Sam Beck is the guy behind Blueshift, an open source sustainable eletronics business that is all about building cool stuff. Helium speakers are the company's first product to market and will be the world's the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers. Not to mention the design files are open source. In this interview, Sam shares with me his unique business mindset and why he's not afraid anyone will steal his thunder, even while they might have access to his design. If we build stuff that's cool enough, we'll find a way to make money. Sam grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and went to college at Columbia University in New York City where he studied physics and art. He got his start with open source eletronics when he moved to Portland in 2008 and began building a bike stereo system that ran off of a dynamo hub (a bicycle part that generates electricity) and used capacitors as backup power. It was a few years later that Sam realized he could use supercapacitors as a primary power source. out the first supercapacitor-powered portable speakers in this interview.

his is my vim configuration to work with Git + Puppet manifests, mostly it’s based on some good articles about this that I found online:

Using vim and Debian to do puppet development Puppet editing like a pro Using Vim to edit Puppet code Using this repository you’ll enable the following plugins:

pathogen Makes it super easy to install plugins and runtime files in their own private directories. snipmate.vim snipMate.vim aims to be an unobtrusive, concise vim script that implements some of TextMate’s snippets features in Vim. syntastic Syntastic is a syntax checking plugin that runs files through external syntax checkers and displays any resulting errors to the user. This can be done on demand, or automatically as files are saved. If syntax errors are detected, the user is notified and is happy because they didn’t have to compile their code or execute their script to find them. tabular Sometimes, it’s useful to line up text. Naturally, it’s nicer to have the computer do this for you, since aligning things by hand quickly becomes unpleasant. vim-puppet Make vim more Puppet friendly! vim-fugitive Provides an amazingly deep Git integration for vim.

Which gadget from our holiday gift guide is your favorite? Raspberry Pi LulzBot TAZ 2 3D Printer Ouya Game Console SparkFun's Learn to Solder "Simon Says" Kit FLORA Wearable Tech Arduino BeagleBone Black Board littleBits Electronic Kits HexBright Flashlight In November, we gave you the ultimate open source gift guide for the holidays just in time to start preparing and brainstorming for a great gift for the tech and open source enthusiasts in your life.

If you have an older PC lying around with Windows XP (or even Windows 98) on it then replace it with antiX and you will make your computer more secure and perform better.

The PCLinuxOS team is happy to announce the availability of PCLinuxOS 2013.12, quarterly maintenance release ISO images. All PCLinuxOS ISOs for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems have been updated with the latest software updates and bug fixes from the software repository. The Linux kernel was updated to the stable release 3.4.70. The KDE on Full Monty, Standard and MiniMe editions was updated to version 4.11.3. The Mate ISO image got an updated theme from Linuzoid and reworked default desktop layout.

There's several things for Phoronix readers to keep in mind this holiday season.

An early patch-set has been sent out by Rob Clark as he prepares the "MSM" DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel. This open-source DRM graphics driver will support at least two new boards in the next kernel development cycle.

Earlier this month I ran some benchmarks showing that with the very latest open-source AMD Linux graphics driver code, the AMD APU Gallium3D performance can be ~80%+ the speed of Catalyst, the notorious Linux binary graphics driver.

While it isn't in the form of any complete documentation, a NVIDIA engineer has begun answering questions by the open-source Nouveau driver developers about video decoding with their H.264 engine.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has just announced a few minutes ago, December 8, that the fourth maintenance release of the Linux kernel 3.12 is now available for download.

Clement Lefebvre has announced earlier today, December 8, that the Release Candidate (RC) version of the upcoming Linux Mint 16 KDE Edition operating system is available for download and testing.

At the recent GStreamer Conference 2013 there was a presentation on "Taking Gstreamer to the Next Level" and in there some interesting features were brought up.

The KDE Calligra fork of KOffice is eyeing its 2.8 release and with it will come several new features. Calligra 2.8 final is expected in January but out today is the first beta...

