Month: July 2013

Individuals contribute 20000 USD to make GNOME more secure and more privacy aware

rest

I’m so excited. I’ve just pushed the last update to the current Friends of GNOME banner. We received donations worth 20000 USD to make GNOME more secure and privacy aware. It’s so awesome to see so many individuals donating to make GNOME better for them and ultimately for all of us.

finished

We got 250 one-off payments and roughly 650 periodic payments from payment plans over the last 7 months. During that period, 52 payment plans were created with the average amount of 10 USD per month (the default setting). However, 51 plans were cancelled :-\ The one-off payments were worth 17600 USD and hence the average donation was about 70 USD.

Depending on how you do the math, the cost of taking the one-off donations was between 3.3% and 4.4%. I find that number surprisingly low, probably because I still can’t make sense out of PayPal’s fee structure. But there are probably some hidden fees that turn up once you actually want to do something with the money, i.e. have it wired somewhere.

A very big “Thank You” to all the donors who generously allow us to continue our mission to produce a Free Software desktop for everyone. You guys rock. Seriously.

The new GNOME board, which is already serving since the beginning of this month, will meet during GUADEC and probably call for bids some weeks later.

Finding Maloney

Every so often I feel the need to replace the music coming out of my speakers with an audio drama. I used to listen to Maloney which is a detective story with, well, weird plots. The station used to provide MP3 files for download but since they revamped their website that is gone as the new one only provides flash streaming.

As far as I know, there is only one proper library to access media via Adobe HDS. There are two attempts and a PHP script.

There is, however, a little trick making things easier. The website exposes a HTML5 player if it thinks you’re a moron. Fortunately, it’s easy to make other people think that. The easiest thing to do is to have an IPaid User-Agent header. The website will play the media not via Adobe HDS (and flash) but rather via a similar, probably Apple HTTP Live Streaming, method. And that uses a regular m3u playlist with loads of tiny AAC fragments 🙂

The address of that playlist is easily guessable and I coded up a small utility here. It will print the ways to play the latest Maloney episode. You can then choose to either use HDS or the probably more efficient AAC version.

$ python ~/vcs/findmaloney/maloney.py 
mplayer -playlist http://srfaodorigin-vh.akamaihd.net/i/world/maloney/04df3324-4096-4dd5-b7c3-6f9b904e3f91.,q10,q20,.mp4.csmil/master.m3u8

livestreamer "hds://http://srfaodorigin-vh.akamaihd.net/z/world/maloney/04df3324-4096-4dd5-b7c3-6f9b904e3f91.,q10,q20,.mp4.csmil/manifest.f4m" best

enjoy!

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This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.