improved support for vodafone usb modems in ubuntu precise

san francisco santacon, 2011

I’m happy to announce that a few packages I’ve been working on over the past year have finally landed in Ubuntu Precise[1].

If you have a 3G USB modem, and it currently doesn’t work well (or at all) in Debian or Ubuntu, you should check this list of modems[2]. If it listed, then you may be a candidate to try an alternative 3G networking stack.

$ sudo apt-get install wader-core

This command will remove ModemManager and install wader-core. It should be an entirely transparent operation to you, except that after you reboot, your modem should appear as a connection option in the network manager applet.

Yay!

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1: naturally, I was a good boy and uploaded the packages to Debian unstable first
2: this list is predominantly composed of Vodafone-branded modems, but there are others in there as well.

Thanks to the Debian python team for mentoring me and to Al Stone and dann frazier for even more mentoring in addition to sponsoring me.

return of the kiva

I know microfinance isn’t perfect, but my instinct tells me it does more good than bad. I was sitting on some funds because I kept forgetting to re-lend them back out, but as of today, I’m all caught up.

You should join me in the fun, my special invite to you.

Good luck to Tharwat, Sharifa, Mohammad, Saleh, Mona, Saja, Aseel, Anwar, and Rawan in your studies!

And in an interesting new twist, there’s a new microlender in southern Sudan, something I haven’t seen before. My new friend Mindara’s profile page says,

Mindara has a motorcycle which generates some money for family use.

I don’t know what that means, but it sounds awesome.

the hardening within

By far the worst part of living in San Francisco is the large homeless population.

It’s rather the opposite of what you’re probably thinking.

The decay of empathy starts slowly, as you first say “no” every time you’re asked for money. It accelerates quickly after that, as you simultaneously discard eye contact while pretending you didn’t hear the entreaty, eliminating the need to respond. By the end, the scar tissue covers your mind’s eye and there is no active act of refusal anymore. The blind spot you’ve grown simply and completely blocks out what you wish not to see, acknowledge, comprehend, empathize.

That — the complete hardening of oneself until you un-see the unpleasantness — is one of the worst transformative acts I’ve ever seen in myself.

My conclusion is that in between the periods of protective rationalization, embrace the shame and make something positive happen. There’s no gordian solution, just a billion brief bouts of empathy.

[comments preferred on google plus]

striking the root

Without hyperbole, the most important problem in America today is that as individual citizens, we have lost our sovereignty. It is gone, lost to corrupting power of money. No matter your political suasion, everything you think is wrong with America today stems from this one root cause. Really.

The most important 90 minutes you can spend this weekend is listening to Larry Lessig lecture on this topic. He explains the depth and breadth of the corruption, and he proposes a plan to solve it.

This weekend, instead of giving more of your time and money to the entertainment industry (who have proven themselves to be actively hostile towards us), listen to this lecture, and spend some time thinking about what it means.

There’s no call to action — yet. We are planting the seeds for a grassroots revolution that needs to come.

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Stepping off the soapbox now, I observe with a hint of irony that it is in fact the entertainment industry that has given us the best treatment of the overwhelmingly corruptive powers of institutions on people, that being The Wire.

costumepus

The good stuff starts at 0:54.

Happy Platypus Friday!