Thanks, that's interesting stuff.

You have to take steps to make progress. You can take something useful and make it more open (like librem) or you could start from scratch and make something very basic that is completely open.

You can take bigger strides towards openness and get something like Novena, but then you make other sacrifices (size, cost, performance).

I guess if you had infinite money you could make a high spec, completely opensource laptop.

For a bunch of software that some people use, life is just easier on Linux. Applications like Gimp, Libreoffice etc tend to work better. Last time I tried GIMP on mac os x you had to click everything twice, once to focus the window and again to actually click something (maybe fixed now). Sometimes there are up to date no Mac builds of a project because none of the developers use mac, and none of the users with macs know how to compile it. Installing things can be a big pain compared to having a good package manager.

Berkeley Earth study took look at the urban heat island effect, and found while its is a real effect, it is localised and not effecting the global averages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And yet some people still cling on to shell scripts for their boot system.

"set -o nounset" at the top of your bash script. Then bash acts a bit more like a real programming language, and gives an error if a variable is not set. More tips (and by 'tip' i mean pretty much essential knowledge) at http://www.davidpashley.com/ar...

This is why you should have
set -o nounset
set -o errexit
at the top of every bash script. Also no one should be allowed to write a bash script unless they have read http://www.davidpashley.com/ar...

For some rough numbers, at 5V a raspberrypi A+ takes 500mA plus 250mA for the camera ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/hel... ). Maplin sell a 5V 10Ah portable battery pack (for charging phones and tablets) which weighs 330g ( http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/mapl... ). So off the shelf hardware gives you a 13 hour battery life.

I assume if energy efficency is your goal you could do a bit better.

I assume that meant the boat was undamaged, not the rocket.

The Neo900 looks even more attractive.

Shotwell https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Sh... is very nice for browsing/tagging. I just wish it had a more advanced raw editing mode like RawTherapee or Darktable.

RawTherapee is great for editing the raw files, but I wish it had a better browser to photos. My perfect software would probably have shotwell as the browser/tagger and RawTherapee as the editor.

I was pleased to see that Matplotlib switch to Grace Hopper as their test image. http://matplotlib.org/examples...

Actually yes, assuming you have a phone (or similar) with GPS.

There are a couple of projects collecting locations of cell phone towers and wifi hotspots to allow geolocation to devices without GPS and faster geolocation for with GPS. Having opensource databases means you can do lookup without having to report your location to a google/apple/nokia and means you can do offline look ups. See https://location.services.mozi... or http://wiki.opencellid.org/wik... or http://openbmap.org/

If you are cycling on cycle paths, then you could record GPS traces and upload them to openstreet map. That will require a bit of time on the computer, but the valuable work is the actual recording.