Ardour provides a good model for profiting off of FOSS
Ardour is a great DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) that is cross-platform and Free (and Open Source) Software (FOSS). However, it is a good case study for how Free (as in libre) software isn’t necessarily free (gratis) software. Upon clicking the “Download” link on Ardour’s homepage, the user will see...
Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors by Richard M. Stallman (2002)
Originally written in 2002, this essay is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard, M. Stallman 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2004), ISBN 1-882114-99-X, www.gnupress.org. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. Something strange and...
Why Software Should Not Have Owners — by Richard M. Stallman (1994)
Originally written in 1994, this essay is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard, M. Stallman 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2004), ISBN 1-882114-99-X, www.gnupress.org Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved. Digital information technology...
Converting .pages to .odt (with a little help from AI)
The issue The co-advisor for my MA thesis passed away last year and his widow allowed me to copy some unfinished drafts and documents from his computer for posterity. He was an avid Mac user and every document I ever received from him was a .docx file. So, to...
Thanks to Stack Exchange, I have my PDF solution
A helpful user on Stack Exchange solved the problem from my previous post for me by creating a small bash script, which reads values from a CSV file and then replaces the matching values in the PDF with the new ones. Check it out: This script takes an input...
Fixing PDF bookmark locations
It’s been a while since I’ve attempted to code anything. After hours of trying to figure it out, I finally found a somewhat-working solution. Unfortunately, it’s not a one-stop-shop solution. Let me explain. The issue So, a very efficient way to try to write things is using Pandoc, which...
So long, Ubuntu 20.04. Hello, 18.04
Well, I had to finally throw in the towel. The unfortunate problem of the black screen after booting didn’t seem to go away. In fact, it seemed to be a fluke of the graphics card “co-operating,” when it did work. Otherwise, I lost all hardware acceleration and could only...
Removing watermarks from PDFs with pdftk!
The issue at hand Many PDFs that I download have watermarks on them. The watermarks being there isn’t always bothersome, but many of them either obstruct important text or they end up making me use more ink when I print. So, through my tinkering, I found a way to...