Supporting Wikimedia Foundation

I donated $20 to support wikipedia.

Supporting FSFE

I joined the Free Software Foundation Europe as a supporter (60 EUR annual payment).

Supporting GNU Toolchain

GNU toolchain, which includes a great C/C++ compiler among many other things, is central to many free software projects. They are now accepting donations. I donated around 7 mBTC (milli-Bitcoin, as of 2017-09-11, 1 mBTC = ~ £5).

This was the first thing I've ever done with Bitcoin, and it was a bit of a faff. Buying bitcoin with GBP is not easy, and involves all manner of authentication steps, including mobile phone verification - so...much harder than getting, say, Euros or US Dollars.

Supporting TOR

Tor is a web browser and project standing against tracking, surveillance, and censorship. At the moment, Mozilla is matching all donations - I donated $75 (and got a free t-shirt).

https://donate.torproject.org/pdr

Installing PsychoPy 1.85.3 on Ubuntu 17.04

This is a bit fiddly. The following worked for me:

N.B. Do not try to do just Stage 2. This will not work and may break stuff.
Stage 1
Install psychopy from the neurodebian repository (see PsychoPy website), but ensure you use --install-suggests i.e.

sudo apt-get install --install-suggests psychopy

You also should install flac if you don't have it

sudo apt-get install flac

This should give you a working version 1.83.

Stage 2

However, some scripts written in the current version 1.85.3, won't work, so you now need to update to the latest version. You can do this using  pip install (as covered on the PsychoPy website). I installed the following components listed on the psychopy website, which is mainly the core bits (I did not try to install button box support etc.):

pip install numpy scipy matplotlib pandas pyopengl pyglet pillow moviepy lxml openpyxl configobj psychopy

pip install xlrd

pip install psychopy_ext

pip install python-bidi

pip install cffi pysounddevice pysoundfile

In addition I also had to install the following things not mentioned on the PsychoPy website:

pip install json_tricks

Paying for free stuff through Patreon

My monthly Patreon payments just went out - Bryan Lunduke ($2) - Linux journalist and activist - and Zoe Blade ($2) - just super-cool electronic music artist.

Making the W3C more open

The W3C is the standards body for the world-wide web. Recently, they approved a standard for DRM, an action which seemed to me to be fundamentally against the open principles on which the web was formed. Bryan Lunduke
 decided to join the W3C to try an shake things up a bit there - the cost of membership is $2500. So I donated £20 to help out a little bit (during his 24-hour youtube telethon). Go for it, Bryan!

Public money, public code

Publicly-funded science is Open, publicly-funded code should be, too.
https://publiccode.eu/#action

€20 donation to FSFE

Paying for Free things

Free Software and Creative Commons materials are free as in freedom, not free as in beer. They take real time of real people to develop and maintain, and this requires money. Where does it come from? In my view, we should routinely pay people to produce and maintain Free and Open content. So, I'm pledging (mainly to myself) to spend 1% of my gross income on such projects (about £50/month if you're interested). And I'm going to use this blog to record my expenditure. So, here's the first one:

$50 USD to support the Center for Open Science.

Donate here: https://www.crowdrise.com/centerforopenscience