Resources
Independent Information
- Aljazeera
Hopefully by now you don't need me to tell you that the best, most objective news doesn't come fromt the US. The US is a culture of subjectivity and opinions. Aljazeera simply tries harder than just about anyone at being totally unbiased. If you think you're being fed a line, check Aljazeera.
- Democracy Now
An remarkably well-rounded, informative, and upright alternative to your evening news broadcast or even NPR, which has been really declining as of late. Quality current events, journalism, and fascinating interviews.
- subMedia
Hilarious and diverse source of news and politics hosted by The Stimulator. Often compared to a more radical and independent Daily Show with John Stewart.
- Miro
Excellent TV replacement. A torrent-based integrated distribution channel of independent media. Even supports HD.
- Many Books
Huge collection of public-domain eBooks downloadable in almost any format. Rad.
Independent Tools
- FreeBSD
A beautiful server operating system descended from Unix. Born out of academia, it's much more organized than Linux and is an excellent choice for a server. I host most of my stuff on FreeBSD.
- Ubuntu
A community-built and maintained operating system that is secure, easy to use, and free. I use it quite a lot too.
- Reaper DAW
A world-class digital audio workstation for an insanely great price. I got sick of all the bullshit the major DAW software companies made me put up with and switched to Reaper.
- MODx CMS
A very nice open-source content management system and is, in fact, running this site. Modular and flexible, you can a lot with it. It's just missing a few key enterprise-grade features. You wouldn't want to use it to host IBM.com or anything, but for personal to medium-sized business use it's a great tool.
- Refinery CMS
A Rails-based CMS that is a wonderful foundation for developing an application with a CMS core. While there are some good tools written in PHP, I vastly prefer to develop in Ruby. So, if I need a project with CSM capabilities, I pop out a Refinery instance and start extending it. It follows Rails conventions and leaves the application layer really really clean for maximum separation between your code and theirs.
Good Food
- Farmer's Markets!
Find farmer's markets near you.
- Coffee Map
Find quality coffee where ever you're going.
- 101 Cookbooks
My wife and I don't cook as much as we might want to, but when we do, there's a good chance we're cooking something from 101 Cookbooks. Heidi Swanson's recipies are amazing and healthy.
Sneaky Shit
- Tor
Tor is an 'onion router', designed to scramble the routes through which your Internet communication travels. It is billed as a service that provides relatively good anonymity, and it does. You should be aware, however, that there are existing successful methods of attacking the network, particularly if you're a government that has the ability to observe both 'ends' of your communication. None-the-less, it's a life-saver for peeps who need to be anonymous or who need to access information/resources that are not available to them (China, Iran, etc). Set up yourself as a relay and donate some bandwidth. You are more anonymous that way anyway...
- TrueCrypt
TrueCrypt is a cross-platform real-time disk encryption program. Use it to protect your data from governments or organization when you travel across borders or from identity thieves in the event of theft of your laptop/drives. It supports 'plausible deniability' or the ability to have two passwords for each encrypted container.
- CryptSetup
If you're on an open-source platform, it's probably better to use CryptSetup rather than TrueCrypt as its code is more peer-reviewed and community-driven. But, it pretty much does the same thing minus the cross-platform ease-of-use.
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OSSEC
If you're running a server, OSSEC is a very helpful set of security tools that is quite easy to set up and use. It basically is a combination of log forensics and active-response scripts that watch for brute-force password attacks and other common threats facing public servers.
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NoTurf Mail
Email and Instant Messaging specifically for activists who want their infrastructure based in politically neutral territory.
