Free software, open source, copyleft, technology, art, knowledge. Freedom.
2009-12-20
I recently found a laptop computer with the hardware caracteristics I was looking for and bought it to replace my old one. I’m very happy with the hardware, but ain’t going to provide free advertising here because I believe the manufacturer does not deserve it.
First task was to perform the exorcism. I removed the proprietary software that the stupid manufacturer puts inside and forces me to buy. Next, all labels and physical spam were detached, including the most important one: the original certificate of authenticity, the one that proves that you don’t care about people freedom, was replaced by a certificate of hacker authenticity.
Product key is made from hexadecimal ascii characters, and barcode contains the string “genuine gnu/linux hacker” encoded. Feel free to use or modify it (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license). The package contains a printable PDF file and its source SVG (made with Inkscape).
No hacker needs a certificate, but it was a fun parody which has a practical usage too as a way to cover some of the remaining spam that is hard printed and can’t be easily removed. The real Genuine Advantage comes when people is unchained from the evil tentacles of of the restrictive software.
It seems that the warranty of my laptop is now invalid as I rejected its EULA and removed one of its “inseparable components” (judge’s decision in a least one previous case here in my country). Who cares, I feel much better now, my freedom is more important than laptop costs. Fuck you stupid laws.
Unless otherwise stated, articles and their accompanying pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Spain License.
roberto@zenvoid.org
Comments
2009-12-22 @ 00:21
let me guess: asus ul series ;)
2011-12-21 @ 07:56
The image contains “Gentium” font, which isn’t standard on my Ubuntu 10.04 installation. I’d need to get that font or substitute another similar-looking font to match the appearance seen in the PDF in the package archive. Unless one is interested in changing the text, this would have been better handled by converting all text to paths, making the SVG file independent of any font installations on target computers.
The bar code is linked into the SVG vector data as a PNG raster file. It would be better to generate the bar code block as vector data, making the SVG totally self-contained, without need for external raster or font data.
2011-12-21 @ 11:42
Hello Phil. You can get the font with “apt-get install ttf-sil-gentium” (or your preferred package manager) in your Ubuntu installation. It is contained in the Universe repository, not installed by default, but has a free license and it is a nice font. There should be no need to replace it with another (unless you want to do that, of course).
About the PNG file: the previous version was actually made with vector rectangles, it was changed to PNG data in this version for convenience; there are command line barcode generators that takes an input text and produces an output PNG file. Changing the encoded text this way is very easy and almost instantaneous, I’ve once used it in a script to generate a few hundred stickers, each one with different encoded text in its barcode.
Anyways, you are welcome to reconstruct the barcode as vector data, and I’ll be happy to add your version here if you send it to me.
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