On Saturday the 21st of March, I climbed on board a passenger aircraft in order to eventually arrive in Boston that same day. It had one stop, where I had to change flights, but with 44 minutes between boardings, I was fine.
Except the connecting flight was four terminals away and I had to catch the local robo train to get to there. I had no idea where to catch it or when to get off of it. Thankfully, I was still in Texas and I spoke the dialect.
Oh wait…no I didn’t.
I didn’t speak at all. I no longer have a larynx. Try flying one third of the way across the United States without having the ability to speak…
In all, it wasn’t all that traumatic. Not for me anyway. But there were some interesting observations I made while on my trek.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue





Actually, of course, it’s not about winners and losers. It’s about what you like. It’s about preferences. After all, unless you’re a diehard command line person, the desktop is how you interact with your computer.

After being a two day event for its first two years, this year the event, which is staged by the Columbia, South Carolina based nonprofit IT-oLogy, will expand to take place over a three day period. In addition, the event is moving from midweek to the beginning of the week, and is scheduled to begin on Sunday, October 18th and run through Tuesday, October 20th.

One of the commenters was thoughtful enough to even include a bash script that made working with the text to speech application Festival much easier. I’m putting the script here for anyone that wants to use it. It works great and I was able to make it work easily.