Found this while trying to get Apple's screwy quicktime trailers to work.

Apple is both less and more evil than Microsoft. Microsoft are relatively honest about not caring about the multitudes of zombies they're force-feeding their crap into, while Apple rips off lots of Free software, gives nothing in return and talks about the user-experience and bla bla bla which is just another way for them to lock their users into a pretty prison.

-- isecore (August 25th, 2009 - Ubuntu Forums)

I bought a mobile broadband USB device from t-mobile yesterday. I've been struggling to get it to work on my Ubuntu netbook. I have hope that I can get it working eventually as it is listed here as:

Mobile Broadband cards

Emailing Colin as there is no sign of how long ago this entry has been like this.

The Acer bricked itself again. But I think I know what was causing it and have now fixed it.

Having replaced the shipped operating system with Ubuntu I needed to add a script to regulate the cooling fan. This worked at first. I then upgraded the BIOS. It turns out that the script (acerfand) was choosy about the BIOS. And once I upgraded the BIOS, but not acerfand, it would just quit whenever I started up. So the fan was running unregulated.

I have since found that the acerfand script updated kernel registers in a non-safe manner that could result in race conditions. That wasn't what was causing me problems. I couldn't even get the thing to run. I'd have known this too if I had looked at the syslog. But that is a boring read. I doubt I'd even listen to the audiobook version.

The file system had become a little confused with the repeated power losses. So rather than risk a hidden vulnerability that was waiting to strike, I did a clean install.

I also installed the latest incarnation of the acerfand script, acerhdf. This time it is an host to Linus kernel module. So when it sets those kernel registers, it should be doing it properly now.