Today's announcment that Verizon and Mozilla are joining the Linux Mobile Foundation (LiMo) is great news for the advancement of mobile Linux.

Having a major carrier like Verizon announce that they "will encourage its handset partners to use the OS even if it is not a part of LiMo" and that they will "make a big financial commitment by hiring people" signals great confidence in open platforms as the way forward.

I've been eagerly anticipating the flood of creative, silly, art pieces that will start to flood onto the 'net around the 2008 American elections. This is a great start.

I've been sifting through the internet, including the excellent Symbian Freeware site, looking at various packages available for live location tracking using the Nokia N95 handset. Our plan is to provide live location tracking of a car vs. bicycle journey that will visit the various Car Free Festivals on June 15th.

The main project that I will be working on over the coming year is the Fearless Mobile Muse project - placing smart phones in the hands of artists and residents in the DTES for the purposes of providing live coverage of a series of festivals in the heart of the city. 

I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology. One of the most successful early projects, and one that I followed with a great deal of interest was MIT's Roofnet project - an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus.

One of the handiest tools in my Linux toolchest is Ffmpeg, the universal media transcoder. I'm pretty sure this fantasically useful piece of software runs in the background of every service that converts audio or video from one format to another (Google video, YouTube, Archive.org, etc). Over the years I've amassed a small collection of commands that will allow me to take media from one source and convert it for use in another - for example ripping video from a DVD or the web and then editing it and burning it back to DVD.