Freenet overview

I was telling a friend about the Free Network Project the other day, which I’d read about a few years ago. I still haven’t tried it, but after refreshing my knowledge on it, here’s a little overview.

A primer

“Freenet” is basically a completely decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer internet. It has files, websites, hyperlinks, etc. but all content is published and requested truly anonymously; the design of the system puts this above all other issues like delivery speed and latency, so while Freenet is a p2p app, it’s much more effective at disseminating censored information under “evil” governments than, say, getting you “warez”. All Freenet users run a small server (“node”) on the network that helps push data and requests around and holds a cache of data on disk called the “data store”.
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Malmö Gearlust

I’m totally spoiled having a big back room dedicated to making and recording music, but sometimes you can still dream.

Check out this amazing pic of the “Mothership”[1] in Sweden’s Gula Studion. Gula was built as a sister studio to the perhaps more famous Tambourine Studios, birthplace of most Cardigans and Eggstone albums. More than the gear; the space, atmosphere, and natural lighting is wonderful. Two more pics of the great room from the Gula site.

Eggstone update! A bit of googling around just unearthed a copy of the ridiculously OOP last Eggstone album on Amazon UK for £7. The order is in, I hope this works out. At least one other seller out there is holding out for $70. I wonder what Josh paid…

[1] pic from an excellent article on the recording of the first Franz Ferdinand album.

Alachua County Library Bookmarklet

Whenever you’re on a page with an ISBN in the URL, like Amazon or some other bookish site, activate ACL to pop-up a search for that book within the Alachua County Library Catalog.

This was generated with the LibraryLookup Project‘s Bookmarklet builder, which can build a similar bookmarklet for any library using one of 16 popular web catalog systems. Very nice. People are also turning these into Greasemonkey/UserJS scripts so you don’t even have to click; when the page loads, your browser queries the library and adds a link to the page like “This book is available now at the library!”. Some even report back how many copies at which branches, etc..

The great thing about bookmarklets and userscripts is that with a tiny bit of code you can force independent systems to work together for your benefit. Um..also because I can save these crazy YouTube videos the kids seem to love.