Unguided Blog

On September 10, the EU will be voting on a vital law against illegal logging. ForestLove is a controversial campaign run by Greenpeace to push the EU’s vote in the right direction. Adoption of the legislation will ensure all timber products placed on the European market are from legal sources and well-managed forests. As the world’s biggest wood importer, Europe has a unique responsibility to help stop deforestation, illegal logging and its impacts on climate, biodiversity and forest communities.

Not only you can watch the video and help Greenpeace get this video to the top of the video viral charts, but you can actively take photos or videos to be submitted to Greenpeace. Greenpeace will edit materials submitted until the deadline of August 31 into a collaborative video that will show the EU commissioners just how much everyone loves the forests…

Watch the video and help promote it.

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It’s a good thing we have computers, isn’t it?

A discussion somewhere has taken me back to a long gone era. Since all holes were fixed and sunlight could not get in, my mind kept wandering to a time not known or forgotten by many I should say, alas. To the Golden Age of the BBS’s, the bulletin board systems, so to speak. They all of a sudden flourished all around the world but especially in USA and Europe. Run by enthusiasts in their homes, usually with custom equipment and a modem, they could barely handle more than eight people online simultaneously, and mind you, eight was a good number.

Some of them reached to such a fame and recognition that they had followers calling internationally. And those international calls, being expensive at the time, created, well, the sublime art of phreaking. Those phone charges had to be avoided. Most being teenagers, many did not have the luxury of paying for them.

Apart from those touchy issues above, they created a literature of their own, a unique culture. With their text files, the ASCII art, they were the pioneers of blogging.

I remembered a text-file named “Fun with Unix”. Originally written and uploaded to alt.folklore.computers by Charlie Gibb on 29 Apr 1991, this text-file was a classic example of the era. Of course, some commands will not produce the same results in most modern Linux shells but you are free to give them a try. I have removed the usual prompt with a dot for easier reading. Lines without a dot are the shell’s responses. Kind of cute if you consider all those were done without a mouse in the command line.
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