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“I’m sorry there kiddo. You can’t watch a lot of videos or use your school’s website because they depend on Flash. I’m also sorry that you can’t play on miniclip.com or use some of your apps. Java doesn’t work on your computer. But hey…ain’t using Linux great anyway? Make sure to tell all your friends how great Linux is.”

Indeed, all of the OEMs showed up for the Christmas shopping rush will bells on, with Asus and HP offering Windows laptops for $199, about the same as a Chromebook. Which begs the question: If Microsoft can’t give Windows away for free on the laptop, how long will it be able to continue selling it on the desktop?

Ken Starks went under the surgical knife this week, as fellow FOSS Forcer Christine Hall reported yesterday. The short version of this story is that Ken’s surgery was successful — as successful as having your larynx and lymph nodes removed can be — and he is resting well in the intensive care unit.

As many of you know, my friend and irrepressible FOSS Force writer Ken Starks has been waiting for a date with his surgeon for the last month or so. He had his surgery today and so far the news is good. I just received the good news from Ken’s friend Ed Matthews, who also posted the contents of the email he sent me in the comments section of Ken’s latest article on FOSS Force.

PayPal was supposed to have made the change on December 3, the date it announced as the target for no longer accepting secure connections from sites using SSL v3 instead of TLS. As I manage a Zen Cart site which uses PayPal’s express checkout as it’s only payment option, I checked with the server’s technical support staff to make sure we were covered. Yup. We got you set up with that, they said. I was good to go.

William Shatner Linux has a propensity for staccato performance across the board on all hardware, and on older hardware it tries to kiss female aliens. If you’re not in that select demographic of users, though, you should be OK.

The computer was a three-year-old Dell running Windows 7 Home Premium. Jack told me it had gotten so slow that he had to do something to fix it. A couple of days later came a late-night commercial touting “WinCleaner” as the key to opening the door of renewed computer speed. It was offered as a thumb drive, preloaded with the very same tools that can be found in CCleaner and other Windows malady cure-alls that have been around for years, but without the flashy GUI inside an even more flashy flash drive.

Open source projects are best as a team effort. Never be afraid to ask for help. Even though I did the bulk of the development work for a long time with Bodhi, I had other people helping with art work, documentation, website and providing support. Even small projects should not be a one man team.

The website Linux Advocates is no more. The site, which focused on a variety of Linux issues, went offline on January 7th with little fanfare and no advance notice. The site had been being published for two years, having gone live in early 2013.

The team organizing the Southern California Linux Expo’s 13th edition, more commonly known as SCALE 13x, has begun to ramp up preparations for the show. This year, SCALE 13x adds a day to become a four-day event running from Thursday, February 19 through Sunday, February 22 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. The speakers have been chosen and the SCALE Team is in the process of sending out acceptances and rejections — so if you’ve heard you’re in, congratulations. If you haven’t heard either way, you will soon.

A more problematic issue has to do the the openness, or lack thereof, of the music codec being used. Although Pono utilizes the Free Lossless Audio Codec or FLAC, which is licensed under the GPL and BSD licenses, evolver.fm reported last August that the files won’t play with full fidelity on anything but a Pono device.

For the last few days, I’ve tried to replace the ZTE firmware and Firefox OS, and ran into signature errors on both counts. Both GPG and Java signature solutions gleaned from various sources seem to have both escaped or abandoned me, and now the “reset” has resulted in the blue Firefox OS screen immediately followed by the majestic fox with the flaming tail. And that’s it.

There is no doubt that we live in a throwaway society. We see it most every recycle day throughout our streets and neighborhoods. Flat screen monitors, computers…even appliances that cost hundreds of dollars. Standing stoically, awaiting their fate to be crushed and sold for scrap.

Sometimes it’s time to just coast for a while. Otherwise a project runs the risk of introducing unnecessary bloat or fixing what isn’t broken, thereby causing unnecessary problems for users — as has happened with GNOME, and before that (and to a lesser degree), KDE.

It seems that Google hasn’t always been able to gain access to infrastructure such as utility poles, ducts, conduits and rights of way in their attempt to bring speed-of-light Internet access to the U.S. one city at a time. The company claims that reclassifying service providers as common carriers would open the door and give it access.

“When you order a computer with Dell Mint, not only are you getting a superior operating system which has been specifically matched for peak performance on all quality Dell computers, you’ll receive added value as well. Unlike our Windows products, all Dell Mint computers come with all of the software you’re likely to need at no extra cost. And in case you need software that’s not installed, each Dell Mint computer can connect to the free Dell Software Center so you can download and install additional software, completely free of charge. As an added bonus, each and every Dell Mint computer comes with free telephone technical support for 30 days for all the software installed.”

Three times this month, Xfce came up in conversation — online, of course, and in the realm of social media and in forum discussions — and the context in which each conversation came up had the desktop on the brink of closure, with one unwitting person saying that Xfce was dead.

Covering FOSS and Linux isn’t nearly as exciting as it was a decade or so ago — but that’s a good thing. Back then, we were at war with nearly every proprietary software vendor on the planet and faced threats from all directions, including up and down. To be sure, we didn’t start the wars we were fighting, as PROFAL (the People’s Republic of FOSS and Linux) only wished for peaceful coexistence.

Most of us have learned to “play along to get along” and things are good for us. But that changed with the first usable iterations of the Internet…the first BBS if you were around for that era. It was then that we began operating under the assumption that we were anonymous online. That we could say or do anything and get away with it.

On a personal note, some of you know that I inherited an old PowerBook G4 — yep, PowerPC 32-bit — now with limited options regarding what distro to put on it. It wasn’t like that when I started back in ’06 with Debian on an iMac, but I digress. I tried what few options are left on the PowerPC side, from both Linux and BSD, and the winner — drumroll, please — is Xubuntu.