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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.

Last night I bought a Tracfone online. This morning, when I bring up FOSS Force on the browser, I’m greeted by an ad hawking Tracfones. Likewise, a few months ago after I purchased a coolant reservoir for my 27 year old BMW, I was greeted by ads on every site I visited for companies specializing in parts for old BMWs. We’re all used to this, right? Even if we just conduct a simple Google search, we’re liable to be followed around by ads pertaining to that search for hours, if not days or weeks. Well, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.

Ken Starks put another well deserved feather in his cap on Saturday when he accepted an award for Reglue from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) at the LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday. Reglue was announced as this year’s winner of the Project of Social Benefit Award by FSF executive director John Sullivan, who also announced that Sébastien Jodogne had won this year’s award for Advancement of Free Software. The event took place on the MIT campus.

The Fedora Project — mythically known as the “bleeding-edge distro” which only experienced users can use, but which in reality can be used easily by anyone from kids to grandmothers — understands the unique connection between diversity and open source. They are looking for a Diversity Advisor, and they’re seeking your help.

This isn’t the case so much with Linux, because users can choose from a long list of desktop environments to install atop any distro, changing the entire look and feel of their system. You can have Mageia and PCLinuxOS both running KDE natively — but you also can run KDE as your desktop in Fedora, even though Fedora defaults to GNOME.

Charlie Kravetz said he was a little nervous at SCALE 13x. Not only had his presentation slides gorped about a week ahead of the expo (he got them back together and working, of course), it was Charlie’s first time speaking in front of a group. And the message he wished to convey in his talk, “Accessibility in Software,” was an important one.

This isn’t likely to bother Shuttleworth & Company much, as it doesn’t make its money from home users — at least, not until the Ubuntu Phone gets traction. What money the company is making comes from the enterprise, and it’s not clear that enterprise customers care whether Canonical cozies up to Microsoft. Most tech companies, or companies that use tech in a big way, are already dealing with Microsoft themselves, by licensing its products if in no other ways.

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.

Canonical trumpets its partnership with Microsoft — yep, Microsoft — this week at the Open Compute Summit, where the Isle of Man reached across to Redmond to demonstrate how Canonical and Microsoft are working together to create scalable, OCP-compliant architecture.

With nearly 50 hardware vendors exhibiting and with over 30 sessions over two days — not to mention a wide range of keynotes including one from Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth and Rackspace’s Aaron Sullivan — nearly 3,000 attendees took in the event on an usually warm March week in the capital of the Silicon Valley.