OffSetLab

The word "free" in the title refers to both the "free speech" and the "free beer" paradigms. The former is preferable, but I'll talk about both. Homo Ludens, right? Also, "entertainment", so I won't delve into how fun learning can be even though information that facilitates learning can be fairly easily obtained. This can also encompass access to materials that are needed for some type of work, but that is a topic for another article.

I was told some years ago that it was impossible to get entertainment without paying for it. This is simply wrong and ties in with the mainstream point of view. What it really tries to suggest is that it is impossible to get mainstream entertainment without paying for it, which is wrong as well, but now at least we are getting to something.

Mainstream is something we find universally consumed, it satisfies the common denominator of taste and receives a lion's share of spotlight. On the other end of the divide are all things niche and divergent, pushed to the margins of consumption, difficult to define by themselves, but easy to recognize in opposition to the mainstream.

This inevitably leads to the topic of piracy and I do know that this topic is extensive, but I'll just paraphrase Cory Doctorow by saying that the problem for artists is not piracy, it is obscurity.

We're witnessing information anxiety as is, and the amount of information we are exposed to is huge. This leads to some things being swept under the rug or never reaching an audience. With the lack of knowledge or money, people are less likely to even manage to push out their work, let alone reach some sort of popularity. Google is digitizing books and offering them as search results, although keeping the copyright in place because it only shows snippets. There have been some problems with this approach, but in most ways digitizing books preserves the information for the future.

Each country imposes some form of legislation pertaining to the copyright of works. The most common approach allows copyright to expire after some time so that the work subsequently falls into the public domain, which means that anyone can use it however they wish. In the grey areas of copyright coverage orphan works persist, their creators or rights holders deceased or impossible to find. Abandonware is a good example of this. Even though the copyright is still in place, the original author makes no money off of it and does not try to do so.

When works are essentially accessed without permission, we are talking about piracy. The justifiability of acquiring works against their copyright, regardless of whether they have been abandoned, or are unavailable in a location, or are neither of those things, is, however, a topic of a much larger debate.

In the end, some artists deliberately publish their works without copyright or with explicit terms of conditions that their work cannot be copyrighted by someone else. Sometimes this is dubbed copyleft or publishing the works under creative commons where some rights are reserved, but not all and the author does not earn money off of things, yet still holds the rights to do whatever he wishes with his work.

Since so many things have been digitized in some way and published online, the argument from the beginning of the article, that it is impossible to find entertainment without paying for it, does not hold entirely true. Piracy aside, as well as infotainment, which conceals from us things that are maybe better tailored to our tastes than what the mainstream is pushing on us, there are various services online that publish works that can be obtained for free.

Here's a rough list and it is likely to be extended and put somewhere for easy access:

• Books
  • Project Gutenberg
• Music
  • A whole lot of internet radio stations
  • Jamendo
  • Magnatune
  • Bandcamp
  • Soundcloud
• Visual
  • GoogleArt
• Games
  • Abandonia
• Culture
  • Europeana

Other popular services like GOG, Steam, Amazon books and similar are offering some free content as well, but their main source of revenue is selling things. Some services sometimes end up hosting copyrighted work that is accessible to everyone and the works are taken down ASAP. Youtube is an example of this, but what is seen cannot be taken back. Still they combat this as much as they can. This is just a random occurrence and if you want copyrighted work, you still have to buy it.

To earn enough money to get by and continue creating, artists have to publish their work through various services, but the more popular the service is, the more they have to be popular in order to get a minimum wage. This is something to think about. The best option in the end is to donate directly.

Lastly, I use a lot of the mentioned free services myself and I never lacked entertainment in any form. You should try it yourself and stop using peer pressure as an excuse.

I already described the purpose of BOINC in the post titled Contributing to society. To expand a bit on it, but still keep it rudimentary, BOINC works by crunching numbers for a project of your own choosing. It will wait for the system to get idle and activate. If you're doing something else, it will wait. This enables you to use your system as usual and when you're doing nothing, it will progress the project a bit. For BOINC to work, you have to have a working internet connection so it can download the files it needs to process before returning the result back to the server. This is the basis of grid computing.

