An interview with Benjamin Mako Hill - The Diigo Meta page

• 10 Nov 14
  

  Carlos Gomez
  • My laptop is the venue for most of my work, most of my hobbies, and (on many days) most of my social life. At the moment, I use a Lenovo Thinkpad X201. Before that, it was a X61s, an X40, an X31, and an X20. See the pattern?
  • My laptop runs Debian "sid" (i.e., unstable). With a two year break around 2004 when I used (and helped start) Ubuntu -- and an ill-conceived 1-month tryst with the HURD in college -- I've been using Debian on the desktop since the early nineties when I graduated from both Slackware and middle school. To the extent that Ubuntu is Debian, I've never even seriously considered using anything else since.
  • I actively maintain and use three servers: two run Debian stable and one Ubuntu LTS (all are now Xen VMs). I'm both a Ubuntu Core Developer and a Debian Developer and I think it's important to actively use software you maintain so I want to keep machines running both operating systems around. I keep development and stable chroots of both Debian and Ubuntu on my laptop to build and test packages.
  • Although I still have mixed feelings, and while I appreciate and am proficient in vim, I love modern Emacs. My decision to switch back was also motivated by ESS (the Emacs R mode, which is incredible), AUCTeX (the Emacs TeX/LaTeX mode), and Org-Mode. None existed in their current form a decade ago and I use all extensively today.

  2 more annotations...

• 20 Dec 12
  

  caochauvu

  @academia @workflow @linux @programming @free

• 24 Apr 12
  

  Joseph Mornin

  I’m Benjamin Mako Hill and I’m a rebel with rather too many causes. I’m a social scientist and PhD student at MIT studying free culture and free software communities: my dissertation is on the sociology of attracting contributors to free culture projects. I’m also a hacker on a bunch of free software projects, a writer, and a blogger. In various ways, I’ve been involved with Debian, Ubuntu, Wikipedia, One Laptop per Child, and the Free Software Foundation.
  
  
  
  

  productivity

• 16 Apr 12
  

  Iwan Setiawan

  debian freesoftware project edu research

• 13 Apr 12
  

  Dan Connolly
  • R is slow and using it with big datasets gives one plenty of time to reflect on this fact.
• 

  Greg Grossmeier

  TheSetup just published an interview with me. Check it out if you want to learn all about my hardware and software: http://t.co/xRZFIoKY

• 12 Apr 12
  

  Alycia Sellie

  I carry around a hacked Kindle DX (graphite) I use exclusively for reading academic papers as PDFs. I am very worried about Amazon’s apparent plan to repurpose Stallman’s dystopian short story The Right to Read as a business model and have not (and will not) buy a book that is defective by design. But although I don’t want to support Amazon, I’m also worried about the cost and environmental impact of printing 7000+ pages of papers a year (which I did before I got the Kindle). On the bright side, it seems that buying the Kindle, turning off the Whispernet, and then never buying a book from Amazon, is a great way to make sure that Amazon loses money and that the battery only needs to be recharged once a month.

  ebooks

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