Giving Something Back

I am using a lot of awesome software, plugins and information which come free and open source because some people take time to build and maintain those. So, why not occasionally support the development with a small acknowledgment?

(Scroll down for further details on the respective project and why I donated.)

2016-01-01 / Tor Project / DONATE HERE

The Tor Project is important because it is one counter measure opposing corporate and governmental mass surveillance. It’s an irony of a special kind that it used to be created and funded effectively by the U.S. government. Most likely its original purpose was to allow for secret communication within *other* countries and to the U.S. But of course it is obvious why it is beneficial for the project to become independent in the long run.

2015-10-12 / SQL Fiddle / DONATE HERE (top-right)

Great tool for communication of and fiddling with SQL code. Thanks, Jake!

2015-08-25 / Adblock Notify / DONATE HERE

Yet another very useful WordPress extension. It’s for the purpose of detecting whether a visitor is blocking ads on your site and displaying a nice message upon that – a big thank you to Brice Capobianco!

2015-06-19 / abgeordnetenwatch.de / DONATE HERE

The field of data science and the concept of information freedom with regards to governmental work and data are obviously tightly related. It is important that there are organizations that work at making our governments more transparent. In Germany abgeordnetenwatch.de is a particularly active group doing great work and is, of course, as any non-profit organization, depending on donations.

2015-04-25 / Internet Archive / DONATE HERE

The purpose of the Internet Archive goes beyond the satisfaction of nostalgic urges. Also for the documentation and tracking of internet crimes and frauds this service is of indispensable importance.

2015-02-13 / GnuPG / DONATE HERE

“Calling GnuPG “email encryption software” really understates its importance. It’s also used in countless applications to encrypt data at rest, and GPG signatures are used to secure the distribution of software. For instance, GPG is an essential part of the package managers of Debian, Ubuntu, and RedHat.” [agwa@hackernews]

2014-12-28 / Mozilla Foundation / DONATE HERE

Monopoly is the natural enemy of freedom – be it within the realms of politics or technology. Mozilla Foundation is not just the organisation behind Firefox originator of JavaScript but also actively engaging in projects supporting the democratic and égalitaire character of the World Wide Web. I think it is a no-brainer to spare a dime or two for that cause.

2014-12-14 / QuickLaTeX / DONATE AT paypal.com to sales[at]advanpix.com

Thanks to QuickLaTex I no longer have to perform contortions for displaying formula on my web-site but can instead just include it directly via LaTeX. The donation process didn’t work through the paypal link which you find on QuickLaTeX settings page, but you can directly send money to sales[at]advanpix.com on PayPal.

2014-11-18 / Anti-spam / BUY PRO HERE / DONATE HERE

It is quite amazing how many spam comments even a comparatively small WordPress web-site like this attracts. The experience of maintaining such a site would certainly be significantly impaired without appropriate means to fight on this front. Anti-spam does from all I can say an awesome job! I would love to have something like an Anti-spam folder where all objected comments are kept – to check the judgements – but you have an option to receive a mail for every spam submission. Judging from that information Anti-spam seems to work like a charm and I trust its ruling – which is based by the way on hidden input fields which spam bots tend to fill in. I decided to simply buy the Pro edition instead of donating. Great job Vitaly!

2014-10-26 / TIPP10 / DONATE HERE

One of the best decisions I ever made – at least with regards to my professional life – was to leave “hunt and peck” behind and set out to learn touch typing. Thanks to TIPP10 this undertaking was a short and playful experience. TIPP10 provides all sorts of customizable typing games and statistics– I highly recommend it! Sadly I didn’t manage to get it working on Ubuntu 14.04 – neither through Software Center nor via manual installation. Anyway, thanks Tom for TIPP10!

2014-10-12 / Cachify / DONATE HERE

According to Cachify’s (of course) reliable page load speed stats the joyofdata.de/blog page load speed is improved by a magnitude of five!

 I suppose that is worth a thank you! Nonetheless it’s a slight damper that Cachify is not released on GitHub or its likes and the author for whatever reason doesn’t seem to see much purpose in providing English documentation (and stats) :-/ ? Anyway, good stuff!

2014-09-28 / Wikipedia / DONATE HERE

I guess there is not much to introduce about this project. Almost every text on joyofdata features at least one link to Wikipedia and of course its relevance to me goes far beyond this web-site anyway. It is often argued that Wikipedia is despite its slightly pushy requests for donations already quite wealthy to begin with and that most administrators don’t see much of the money, too – nonetheless, I say, shall they be wealthier – there might be some imperfections but that doesn’t change the fact that maintenance of servers and service are expensive. Just think about how much do you pay for comparable services and x amount of benefit?

2014-09-24 / Crayon Syntax Highlighter / DONATE HERE

Great WordPress plugin which I am using in most of my postings to make the code look more vivid. If I could ask for one improvement, it would be a possibility to toggle the toolbar. I usually deactivate it because I sometimes want to copy-paste my own code and then the toolbar overlays the first line as soon as my mouse enters the code box. And of course, R syntax highlighting can never be good enough :)

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