“Exterminate All the Brutes”

Christian Imhorst made an interview with me for the online-magazine “Freies Magazin”. The Interview is only available in german Language.

A Malawian youngster has built his own windmill generator. On a Blog the youngster wants to finance his secondary school with the story.


Boingboing as well as Soyapi blogged about it.

After demand I sould like to put the pint master of the shirts on the blog, because there is only a small quantity of shirt that have been printed. Feel free to download the master for the front and the backside of the shirt. CreativeCommons-ShareAlike 3.0 as usual.

P.S. “Anthu Ozindikira amagwirisa ntchito GNU/Linux Software” means “thinking human beeings are using GNU/Linux Software”.

The Administration of the State of Zurich in Switzerland still uses the proprietary xls, doc etc. formats of the MS Office Suite. That’s why each an every worker of the state of Zurich has to write its timetable into a table of such a proprietary file. Today while transfoming my timetable.xls file into a ODF (Open Document Format) file I coincidentally found out that the timetable with its calculations and algorithms still works perfect in Openoffice. And it also does in Neo Office (on a Mac OS X). Further I noticed, that the file shrunk by 70%, although the content of the file was exactly the same. This means that a conversion of a xls file into the odf format cleans the file and keeps it neat. If the administration of the state of Zurich would switch to the ISO certified ODF Format we could economise 70% of our storage Servers, that could be used for example for another Free Software project in Malawi.

Melissa Draper from the Ubuntu Project recently posted an interesting article about Edubuntu on the Linux.com portal. In the article the thin-client project, that I realised in 2006 at the Polytechnic, is mentioned.

As long as switzerland keeps the banking secrecy and refuses it’s humanitary tradition the african rulers will keep their money at the Paradeplatz in Zurich and the World Economic Forum (WEF) will take place in Switzerland. While the so called “very important person” will meet this week in Davos i will run my attention on the World Social Forum (WSF), that is taking place now in Nairobi.

Past Wensday, the 17th of january 2007 I presented together with Nathalie Bissig the Malawi project at the dept. of new media studies. At the “day of the open doors” after my presentation there were Urs Hodel presenting his project “News Jockey” and Domagoj Smoljo together with Carmen Weisskopf their project Projekt Bitnik.

The official 23C3 recordings have been released. The Server is available at dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de. We mirrored the server and its available at mirror.hgkz.ch (http, ftp, rsync). The recording of my talk (#1638) can be found here: #1638 Freie Software – Eine Chance für Afrika? (in german).
I also uploaded the talk in written (german text).

Nathalie Bissig has set up her own Weblog where she releases fotos and drawings of Malawi and of the 23C3.

Ramon Cahenzli has recorded the talk, that I held this morning at the 23C3 in Berlin. The Film can be downloaded at this URL (The talk is held in German Language). Thank you, Ramon

The audio layer of the file is corrupt. A file in better quality will be put online asap.

One of the reasons that since the end of november 2006, 25 new thinclients are running in the library of the polytechnik, are these 6 students.
Wilson Mpindi, Clara Chirwa, Clarence Gama, Prisca Mvalo, Moses Dossi, Adam

They helped us from octobre to novembre. With a lot of interesse and know how, they installed the software, buildet up the servers, and seted up the thinclient network. We would like to thank them once more for this collaboration. It was a real pleasure for us.