Open Source, DIY, & Face Yoga

Face Yoga? Hell yes! I have participated in this my entire life as I am a frequent yawner and eye-widener. I also discovered the eye exercises mentioned here years ago and have tried to incorporate them into my life. Basically, the advice I read said to look into the most extreme diagonal corners of your vision alternating opposite sides; so:
up to your right, down to your left, up to your left, down to your right. It also recommended holding an object or just using your hand for something to focus on in those corners of your sight for even greater benefit.

I used to drive down 10 miles of highway every single day when I was going to high school and when I was bored I would sometimes practice the focus technique by focusing on something on the horizon and then focusing on the dirt or bug brains on my windshield. Doing this back and forth for a while will make your eyes slightly sore and may distract you from the road so don't blame me if you hit granny going to get her mail while strengthening your vision!

Another thing to look at for improving vision is the controversial Bates Method endorsed by the amazing Aldous Huxley.

On the Open Source Front:

Paris LOVES the open source! They are giving away 175,000 USB Drives loaded with open source software like firefox and openoffice (I assume, it doesn't specify the office suite)

Princeton library joins Google Books project
While Google definitely has some ulterior motives to many of their projects, I can't help but love them for trying to digitize every piece of literature ever. The addition of the Princeton Library will add thousands of pieces of knowledge to the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection.

I would also like to point out how much I endorse the new Do It Yourself (DIY) movement taking place thanks to the likes of people like MAKE & Instructables. A cool DIY item I found today is Make Your Own Febreeze!

I love Febreeze for its skip-the-washing-machine-when-all-that's-nasty-is-cig-smell abilities.

More on Open Source

I suppose I should bring some more clarity to the philosophy of open source that I claim to loosely base this blog on.

This might be best achieved by some examples:

You can't talk about open source without mentioning Linux. Linux remains one of the few alternatives to Microsoft and Apple in the desktop environment. From Wikipedia, "Its underlying source code is available for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute freely, and in some instances the entire operating system consists of free/open source software." Linux has been the territory of only the nerdiest geeks for a long time but the emergence of user-friendly packaged distributions like Ubuntu has led to Linux becoming a viable alternative for the average computer user fed up with proprietary nonsense.

If you want to do something on a computer there is almost always going to be an open source solution already developed for exactly that purpose. Someone named Jason has compiled an awesome list of open source software for replacing windows software.

Some of my fav's

Firefox (web browser)

OpenOffice (Office Suite)
Completely replaces and can handle all powerpoint, spreadsheet, and word processing tasks with ease and greater compatibility.

Gaim (Instant Messenger)
Chat on any service - AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN, Jabber, ICQ - with this multi-platform, tabbed IM client.

Don't think that this is just limited to computer software though. An amazing humanitarian cause can reap huge benefits from this model. The Open Architecture Network is one such cause. According to this article,

The Open Architecture Network is a collaborative database which Architecture for Humanity hopes will make it easy for architects, designers and engineers from around the world to freely share their work, evaluate and modify existing solutions, and collaborate around new approaches. Think of it as the Wikipedia of humanitarian design, the first big step towards open source design.

With a coalition of sponsors and partners, including Sun, Architecture for Humanity built and is starting to test a system designed to be not just a repository of good ideas, but a tool for collaboration and research. Users will be able, Cameron says, to search existing ideas based on a number of criteria (such as, say, "housing, affordable, tropical, community-designed, passive solar, bamboo materials) and the ratings of other users.

As you can see, there are very few, if any, problems that don't benefit from an open source design! Got any counter examples? Post 'em in the comments.