Benjamin Kerensa

Let’s End the Community Council Entrenchment

November 11, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

Let’s bring some change to the Community Council. A few of those running for Community Council have been on the council for years and not given up their seat to allow new ideas and fresh leadership to come to the council.
I think this is bad not only in governance of open source projects, but in leadership of any body whether it be a nonprofit board, a city council, a parliament, or congress.

At least two of the most senior people, in terms of how long they have been on community council, are in my opinion also the most disconnected and least communicative with the community, with one of them not having contributed to Ubuntu outside of their council role in years.

I think it is time to shake things up and that is why I am prioritizing my vote for the following four people as top picks and I’d encourage you to use your vote however you want but please consider shaking it up and bringing in some new faces.

TL;DR We know entrenchment in community leadership, nonprofit boards and politics is generally bad so lets shake it up!

My pick list:
Scarlett Clark
Svetlana Belkin
Phillip Ballew
Walter Lapchynski
Marco Ceppi
C de-Avillez
Jose Antonio Rey

Update: Charles Profitt a member of the Ubuntu CC who is departing emailed me this blog post he did last month which aligns with my opinion on entrenchment and dynamic not static leadership.

Review of Netgear Arlo

September 17, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

Netgear sent me their Netgear Arlo camera system making me one of their product ambassadors and wanted my honest feedback on the product, so I spent a few months now evaluating Netgear Arlo and here is my thoughts.

Installation

For me, technology needs to be simple to setup and configure and Netgear Arlo was rather simple to install. I simply drilled in some screws for the camera mounts and attached the cameras and then setup the base station and synced them. The whole setup process took me no longer than ten minutes. Although, fine tuning the position and sensitivity of the motion detection did take some time to get right.

Web Interface & Mobile App

So during my first few weeks of checking out Arlo, the Android Mobile application had some usability issues and crashed until Netgear released an update which did take another few weeks. This was sort of frustrating but these things do happen. Overall, my experience once the Android app bug was fixed was positive and the app worked well and was easy to use. The web interface worked well too. It seemed I would frequently get an error about the base station not being responsive via the web interface and this error never seemed reproducible in the Android app, so it felt anecdotally like this was an issue in the web app.

Price

While I received the Netgear Arlo for free, I did check out the price of the Netgear Arlo and it seemed very reasonable priced and comparable if not lower priced than other competing systems.

Night Vision and Effectiveness

Surprisingly, while using the Netgear Arlo one night it detected someone on the property and I called the police and later found out the individual was casing homes and was arrested. If it were not for Arlo, I do not know how that would have played out and it makes me feel much more secure knowing I have push notifications whenever Arlo detects motion. The night vision built into the system lets me monitor night and day.

While there are still some optimizations I think Netgear can make to improve how long it takes for a recording to start once motion is sensed, I really found the Arlo to be a good product.

Integrations

One disappointing aspect of Arlo is that while it’s an internet connected device (and maybe even a IoT device if you will), it so far has no third party integrations like IFTT, WeMo, Phillips Hue or others. This gap left me desiring more in this regard.

Conclusion

For the price point and what you get in this system, Netgear Arlo is a useful tool to help improve security around your home or business. It has helped me in the situation I described above and I have been impressed enough that I have reccomended it to several colleagues who ended up getting the system themselves and also are benefiting from the product.

I think Netgear has a good product here and much potential to continue to improve and optimize it and make it best system out there.

Disclaimer: Netgear provided the product free in exchange for an honest review.

Help Us #SaveWiFi

September 4, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

Maybe you have not heard, but the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a proposal which would allow the agency to regulate device manufacturers and make them lock down certain wireless devices such as routers.

This is not good news because if passed, this means OEM’s could prevent users from flashing free and open source firmwares like OpenWRT or other custom firmwares on to hardware they purchase. This is not very consumer friendly and not to mention router OEM’s like Cisco, Linksys, Belkin, Asus, Buffalo, and others are not that great about updating the internals of their firmware and sometimes leave users with firmware that exposes them to security vulnerabilities.

I wanted to write something short and encourage folks to please go and comment here. If this proposal passes, it could have an international impact unless OEM’s decided to ship a U.S. version and International version of their routers which is very unlikely.

Read more about this here, go and leave a comment here and tweet #SaveWiFi and spread the word across the web!

Update on Glucosio

September 4, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

Glucosio is an open source project I founded recently. I blogged about the kick off here. I wanted to give an update as the project is moving forward better than I had imagined.

Development

We are currently aiming for our Glucosio for Android Alpha release this month with a tentative release date on September 20th, 2015. This being our Alpha and our first public release will be the base of the app. It will have basic functions but the more advance features on our roadmap will be distributed across subsequent releases and I’m sure we will keep coming up with innovative ideas as we research the needs of people with diabetes. Hat tip to Paolo, Ahmar, Satyajit and Elio who have been working tirelessly on this release.

