SONY’s new hand-held console is riddled with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Both hardware and software are built to control what consumers can do, requiring large and frequent payments to SONY in order to experience the features the PS Vita advertises. As the SONY marketing machine focuses its powers on children and young adults in their Read more »
So, I got hit by a car on Monday while cycling home. It was dark and raining, and I was in the cycle lane about to go straight over a junction when a car turned left into my lane and into me. I went over the handle bars, possibly over the bonnet, and landed on Read more »
Last week I travelled from Liverpool to Berlin for three days to step up preparations for Document Freedom Day 2012. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon and went straight to the FSFE offices. Over the next two days I had meetings with other Document Freedom Day organisers, added a new web page, two new features, and Read more »
Sent to the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA)in support of a funding application made by MadLab Manchester Hackerspace. Dear AGMA, I am writing in support MadLab in their request for AGMA funding. I have been running Free Software Foundation Europe events at MadLab since January2011, and have made use of their facilities on both Read more »
This French article is reproduced from Framablog[2], and is a translation of my article “Will teaching children basic programming skills have a political impact?“. Apprendre les rudiments de la programmation aux enfants aura-t-il un impact politique ? La BBC m’a envoyé un courrier électronique la semaine dernière pour me demander mon avis sur la rumeur actuelle Read more »
At FOSDEM, FSFE’s page about how to free Android devices was officially launched by Torsten Grote, leaflets were handed out, and over the course of the weekend news of this hit hackernews.ws, causing a ‘slashdot’ effect resulting in 12,00+ hits. Great going in such a short time, and goes to show what an impact sharing Read more »
I was emailed by the BBC last week and asked to comment for the PM programme about suggestions that the British Government may add basic programming skills to the national curriculum, and whether this would have a political impact on society in terms of how we interact with technology. Here’s my answer. Question: Are we Read more »
Today I tried to install all the different Free Software VJ tools that I could find for GNU/Linux (VJ = video jockey, like DJing vith video). I was using my favorite distribution, Fedora, version 16, which I installed at the weekend on the laptop of a new friend of mine, Federica, who came to a Read more »
On 4th September Anna Morris, Yuwei Lin and I gave presentations of Free Software at the DIY Feminist Festival in Manchester. During the Open Street Map workshop a group of us went into the large park near the venue and added detail using pre-printed paper maps and mobile devices. Before the workshop the chapel at Read more »
UPDATE: I can now confirm that gImageReader also works well on Windows. Today I discovered gImageReader – really easy OCR software for GNU/Linux. It uses Tesseract as its back-end, and the interface is very intuitive, with straightforward instructions at the bottom of the window letting you know what to do next at each stage of Read more »