Into the clouds...

Where is the cloud? How safe is the cloud? Why to use a cloud service?

Those where the first questions I asked when I learned about the cloud a few years ago while I was in a conference. Of all three questions the third was the easiest to answer since I already had a problem with on where to store my presentations while traveling from conference to conference since I already had a lot of experience with 'flash drive accidents' . I was always careful and always had my presentations at least in 3 different storage after completion but even though all the 'safety' measures I was taking the personal stress of thinking that at any given moment things could go wrong.

 I tried my first cloud service that was Dropbox. It was nice for a while but then the other two questions came up and although I was sure about my content I wanted to know where is my content stored and how safe my content was. Two years ago I discovered ownCloud  and it seemed like a good idea that was going to solve all of my problems. I am a plain user and I do not need any 'extreme' stuff from my cloud, although ownCloud has that too. Setting it up was much less trouble than expected and this is another strong point of ownCloud. Literally it takes just a bit longer than it takes creating an account to gmail. Also it was much easier for my wife to learn how to use it after I had a client installed in her laptop. At least easier that teaching her ssh and stuff... Made my family life much easier :D

Last but not least ownCloud is Open Source and if you are reading this blog for a while you know how I feel about it :)

Building a Hackerspace

A lot of good things are going on lately. Last weekend I was in Nuremberg for the openSUSE Board f2f meeting which when more than fine. I am preparing for oSC15 and on the openSUSE Camp things are better than usual.

We spent a few months talking about making a Hackerspace in Thessaloniki and almost a couple of months some people decided to stop talking and start acting. So we made Tech Ministry , a 180 square meters place in the center of Thessaloniki where everybody can find a home for their projects. Of course we are still building it, literally a hackerspace is never over, but we still need a few things to make it functional. We plan to have it fully functional but the end of next week, but I know really well that everybody has a plan until they get hit, LoL.
If you have some money left in your paypal and you want to help you can do it by donating to our Hackerspace here. We could also use any kind of equipment that you don't need so all you have to do is contact me here by sending a comment or by sending me an email. If you are an FOSS Project Tech Ministry is always happy to support you by promoting your project in our members, so just send us all the information you think we will need for that.