Being a geek, though, I was most surprised to spot that they were using Drupal; in fact, they’re on the mostly patched Drupal 5.7 version at the time of writing. This piqued my interest further, and I emailed No2ID to mention that I’d been reminded to join them—which I ought to have done years ago—by the very people whose perniciousness they were trying to militate against.

At the same time, I remembered from OpenTech that No2ID had begun a recruiting drive, and I was sure that Simon had blogged about it but couldn’t at the time find the post. I actually asked Guy Herbert at No2ID about this, and rather politely he explained that, no, it wasn’t them: it was the Open Rights Group. He refrained from adding “you buffoon.” But now, thanks to mylifemyid.org, I’m a member of both No2ID and ORG, two organisations I should have joined long ago.

In all its years of oppression, subjugation, scaremongering and offences against the person, the Home Office has never spread so much love. Thanks, Home Office: you’re a pal!

Still, fighting the good green fight can feel pretty lonely, and sometimes you forget not just how many people are on your side in the next office or town, but also of the billions of people who have something to lose to climate change. So as a bit of fun, and to remind ourselves what it’s all about, we’ve recently given the green finger to climate change. Here we are, doing just that:

Want to join in? You can respond to the original YouTube video.

Your mashup is probably legal.
Your mashup is probably sound.
Your mashup is probably legal,
So pass all that data around!

Stuff here
Stuff there
And something mashed up in between (be-tween!)
Stuff here
Stuff there
And something mashed up in between

Your mashup is probably legal;
You could monetize it as well!
But though I contend it’s all legal,
Remember I-A-N-A-L!

[Repeat chorus]

As I’m currently ploughing my way through Mayer Hillman’s inspirational How to Save the Planet, I’m all stoked for this sort of thing. I may also pop to the pub with anyone who says hello, afterwards. Eynsham has more good pubs than it knows what to do with.

The letter purports to be from Dylan Thomas to “Vernon”, probably his friend Vernon Watkins. It was written in July 1937, only a few days after his marriage to Caitlin Macnamara. The handwriting is of a piece with other samples I can find on the web.

Thomas was a legend while alive, and since his untimely death his reputation as a poet has ripened to maturity, while the somewhat sordid details of his lifestyle have always hung around his work like a bad smell. It’s a relief therefore to read such lucid, light-hearted chat (there’s no other word from it) written by someone rewritten by popular English culture as a gifted, drunken, tortured, ultimately doomed artist. Remarks both humorously self-deprecating and wickedly vituperative (about Nigel Heseltine, who he never liked) reveal an entirely different aspect of his personality.

The letter may or may not be original: it has a laminate over its front so it’s quite hard to tell. There’s a shadow on it that looks like an artifact of photocopying a folded original. It might even be an escapee from a museum exhibition; certainly it could already be part of known Thomasiana, which would make our—K’s—copy entirely redundant, but I’d like to think otherwise.

We had no idea what to do with it, and—though we could do with the money—felt that trying to sell it would leave a nasty taste in our mouth (and abject embarrassment if it turned out to be worthless). So it’s been sent off to the National Library of Wales today, but not before I made a decent scan of it, and also transcribed it.

“They are rejecting me now but the day will come when the name Dylan Thomas will be echoed from shore to shore. Only I won’t be alive to hear it.”

This is one of the few parts of Oxfringe ‘08 that also happened in Oxfringe ‘07, and the only one this year that I’m actually involved in. I think ‘08 organiser Andrew only asked me to be the MC because he wanted to punish me for not helping out, so: in that spirit, do come along and watch me die on my arse.

As I spend the scraps and offcuts of January and February evenings ripping and filing my 2007’s CDs—some of which I won’t listen to very often once they’re fossilized in the collection—I’m aware of a tremendous weight of madeness and invested time and energy on the part of the manufacturers, and of a sort of casual luxuriating in my first-world lifestyle on my own part. You prepare a playlist before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my tapeheads with crude oil; my CD tray overflows. So in 2008 I hope to buy as few CDs as possible (none is the target) while also avoiding DRM-crippled music and staying legal.

To this end I’ve been seeking free and semi-free online music—free as in beer, semi-free as in of limited choice—since the new year. So far, outside of bittorrenting (which is obviously of variable legality, depending on what you’re downloading), I’m having some success with Last.fm. Until recently they offered a sort of customized “radio station”, where your input into the of the next track was limited to an intelligent deduction by Last.fm based on what you told it you enjoyed in the past. Now, alongside this potluck service, they’ve just started offering three free streamings of any explicitly chosen track before requiring you to buy the track from a commercial partner.

