jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

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Archive of posts filed under the free software category.

Encrypted

Posted by jfleck on 4 February 2025, 6:24 pm

No particular reason, but I had some time yesterday and asked a young tech friend for help dusting off my Signal account, which I hadn’t used in a while. Should you also be interested – again, no particular reason, just feeling geeky on a late winter day – here’s some info to help you on …

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Filed under free software | 3 Comments

Making a map

Posted by jfleck on 28 May 2012, 4:15 pm

Inspired by the beautiful maps Geoff McGhee made for the Lane Center-KQED California Delta project, I spent some time this weekend playing with GIS software. I haven’t done any hackerly projects in ages, and a friend who’s a GIS professional had suggested QGIS, a free software project. (ArcGIS is pricey, and I’m a Mac guy …

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Filed under cycling, free software, maps | 4 Comments

This was me once

Posted by jfleck on 30 July 2008, 10:45 am

I’m in recovery.

Filed under free software

identi.ca

Posted by jfleck on 2 July 2008, 7:31 pm

Troopin’ on over with the cool kids to identi.ca – kinda like Twitter, but with open source cool.

Filed under free software

Congrats to DV!

Posted by jfleck on 14 June 2008, 9:25 am

The very cute couple: And you’ve gotta check out the blog post: a) did a new release of libvirt, and b) got married. 🙂

Filed under free software

Access to the Code

Posted by jfleck on 28 February 2008, 9:18 pm

One of my old Gnome friends, Dave Mason, is in Rwanda working on a public health technology project. He told a great story today about what the Rwandans he is working with need from their software: I was very directly asked if we would develop our software in open source. They asked because two other …

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Filed under free software | 2 Comments

Administrivia

Posted by jfleck on 16 May 2007, 8:44 pm

I’ve upgraded the software running Planet Fleck. I was running a quite old version of Jeff Waugh’s wonderful Planet, and it wasn’t handling some of the feeds very well. That’s why James’ blog, for instance, looked like gibberish, as did the new Nature climate blog. But I wasn’t motivated enough to fix it (I hate …

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Filed under free software

Trusting in Statistics

Posted by jfleck on 18 September 2006, 8:40 pm

My friend Luis, who was smart before he started going to law school, has an interesting discussion of the expansion of the open source model: There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the …

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Filed under free software, science

Gender Issues

Posted by jfleck on 9 August 2006, 5:10 pm

Over at Dave’s blog, some thoughtful comments from Malcolm regarding gender issues in the computer world: I’ve been using motherboards and daughterboards since I started playing with computer hardware. No fatherboard in sight, though. Come to think of it, most of the plugs on the back of my machine are female as well. I’m with …

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Filed under free software

Stuff I Wrote A Really Long Time Ago

Posted by jfleck on 30 June 2006, 2:46 pm

An old missive of mine resurfaces: “filesystem or file system“

Filed under free software

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