Tanguy Ortolo

I just received an USB headset from Plantronics. Since it has a keypad on it, with buttons to mute the microphone and to adjust the volume, it appears as both a sound card and a keyboard. Problem: that keyboard sends a mouse ButtonPress 1 (yes, a mouse button event, do not ask me how that is materially and logically possible) when the microphone is muted, and only sends the corresponding ButtonRelease 1 when it is unmuted. As a result, the pointer behaves as if the mouse button was pressed continuously, rendering the desktop quite unusable.

Read more Using a Plantronics USB headset under X.Org/Linux

FAT

USB sticks are traditionally formatted with FAT 32, because this file system is implemented by almost every operating system and device. Unfortunately, it sucks, as it cannot use more than 2 TiB, store files larger than 2 GiB or store symbolic links for instance. In a word, it is an obsolete and deficient file system.

exFAT

Good news: someone addressed that problem. Bad new: that someone is Microsoft. So as you could expect, exFAT, the extended FAT, is a stinking proprietary, secret and patented file system. There are free implementations of that shit, but it is safer to stay away from it.

Read more Using the UDF as a successor of FAT for USB sticks

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image

La Quadrature du Net est un groupe européen créé pour défendre les droits et les libertés des citoyens sur Internet contre les attaques permanentes de l'industrie du divertissement de masse, comme par exemple le récent ACTA. La récente victoire citoyenne contre ces monstres est une bonne occasion pour prendre l'initiative et d'appeler à une réforme du système de droit d'auteur, qui est inadapté à l'omniprésence des systèmes basés sur la copie.

Read more Des clefs USB datalove pour réformer le droit d'auteur

La Quadrature du Net is a European advocacy group that has been created to defend our rights and freedoms on the Internet against the continuous political threats driven by major corporations, such as the recent ACTA. After the recent citizen victories against these monsters, it is time to take the initiative and advocate for a reform of the copyright system which has become inappropriate with the omnipresence of copy-based systems.

Read more Datalove USB drives to reform European copyright