At this point, we’ll assume you know that four humans took a spacewalk around the Moon and returned triumphantly to Earth on Friday. Even if you’ve somehow avoided hearing about it on mainstream channels, we’ve kept a running account of the best of the mission pasted on the front page of the site for the ten days the crew has been in space.
Assuming you’re probably tired of space stories at this point, we won’t cover it in this post… except to point out that the thrill of a lunar flyby has driven a number of players at once. Kerbal Space program in the highest number ever seen – some 20,000 astronauts spent this weekend trying to assemble their rockets in honor of the Artemis II mission.
With so many people focused on the Moon it would be the perfect time for the company to skip the bad news, which is probably why Amazon chose this week to announce that it will drop support for Kindles released before 2012. There probably aren’t many first- and second-generation Kindles left in the wild, but the 2012 cutoff will mean the Paper cutoff will remove one device past May 20.
Amazon says that pre-2012 Kindles currently in the hands of users will still work, but they will no longer be able to buy or download new books. The main problem is that you will not be able to register these old devices after May. So if you have to reset your Kindle, or want to buy it from the side market that has been wiped, you won’t be able to link it to your account to download your purchases.
In fact, the idea that Amazon will no longer have its nose in these devices doesn’t bother us at all. In fact, it feels like an improvement over the status quo. If you own the device in question, now would be a great time to download Caliber and start managing your offline ebook library. In fact, even if your Kindle is new enough to be affected by this change, you should still download it. Seriously, just use Calibre.
In terms of software, XChat’s entry has just appeared in Apple’s App Store. No, not that XChat. Instead of connecting to your favorite IRC server, a new mobile app will let you send messages to… whoever you’re still using. Twitter X. Confusingly, there is also XChat in the Google Play Store, but that seems to be a completely different thing.
Finally, we’ve been seeing a lot of chatter online this weekend about France abandoning Windows and switching to Linux. While we applaud any general push toward open source software, it’s worth digging into the details of this one. The order says that the Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) will switch its desktop machines to Linux, but that represents only a few hundred machines.
The information gained during the launch will help in planning for mass migration in the future, as all other governments have been asked to come up with a migration plan before the end of the year. Where those other agencies, and the thousands of devices they use, will actually have penguin power is unclear. It is possible that they would come back and say that the complete migration will take ten years to complete.
So it’s a step in the right direction, but it will take some time before any significant piece of French infrastructure separates from the Redmond giant.
See something interesting that you think would be a good fit for our weekly Links column? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
