Electric Vehicle Conversions for the Masses?

Wikipedia has a growing list of the many upcoming and production electric cars, scooters, as well as motorcycles (even open source projects), but what about the millions of gas vehicles already on the road? There doesn't seem to be any single good central source of information for electric car conversions.

It's hard to do conversions due to the unique form of different vehicles, but the waste generated by abandoned vehicles is huge, not to mention buying a new car is a big investment. What auto shops are willing to do conversions, and how much do they (over)charge? Is DIY the way to go, and where can you get everything you need? Most importantly, is it even worth it to convert your car or is it cheaper to just buy a new one? Seems this is a niche waiting to be tapped.

Linux needs games, games need you

It's no surprise that gaming is one of the areas lagging most in the Free Software world. Fanatics will say that yes there are good FOSS games, but the truth is, they're nothing compared to the plethora of proprietary options for Windows. The current open source games won't hold over people who crave the latest games that are being cranked out. Free Software emerges and evolves out of necessity and innovation. It's hard to see a real need for gaming, but better games could offer a lot for the spread of GNU/Linux adoption.

Games are already cited as being the only factor holding many many people back from switching over from Windows completely. Think about it-- if FOSS gaming reached the "tipping point" and games were compareable to the newest proprietary titles, the fact that users could have similar games for free would be a huge selling point for Linux.

The world of gamers is HUGE. There are individual players, groups of friends, competitions, and professional gaming leagues. Gamers play on whatever platform has their games. This can be exploited for Linux. Right now, tournaments can be held for games like Nexuiz (donate!), and in the future when games are attractive enough to adopt Linux for the games, the world of gamers will start to migrate. Until then, they won't even budge. We can't hope to even chip at them until Linux gaming improves.

What can you do? Contribute! Linux needs games, and games need you. Of course, it's a good idea to support and FOSS products you use, but games are in serious need of support. If you're a programmer, you can obviously help with that. For the average anybody, you can download and try the game, submit bug reports, or at least send in a donation. Even if it's just $5, it makes difference.

Here's my request to you: Donate $25 to FOSS gaming. You could donate all $25 to one game, or $5 to five different games, or whatever you like. Just google a list of top FOSS games to try. It's easy, and gaming needs a boost...and Linux needs gaming. So spread this far and wide and give Linux the games it so desperately wants and needs!

Update 2009.04.16: I recieved a very insightful email response you can read here.

(Google) Customer Support Issues

This isn't a problem specific to Google, but it just happened to bother me while waiting on these two help requests which to this day have still not been solved and Google is a company i would've expected to have come up with some brilliant solution to this issue.

Most issues are from users who don't know what they're doing, but for issues that are on the company's end, it's almost impossible to get them fixed. Facebook deals with this in a great way...they make it impossible to find a way to contact them. There needs to be some way to sort out the issues that are no on the user's end and then prioritize them. Anybody have some brilliant ideas? Post them in the comments!

Put the MBTA on Google Transit!

The announcement of Google Transit three an a half years ago was exciting news to me. Finally, the best map service would also be able to provide directions for public transportation! Since that announcement, i have watched the number of enlisted transit agencies grow and grow, but to this day the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), who provide public transportation through the Greater Boston area, has still not enlisted in Google Transit. They even adopted Google Maps to provide directions on their own website, but they won't use Google Transit.

This is extremely inconvenient, to say the least. Why is it that they have failed to acknowledge or respond to inquiries regarding this? I contacted them when Google Transit first came out and again more recently, but neither attempt got a response. My only theory is that they want people to be forced to use their website for directions. This is one failure of a marketing strategy if that is indeed their (backwards) thinking.

Making information more accessible will only help the MBTA, and most of all, customers of the MBTA. Every search for directions using Google will provide a link to the MBTA website, and webstites who need to link to public transportation directions will give even more visibility to this. Everybody wins. Restricting access to this information doesn't do anybody any good. A small uprising of angry commuters have even created a Facebook Group titled, "Put the MBTA on Google Transit!!!" which i engourage all of you reading this to join. Supposedly, this issue will even be gaining some media attention soon, so hopefully well see some progress in the near future.

