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.

I have an Ogg Player now. Finally. The one I plumped for is the Samsung U3 -- a 2gb unit about the size of a packet of gum. My wife and I both got one in fact -- $40 a pop from Fry's electronics. (No, not that Fry)

It works reasonably well with GNU/Linux -- uses a silly MTP protocol instead of regular USB Mass Storage (UMS) -- basically turning it into a regular USB drive. Apparently there is a way to flash it with some older firmware that switches it over to UMS, but you need a Windows XP machine to actually do the flashing...

Rob and David have recently purchased Sansa Fuse players, though Rob's purchase was largely spurred on by getting the same Samsung as him... They look good, but they're a little pricey and the wrong form factor for me. I really want something like a stick of gum. I don't want to look at it, though real buttons instead of the U3's touch sensitive things would be nice. That said, the U3 does have a funky OLED display, and holds an lot of charge. It even has a radio, but I've found there's not much to listen to on the radio that isn't dreadful, or better listened to as a podcast.

If you ever want to set off a few alarm bells in a cellphone store, try and buy multiple SIM cards. With cash. Without ID. With an accent.

My intentions were harmless of course -- picking up 3 pay-as-you-go SIM cards for 3 users of the OpenMoko FreeRunner, myself included. After a short explanation along the lines of "journalist" and "reviewing cellphones" and "isn't the G1 fantastic?", I managed to get away with showing a piece of plastic with a name on it and no photo ID.

Of course, the G1 sadly, doesn't look fantastic... I believe you can't even change the kernel on it unless you buy the developer edition. Lame. I also heard that 'Debian' on the G1 is little more than a chroot and a series of sleep commands. Bless.

Really considering getting a Frogpad now. Especially since I hurt my wrist by falling in some poorly maintained snow this week, and then caught a cold from a colleague during the inauguration. Bah.

• Salt and Vinegar Crisps
• Lucozade
• NyQuil (though, I already knew about this one)

Exploring Freedom is now OpenID enabled™ -- please use this post for all and any OpenID related testing. If you don't already have an OpenID, you can get one or run your own server very easily.

First up is Vala -- using C#-style syntax. With a self-hosting compiler that translates Vala source code into C source and header files, Vala uses the GObject type system to create classes and interfaces declared in the Vala source code.

Secondly, is Shuttleworth's suggestion that JavaScript be used to create desktop applications.

Both of these are useful measures against C#, and potentially good ways of doing things JavaScript is the best dynamic scripting language, with a sweet spot between familiar syntax and power, and Vala's idea of translation to C worked well for the old d2c Dylan compiler.

So, Exploring Freedom is back again for 2009. Rob and I are still working hard on the book, but we want to make it extraordinary, so keeping up the activity on this blog has been hard. Most of the articles for the first volume of the book is now in the stage of being finally edited and I hope the book will be out in the next few months, but we're doing this in our spare time.

So, what's new? Well, since we last wrote, Apple have dropped DRM, we both got hardware Ogg players and Matt's been playing with the OpenMoko a fair bit.

The blog itself has moved, once again, to Wordpress, continuing the Movable Type vs Wordpress debate further. There are some annoying bugs in the Debian package of MT, and I've had some real problems upgrading it from tarballs for one of the FooCorp customers. This, coupled with Six Apart changing things again and MT feels a little neglected. That said, I am keeping a copy of the blog (in private) in MT, and we may continue to use it again someday.