Presto’s Ramblings

On my Linux system, I have several screensavers that use a program called Fortune that supplies short quotes to be displayed on the screen by the screensaver program. The quotes provided cover many subjects, but I’d like to create a database for the program that contains explicitly pro-freedom quotes. To that end, I’d [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve switched the keyboard layout back to QWERTY. The Dvorak experiment is over for now. As expected, my typing speed slowed to a crawl after the change, but I have been getting somewhat faster over the past few days. The problem is that I have too many irons in the fire, too [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve been hearing for years about the advantages of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout. Some of my favorite writers and many programmers use it, so I thought that I’d give it a shot. My keyboard is an IBM Model M with easily removable keycaps, so changing over the keyboard was very simple. [...]

[Read more →]

For those of you anarchists thinking about reasons to convert to Linux, here’s another one for you. While poking around the repositories* that come with Ubuntu, I discovered that there’s a package called ‘anarchism’ that installs a local copy of the Anarchist FAQ on your computer. I understand that it is also in the Debian [...]

[Read more →]

Saturday is Software Freedom Day. I was going to write a long essay in honor of the day, but I ran out of time so here are links to the classic essays on the subject:

Eben Moglen: Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright
Roderick T Long: The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
Richard [...]

[Read more →]

A long time ago, I promised to post my results in switching to Linux. I’ve recently completed the switch (mostly) and wanted to tell you how it went. So here goes.
Over the last 5 years or so, I have flirted with Linux since I wanted to get away from Windows. I tried [...]

[Read more →]