D Ruth Bavousett

See the following -

7 Cool Little Open Source Projects That Stood Out in 2016

In the early days of the open source movement, a lot of the attention was on operating systems, and later on large content management systems. These days, containers are mentioned regularly even in mainstream news outlets. The big tech stories are great, but they miss the other great activity in the niches of the open source space. I've rounded up seven interesting lesser-known projects from the past year. You can see more articles about projects like this in my Nooks and Crannies column...

Build Your Own Open Source Artificial Pancreas System to Regulate Insulin Delivery

In her Day 2 OSCON keynote, Dana set out reminding us that Type I diabetes, suffered by millions of people around the world, is incredibly complicated to manage...The solution is an artificial pancreas, which acts to close that loop by monitoring and adjusting insulin levels, just as the normal pancreas does. But those devices are not yet available on the commercial market, and won't be for some years yet. Enter the OpenAPS project (Open Artificial Pancreas System); find it here on GitHub. "OpenAPS is a simplified Artificial Pancreas System (APS) designed to automatically adjust an insulin pump's basal insulin delivery to keep blood glucose (BG) in a safe range overnight and between meals"..

Got the Writing Bug? An Introduction to Bibisco

A couple of years ago, when I started tinkering with long-form fiction writing, I attended some events for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Among the attendees there was a lot of talk of using Scrivener as a tool for organizing your writing, and as a place to keep your details. I looked into it, but it was kind of pricey—and the license was such that to use it on my Windows PC and my MacBook, I'd need to buy it twice, which did not appeal to me at all. So I muddled along for a year or so, starting my novel with a pair of LibreOffice Writer documents: one for the novel, and one for my notes on people, places and things, along with some ASCII sketches and a folder full of pictures and scans of drawings I'd made...

Prepare to Be Hacked: Information Security for Small Organizations

Information security is challenging, and can be breathtakingly expensive in money and staff energy. Smaller organizations may not have the money or staffing expertise to do the job right, even when the need is the greatest. At OSCON 2016, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) gave a really interesting talk on how her small nonprofit has done some creative thinking about security, and how that influences the deployment and operation of their application. Callisto is an online reporting system designed to provide a more empowering, transparent, and confidential reporting system for college sexual assault survivors...

Writing an Academic Paper? Try Fidus Writer

The Fidus Writer online editor is especially for academics who need to write papers in collaboration with other authors, and it includes special tools for managing citations, formulas, and bibliographies. If you're writing an academic paper by yourself, you have a lot of choices for tools to edit your document. Some of them even take care of making your footnotes and bibliographies come out in the right format. But writing collaboratively is harder, for lots of reasons. You could use Google Docs, ownCloud, or even Dropbox to share the document, but then you lose useful citation-management tools...