If you're on DigitalOcean or a similar provider, you pay money to have your instance up and running. Most of the time, for a small user, the instance will idle. It would be better utilized if it was doing something. For the record, this instance is processing some data but this blog itself is static. The utilization of the system is miniscule as can be seen in the usage graphs on the DigitalOcean account page. To get the most out of it and contribute to the society, you can put your system to do some work.

This tutorial is written for the Ubuntu droplet, but your setup might differ. The ideas are taken from Scott Miller and Logan Marchione.

For starters, I have been running BOINC for some time so I already have an account. The same goes for the droplet so I don't have to go through initial setup for those. You can refer to the official documentation on both sides.

I installed a BOINC client via terminal. Since the droplet is headless, I don't need a GUI.:

sudo apt-get install boinc-client

I already have an account crunching numbers for the Malaria disease behaviour so I need the account key from it. I can see the key on the account page.

Using that account key, I can attach the droplet instance to it.:

boinccmd --project_attach http://www.malariacontrol.net/ account_key

When you attach a project like that, BOINC will start working immediately. By default, it will use 100% of the CPU which is bad for the other VMs running on the same KVM. You must not be a "noisy neighbour". Otherwise you will most likely get banned from your DigitalOcean account. YMMV at this point since you might be using your droplet instance for other things. I'll set up my limit to 65% since I'm not using a lot of CPU and I've asked their support about running BOINC. The 65% came as a recommendation from them.

For this to take effect, on my account page, under computing preferences, I'll set up separate settings for this machine. I add the profiles for "work" and set the CPU usage to 65%. Idle detection is somewhat problematic, so I'll set the suspend work unrestricted.

And then, when checking the machines under "computers on this account" details, I can associate the droplet instance with the new profile with the location setting.

Next time it connects, it will pick up those settings. However, you can update and restart the process with the following commands.:

boinccmd --project http://www.malariacontrol.net/ update
sudo service boinc-client restart

Soon enough, the results should be visible on the account pages for both BOINC and DigitalOcean. Happy crunching.

Starting a new drawing can be daunting. Staring at a blank paper still scares me even though I try to tell myself that there is nothing to be afraid of, that I am allowed to fail. I can only learn something here and the drawing I produce need not be "good"; it's just another step in the process. I have to make it a mantra of sorts because I'm not just trying to learn how to draw well, but also to change some aspects of my personality. I firmly subscribe to the "measure twice, cut once" school of thought, which can be something of a double-edged sword when trying to put down that first line. Doodling helps here because I can be relaxed and just, well, doodle, but at one point getting serious about drawing requires thinking and observing the subject that is drawn.

As part of me getting back in shape I figured I should put my training wheels back on and draw more with traditional tools. At least in the beginning. Good foundations come a long way. Back in the art school we were given some instructions on starting, so let me reiterate here some tips for approaching the work from the very beginning. Just will, paper and pencil will do.

Visual measuring, when drawing from life, is done using a pencil or any kind of straight stick. An arm holding the pencil is extended to primarily measure two things: the angles of observed objects in relation to the paper's borders, and the proportions, which come down to how the object's parts relate to the entire object, i.e. how many times a part fits into the whole (the simplest example of this is determining the human head - body ratio based on how many times the size of the head should fit inside the size of the body). This is also used for measuring the so called negative space in the composition, the negative space being, for instance, the distance between an object and the edge of a paper, as well as the space between all the objects that are to be drawn on one paper. The positive space are the objects that are being drawn.

The most important thing while drawing is placing the first line and visual measuring helps a lot here. If the first line is wrong, the whole drawing can go wrong. Digital drawing can alleviate this by letting you transform and move that line and even by resizing the canvas, but traditional drawing is less forgiving. If you erase the line too many times, you damage the paper or make too big of a mess, so trial and error is not exactly the best option. Also try drawing with a pen at first because you cannot erase the lines, don't worry about shading at all. Using visual measurement helps train the hand as well as the eye, it boosts memory and can even help relax a person doing the drawing. This part of the drawing process involves a lot of thinking and at first doesn't come intuitively.

Remember that "measure twice" principle? Here is where it comes in handy. Observe and think.

