BRCK in Violation of the GPL

Update (2015-05-19): BRCK has responded and put up an open-source compliance page on their website. During a recent meeting of the Nairobi GNU/Linux Users Group we discussed BRCK, the Kenya-based makers of a slick, “rugged”, battery-powered-GSM-router thing of the same name, and their apparent violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The lively discussion […]

Hacking on the Eudyptula Challenge

Last weekend a few of us met up at a coffee shop in Nairobi to hack on the Eudyptula Challenge. From their website, the Eudyptula Challenge is: … a series of programming exercises for the Linux kernel, that start from a very basic “Hello world” kernel module, moving on up in complexity to getting patches […]

Genome Assembly Likes RAM!

This is what it looks like when you do a genome assembly and run out of memory… The machine in question actually has 384GB of RAM (not much, as far as machines which do genome assembly go!). Assembling a genome is like doing a massive puzzle; you need to have all the “pieces” in contiguous […]

“Welcome to Uganda Telecom”

Something a little close to home from Jacob Appelbaum‘s talk at the Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg yesterday. During a section about GSM spoofing equipment used by the NSA, he mentions one epic fail by the UK GCHQ. Apparently they set up fake GSM equipment at the Ecuadorian embassy in London (where Julian Assange has […]

Got an Intel Yolo

So I couldn’t resist… I picked up an Intel Yolo today: I just happened to be at Sarit Center and saw that Safaricom had them on demo. I was pretty impressed, the thing is pretty snappy, the battery apparently lasts forever, and it was only 11,000 shillings ($125). It’s a very competitive phone for its […]