The guardian’s series on internet freedoms (or otherwise) continues today with an article by Richard Stallman on the kindle and ebook publishing. Stallman makes a point I’d missed in my own commentary on the kindle when he says: “Many other habits that readers are accustomed to are not allowed for ebooks. With the Amazon Kindle, …
Tag Archive: free software
Apr 16 2012
rockbox rocks
Some time ago my wife bought me a Sansa Sandisk Clip+ music player. When she asked me “what kind of MP3 player” I would like, I specifically specified the Clip+ because it could handle ogg vorbis encoded audio files. All my audio disks are encoded in this format. Picky I know, but there you go. …
Feb 20 2012
HMG goes cloudy
The UK Cabinet Office has announced the winning bidders to supply IT goods and services to UK Government under its new framework contract called “G-Cloud”. The winners are listed on a new website called the CloudStore which, supposedly, allows HMG procurement specialists to search for the goods and services they want to purchase. The new …
Jan 30 2012
tomorrow the world
A slightly breathless new post over at omgubuntu proudly boasts that the market share of Linux on the desktop jumped “from 0.96% in January 2011 to 1.41% by the year’s end.” (That could equally be be written as a close to 50% rise in Linux’ popularity). No doubt this will scare the pants off Steve …
Jan 22 2012
moxie’s proxy
Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher probably best known for his SSL proxy tool, likes google even less than I do. His googlesharing website says: “Google thrives where privacy does not. If you’re like most internet users, Google knows more about you than you might be comfortable with. Whether you were logged in to a Google …
Nov 09 2011
dis-unity
The reaction to Ubuntu’s move to Unity seems to be getting wider coverage. Over at LWN, Bruce Byfield blogged recently about the rift between the Ubuntu developers and its users. In particular he highlights Tal Liron’s entry to the Ubuntu launchpad bug wiki under bug number 882274. In that entry, entitled “Community engagement is broken” …
Nov 06 2011
fully minted
After exploring the alternatives to Ubuntu, I finally settled on Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) running Xfce as the desktop. I am now Ubuntu free and have a desktop that looks the way /I/ want it to look rather than the way some design nut wants it to look. I am also hopeful that the …
Oct 19 2011
time to ditch ubuntu?
I’ve used Ubuntu on my desktops/laptops and netbook for some time now. I think my first installation was 6.06 (the version 6.04 which was late by two months) and my desktops currently all run 10.04 LTS. I got over the minor irritation of the move of the window control buttons from the top right to …
Jul 02 2011
one reason I don’t use apple
Being a linux and FLOSS fan has its advantages, not least the fact that most, if not all of the software I would want to use (and indeed, /all/ of the software that I actually do use) is free as in beer as well as free as in speech. And given the much smaller target …
Sep 12 2010
a graphical web of trust
I recently stumbled upon sig2dot, a gpg/pgp keyring graph generator. In fact this seems to have been around for some time, but I’d never come across it before. It can be used to generate a graph of all of the signature relationships in a GPG/PGP keyring, and, like other visualisation tools, this graphical image producing …