Intel's EFI: Hidden Threat to Computing Freedom?

Now i'm no expert in this field, but from what i've been reading, the industry is shifting towards Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and EFI means bad news for the future of fully open machines. First of all, it will make current fully-free BIOS replacements like coreboot useless as well as always requiring a piece of proprietary binary-only code to build a free BIOS on top of EFI. It will trap certain OS operations to an EFI-based control system meaning that the OS doesn't necessarily own the platform. On top of all that, EFI can control many things that effectively make it a "DRM BIOS". All of this comes with added complexity and, as expressed by Linus Torvalds, without real advantages. Linus also refers to EFI as "this other Intel brain-damage (the first one being ACPI)", and this is why i stick to AMD =]

This excerpt from an interview with Ronald G. Minnich from FOSDEM explains in more detail the dangers of EFI:

What are your thoughts on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)?

I have spoken with the EFI authors at length. They make no secret of the fact that a "core value" of EFI is the preservation of intellectual property related to chipset programming and internal architecture. To put it another way, EFI is dedicated to the preservation of "Hard" hardware (as defined above), and the provision of binary interfaces and subsystems to BIOS vendors and others.

It is not really possible to build a full open-source BIOS if EFI is involved. The Tiano system, which Intel claims is an open source BIOS, can not be used to build a BIOS unless it is attached to proprietary, binary-only BIOS code provided by a vendor.

Another important thing to realize about EFI is that it also contemplates enabling chipset features that will trap certain OS operations to an EFI-based control system running in System Management Mode. In other words, under EFI, there is no guarantee that the OS owns the platform.

Accesses to IDE I/O addresses, or certain memory addresses, can be trapped to EFI code and potentially examined and modified or aborted. Many see this as an effort to build a "DRM BIOS".

I am not sure what the real intent of this design is, but is is a real concern in secure environments (such as those found in governments, banks, and large search engine companies). A number of vendors and users have told me that they are not sure they can ship an EFI system they are willing to trust in a secure environment.

I've taken this to Dell's IdeaStorm, asking them to resist EFI, but i'm not sure where else to go and how concerned we should all be about this. Thousands of customers called out for Dell to put effort into adopting a free BIOS replacement for a number of reasons, but Dell's john_h has informed us that their "BIOS teams have investigated, but no plans to do this. Most of the industry is moving towards using uEFI", clearly not a pro-consumer move. Please vote on it and let me know in the comments what you think of these issues with EFI.

Ideas for Facebook

I originally thought of these for Orkut, but given that it still sucks with no sign of being ready to implement any of the dramatic changes necessary to make it as good as it could be, i decided Facebook is a lot closer (although not necessarily close) to hearing out these ideas. These could actually work for any social network or even just be created by application developers.

1. Friend groups
   Wouldn't it be neat to have a group dedicated to each user, and have all their friends be members? There could even be the option to make a post hidden from the person the group is dedicated to (and you could then, for example, plan a surprise party for them). People might be too paranoid for something like this, or maybe it could be abused, but i thought it was an interesting new idea to consider, and in testing it could be an optional feature.
2. Wiki profiles
   So i started thinking, what if  the Wikimedia Foundation created a separate project just for personal biographies? Then i thought, what if Wikipedia could get into social networking by doing something that's never been done before-- letting your profile be created by your friends? Maybe Wikimedia won't do this, but social networking sites could enable an alternate (optional?) profile for this. This could actually just be a part of the "friend groups" idea. It could be an alternative wiki-style profile that comes with a group dedicated to you. It'd be interesting to see how friends describe you collaboratively.
   
3. Listed Interest GroupsTo reduce the number of pointless groups that have no real purpose other than to attract users under a common interest such as chocolate, for example, items listed under forms like "interests", "activities", etc. could, instead of just listing those that share the same interest, put them all into a special kind of group. Groups like this one, "Chocolate", on Orkut with over 610,000 members, and this one, "Chocolate = Love", on Facebook with over 105,000 members, really don't need to exist. Facebook's "Pages" feature almost addresses this issue, but the pages are just feeds with a wall and not groups.

