The Amazon Kindle and Garmin GPS navigators use GStreamer, a piece of software that my company, Collabora, maintains. (As colleague Youness El Alaoui describes, "GStreamer is a multimedia framework for constructing graphs of media-handling components. This means that businesses can easily create customized pipelines allowing media playback, transcoding, media streaming, video editing, etc.")

If you're connected to the Net from a new physical location or network, and suddenly you can't send email (but receiving works fine), try switching your SMTP (outgoing) port from 25 to something else, such as 587. Port 25 often gets blocked as part of spam prevention.

Collabora's Cambridge headquarters might be where Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX Spectrum, worked. Thus, our offices might appear in a new dramatic recreation of the battle between the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro, to be televised in the UK.

WisCon 34 wants ideas for panels. I am thinking of proposing "HOWTO Describe Nonwhite Characters Sans Fail" (a.k.a., "Her Skin Was The Color Of A Delicious Coca-Cola"), and/or something asking about the goals and effectiveness of Goodreads/LibraryThing/BookMooch/PaperbackSwap/Tor.com/Suvudu/Infinite Summer/50books_poc.

Update: I would be remiss not to link to Jed's roundup of links on describing brown skin tones and otherwise "indicat[ing] culture and ethnicity in fictional characters". And I may as well get these in while I can: "her skin was like a half-caf no-whip soy venti frappucino"; "her skin was the 85% cacao shade of the new Ultra Dark Dove Bar, $9.99 for a box of 12, in your grocer's freezer"; "her UPS brown fingers muted to an eight-grain Kashi GoodFriends hue at the wrist, but her elbow reminded me of a FedEx logo spattered with Aegean mud."