Year: 2013
Gender and tech
Trans Technology Symposium at Rutgers next Tuesday, 3/5
My friend Christina Dunbar-Hester and her colleague Bryce Renninger are guest curators of a pretty eclectic and awesome exhibit of gender-subversive art and artifacts which runs through June 3, 2013 at Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art in the Douglass Library. In their words, “Trans Technology focuses on technological art and artifacts that engage in trans, queer and feminist projects that help to trans (to use the word as a verb: spanning; interrogating; crossing; fusing) conceptions of the heterosexual matrix in technology.” A bunch of the featured creators will be at a symposium this Tuesday, March 5, 2013.
I was asked to contribute a jokey tee shirt with a series of (fallopian) tubes (Senator Stevens, don’t tie our tubes!) that I made back in 2006. Click here for the back story. My friend and frequent collaborator, Georgia Guthrie, is showing a piece that she knit from network … Read the rest
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Overclocking, wire tripping, and further adventures with Tor
Yesterday I was at the OTI offices again for a workday. For a chunk of the day I worked with Dan Staples on reviewing some things I’d learned about network settings in Commotion, and testing a Tor-enabled Commotion build. (More on that in a separate post.)
A couple of funny things happened on the way to the Internet. First, running Tor on a Ubiquiti PicoStation wireless node caused the little machine to overheat and reboot within 30 seconds of the process starting! Ha! We niced the process and managed to get it to stay up long enough to properly start up. I’ll do some more troubleshooting to figure out why it’s running so hard and see if there’s a way to (literally) cool it down. But I thought that was a pretty awesome problem.
At the same time, I successfully connected to the Internet through a Buffalo Air … Read the rest
Read MoreCivics, Society and Activism
I Want a CSA for music.
I was just listening to the Eavesdrop Radio podcast from two of my favorite djs, Junior and Lil Dave and it occurred to me that for as long as I’ve loved and respected their work, I have yet to actually pay money for a release on Junior’s label Recordbreakin. That’s horrifying…great friend I am!
But then it occurred to me that it would actually be easier for me to just pay Junior a chunk of money every year or month and have him send me download codes for whatever they’ve released in some time interval. Think of it like a CSA for music.
In a CSA, or community supported agriculture, you “subscribe” to a farm. You sign up and pay a lump sum to a farm in the winter which entitles you to a share of veggies every week through the growing season. It ensures that the farmer … Read the rest
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Solidarity with a gap year student
I have a close friend who graduated from high school last spring. After a lot of thought and negotiation with her parents and the university where she’d been accepted and funded, she decided to take a gap year, that tradition of time off after high school that is common in Europe but often maligned in the US. I was one of the people who got her thinking about it.
It’s fair to point out that we’ve known each other for a long time and I’ve been there to selectively pass ideas across the table to her: an introduction to Linux, tours of subversive little urban spaces, genres of music. So I was in a good position to suggest a gap year to her, and to substantiate the benefits to her parents.
She’s in the middle of it now, and her version of taking it easy is working 2 jobs … Read the rest
Read MoreGender and tech
Adacamp was my dream un-conference, and so can you!
TLDR: Click here to indicate your interest in AdaCamp 2013 in San Francisco this June. You’re interested because the last one was awesome.
Ladies and lady-positive people, you know that tech gathering that you dream about, the one where you’re surrounded by people who are smart and strong but modest and appreciative of all the factors that helped them get where they are? The one where privacy and maintaining a safe space is conspicuously valued even more highly than the conference’s own publicity? Where the women’s room sees some traffic and the men’s room is declared an all-gender space? Where the food is sensitive to a range of dietary needs and tastes AMAZING? And the one where you wish you could be friends with everyone there?
I was there, and let me tell you, it was awesome. In July, 2012 I went to AdaCamp, an unconference organized by the … Read the rest
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Hacking The Gender Gap this Thursday
“Hacking the Gender Gap” is a hands-on workshop for understanding and defeating the gender gap in tech. I helped develop it last March for the Women In Tech Summit with my good friend and Hacktory powerhouse, Georgia Guthrie. Amy Guthrie (no relation, another awesome Hacktory organizer) and I will be facilitating it this Thursday evening at our new space at 3711 Market St. for Girl Geek Dinners. We’ve done it at Adacamp, HOPE9, and HacDC, and if you’ve heard of it, it might have been as “that timeline thing.” In a nutshell, participants share their experiences with technology–both positive and negative–on a physical timeline; identify patterns in the assembled experiences; and discuss ways to make tech communities more inclusive, and ways that awesome people already have. (Many thanks to Katie Bechtold who, I think, wrote that description for HacDC.)
Check out the Meetup … Read the rest
Read MoreMaking stuff
Un-Borked
Erm. So, WordPress had replaced the widgets in my right sidebar with my penultimate post, but only on the front page. If I clicked a post to view it on its own page, the sidebar worked correctly. But it persisted even if I deleted a post or changed my theme.
I managed to fix it, but I’m not sure how. I do know that my web host upgraded WordPress a few days ago and that I only noticed the issue yesterday. Yesterday I did notice that the html editor was adding a lot of div tags that it wasn’t using before. I went through my last few posts and replaced them with the good ol’ P (paragraph) tag. The front page works again. I’m not 100% convinced it’s because of the deleted div tags, but the sidebar in my theme is indeed differentiated with div tags, so maybe???… Read the rest
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Tor basics in plain English
Here’s a cheat sheet that I wrote up for myself about two weeks ago after I’d gotten my bearings with the basics of Tor. I actually wrote it as an informal status update to my mentor and realized that if it was helpful to me, it might be helpful to someone else. If you see any errors, don’t be shy about setting me back on the right path!
First, though, please bask in the glory of this super awesome clickable graphic that demonstrates what network traffic is and isn’t obscured by Tor and HTTPS (encrypted HTTP). This snippet below is just a teaser. Click it to go to a page where you can click buttons for Tor and HTTPS and see how they work.
After a visit to the OTI offices and an overview of Commotion with my project mentor Will Hawkins, I felt like the fog had parted a … Read the rest
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Week three is the new Tuesday
Last week I was chatting with one of the GNOME internship program mentors who asked how the internship was going for me. I said that I felt pretty good, but that I was in a little bit of a lull. I’d learned about all I needed to know to get my feet wet with the technical end of my project, and now I needed to get better clarity on the question I am asking/problem I am solving to be able to really dig my heels in. I was floundering a little, but also having open-ended conversations with people who might be interested in the work. I didn’t know at that moment that those conversations would lead to a significant breakthrough the next day, resulting in a much clearer goal for my internship term.
It was nice to hear, then, that apparently a bunch of the interns in my cohort were … Read the rest
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Deepest Condolences
I’m taking a moment to offer my sympathies to the friends and family of Aaron Swartz, who died on Friday. I didn’t know him, but he was a friend to at least one of my friends and his passing is a blow to many, many people. He was a dynamic, passionate, and creative defender of information freedom, and he will be missed. Here are remembrances from people around the Internet:
Peter Eckersly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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