Although Fedora 19 and Korora 19 are genetically identical, we admit it's a little unfair to pit these distros against each other. Fedora is more than an OS: it's an ecosystem and caters to a wide spectrum of users. On the other hand, Korora is just one branch of that ecosystem that has been pruned and cultivated to serve one section of Fedora users: the everyday desktop user.

ROSA is announcing a new major release pack for the 'R' series of its distributions - the ROSA Desktop Fresh R2. The 'R' lineup is targeted to the experienced users who care for fresh updated versions of the software and for those with new modern hardware. The R2 release includes all the updates, bug fixes and features added since the R1 release. The ROSA Desktop Fresh R2 is based on the KDE graphical desktop environment. The GNOME and LXDE editions are expected shortly as well.

Protecting email from unauthorized access and inspection is important particularly because the protocols that govern email do not include encryption. Email was not designed with any privacy or security in mind. The consequence of the lack of security is that email can be compromised on the sender's device, on a network, on a server, and on the recipient's device.

Unvanquished is a fast-paced, futuristic FPS with RTS elements, pitting technologically advanced humans against hordes of highly adaptable aliens. The player can choose from either team, providing a fresh gameplay experience on both sides of the conflict.

How to set the default applications on Google's Nexus 7 tablet

Mentor Graphics has updated its Mentor Embedded Sourcery CodeBench and Analyzer embedded development tools with faster performance and improved debugging.

After landing hardware support improvements last week for Coreboot, the open-source BIOS firmware replacement now has another new feature: ACPI power limiting and it's been implemented for Intel Haswell CPUs.

My take on the just out Linux Journal readers choice awards. Ubuntu is dropping in position, Unity is getting chastised, and there is some confusion over hardware and software and other issues.

Developers behind the ioquake3 engine that serves as the community's leading open-source fork of id Software's once incredible id Tech 3 engine are still working on new features. The latest sub-project of ioquake3 is working on a new game launcher.

Since Edward Snowden ruined it for everyone by making us aware of the fact that we share the water with sharks when we surf, security has been a key word. This, of course, has been a bonanza for security vendors and right now everyone is clamoring to get on the gravy train.

As the Linux market gets crowded with more and more players, the control of standards becomes important; that's how one gains marketshare and outwits rivals. That is the only reason that one could possibly assign for Red Hat releasing a language called Ceylon to compete with Java. Ceylon was first called a Java killer when news of its being planned was leaked via presentation slides but that description was quickly toned down; after all, nobody wants to poke a stick in the hornets' nest that is Oracle, not openly anyway.

Earlier today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal on the Alice vs. CLS Bank case which is yet another case that looks at the patentability of software. The ruling in the Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) was one of the biggest judicial messes you'll ever see. The ruling was 135 pages of different judges all disagreeing with each other. In all of that there is only one single paragraph that the court agreed on -- one which rejected the patent as not being patentable subject matter. But as for why they did that? No one could agree.

InHand Electronics announced the Hydra-F6, a customizable, MIL-SPEC ruggedized, 7-inch, WSVGA tablet that runs Android 4.2 on a Freescale i.MX6 SoC. InHand’s Hydra-F6 tablet is built around its Fury-F6 embedded board for the dual- and quad-core models and its similar Siren-F6 for the single-core version of the Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6. Announced in August, the 2.5 […]

Hold onto your swords RPG fans Eschalon: Book III is right around the corner, sort of, it will be in your hands February 2014!

US law on software patents is as chaotic as it's ever been. In May, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which takes all patent appeal cases, agreed to have an important case about software patents, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, heard "en banc" by the full court (10 judges at the time).

That produced one of the most splintered rulings ever to come out of the court. The ten judges hearing the case issued seven different opinions. None of those opinions gained a six-judge majority, so the ruling produced no binding precedent. It also showed how the Federal Circuit was all over the map when it came to software patents.

Wine 1.7.8 has been released as the latest bi-weekly development version of Wine to run your favorite Windows programs on Linux and other operating systems.

KVM, the long a popular x86 Linux virtualization technology, will appear in IBM's Power architecture in 2014.