This is a span­ish-on­ly post, it makes no sense for any en­glish-read­er­s: it's about how to buy elec­tron­ics in Ar­genti­na.

Warn­ing: rant ahead.

Yes­ter­day the gov­ern­ment of Ar­genti­na an­nounced that they are giv­ing way 3 mil­lion net­books to stu­dents. They al­so an­nounced that they are giv­ing them the op­tion of Ubun­tu or Win­dows 7.

There was, of course, the typ­i­cal re­ac­tion from the FLOSS side: why are they giv­ing Win­dows to the stu­dents when Lin­ux is bet­ter? It's un­fair that the gov­ern­ment pays for Win­dows!

I am here to tell you to grow up and stop be­ing a ba­by. I am here to tell you to stop treat­ing oth­ers like ba­bies.

I think I can do this be­cause I am im­mune to crit­i­cism from the FLOSS crowd: I am a mem­ber of that crowd. I have an awe­some FLOSS pedi­gree, I have used noth­ing but Lin­ux for over 15 years. And I have a thick skin and I don't care much what oth­er peo­ple say, in prin­ci­ple, un­less they give me good rea­sons to care. And I am telling you to stop com­plain­ing.

I am telling you that if the on­ly rea­son to use a spe­cif­ic piece of soft­ware is be­cause it's cheap­er, you are ac­cept­ing that piece of soft­ware suck­s.

I want peo­ple not to just use Lin­ux, I want them to want to use Lin­ux. I want them to wait anx­ious­ly for the next re­lease of Ubun­tu or Fire­fox or what­ev­er.

And the first step to­wards ex­cel­lence is want­ing to be ex­cel­len­t. If hav­ing to pay noth­ing for Win­dows or Ubun­tu there is a cer­tain­ty that Win­dows will win, then Ubun­tu freak­ing sucks and needs to im­prove. Peo­ple are not adopt­ing it even if it's free? Then some­thing is wrong, and fig­ur­ing out what is im­por­tan­t.

But even more im­por­tant than find­ing the miss­ing piece is know­ing a piece is miss­ing. Open source has grown com­pla­cen­t. It's grown self right­eous. It's be­come ado­les­cen­t, sure of its awe­some­ness and im­mor­tal­i­ty.

I don't be­lieve in many things, but I do be­lieve in free will. I be­lieve that peo­ple are not mo­ron­s, I be­lieve that if they pre­fer Win­dows, it's be­cause it does some­thing bet­ter, and I be­lieve that what­ev­er that is (and I don't re­al­ly know what it may be), it can be found, and can be im­proved, and can be re­placed, and oth­er things can be added, and peo­ple will want to use the bet­ter prod­uc­t.

And if they don't... well, at least we fought an hon­est fight, and we did our best, and we (hope­ful­ly) had fun in the pro­cess, and pushed the en­velope, and cre­at­ed nice things, and the users are bet­ter off in the end even if our ba­bies are not the cho­sen ones, be­cause we raised the lev­el of ev­ery­thing.

For ex­am­ple, be­fore Lin­ux, Win­dows sucked much, much more than it does now, and I think many of those im­prove­ments were be­cause of Lin­ux, and I am hap­py that to­day Win­dows users have a OS that does­n't stink.

I want free and open source soft­ware to be used be­cause it's awe­some, not be­cause it's cheap. Awe­some and cheap I can live with. Just cheap? That suck­s.

And the con­stant "they use win­dows be­cause they don't know bet­ter"? That's pa­tron­iz­ing and con­de­scend­ing, and very, very an­noy­ing. And if it an­noys me, who is not the tar­get of the lame con­de­scen­sion, trust me, it an­noys the crap out of Win­dows user­s.

Grow a spine, get your ass­es in­to gear, start mak­ing awe­some stuff, kick ass with qual­i­ty. That's why we are here. Not to be the cheap­est date in town.

Be­cause it worked on­ce, let's do it again. I have just set a com­plete­ly ar­bi­trary, and prob­a­bly too ear­ly date for the re­lease of the first eng­lish Is­sue of "PET: Python En­tre To­dos" mag­a­zine.

The eng­lish ver­sion is called PET, which means "Python En­tre To­dos: Eng­lish Trans­la­tion".

It will have the same con­tents as the first span­ish Is­sue and... it will be the last Is­sue done like this.

From now on, both ver­sions will be pub­lished at the same time, if we can.

So, there will be a very short gap be­tween the eng­lish first Is­sue and the sec­ond one (less than a mon­th, we hope).

