being a tyrant in your own corner of our company and today it stops!”
Would being paid less inspire you to work more efficiently?
Why should we expect that the government could keep providing the same services, the same benefits if we stopped funding it?
No, the sad truth is that the same theories that produced one of the scariest global financial crisises in history are now telling us that doing away with government and allowing the free market to rule instead will lead to greater general prosperity.
Is it not worrisome that the prevailing wisdom of our sage philosophers is that all you need to know you learned in Kindergarten and that big business and the free market economy has our best interests in mind?
You can do more with less for a time, and certainly we are all called upon to do so at various points in our lives.
But for the long term, growth comes when you do more with more. America needs to invest in the things that will produce general prosperity, particularly health, education, infrastructure and science. To do so we need properly funded government run by smart and hard working people who are paid well for their time.
If we need further proof we have only to look at the free market itself… could you produce above and beyond what you currently do if you and your coworkers budget were cut in half? How much more could you produce if your budget were doubled?
Most conservatives think marriage is great because it’s traditional and often because it’s what their spirituality holds in high esteem.
A liberal likes marriage because it’s the ultimate expression of love and choice and also what their spirituality holds in esteem (contrary to popular conservative belief, liberals love the idea of marriage… why else would they be so adamant about giving everyone straight or gay the right to marry?) .
I like marriage for both reasons…
and…
because it’s green. Think about it… married people carpool a lot. They live in smaller spaces per person and share most everything (nope… married people don’t have two toasters because that would be silly… we’re smart and share one!), And instead of going out and finding things to consume married people are always broke… so they stay home and cook, make gardens, ride bikes and according to TV, on occasion they sit in separate bathtubs and watch the sunset together.
And with combined finances, married people are much more likely to start a local business with 1 person’s salary and the other’s ingenuity. Local business is the lifeblood of an economy and is far greener than outsourced economy.
At long last, one is no longer beholden to DropBox or hacking away on command line with rsync for a convenient cloud file storage and synchronization service!
