Prishtina Hackerspace: We made it on Kickstarter

Every little bit counts, and your bits certainly gave us more than a byte. Prishtina Hackerspace is your success, as much as it is ours now.

Thanks to people’s generous support on Kickstarter, Prishtina Hackerspace now has the necessary means to have a sustained impact and be the source of even more community-based innovative projects.

We managed to reach the aimed goal of $15,000 in funding, and we ended up with a total of ~$ 17,000 of funding.

See the campaign here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1731685895/lets-build-a-hackerspace-in-kosovo

My speech at TEDx Prishtina – 2014

“I am what I am because of who we all are” says the Ubuntu philosophy from a Southern African region, which is based on the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. That’s how Free and Open Source communities try to function globally.

I’ve been a community guy since the age of 14. That was when I started my professional journey, and that was also when I joined Kosovo’s tech community.

Being a part of this community has led me to ask some questions: How can my work impact the community around me, and how can communities change societies?

At 14, I joined FLOSSK, a nonprofit whose acronym stands for “Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova”, a not for profit organization that had just been conceived at that time – back then, a small group of people with one cause in common: that of free and open source software and knowledge. That cause quickly became my way of life, and an indivisible part of me.

Wiki Loves Monuments – Albania & Kosovo

Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition organized for the first time in Kosovo and Albania

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest for monuments running this September, organized by Wikimedia globally, as well as in Kosovo and Albania organized by FLOSSK and Open Labs.

Cultural heritage is an important part of the knowledge that Wikipedia collects and disseminates. Everybody can contribute images as well as write articles. An image is worth a thousand words, in all languages at once, and enthusiastic people can (re)discover the cultural, historic, and scientific significance of their neighbourhoods by uploading photos to Wikimedia.

In 2012, Wikipedia volunteer communities in 35 countries joined this initiative. In 2014 nearly 40 countries all over the world are participating through national contests organized with their national monuments, partners, rules, events and winners.

The organizers – FLOSSK from Kosovo and Open Labs from Albania – with the support of the Institutes for the Protection of  Cultural Monuments in Kosovo and Albania, through digital access to cultural monuments, want to promote the cultural heritage of the respective countries to the world.

MOSSCon 2013

Some of you may know me as a FLOSS and GNU/Linux enthusiast and activist since late 2009 (when I was 14) and that dealing with Free and Open Source software was always a natural outcome of my dedication and willingness to expand my knowledge and learn more about FLOSS ideology and the awesome community behind it.
You may know me as Altin, the FLOSSK guy that has been working together with his friends the last years on promoting, developing and translating Free/Libre and Open Source Software in his lovely small country – Kosovo. But this time the story takes place in Louisville, Kentucky.The city that I came in as an exchange student from Kosovo.

Folks, I wanted to share 1/4 of my great story of being an exchange student in this country, or better saying; an update on what i was working on during most of my stay here. I would like to keep it short this time as I will be blogging again after May 18th when this event is done! (That will be a more “in depth” story)

During my stay in a completely new environment with different culture, different language, different mentality, and knowing nobody, I managed to put a team together to organize the first (and looking to be very successful) Open Source Software Conference in Kentucky – MOSSCon (Midwest Open Source Software Conference).
Being still an High School student with a limited amount of time, MOSSCon is a challenge that was worth starting it and it is something that I will always be proud of. I am happy to have initiated and leaded this conference and I am even happier  to have met all these awesome people that taught me these important steps for my career. I am glad that after I leave this country, someone will remember me of doing a good thing and I will remember that I left something good behind. A group of people that I will never forget, a group of people that will continue organizing an awesome annual conference about Free and Open Source Software in Kentucky.
MOSSCon in now on the process of being a registered 5o1[c]3, we already formed the board of directors and we are almost done with the papers and all that… I’d like to point out here something that is very important about it and motivated me even more, something that I never expected to happen, especially (in US) at this time and at this age; The board members elected me as the “board president”.

This is not over yet, the most important part of it is yet to come, and we’ll see the results on May 18th. There is still lots of work to do!
We had lots of people joining and leaving the organizing team, but MOSSCon stays a community driven conference; “By the people, for the people” as we like to say it, and all credits go to the “organizing team” which is mostly made out of KYOSS (Kentucky Open Source Software Society) and a group of enthusiasts who share the same vision that the software should be Free and Open to the community to develop and adapt it to their needs. A community of enthusiasts of all age groups that is established to promote software freedom, open source software, free culture and open knowledge, a global movement that originally started more than 25 years ago.

A visit in University of Louisville – Speed School

Weeks ago I got an invitation to see a CyberDefence competition in one of the classes in University of Louisville – Speed School (Computer Science department).
To be honest, I really had some tough time trying to find the right building, UofL campus is Huge !!,
I would easily compare it by the size of one of the biggest neighbourhoods in Prishtina.

CyberDefense competition was lots of fun…
I was very excited to see students practising their knowledge in that field…  Just being in an environment where people do stuff that I love and do best was inspiring and very motivational for me at the same time.

