The Joy of Sharing Knowledge

For three Saturdays now I’ve been going to a place called Paradise Heights. At first glance you couldn’t think of anything paradisaical about the place. Built at the foot of the infamous Smokey Mountain, Paradise Heights looks like nothing but a series of unfinished buildings rising above mountains of trash.

That's me showing a workshop participant how to use the mouse by playing a GCompris game.

Gawad Kalinga volunteers have not only built homes for the poor in Paradise Heights, they have also organized the community for a series of trainings. One of these trainings is a computer literacy program for adult women. I volunteered to be one of the facilitators of the said program.

The age range of the 17 computer workshop participants is from 23 to 55. Their organizer told me that most of them are former garbage scavengers. On the first day of the workshop, the participants made it clear to me that they’ve never held a mouse nor a keyboard before. So we spent the first Saturday playing GCompris – a collection of free and opensource games engineered to teach users how to utilize the mouse and keyboard.

As expected, they found it hard to keep the mouse pointer steady and hit the mark. But four hours of practice, patience and perseverance paid. I was happy to see them making double right-clicks at the end of our first session. So that they wouldn’t forget the assigned keys for each finger, the participants traced their hands on paper and wrote the corresponding keys on top of each illustrated finger.

A workshop participant practicing her newly-acquired skill. Take note of the drawing as her guide. Click the image for bigger size.

During my second session with them I taught them how to use OpenOffice.org Writer, a free and opensource word processor. I started by explaining to them the basics of word processing and then asked them to type “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” After four hours they were able to encode paragraphs and effect basic formatting such as bold, italics and underline all by themselves.

In response to popular request, I taught them how to navigate the world wide web during our third session. Something as everyday as websites for people reading this blog appears so out-of-this-world to the Paradise Heights women. I made an effort to slowly explain to them how to visit websites, how to search for virtually anything using google and yahoo, how to play educational games, and how to watch videos and listen to music online. I also taught them how to open an email account and send/reply/forward electronic messages. By now, almost each participant has an email account.

The participants helping each other to create their very first email accounts. Notice the smile and the excitement on their faces. Click the image for bigger size.

You can only imagine the joy I experience as their facilitator. Women who used to pick rubbish from dumps are now empowered individuals who navigate the internet and eventually, I hope, encode their stories and make their voices heard all over the world through online media.

The three Saturdays I spent with them taught me that it is never too late to learn anything new. It has also taught me that a garbage dump can become a “paradise” when residents envision and believe it to be so. Through their desire to be computer literate and their willingness to practice what they’ve learned from the training, I can say that in time they will take their “paradise” to new heights.

How to connect to SmartBro Prepaid in Ubuntu Jaunty

A friend of mine recently bought a SmartBro Prepaid USB stick (Huawei E156C). She asked me to help her set it up. You might think that you need to be a Linux geek to configure the mobile broadband to work in Linux. It is so easy anyone who knows how to use a mouse and a keyboard can do it. Here is how I made it work in Ubuntu Jaunty.

Once you connect the USB stick, you are prompted with this dialogue box. Just click “forward”. You may also click on the images for full view.

You choose “Smart,” of course. Then click “forward” again.

All you have to do then is click “apply.”

5 iPhone Apps for the Holy Week

If you plan to make good use of your iPhone or iPod Touch this Holy Week, you might want to install these applications:

1. Way of the Cross – contains colorful images and the traditional text of the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

2. Via Crucis – similar to the the application above, except that the prayers and meditations used in this app are from the Vatican website.

3. iConfess – a guidebook to the Sacrament of Reconciliation for Catholics.  It covers such important topics as the Ten Commandments, Examination of Conscience and the basics of confession (what, why, how).

4. Cards for Easter – a collection of 11 Easter cards that users can send out through email directly from the iPhone or iPod Touch.

5. iMissal – the first and so far the only Catholic Missal/Missalette app  for iPhone and iPod Touch. It features a full calendar of the liturgical seasons, the Mass readings for the whole liturgical cycle, over 50 of the most popular Catholic prayes and of course the Order of Mass.

Dualbooting My iPod

I have a 4th generation iPod. It is ancient, I know, but it still functions without any problems. Well, I’ve never had problems with it ever since I purchased it in the summer of 2004, except that it does not allow me to play free and open source audio codecs like OGG and FLAC. I am a free and open source advocate, so using open codecs is very important to me.