Translations

I’m happy to report that Glucosio is already translated into 13 languages. More specifically: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bengali (India), Breton, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, German, Italian, Spanish, Spanish (Venezuela), and Spanish (Mexico). We plan to have Greek, Japanese, Vietnamese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi before launch. (Want to translate these for us? Check here.) Translations are really important to this project because every language we can offer is a population of people we can reach with our app seeing as diabetes is a global problem. The more people we reach worldwide, the more we can offer great tools to and the more opt-ins to share anonymous trends and demographic data with diabetes researchers we can get. Hat tip to Arturo who is leading our l10n efforts!

iOS

We are still actively looking for a lead iOS Developer or even two people contributing part-time on our Glucosio for iOS product. If you know someone, tell them to ping me!

HTML5 App (Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen)

This is sitting in our backburner but it is definitely within the scope of our vision and will help us reach platforms like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen. We initially looked at doing cross-platform development but realized we could give a better experience if we built individual apps for Android and iOS.

Funding

Currently, this project has been very low cost thanks to some great supporters. Other than that, I have bootstrapped any costs, which again have been very small. We have decided from the start of this project that we do not want to monetize our apps because we feel it will dilute our vision and goals for the project. That being said, maybe the team will look into donations, crowdfunding or other options in the future if it becomes necessary. We are also looking into becoming a SPI (Software in the Public Interest) associated project so we will have a financial home and some resources available to us.

What’s next?

We are just going to be focusing for the next few weeks on getting this Alpha out the door. That includes wrapping up translations, doing some internal testing, and making sure we get out a crisp Alpha (that happens right?). Then we will sit down and discuss next things we want to prioritize and have a release post-mortem to improve our next cycle.

How you can help?

We have a really great team of people and would love to have more help. It has so far helped for us to have lots of hands in the pot and allowed us to scale as a project and get a lot of work done in a very short amount of time. If you are interested in contributing, hit us up at hello [AT] glucosio.org or ping us on Twitter at @GlucosioApp. We have contribution areas to include Development (iOS/Android/HTML5), l10n, Marketing, QA, and more. Hopefully by our Beta release, we will have some crisp documentation on our wiki on how to get started on all of these pathways!

The Mozilla We Want

August 7, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

Hello,

In case you, as a Mozillian, have missed Christie Koehler’s tweets of the last 24 hours, I implore you to have a look but also at the responses from Mozillians and employees current and former who agree that the issues she is pointing out are real and you can read about them here.

These issues are making Mozilla bleed and some are caused or allowed to exist because our leadership, our very governance allows them. We need to have a conversation about these problems and cannot just let Christie’s departure be in vain and roll along with the status quo.

We need to fix the culture at Mozilla and we need to invest in community and diversity and we CANNOT let the status quo continue if we expect to be able to be competitive, innovative and push the mission forward.

Can we have a town hall to discuss some of these issues? Can we get a response from Mitchell, Chris or Mark on these issues?

Discussion on this post is closed but feel free to engage on the Twitterverse. (Be polite)

Unnecessary Finger Pointing

July 30, 2015 By Benjamin Kerensa

I just wanted to pen quickly that I found Chris Beard’s open letter to Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) to be a bit hypocritical. In the letter he said:

“I am writing to you about a very disturbing aspect of Windows 10. Specifically, that the update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.”

Right, but what about the experiences that Mozilla chooses to default for users like switching to Yahoo and making that the default upon upgrade and not respecting their previous settings ?What about baking Pocket and Tiles into the experience? Did users want these features? All I have seen is opposition to them.

“When we first saw the Windows 10 upgrade experience that strips users of their choice by effectively overriding existing user preferences for the Web browser and other apps, we reached out to your team to discuss this issue. Unfortunately, it didn’t result in any meaningful progress, hence this letter.”

Again see above and think about the past year or two where Mozilla has overridden existing user preferences in Firefox. The big difference here is Mozilla calls it acting on behalf of the user as its agent, but when Microsoft does the same it is taking away choice?

Set Firefox as Windows 10 Default — Clearly not that difficult

Anyways, I can go on but the gist is the letter is hypocritical and really unnecessarily finger pointing. Let’s focus on making great products for our users and technical changes like this to Windows won’t be a barrier to users picking Firefox. Sorry, that I cannot be a Mozillian that will blindly retweet you and support a misguided social media campaign to point fingers at Microsoft.

Read the entire letter here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/07/30/an-open-letter-to-microsofts-ceo-dont-roll-back-the-clock-on-choice-and-control/