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It's almost Halloween, one of my favorite days and party times. This year, I decided to (pumpkin) spice up some of my decorations with automated motion sensing. This spooktacular article shows you how I made them, step by step, from building and wiring to coding. This is not your average weekend project—it takes a lot of supplies and building time. But it's a fun way to play around with Raspberry Pi and get in the spirit of this haunting holiday.

I am a current graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in the Scientific and Technical Communication MS program. The following is an interview I conducted with Jim Hall to learn about international professional communication strategies in the multinational group, the FreeDOS Project.

In the second part of my interview with Sam Knuth, a fellow Open Organization Ambassador, we discussed how leaders can identify areas for coaching open management practices within their organization to ensure the managers they lead are letting open values guide their work teams and associates. It takes emotional intelligence—and effort.

Over the past several years, Rust has gained a passionate following among programmers. Tech trends come and go, so it can be difficult to separate excitement just because something is new versus excitement over the merits of a technology, but I think Rust is a truly well-designed language. It aims to help developers build reliable and efficient software, and it was designed for that purpose from the ground up. There are key features you'll hear about Rust, and in this article, I demonstrate that many of these features are exactly why Rust also happens to be great for embedded systems.

Open source has touched a lot of scientific disciplines, but one area where it is missing is soil science. Until recently, you could only find it in educational materials. A team from the Université de Lorraine, INRAE in France, and Western University in Canada bring open source to the soil science community.

Every year, Google organizes a program called Summer of Code (GSoC). Students worldwide can write open source code under an open source mentoring organization and get paid to do so! You get to work on cool open source projects, network with talented engineers, and get paid during the summer break. How cool is that!?

In this blog post, we'll guide you through our GSoC experience and give you tips and tricks so that you can have a fantastic experience like we did. We'll also share our differing perspectives based on our different interests and challenges.

I have a confession to make. This may be an unpopular opinion. I actually enjoy reading documents on a piece of paper as opposed to digitally. When I want to try a new recipe, I print it out to follow it so I don't have to continually swipe my mobile device to keep up with the steps. I store all my favorite recipes in sheet protectors in a binder. I also like to print out coloring pages or activity sheets for my kids. There are a ton of options online or we create our own!

Wget is a free utility to download files from the web. It gets data from the Internet and saves it to a file or displays it in your terminal. This is literally also what web browsers do, such as Firefox or Chromium, except by default, they render the information in a graphical window and usually require a user to be actively controlling them. The wget utility is designed to be non-interactive, meaning you can script or schedule wget to download files whether you're at your computer or not.

With a growing number of cloud-native applications going to production through Kubernetes adoption, security is an important checkpoint that you must consider early in the process. When designing a cloud-native application, it is very important to embed a security strategy up front. Failure to do so leads to lingering security issues that can cause project delays and ultimately cost you unnecessary stress and money.

Networked computers are so common these days that most of us take it for granted that a computer on one side of a room can contact one on the other side of the room, much less the other side of the world. When it works as designed, networking is what makes the Internet, the cloud, file shares, media streaming, remote administration, printing, and much more possible. When something goes wrong, it can sometimes be challenging to diagnose. One of the most fundamental diagnostic tools for networked connectivity is the ping command.

If Linux is your primary working environment, then you might be familiar with the Executable and Linkable Format (ELF), the main file format used for executables, libraries, core-dumps, and more, on Linux.

I got introduced to the markdown format a few years ago when I began to explore Jupyter Notebooks. Many of the other writers at Opensource.com knew markdown, but it was a skill that was unfamiliar to me.

Markdown is a standard way of writing text, in which you use minimal notation to markup how you want the text styled. For instance, instead of clicking a button to make a word bold, you surround the word with two asterisks (**word**). This has two effects:

One of the best ways to keep your data secure is by only writing data to an encrypted hard drive. On a standard drive, it's possible to view data just by mounting the drive as if it were a thumb drive, and it's even possible to display and recover even deleted data with tools like Scalpel and Testdisk.

In my programming work, I often need to know the memory used by web applications. A rough estimate is usually enough before getting down to details and browser profiling tools.

I play a lot of tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), in terms of both frequency and variety. Generally, I prefer playing RPGs in person with friends, but over the past two years, I've been playing online.

At first, I wasn't sure how to run a long-term game online. I knew there were a lot of tools out there to make it possible, but none of them interested me until I discovered the world of open source online tabletop gaming. With a small collection of open source applications, I've been able to run all my games exclusively on open source.

Open source arrived in the pen-and-paper RPG industry back at the turn of the century, when Wizards of the Coast, publisher of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, developed the Open Game License (OGL). Many publishers have since adopted the OGL themselves or use similar licenses, such as Creative Commons.

It's that time of year again for gamers everywhere.

Both startups and more established firms are increasingly turning to content marketing as a way of reaching prospective customers.

However, corporate marketers often consider the open source software (OSS) community a challenge to reach. This article features ways your technology and content marketing teams can work together to target and reach the community around an OSS project your organization supports.

Recently I was invited to present on free and open resources that are available on the web. This presentation was part of a local effort to keep our community working—sponsored by the Foster Center at St. Bonaventure University near my home. Some of the resources I shared were not open source and merely cost $0, but many of the tools were also open source.