CyberDefense competition worked like this:
There were 5 teams made out of students, each trying to protect their virtual servers while the Red team (in another room) which was made out of senior students and professors were trying to hack into their systems…

/dev/mapper/cryptswap1 is not ready yet or not present

I had this error going for a long time now (usually while my system was loading from a reboot) and my swap space would usually just not work…
I finally had some time to deal with that.
I couldnt even reformat it in gparted or something similar…

This is how I fixed it:

First you turn your swap space off

$ sudo swapoff -a

commented out the existing swap line in /etc/crypttab

comment out the swap line in /etc/fstab

# /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0

reboot your pc/laptop

now you should be working without a swap space, try reformatting your partition in gparted to a linux-swap type (in my case it was /dev/sda3)

after successfully reformatting it, proceed this way:

Setting up Mozilla Louisville Community

One Month ago, I arrived in Louisville Kentucky with a 1 year student exchange program…
I am enjoying my time here so much. I especially enjoy the fact that there are lots of tech places where I can hang out.. (One of them: LVL1 Hackerspace).

I have also been actively involved with some communities since I came here. I helped the organizing team of louisville.startupweekend.org, I attend LVL1 Hackerspace meetings and I also got involved in KYOSS (Kentucky Open Source Society).

Some 2 weeks ago, I attended the KYOSS monthly meeting which was held at LVL1.
I was really impressed and very happy to see all those passionate wizened faces at LVL1 while thinking of myself, one day, tirelessly doing the same thing…
While everyone introduced themselves, I met a guy there called Alex (Alex Hagerman) who was also a Mozilla contributor, probably the only one in town.
Days before that, I was searching the Internet to see if there was a Mozilla community in Louisville, but couldn’t find anything.
While I was talking with Alex during the meeting, I stated that and suddenly we came up with the idea of starting Mozilla Louisville Community.

I am still a high school student here, it takes me so much effort, dedication and time; but nothing is stronger than my will and passion to contribute to Mozilla.

Hello world in Arduino

This is the most basic programming that you could do with an arduino uno.
It just endlessly turns the light built in the arduino on and off.

So, after having an arduino uno and a usb cable to connect it to your pc, you would want to have also the arduino software.

• Get the software here: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
• Extract it into a folder
• Plug in your arduino in pc

Conky configuration

Conky is free software (a desktop widget) which runs in X on Linux and BSD. Originally a fork of Torsmo, Conky’s torsmo-based code is BSD licensed. New code in Conky has been licensed under the GPL 3.0.

Since its inception, Conky has changed significantly from its predecessor, while maintaining simplicity and configurability. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in its own window. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by using scripts and other external programs.

Lately I was configuring/designing/modifying a Conky configuration and I decided to share it with others.

SETUP

Go to github repository and get the Conky config files: https://github.com/altinukshini/conky_blue

Note: If your battery is not showing than you are probabbly using another format exc (BAT1 or BAT2) instead of BAT0 which is the default one.
To fix this issue change line 65 in conkyrc file:

from: ${battery_percent}%
to: ${battery_percent BAT1}%

To call this script in Conky, use the following in your conkyrc:

lua_load ~/.fluxbox/conky/conky_blue/clock_rings.lua
lua_draw_hook_pre clock_rings

Because I have used this conky configuration with fluxbox I have put it under .fluxbox folder on my home directory.

Copy: Configure IPSEC VPN connection with Racoon, Kannel and RapidSMS in Debian server

This guide will address establishing a remote connection with a mobile operator, create a data collecting RapidSMS application, and everything in between – specifically using the Kannel SMS gateway.

I realize this guide will only cater to a very specific group of technicians seeking to use the following technologies:

-IPSec VPN, as their means of communicating with a mobile operator (SMS Center).

-Kannel, as the SMS Gateway which talks to the SMS Center, relaying messages via HTTP requests.

-RapidSMS, as their choice of data-collection and communication tool.

This guide is aimed at demystifying any confusion that may occur in an otherwise obscure and arcane world of SMS. I will use my very own examples and clarify version numbers to show what works. I am using the Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” release.

VPN

We will begin by establishing a Virtual Private Network as the very first step – without it, no data would be able to get in or out from the SMS Center.

At this point, you should have already made arrangements with at least one mobile operator to establish a VPN with their SMS Center. Additionally, they should have provided you with a list of parameters necessary for the connection, these include authentication methods, source IP addresses, ports, keys, and much more.

This guide will be focusing on establishing an IPSec VPN – solely because of the specific parameters given by my mobile operator.

Below is a copy of the sheet of parameters given to me by the local mobile operator post-agreement, use it to cross-reference with the configurations in the next few steps:

Recursively change permissions to all subdirectories and files in Drupal

I used to have problems with Drupal’s sites/default/files/* directories permissions because for some reason they got messed up and this is the script that I used to fix that.

find . -type d -exec chmod 753 {} \;

this is for the files:

find . -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;