- <title>Debian Edu interview: Angela Fuß</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Angela_Fu_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2012 21:30:00 +0100</pubDate>
- <description><p>Here is another interview with one of the people in the <a
-href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
-if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
-After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
-the people behind the German
-"<a href="http://wiki.it-zukunft-schule.de/">IT-Zukunft Schule</a>"
-project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
-welcome to Angela Fuß. :)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
-Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
-two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.
-
-<p>At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
-the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
-Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
-growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
-system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
-in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.</p>
-
-<p>In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
-nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
-that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
-working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
-Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
-relationship management and the communication processes in the
-project.</p>
-
-<p>Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
-and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
-and a yoga teacher.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I fell in love with Mike ;-).</p>
-
-<p>Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
-Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
-founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
-their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
-newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
-several points where the communication with the schools head or the
-teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
-one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
-between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
-parents.</p>
-
-<p>Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
-started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
-schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
-Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
-networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
-Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
-Germany.</p>
-
-<p>For information about our school project you can read
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">the
-interview with Mike Gabriel</a>.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
-answer comes rather from a social point of view.</p>
-
-<p>The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
-and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
-background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
-and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
-something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
-;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
-advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
-works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
-teachers, parents...</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
-Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
-
-<p>What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
-the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
-marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
-schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
-I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
-
-<p>Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
-do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
-democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
-and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
-Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
-level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
-different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
-on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
-LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
-my N900 running with Maemo.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
-Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
-schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
-that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
-strategy has three crucial pillars:</p>
-
-<ul>
-
-<li>We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
-concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
-kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.</li>
-
-<li>Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
-are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
-beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
-they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
-they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
-needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
-we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.</li>
-
-<li>Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
-co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
-contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
-offer to become more and more independent from us.</li>
-
-</ul>
+ <title>Sleep until morning - home automation for the kids</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Sleep_until_morning___home_automation_for_the_kids.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:50:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p><img align="left" style="margin-right:25px;" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2013-02-10-morning-light.jpeg"></p>
+
+<p>With kids in the house, one challenge is getting them to sleep
+during the night and wake up when it is morning. I mean, when I
+believe it is morning, and not two hours earlier. In our household we
+have decided that 07:00 is the turning point, but getting the kids to
+sleep until 07:00 is a small challenge every day. They have adapted
+quite well, and rarely wake up at 05:00 any more, but some times wake
+up at times like 05:50, 06:15, 06:30 or 06:45, and it is hard to put
+the awake one to bed again without disturbing and waking the rest.
+And I understand perfectly well that they fail to sleep until 07:00
+some times, as there is no way for them to know if it is before or
+after the magic moment without coming and asking us parents.</p>
+
+<p>But yesterday I came up with a method to solve this problem. It
+involve home automation. A few years ago I bought a
+<a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick">Tellstick</a> and RF
+switches at the local <a href="http://www.clasohlson.com/">Clas
+Ohlson</a> shop, allowing me to control lights and other electrical
+gadgets using my Linux server. When I moved from the old flat to a
+small house, I put away all this equipment as most of the lighting in
+the house was not using wall sockets and thus not easy to connect to
+the gadgets I had. But recently I bought a
+<a href="http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick_net">Tellstick
+Net</a> to be able to read sensor input as well as control power
+sockets. I want to control ovens in the basement to avoid the pipes
+to freeze, and monitor the humidity to detect flooding. The default
+setup for Tellstick Net is to be controlled by the vendor web service,
+which to me is a security problem, but it is also possible to build
+ones own
+<a href="http://developer.telldus.com/blog/2012/03/02/help-us-develop-local-access-using-tellstick-net-build-your-own-firmware">firmware
+with local access</A> instead of being controlled by a Swedish
+company, thanks to the release of the GPL licensed firmware source
+code. I plan to get that running before I let it control anything
+important. But while working on this, one idea to make it easier for
+the kids came to me yesterday. We can set up a night light controlled
+by the computer, and turn it automatically on at 07:00. The kids can
+then check the light in the morning to know if they are supposed to
+get up or not. They joined me in setting everything up, and I
+repeated the concept several times before bed times to make sure they
+remembered to check the light before getting up in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>We tested it this morning, and all the kids stayed in bed until
+after 07:00, and every one of them commented on the fact that the
+"morning light" was turned on and signalled that the morning had
+arrived. So this look like a success, and I am excited to see how
+this develops the next few days. :) I really hope this can allow us
+all to sleep a bit longer in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>A nice advantage of this setup is that we can remote control when
+to tell the kids to get up. We do not have to wait until 07:00, and
+can also delay it if we want to.</p>