Other useful techniques that can help out when starting a drawing are the contour drawing - drawing the outline of an object - which trains the eye to notice details, and the linear block-in - drawing a boxy shape to encapsulate the object and then drawing smaller boxes within it, around the object's parts, until the block model produces a reasonably detailed simplification of the object's shape. I also found that drawing a lot of circles can bring about a shape of an object fairly quickly.

The point of these techniques is to facilitate practice and produce sketches, which can and will usually look messy and ugly. That is OK because the refinement will come later. In this case there's no need for an eraser that much because drawing a wrong line can help the next one to be placed better than the last one.

I am doodling every day and the results are in my scraps page of the DeviantArt account. You can check my progress there as well.

When I got into drawing a few years ago I found that I had a serious discipline problem when doing stuff on my own. In a way, I still have it. Back then I tried to tackle it by enrolling a formal art school, thinking that giving money for it would force me to keep up the pace, and while it did just that for the duration, the momentum didn't exactly carry over beyond school, and the classes did not live up to my expectations as they relied too much on individual effort to emulate and not enough on transparently explaining the techniques.

I did a whole lot there, but kept feeling it was not enough, and, seeing as how I was a total beginner, I sucked and felt I wasn't progressing fast enough.

The works I did back then were posted here, on the old web, and I still have them on me. We mostly did charcoal techniques and I took photos every time.

Two years ago (has it been that much?) I started drawing (again) every day on paper. I brought those sketches with me here in Ireland and have since scanned them, although the quality is what it is and not all of them are presentable because of it. I don't have a scanner so I was at the mercy of the girl working at the photocopying service. I kept this up a couple of months, but life intervened, I suppose. Work obligations intensified, which ate up both my time and energy, and then I changed jobs and had to deal with that and moving to another country... and now I am here and trying again.

I bought myself a Wacom graphics tablet, a Cintiq model, to do art digitally (yet again), but getting back into it is slow. So I've decided that the time for half measures has passed and tasked myself with drawing or painting every single day. Vesna got me a small sketchbook for when I'm not near the PC using the tablet and I challenged myself with a daily sketch as well. My current software combination is GIMP and Corel Painter. I started to doodle two weeks ago so it tied in nicely. Since I'll probably have some insights along the way, I'll try to assemble them in tips for myself in the future when I forget (I will definitely forget), or for whomever finds them useful. In a way I intend to document the process of learning to do art. I'll be posting my discoveries here so you can expect that kind of articles as well.

I have an old DeviantArt account that has been collecting dust for some time now so I decided that I'll keep updating it and not just start over. On a side note, DeviantArt uses the oEmbed API and Vesna did her best to get the results to display here. I had to provide her with an updated JSON list of the latest artwork that I'm parsing on the server with a simple cron job. We have our fingers crossed that this time the drawing and painting will kick off. You can see it displayed here, but mostly on the DeviantArt profile.

The basic thing someone can do to contribute in this society is to donate from the resources at their disposal, be it money, goods or skills in your free time. This behaviour can easily be abstracted into three categories depending on the involvement: either you are not contributing voluntarily at all, you are contributing passively or you're contributing actively.

The first category is the path of least resistance because the society will ultimately force the individual to contribute in some manner. The most common way is through taxation and state required contributions, but that's not what I want this post to be about. I find the second category interesting as it allows people to easily take part without affecting their everyday lives. The third one involves a lot of dedication and can verge into activism.

Since I'm coming from a software background, I am familiar with the practice of writing code and releasing it as open source. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged application or a library. It can also be just a snippet of code someone might find useful. This is common to the software development culture and the Internet behaves like a catalyst of this phenomenon.

A particular type of active contribution to the society is called citizen science. It involves any non-professionals who are willing to make a contribution to science. The common areas in which one can participate in this way are those which require data accumulation or processing which is not automated or cannot yet be automated, such as taxonomy of things like galaxies, or monitoring and recording populations of wild animals, like birds for example, which is important for biodiversity. Zooniverse is an example of a collection of such projects, but they are not the only ones out there.

If you're a professional, consider publishing your work under open, permissive licenses like Creative Commons. They are expanding to science as well and even had a separate project for this called Science Commons.

Open access can also augment the progress of knowledge. I remember when I was a student, I wanted to read a paper on one particular signal-processing algorithm that no applications were using, but I had no money to buy access to it and so I've never learned it or tried to implement it. This limitation can be very frustrating.

