Hi: This is the website for Owen Carter, a British guy who has been living in Amsterdam for the last 11 years.
I'm afraid there is nothing earth-shattering here, no solutions for World Peace, no cures for peoples ills.. Just a few of my photos and ramblings.
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 January 21st, 2007 |  OwenI must confess, I am quite impressed by this! If only it had native SMB or FTP support. Sigh.. but a FreeBSD port is available.
July 19th, 2006 | Owen This is probably just what I need to read..
April 10th, 2006 | Owen I’ve decided to start tracking FreeBSD CURRENT. Building my own kernel and world worked like a charm. And now the system has all the most current FreeBSD security patches and technologies, plus it is highly optimised for my hardware and now runs a bit quicker.
April 5th, 2006 | Owen  And if it´s not your flag. Please go here and tell them.
A very cool resource, I will be updating my webcam page soon, and I plan to use that to humurous effect.
March 17th, 2006 | Owen I’m going to try this out, a simple concept. If you only listen with a MP3 player, then why have your podcast reveiver software on your computer, when you can just have the software on the MP3 player itself.
Very simple concept, very innovitave, great.
March 16th, 2006 | Owen Because they do things like this:
Relatively Einstein
And then broadcast it over the Internet 
March 6th, 2006 | Owen MS critisizes Openoffice for being ‘behind the times’.
No bad thing say I, as one Slashdot poster puts it:
“Precisely; it is remarkable the number of people who hanker back to the Word or indeed Wordperfect of the mid 90′s. This was a time before feeping creaturitis had led to a situation where the user could spend several minutes navigating menus looking for a particular function.
Sadly, if I were to be brutally honest, I would say that this is one area where OO.o really isn’t 10 years behind MS Office, it is jam-packed with seldom used functions, that however is the price of getting involved in a tick-box war with MS Office (which open office really has to).“
- Angostura
February 13th, 2006 | Owen The new (v3) version of the GPL (the licence the Linux and a lot of other open source software is distributed under) is causing a lot of Ruckus. It’s been slightly hijacked by some extremeists to add a clause that it cannot be used with DRM schemes. Now I’d be happy to see DRM go away too, but it can only be done via educating consumers to reject it.
[Sidenote: If you've been stung by a DVD that -forces- you to watch 10 minutes of adverts before the main showing (Disney!) you'll know what I mean. If they want to do that, fine, they should just have to state that -clearly and visibly- on the front of the DVD, right next to the price. Then the consumer can decide.]
Anyway, the zealots are winning, GPLv3 will have the restriction, and so will go the way of the dodo. Linus Torvalds (Linus of Linux fame) is not going to adopt it for Linux, causing much hostility from the zealots..
Anyway, the Register has a nice piece that fits my feelings quite well, the choice quote from it being:
“Blaming Linus for not carrying *your* banner in your personal fight for “freedom” is insane. Fight it yourself if you must, but don’t start dragging someone into it who just wants time to plug away at his OS.“
January 27th, 2006 | Owen Cingular tries to patent selecting emoticons (:-O) on a mobile phone.
The worlds patent systems are really, really broken.
November 21st, 2005 | Owen My server has been upgraded, up to FreeBSD 6.0.
The upgrade is complete, although I’m still wrapping up some things, one missed goal was to get the Wireless NIC running. Wireless support is supposed to be a strong feature of this new release, but I must confess that I’m unconvinced. So far it does not work, even examples given in the documentation have errors. Grrr.
If I can beat this into shape I can then move the server to a more socially aware location, out of my sitting room.
October 25th, 2005 | Owen “This is what the inherent failure of Wikipedia is. It’s that there’s a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders..”
From a ‘readers letters‘ article in The Register, which at least, has an editor.
August 30th, 2005 | Owen An enterprising student.. Hamster powered mobile phone charger! brilliant. Why he only got a ‘C’ for this is beyond me, it looks both inventive and well constructed to me..
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