I found the solution to my problem in Rockbox, a free and open source firmware replacement for the iPod and other digital audio players. Aside from supporting the OGG and FLAC codecs, Rockbox includes a wider range of sound settings, plugins, games and applications than the iPod’s original firmware.

Installing Rockbox using a Windows machine is as simple as downloading, unzipping and running this software. Everything is graphical so you do not have to mess around with command lines. Mac users have to use this software while Linux users should get it from here.

Rockbox does not erase the iPod firmware. It coexists with it. Thus I can choose either to boot Rockbox or the original iPod firmware. First generation iPods up to iPod Video are supported. Of course Rockbox is also proven to work in other digital audio players. For a complete list of supported players please follow this link.

Some of the sound settings that I find particularly awesome are gapless playback, crossfading, replay gain, 5 band fully parametric equalizer, and crossfeed. It was not until I tried the demos included in the software package that I realized that my grey iPod 4G could actually display 3D animation. It might also interest you to know that Rockbox includes the following popular games:sudoku, solitaire, minesweeper, and pong. Rockbox also allows users to change the font and the theme of the user interface.

If you want to know more about Rockbox, you should visit this site.

OpenOffice 3.0 – Superior Alternative to Microsoft Office Now Available

The much awaited Version 3.0 of OpenOffice.org is now available. OpenOffice .org is an open source office suite that is best known as a free and superior alternative to Microsoft Office. You can download the complete software package from here.

I love OpenOffice.org. It is stable, easy to use, and runs on Linux, Windows  Mac and other operating systems. Another reason why I love OpenOffice.org so much is the fact that it is free. This means that you can download it for free and install it on as many number of computers as you like. You are also free to make as many copies of OpenOffice.org as you want and share them with other people.

I’ve been using OpenOffice since 2004 and I’m fully satisfied with its performance. I use it mainly for word processing and preparing spreadsheets and multimedia presentations. Here is a list of the major components of OpenOffice.org and their MS equivalent.

Function	Microsoft Office	OpenOffice.org
Word processor	Word	Writer
Spreadsheet	Excel	Calc
Presentation	PowerPoint	Impress

Aside from the applications I’ve listed above, the OpenOffice.org suite also comes with the following components: Base - A database program similar to Microsoft Access, Draw - A vector graphics editor comparable in features to early versions of CorelDRAW, and other apps for creating HTML and XML documents.

I promise you there is not much adjustment to make when you shift to OpenOffice.org because its user interface and feature set are identical with that of MS Office. You do not have to worry if you already have documents you’ve created using MS Office because OpenOffice.org can open and read them with a very high degree of accuracy.

If you want to keep your data compatible with MS Office, you actually have the option to save files you’ve created with OpenOffice.org in a format that MS Office can read. You need this when you regularly share files with people who only use MS Office or when you need to open your documents in another computer that does not have OpenOffice.org.

I think it is also good to keep in mind that the mission of OpenOffice is “to create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.” We can all be part of a community whose goal is to shatter all forms of monopoly and deliver a sophisticated and dependable yet free multi-platform office productivity suite.

Gimp 2.6 Released

A new version of Gimp, my most favorite graphics editor, has just been released. Gimp is a free software that you can use for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It is the best alternative to Photoshop. It has a lot of new and improved features designed to make image manipulation swift and easy.

Windows users should download Gimp from here. If you are a Linux user, you can download it from here.

Gospelr: Microblogging God's Word

Gospelr is the twitter for Christians. According to its developers, the purpose of this microblogging technology is “to provide an effective communication medium for sharing thoughts, ideas, words of encouragement, prayer requests, daily scripture readings/devotionals, and more to friends, staff, ministries, family, and others.”

I have been maintaining a Twitter account since October 2007 and I use it not only to update my friends about my whereabouts but also as a ministry platform. My tweets are mostly quotes about faith, praying, joy, celebrating life and spreading God’s Word. In short, Gospelr is exactly how I want Twitter to be.

The fact that there are people out there who want to code, develop and make use of the latest technologies for evangelization amazes me. Gospelr is another example that popular web applications and services can serve the Church and its mission.

Two things that make me want to use Gospelr is its being Twitter-integrated (what you post in Gospelr will also appear in Twitter and vice versa) and the developer’s promise that they will soon make a WordPress plugin (my site is powered by WordPress).