On the other side of the same spectrum stands crowdsourcing, which allows users to participate in a project without investing the significant effort required to be a citizen scientist. A famous example of this is the reCAPTCHA robot checking. While performing optical character recognition to digitize books, machines run into words they cannot read. These words are assembled and presented to the user alongside a word that a machine can read (a control word) so as to verify whether the user is a web robot or not. As multiple users try to decipher the word, the most frequent answer is adopted as the solution in the digitization process. This method has expanded to annotating images and creating datasets for the natural language processing and similar areas.

Other examples of crowdsourcing use people or their technology in the role of a sensor. NOAA maintains CrowdMag applications that take the magnetic sensor data and GPS coordinates from smartphones. They use that data to approximate the Earth's magnetic field and correlate it with the data coming from the monitoring space satellites.

Big companies like Google can also use smartphone data to calculate the likelihood of traffic jams, the density of cars and people, the elevation of the terrain, the words people use and similar things to make their services (maps, keyboard input, spam filter, search) better. However, this type of collaboration raises concerns about how effective their privacy policies are. If they can connect particular data with a certain person, they can map habits, movement and social relations if they want, and we cannot know who can get access to that data. Poke this enough and you can find the dirty underbelly of data sharing.

Without going into too much detail, there are, of course, ways to avoid compromising one's privacy. One might use the TOR network to hide their internet traffic, use alternate DNS providers and abstain from social services like Facebook, or even go so far to use the alternatives like Diaspora. With a strong enough internet connection somewhere, you can also host a TOR node that is used in TOR traffic if you know what you're doing.

Depending on how powerful your computer is, you can also set it up for grid computing. The idea here is to use your CPU and GPU as a part of a big grid that executes meaningful calculations of various scientific data. BOINC project serves as a platform for this endeavour and your machine or smartphone can crunch numbers for it. You get the data from the Internet, perform calculations with it and return the results. The types of BOINC projects range from protein folding simulations, epidemics research to the famous SETI@home. You only need to set up BOINC once for it to be automated and select the projects you want your machine to participate in. Points are awarded for contributing if you need this to be somehow gamified.

A more traditional way to go about contributing would definitely be simply to donate money, for example through funding of International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and similar organizations. Even buying consumerist products can have the added benefit of trickling money down to those who require it. For example, you can buy digital goods like video games, eBooks and comic books from organizations like Humble Bundle and chose to give your money to charity as well.

Various funds exist to get the resources for a certain cause, but it is very important that one knows where they're giving their money. Ultimately, you can always give that spare coin in your pocket to a homeless person you pass by on the street and be certain that it will alleviate at least the tiniest bit of human suffering. Don't get me wrong, we should invest effort into addressing the issues underlying the homelessness and poverty, but until that happens it's good to know that we can at least make sure that somebody has a meal to eat and clothes to put on.

If you're healthy, you can also donate blood, platelets, bone marrow and even organs. The donated blood has a short shelf life and a steady supply has to be maintained, and as far as organs are concerned, you might want to apply for a donor card or at least make it clear to your closest of kin that you'd be willing to donate in case of untimely death. Short of dying and going all the way, you can donate a kidney to a relative in need and live.

Considering what little time we do have, we can give of it as well for a good cause by volunteering in various organizations or even organizing things independently. A food-not-bombs event is easily put in place, it sends a universally positive message and brings the neighbourhood together. You can also volunteer at clinics, schools, charities, homes and canteens for the homeless, animal shelters, or simply join a protest or sign a petition to make your support for a cause corporeal.

There are numerous things we can do to become more conscientious community members: learn a sign language, train for a fire-fighter, complete a first aid course, but you don't have to acquire new skills to help. Any kind of skill can be utilized for the betterment of the society. No matter if you're a software developer, a carpenter or a committed advocate of a cause, working from your backyard or involving yourself in institution-level efforts.

According to FAO, 1.3 billion tonnes of food is thrown away each year and recently France has passed a law that every supermarket has to donate the food that is about to expire instead of throwing it away. They're hoping for the EU to follow.

Change happens cumulatively as an emergent consequence of divergent efforts. A critical mass of people working independently towards a better society can nudge it the right direction, eliminate or at least alleviate the problems we are facing.