2008 December 10 | Adventures In Open Source

Adventures In Open Source Linux News, Reviews, Tips and Rambling :)

Update: The Freedom Key
26

December 10th, 2008DanHumour, Open-Source / Linux, Update

Howdy, something a little different for you today but I had to share this. As you may have read in previous posts I’ve been producing a podcast called the Software Freedom Law Show for the Software Freedom Law Center in New York. It’s been a lot of fun to work on and as a true audio geek I love making it sound as good as I possibly can but it inadvertently led to some interesting computer modifications for me this week. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…
One morning I crawled out of my pit (bed) as usual and made my way downstairs to get some breakfast, on my way I passed the front door and saw some mail on the floor. One of the envelopes immediately caught my attention as it had been sent from Broadway, New York. Had I finally won that big part in Cats?? No sadly not but it in fact was a very nice thank you card from Bradley and Karen at the SFLC for helping them with their podcast. They also included a load of nice Free Software stickers such as a GNU, some SFLC and GPLv3 logos. I wasn’t expecting this so it was all a very nice surprise. I also noticed that included in the set were some small see-through stickers with the SFLC logo on them. The logo is a key from a computer keyboard with the letters “frdm” on it to represent freedom. This got me thinking, always a dangerous occurrence and soon the smoke was coming from my ears.

Regular readers will know that earlier in the year I bought a Dell M1330 laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed, it’s only ever had Linux or OpenSolaris (very briefly) installed on it and yet it still has a key on the keyboard proudly displaying the Windows logo (see pic to the right). All machines do these days it seems but this has never had Windows on it and it NEVER will. So how could I fix this? Looking at the SFLC logo it struck me that what I needed was a “frdm” key I already had the stickers so I set to work. If you want to do this yourself you’ll need the following:

- 1 see-through SFLC “frdm” sticker
- 1 standard hole punch so you can extract some of the off-cuts
- Some basic hand eye coordination (if I can do it you’re probably safe)

I realised that just placing the sticker over the key wouldn’t do the trick as it’s mostly transparent and that nasty Windows logo would still be visible. The solution came when I thought to use some of the waste paper out of my hole punch. The little paper circles it creates are the perfect size to obsure the Windows logo on my keys, jackpot. I simply placed a little paper circle on the key and positioned it just right, then I carefully attached the sticker over the top being sure not to move the paper. Et voila I now have a freedom key

(The freedom key – after shot)

A slightly pointless exercise I know but it makes me feel better and I think it looks pretty good so why not make your own freedom key? It’s easy and if I can do it with my complete abscence of art skills I’m sure anyone can.