So, I realized I hadn’t really written anything here in nearly two years. Ouch.
What’s new? In quickfire:
– GNU FM and GNU social are still going.
– Rob, Liam and I formed our company legally finally. We’re [Foo Communications, LLC](http://foocorp.net/).
– Still in Boston, still at the FSF. Both still good.
– Mark, Vikki and I have committed to recording a new [furny](http://furny.co.uk) album in 2012. Scary.
– I’m not play Warhammer much, I’m playing lots of [Kings of War](http://www.manticgames.com/) and trying to get into some Blood Bowl.
– I have an inordinate amount of plastic dwarfs in my office. Close to a 1000 of them.
Rob and I have committed to various new blog posts at the [FCL blog](http://foocorp.net/blog/), the [Foo Projects blog](http://foocorp.org/blog/), and even [GNU FM has its own blog](http://foocorp.org/projects/fm/blog/) now.
I’m off to make something which will put all my blog posts in one place.

Recorded in free software and hosted by Libre.fm core developer, Mike Sheldon, episode 1 of the Libre.fm podcast is now available.

Microsoft are quickly claiming the mantle of patent troll. Yesterday they attacked free software with claims against the TomTom and its utilization of the kernel Linux. With widespread support for GNU/Linux becoming a reality, are these patent claims an attempt to chill adoption? If so, then we need to make sure everyone knows about Bilski.
Please digg this story to help get the word out.

This morning I got this overly hostile email from the Open Rights Group.

Subject: Why have you stopped donating to Open Rights Group?
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:02:21 -0500
From: Jim Killock, Open Rights Group
Reply-To: Jim Killock, Open Rights Group
To: Matt

Looking forward to next week’s “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Can now be purchased from the FooCorp download store in either MP3 or Ogg Vorbis.

yum shell
remove fedora-logos
install generic-logos
run

Nice. Thanks to _drj2 on irc for this one.

So, tonight I finally got around to signing up with Amazon.com — I had been putting it off for a while. The experience is somewhat different to the UK version, in so much that Amazon really delivers on a whole lot more promise than it does in the UK.
Point 1 — Repeat orders
Now I don’t have to worry about my cat getting fed — Amazon are going to ship a 24-pack of catfood to my house every 30 days for the rest of time. Kitty will be happy. Also ordered some healthy snack bars, some bathroom products and some vitamin suppliments on the same setup. Pick 1, 2, 3 or 6 month delivery windows for the products and boom.
Point 2 — Extra options
I get a little sick of seeing all the bullshit for Kindle on Amazon.com — there really ought to be a way to say “No, I really don’t want a DRM-laden swindle” and never have to see the vague and persistent pleading that comes from all their Kindle nonsense. But amongst all that crap, I did pick up on a way to get my book from Amazon in a hardback form at a price lower than the paperback.
Point 3 — Speak to a real person
I had a couple of problems with signing up for my trial of Amazon Prime — first it refused to let me sign up at all, and then it insisted I had signed up before and refused to give me a trial at
all. So, I let Amazon know and now there’s a real person, who called me, and is dealing with my problem. At midnight.
Why am I up at midnight buying things on Amazon? Well, I have a nasty cold, so I’m away from work and taking a variety of cold medicines which leave me sleeping weird hours. My favourite so far is the ‘CVS Pharmacy brand Cold and Flu remedy’, which as clearly marked on the box is ‘Recommended by the CVS Pharmacy’ — not sure what to make of that. Either they’re being overly sincere, or their customers are usually fooled by any vague recommendation. Made a note in my to-do list to contact CVS and see if they’ll put my face on the box instead.

I turned my laptop on earlier to hear two beeps, followed by the insightful message ‘Fan error’, before my machine quickly shut off.
Thankful of my most recent backup, I safely stored the SD card I backed up onto in an Altoids tin in my desk and wrote ‘Backup’ on the lid with a Sharpie. No kidding.
I scrambled for my cellphone, grabbed my wife’s laptop and found the support number for Lenovo, hoping someone out there would take pity on me and quickly sell me a new fan. After less than a minute on hold, and with no annoying menus to jump through save for pressing 1 to confirm I really did have a laptop and wasn’t calling to tell them my AS/400 was on fire, I got through to a real-life-person, who helped me locate the serial number in my BIOS, took my name, address and phone number and offered me the option of going to a Lenovo service center, or having them collect my laptop for repair. I didn’t really want either — I didn’t want some Windows dude fiddling with my machine and I certainly didn’t want to send it away — knowing that we have a hardworking sysadmin at work who must have taken apart dozens of ThinkPads during his time there, and another who used to work for IBM and has the very same ThinkPad that I do, I asked the guy if they would be able to send me the fan instead… “Sure!” he said, and went off to check out how they’d do that… he came back a few moments
later with “Actually, that laptop looks like it has two fans… We’ll send both of them to you, just send us your broken one and the unused one back when you’re done…” — he even set up and extended my warranty for me, enquired when I’d moved to the US and asked how I was enjoying it — all this from a serial number!
So yeah. Lenovo. Wow. Shame they still don’t sell a laptop running GNU/Linux — it looks like they sold one with SuSE for a while, but that appears to have gone away too. Still, there are people like Los Alamos Computers who will sell you one with gNewSense preinstalled these days, so if I do ever get around to replacing this one, I know what I’ll be getting.

So Bush went, and Obama came in — even taking time to check on Bush before he left. But what was disappointing to me was the sheer lack of ways to watch the thing with free software.
The official site used Microsoft Silverlight, and surprisingly, YouTube didn’t do a live feed. There were a couple of options floating around:
* Install Moonlight (bleh!) — okay, so Moonlight is free software, but before you rush off and install it, know that you’ll have to click through on a Microsoft EULA to actually do anything useful with it, like watch a president take office. Silly, silly, silly.
* WBUR’s Live Ogg Vorbis stream — This one is reasonable. It’s just not as much fun to listen to it. You need to *see* this kind of thing, really.
* BBC World Service — This one, works with Totem. Some old Real Media or Windows Media format I’m sure, but old enough to have support in free software at least. Patent encumbered and less than ideal.
Of course, the BBC World Service is distributed in the US by Public Radio International — and they supply content to WBUR. So, is there a way they could supply their TV to a local PBS affliate that would be willing to stream Theora? I think it’s worth fighting for.