Looking out for the little-guy in a world over-run by Big Software

Steve Mann

When I made the Virtual/All Reality desk for my office, I went to several responsible eco-friendly foresters, and acquired a responsibly grown and cut redwood tree, which I sent to a sawmill to have it cut into the rough shape I wanted.

A colleague from Apple (Alex, who designed the circuit board for the iPhone 6) and I finished it by hand in my garage in Silicon Valley, California. We sanded it down in the traditional way, by hand, without using any power tools. We hand-finished it with Danish oil. Finally, we put together the augmented reality wave machine, by hand, in my garage [link] and [Instructable].

I built this website in the same way, by hand, without using any software, i.e. without using any computer programs that are articles or goods of commerce. Everything used in the production of this website is free and open source, in keeping with the ideals of open science. The text was all created using vi on in the Gnu Linux environment. The images were captured and processed using computer programs that I wrote myself (and therefore have the source code for). The illustrations were done in Inkscape, which is also free and open source and runs on a wide variety of systems.