It all kicks off today! You’ll be relieved to hear that Mr. Bean was unavailable for this particular opening ceremony:

Day 1: Engelbeckenholunderblütensekt

As mentioned in the video, you can download the recipe and branding elements here:

Engelbecken recipe.odt

The font used in the label is the open source Chunk, from The League of Moveable Type.

Now, this project format is hardly ideal – for example, the label is a non-editable PNG, and the .odt with the recipe does not include previous revisions. I’ll be looking into how to better document my projects over the next few weeks. This is also one of the many issues with my current website setup – I’m starting a ‘bug list’ of areas to work on over the year and the project website (and the bug list itself) are right at the top. Vimeo is also a temporary video hosting solution until I get a better website up & running. Anyone have much experience with GNU MediaGoblin, or Kaltura.org?

While some aspects of my project might take a few weeks to organise a solution for (the open source cellphone is hopefully coming soon, but it’s not cheap…) – there are things I can change on day 1. Software is of course the obvious one, so over the course of the day I’m going to be installing Linux and open source software. I’ve already written the suicide note for my personal facebook page, (come join me on diaspora!) and I’m currently composing an inventory of products and services I use.

In other news, the IndieGoGo campaign is still on for another week – tell your friends! Here’s Judith’s latest drawing for the calendar:

One of the core ideas behind the calendar is presenting those who have inspired others to get involved in open source, so Yochai Benkler is an important one for me personally. I read his marvelous book The Wealth of Networks 3 or 4 years ago, and it was my first real in-depth introduction to online collaboration, to open source, and peer production, and it’s something I would recommend to everyone. You can buy the paperback, or, because it’s licensed under a Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike license, you can download various electronic versions for free. If you want to read the book on your proprietary Kindle with its proprietary formats, I won’t judge you. Here’s how to convert ePub files to MOBI files.

OK, time to partition my hard drive! First step, work out what ‘partition a hard drive’ means.