2009 Wishlist for Google

Happy New Year everyone! Inspired by the comment thread with this post on Blogoscoped, i decided to put together my complete 2009 wishlist for Google. I hope i didn't miss anything! Let me know what you think in the comments

1. Don't be evil!
   Never forget this. Do not compromise this no matter how bad the economic and financial crisis gets. In the long run, this is why the world will love you!
   
   
2. More Storage!
   MUCH more storage in all services that provide it and especially for paid accounts. What happened to striving for infinite storage?
   
   
3. A non-sucking Orkut overhaul
   Seriously...
   
   
4. GrandCentral Update--
   Integration with GMail contacts and Gtalk voice (& video?) chat would be absolutely killer.
   
   Update: GrandCentral is now Google Voice!
   
   
5. Serious OpenID Support
   Provide and accept OpenID for all Google accounts (obviously non-Gmail Google accounts can't do certain things...like use GMail).
   
   
6. Ability to merge contacts
   I have way too many contacts for this to be possible to do manually, it's insane.
   
   Update: This feature is now available but not very useful without a duplicate contact detector
   
   
7. Make Google Shared Stuff really useful
   Similar to Digg/Reddit but done Google-style (better interface, tags instead of sections, region specific view, a fairer system, etc). See: my 5 ideas for Digg
   
   
8. Accept open formats
   OpenOffice presentations for Google Docs, ogg theora videos for Google Video and YouTube etc, etc.
   Update: YouTube accepts Ogg Theora already but GDocs doesn't take OpenOffice.org presentations (.odp)
   
   
9. YouTube (gradual?) Overhaul
   YouTube doesn't look very nice and Googley, and it doesn't have any balance between features and a clean/intuitive interface. Also, decide how to separate or merge YouTube and Google Video. Will GVid search and YT host, or will you just merge them?
   Update: YouTube is now for hosting videos and Google Video is now for searching, but a makeover is still much in need
   
   
10. Non-Flash Video Playback
    Allow Google Video/YouTube to play formats other than flash (like the original video file).
    
    
11. Take on PayPal
    Google Checkout is great at what it does but needs some of the key features from PayPal in order to really be able to compete. Then Google Base could add EBay and Craigslist like functionality (and expand Google Classifieds out of Russia).
    
    
12. Speak lojban!
    Lojban has a lot of potential for Google in the translation department, and a lot of potential for the world in a bunch of departments (universal language, etc). See: My top reasons to learn lojban
    
    
13. Google Answers
    Expand this out of Russia already!
    
    
14. Bridge with AIM
    AIM was supposed to be bridged with GTalk, not just accessible through GMail chat! AOL was experimenting with Jabber/XMPP so pressure them to go forth with that.
    
    
15. GDrive
    Or at least "accidentlly" leak more info about it's status/progress ;)
    
    
16. More use of technology aquired from NevenVision
    Improving image search (removing the need for the ridiculous image labeler "game") and improving Picasa Web Albums-- automatically extracting text and shapes from images.
    
    
17. Mobile Social Networks
    Merge Dodgeball, Zingku, Jaiku, and all that mobile social networking stuff [with the non-sucky Orkut?].
    
    
18. Feedburener update
    Feedburner really needs to be Google-ized and integreated with other services (blogger).
    Update: Feedburner now uses Google Accounts but still needs a makeover and better integration.
    
    
19. Page Creator to Google Sites
    Hurry up and make the migration and then start making big improvements to Google Sites!
    
    
20. Release MeasureMap
    'Nuff Said.
    
    
21. Refuse censorship
    See: #1. Don't be evil
    
    
22. Cross-platform everything
    Make everything cross-platform (reduce the release time gap between different platforms, ideally to zero)
    
    
23. Free as much source code as possible
    Continue and expand on your commitment to Free software!