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LinuxFest Northwest — just south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) — is like Old Man River: It just keeps rolling along. Shows come and go, they grow and move, but the oldest community-run expo has put down some solid roots at Bellingham Technical College. The show has grown over the years, and so has the college. With recent improvements over the last few years, LFNW has grown to be a top-notch destination for speakers, exhibitors and attendees, with around 80 presentations being part and parcel of LFNW’s weekend fare.

David emailed me and stated that his interest was piqued by the fact that I wanted to explore the use of MaryTTS as part of our solution. While David’s talents were focused on Chorustext, his hardware project, he realized that his skills could greatly help our team effort and he asked to be brought on board.

Last week in Columbia, South Carolina, the developers’ conference POSSCON went through something of a reboot. Last year the conference was cancelled to allow It-oLogy, the organization behind the event, to put its energy behind launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. This year, with last year’s successful premiere of the Hotlanta event under its belt, IT-oLogy pulled-out all the stops to reestablish POSSCON.

I hate to be the look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth guy — to be honest, I hate raining on parades, even Ubuntu’s — but this news is not as great as it appears. For starters, buying one will set you back anywhere from $949 to $1,849.

Before I turn into Siskel and Ebert and give this computer two thumbs up, perhaps I’d better explain a few things first. On its own terms, the machine certainly would deserve the upturned thumbs, and maybe even a gold star on your refrigerator door. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s necessarily a drop in replacement for the latest top-of-the-line offering from HP or Lenovo — even though for many uses it could be.

We’re talking about thousands of dollars worth of stuff that the kids we serve can use. So why don’t they do the right thing and donate this merchandise to organizations such as ours instead of throwing it away? Because they don’t want to do the paperwork. It’s the way business is done. That’s fine and I understand. But that doesn’t make it suck any less.

Simple Ads Manager is a plugin that we’d evaluated about a year ago. It was deactivated, but we’d failed to remove it from the server after we’d determined that it wouldn’t meet our needs. Bad move. The cracker/hackers had found it.

We hear from Softpedia that Chromixium is just about ready for prime time. Well, that may be jumping the gun a little bit. What we really hear is that the distro has now gone from beta to release candidate, and that a honest-to-goodness 1.0 stable version is virtually just around the corner. Trouble is: we’re not sure yet just how far away we are from that corner. Shouldn’t be too far, however. The beta version was only released in February, so these developers aren’t wasting time.

Additionally, because I’m writing this article for FOSS Force, you can bet your bippy the article will deal with something the-house-that-Gates-built is doing that has an effect on Linux or open source. This means, again following best SEO practices, I’ll need to use “Linux” and “open source,” as well as the acronym “FOSS” with sufficient frequency to convince the search engines that this is an important part of the story — again, eight uses each for my 800 word article. And if I really want to make sure that the article finds its audience, I’ll need to include “Linux” and “FOSS” in the title too.

Mustering up all the Spanish my brain can recall from my youth in Miami –- most of which has been supplanted with the Japanese of my adult life and which makes for some curious Spanish/Japanese sentences when I try to speak Spanish now –- I decide to join the conversation about my laptop cover.

It wasn’t until almost a week into this TTS discovery voyage that I found Mary. Not a human named Mary; a text-to-speech engine named Mary. Mary is an open source application with the downside, for many, of being a Java app. That may be a downside for you, but for me, with my options being limited day by disappointing day. Mary just might be the girl of my dreams.

When I took it out of commission, I decided I was through with Windows for good. No more dual booting. No more keeping a Windows machine running all day just to process plastic. No more blue screens. No more rebooting for no apparent reason except that’s what Windows wants.

This could be something. This could be nothing. It remains to be seen. Regardless, it’s time to think seriously about buying hardware that is built for Linux, from manufacturers like ZaReason, if you want your choice of distros, or System76, if you want your choice of distro (as long as it’s Ubuntu) — as you should be doing already, of course.

By design, the research company’s numbers don’t reflect the amount of money spent by U.S. taxpayers funding the NSA’s operations. Nor do they indicate how much of this $47 billion is being born by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, as far as I can tell. What I do know is that many foreign governments have been publicly investing in Linux and open source projects since Snowden’s revelations that back doors for the NSA have been built into many proprietary U.S. enterprise software products.

My darling daughter Mimi, who had installed Debian when she was 9 (with her proud father watching over her shoulder), had been an Ubuntu user for years. We’ll get to why that was OK with her Dad in a minute. Unity, of course, changed everything: She hated it as much as her father did (and does), and she switched to Linux Mint, which she had been using for the last several years.

To a kid who already has an aptitude or interest in computer science, this opens a whole new world of opportunity for her. She steps not only into a career of her choice, she steps into a community of millions of free software programmers and users. She has her eyes opened to the concept of community and purpose…and the reality that she can make a difference as well as a paycheck.

The LibrePlanet 2015 awards ceremony was at 5:30 PM, so I had time for a shower and a bite to eat. Of course, these days I don’t do much “biting” when I eat. I am on the John Glenn diet for another two months. If it can’t be squeezed out of a tube, I can’t eat it. Of course, my inability to speak or eat “real” food precluded any meaningful participation at a large dinner table with colleagues. “Oh, Ken…? Yeah, see over at that table? The guy in the Linux hat who isn’t talking or eating? That’s Ken.”

Did you ever notice that when you go to a LinuxFest that many of the geeks are carrying around Mac laptops? Tarus Balog has noticed, mainly because he’s a long time self professed Apple fanboy himself, who’s taken the steps to free himself of the limitations inherent in using proprietary operating systems and make the move to something a little more open.

Of course, LibreOffice as an online app has already been available online since early last year through rollApp — but this will be different. For starters, it’ll be “free as in beer,” meaning it won’t cost you anything. While rollApp has a free plan which allows users to open files from cloud storage to read online, users have to pay $6.99 monthly if they want to actually save their changes.

Why KDE? According to your comments, there were two major reasons: stability and configurability, with many of you saying, “It just works.” But there seemed to be some disagreement over whether KDE’s legendary configurability is as great as it once was.