Things I'm gonna do one day when I get enough money/time.

A lot of the things I say I'm gonna do one day revolve around open source or the Internet in some way or another. Open Source works because the people who use it are the people who create it. They give away the fruits of their labor openly to the world for anyone to use. It makes the world a better place when knowledge is shared for free, and when anyone can take that knowledge and create something better with it. It is a self-sustaining process that inherently creates better and better "whatever". Apply unencumbered access to knowledge and the ability to actively use that knowledge to most any situation, to most any process, and it simply will become better.

That is what Open Source is to me. Knowledge. Power. Control. On top of that its all gratis! How cool is that?

So one day when I get some money and time, I am going to contribute to the open source projects that I mention on this page.

When TiVo was originally created, it was heralded as a system that would allow you to skip past commercials, record all your favorite shows and save them for later, and have it record things you might thing were pretty cool based on other stuff you had already told TiVo was pretty cool. Thats not so much the case anymore. One of the biggest selling points, skipping commercials, is slowly going away. They are also beholden to the rest of corporate America which means its necessary to cater to Hollywood, the cable companies, and even the NFL. TiVo's other interests do not have my interests at heart. And I'm not feelin' that monthly service fee. I mean, I know they've gotta make money somehow, and I don't begrudge them that. But it doesn't mean I have to support them, either.

For that reason, I'm going to create my own Personal Video Recorder using software like MythTV or Freevo.

Using software like Shoutcast or Icecast, you can create your own radio station that anybody around the world can listen to. If you use something like Peercast, your listeners all share their bandwidth with each other, so you don't even have to pay very much for yours.

Using software like IRMP3 or NetJuke, I can create a home audio jukebox like this guy did. It would play all of my MP3s. It could also play FM Radio, CDs, or even Internet radio streams! I could network the players so that they could all access the same MP3 repository. One room could be playing a random selection of Hip Hop and House, and another could be playing R&B ballads and Jazz. Each one would have its own remote control, and would display the information about the song its playing on an LCD screen. Thats just the beginning. I haven't learned enough yet about what NetJuke will allow you to do, but I do know it can stream music.

Can you imagine creating a WiFi receiver for the music streams from your house? If you had neighborhood or city wide wireless Internet access, you could listen to the streams of music YOU pick to hear in your car! or at the beach! any fuckin where! How cool is that?! You could set it up so that anybody could listen, only you, or only the people you give access to. How much money could you make off that? Probably enough to pay for your bandwidth!

I bet you could tie this jukebox into Asterisk to control the music people hear while they're on hold, too. Just Fuckin' Cool.

One thing that fuckin' KILLS me about the local telecoms is how much they charge to set up your phone in the first place, and then how much they charge each month for service. You could easily spend $50 a month for home phone service. This even when 9.6 people out of 10 have a home phone. With that many customers, the phone company's rates should be like salt at the grocery store: exceptionally cheap. So forget local phone companies. I'm using somebody like Vonage, SipPhone, Free World Dialup, or Skype to take advantage of the high speed internet that I am sure to have when I get enough money. That way I can make free or, at the most, almost free calls.

Asterisk will allow you to set up a phone system with extensions for your various users, voicemail for each of them, a professional "Press 2 for this person, Press 3 for that person" type phone menu, and a bunch of other things. The software is free (and Free), and the hardware is commodity, so you can get it for relatively cheap.

How cool would it be to have individual voice mail for each person in your house?!

It can be set up to do things like call a certain number if it detects you are near the server (ie: in the house) or another number if you are out of the house. You can set it up to know when your meetings are over, and have it call the room. Wake up calls? No Problem! Need to be called on the half-hour to get an excuse to get out of a potentially bad date? Asterisk can do all that.

It is already possible to set up wireless internet in your home. How cool would it be to set up wireless internet for anybody in your neighborhood? I found a website where a guy describes doing just that here. I want to do that in my neighborhood too. If enough people get together and do that, it would be easy enough to set up free wireless internet access for a city even.

Darknet is a term originally defined by Microsoft. It basically means a network that is off the radar. One that you need special access or special permission to join. This is as opposed to the Internet in general, but more specifically P2P networks like Kazaa, Gnutella, and eMule, which anyone can join.

My darknet would focus on music. Any kind of music. Only be people who were invited could join. They may even have to pay. I would use something like WASTE to operate it. The people that I invited to join would have to contribute content. There would be no leeches there. There are a whole bunch of other issues I would have to figure out, like how to make sure the RIAA never got in there, but I'll do that later.. when I get time :)