So, stay tuned

I just got a new phone be­cause my old one dis­ap­peared. I got a Sam­sung Star, which is not a smart­phone, but what they call a fea­ture­phone, which seems to mean "it does a lot of things but is cheap, can on­ly be cod­ed in Ja­va and does­n't run an­droid".

Here's some of the fea­tures of this baby:

• Touch­screen, 400x240

• Fake GPS (gives you a 400 me­ters ra­dius of your lo­­ca­­tion. Good enough for me in the city)

• We­bkit-based brows­er that works sur­pris­ing­­ly well (it comes with the LGPL as a doc­u­­ment and you can't delete it :-)

• Ac­celerom­e­ter

• FM ra­­dio

• A 2GB mi­cro-SD card

• 3.2MP cam­era (takes video at 320x240).

The cam­era can take de­cent pho­tos in good con­di­tion­s:

And it even has some "ad­vanced" fea­tures (by which I mean: things my cheap ded­i­cat­ed cam­era does­n't do), like smile shut­ter and panoram­ic shot­s:

Oth­er that that... well, it's a phone, what can I say. It was "cheap­", which means "it costs more than I want to pay for it, but less than the al­ter­na­tives".

So, how am I tak­ing ad­van­tage of it...

First: I have not had a de­cent pock­et-­sized ebook read­er since my last Clie died. So, I looked for soft­ware to do that.

It turns out that the world of Mi­dlet­s, as fea­ture phone apps are of­ten called, is aweird place, where things are quite hard to find for the unini­ti­at­ed.

There is a sort of "app shop" at http://get­jar.­com but it's by no means com­pre­hen­sive, and of­ten things are quite hard to find.

Af­ter lots of look­ing, I found a good (I may even say very good) pro­gram called Fo­liant. Here's their home page, rus­sian on­ly ... it's weird, my favourite Palm ebook read­er, Palm Fic­tion al­so has a rus­sian-on­ly site!

Of course, the fonts sucked (way too large) but it turns out you can con­vert TTF fonts us­ing this tool so I am now back to the love­ly Droid Sans I am used to.

An­oth­er nice thing about the new phone is that it can ac­tu­al­ly play me­dia (yes, my pre­vi­ous phone was so crap­py it did­n't even play mp3). But... not ev­ery kind of me­di­a. For au­dio, just use mp3. For video... it's a bit more com­pli­cat­ed.

Here's the short ver­sion:

1. Con­vert us­ing Hand­Brake, ffm­peg MP4 video, AAC au­­dio.

2. Al­ways use the .m­p4 ex­ten­­sion, the phone is not smart enough to know what a .m4v is.

3. Don't make the video larg­er than 320x240.

Num­ber 3 is a prob­lem. For ex­am­ple, you may have a video in a wide screen for­mat, like 640x272, which is a 2.35:1 ra­tio.

The ob­vi­ous thing is to cap the width to 320, and that would give you a 320x136 video.

Well, that's wrong. What you should do is find the right height, keep­ing as­pect ra­tio, for a 400px width. In this case, that would be a 400x170.

But you can't use a 400x170 video! which is why you will use 320x170, and on play­back tell the phone to stretch it and ig­nore as­pect ra­tio. And voila, 400x170 and the cor­rect as­pect ra­tio.

The dif­fer­ence? 320x130 has on­ly 41600 pix­el­s, while 320*170 has 54400, which means you get a 30% bet­ter pic­ture.

Yes, it's tiny (3 inch­es) but it looks pret­ty sharp, and de­pend­ing on the kind of ma­te­ri­al you are watch­ing, it work­s.

UP­DATE: Fo­liant is bet­ter than I thought, once you get the Sam­sung-spe­cif­ic ver­sion. It's fullscreen (no sil­ly soft but­ton­s) and the screen ro­tates au­to­mat­i­cal­ly us­ing the ac­celerom­e­ter. It's a plea­sure to use, and the UI is very nice.

On the news to­day (the news­pa­per is Tiem­po Ar­genti­no, sor­ry about the un­read­able pho­to):

It says "In Spain it amounts to less than 340 thou­sand cus­tomers a mon­th, or 0.006% of the to­tal".

This is talk­ing about cell­phone user­s. Now, how many cell phone users are there in Spain?

Ac­cord­ing to this news­pa­per, 340000 are 0.006% of the to­tal, so... 5 666 666 667 (aprox­.), there­fore, Spain has rough­ly one cell phone for each man, wom­an and child in the world.