Spoken Gems

According to BBC, Stephen Fry has the second most popular Twitter account. On Thursday 12 March, he talked to Kenan Malik for Analysis: Clever.com.

Listen to an excerpt at BBC.

And in case, you want his Twitter account to be number one,…

David Merrill, MIT grad student, had the opportunity at this year’s TED conference to present a new and intuitive way of interacting with computers: Siftables.

In my opinion, everybody should watch at least one TED talk a week. Here’s my recommendation for this week:

In this enthusiastic talk, Susan Blackmore takes the definition of "memes" to a whole new level: temes.

Jo Glanville argues in a discussion at “Battle of Ideas” called “Caught in the Web” that the internet has been a revolution not only for free speech but also for censorship.

The full discussion is available at Fora.tv.

The great Stephen Fry explains what free software means and celebrates the 25. birthday of GNU.

If he got you interested what free software is all about, here are some sites you might want to visit:

• He recommends the gNewSense operating system. The most widely used operating system based on Linux is probably Ubuntu/Kubuntu. It’s not completely licensed under the GPL but definitely one of the most advanced operating systems you can get.
• If replacing a whole operating system sounds too scary, you can start with installing some programs:
  • Firefox (alternative to Internet Explorer)
  • Thunderbird (alternative to Outlook)
  • OpenOffice (alternative to MS-Office)
  • GIMP (alternative to Photoshop)
  • VLC (alternative to Windows Media Player)
  • And if you didn’t find a replacement you’re looking for, visit the GNU site.

Those programs are all free of charge. And especially Firefox and VLC are far better than their Microsoft counterpart. Just give it a try.