Donationware March 2013

I haven’t been keeping up with the donationware idea as well as I’d hoped. There’s a surprise. I’m blaming being stuck on one of those interminable projects where all the tool choices were made a long time ago and time for side-projects has been fairly limited.

So, instead I’ve been busy attempting to pay for music I’d previously “borrowed”. A brief digression: I’ve deleted any music that I haven’t played or didn’t get on with and have been gradually buying FLAC versions of music I’d like to keep. I’m not enough of an audiophile to actually listen to FLACs but I am just obsessive enough to buy them and convert to a more practical format. I’ve been buying directly from artists or labels where possible. This is oddly satisfying and - having spent some time setting up a Bandcamp-style label shop a couple of years ago - rather instructive.

Back to donationware. This month I’ve gone with the (not strictly work related but fun and rather impressive) OpenELEC, “a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into a complete XBMC media center”. It’s a fine piece of work which runs quite happily on a Raspberry Pi. More on this when I’ve ironed out a couple of remaining kinks.