I’ve yet to try the former service (I think you might have to subscribe to be on the beta wagon: I’ll look into that later), but the latter has so far provided our house with unlimited, free access to a radio station for our very own target market. While such slightly sinister profiling might make it harder for me to discover truly new music, it does at least permit me to expand the boundaries of my comfort zone slowly, and cast a critical eye over my friends’ music preferences, while at the same time giving artists their due and most importantly avoiding physical recordings unless I really want them.

Most commercial support for Linux distributions still consists of monolithic installations, wrapped up with checksums to prevent you tampering with them, and installing themselves on your computer in whatever location and potentially harmful fashion they fancy. Until upgrading to Gutsy this was largely my experience (painfully and often repeated) with such packages as nVidia and wireless drivers, and interesting software that barely gave a second thought to existing Feisty users.

After a spot of Googling I was expecting to have to go through the same palaver with Last.fm’s client, and crossed my fingers that nothing would go horribly wrong. But I needn’t have worried: the Linux client for Last.fm is

1. free of cost, as in beer
2. free of restrictions, as in open source
3. free of hard work, as in a no-sweat installation utilizing the Debian packages and apt package management that’s core to Ubuntu

To install it on Gutsy, you first want to add the GPG key for the repository for security reasons. At a command line, type:

wget -q http://apt.last.fm/last.fm.repo.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

You’ll be asked by sudo for your password. Then, open Synaptic Package Manager (under “System > Administration” in the GNOME menus); then, via “Settings > Repositories”, add the following new third-party repository:

deb http://apt.last.fm/ debian stable

You can then search for the Last.fm widget’s package in the manager (hint: it’s called lastfm) and install it. When you first run it after installation it’ll ask for your Last.fm account, so best have one of those in advance. And that’s it: you’ve now got Last.fm’s widget on your Ubuntu PC.

All of the above is explained briefly on the very URL of the apt repository. Not only that, but they have a free bonus photo of a very cute bunny in case all the apt stuff bores you rigid. Like a TV licence for the Flash version of the BBC iPlayer, all of this is practically worth a subscription alone. As I type, my mouse sits over the very location of the link to do so in a separate tab. I just need to know first: how many more rabbits do I get when I join?

Tom Dyson is starting a CRAG for the Wychwood area: that is, more or less anywhere within around fifteen miles of Charlbury in West Oxfordshire. If you’re interested, and you live in Witney, Eynsham, Burford, Chipping Norton, Kidlington, Woodstock, Stow-on-the-Wold, Hook Norton… then come along. It might change your way of life.

Here’s a preview, with an excerpt from each story. The final lineup is largely unchanged from the table of contents agreed previously, although titles have been tweaked somewhat.

I have a master copy in my mitts now, and it looks rather good. I daren’t read it close up, though. Maybe a drink or two first.

Certainly marketing genius and total orphan Lily Allen, and internationally renowned cuttinge-edge futurologist Gene Simmonds are pulling the sort of pouts you’d expect from them both, and Guy Hands has a look on him like they just cancelled Christmas. But even in these hilariously gurning faces of criticism, and amid the wafting and intermittent atmospheres of genial misunderstanding of how content works these days from the TV and radio monoliths, Radiohead are keeping chipper. Far more so than I’ve ever seen them before, in fact. And when everyone’s on YouTube for free, letting rip with their Thumbs Down webcast, and accepting its reappearance—syndication, if you like—all over the shop very shortly afterwards, was a refreshing change from everywhere else exercising rigid control at the loss of an audience.

But for those of you (like me) who were thinking of taking part in Radiohead’s distribution revolution, yet weren’t keeping an eye on the time:

• The download-only area of “In Rainbows” closed this morning. I just managed to get a copy of the tracks yesterday: I’m sure if you’ve missed out then you’ll all know someone who’s got a copy they can loan you, right? Loan you until the plain old CD comes out at the start of 2008, right?
• Discboxes (40-quid monstrosities that I was secretly waiting till next year to buy) are actually already out and limited stock. I thought from various reportings of the event that they too weren’t going to be on sale till the new year. Get yours while it’s hot.

If there’s demand I bet there’ll be more discboxes, but frankly if Radiohead don’t stamp “SECOND IMPRESSION” over the next lot then I might sue. Actually, if my discbox doesn’t have “A TOTAL W.A.S.T.E. OF CARBON” scrawled over it then I’ll be terribly disappointed.