For those of you who don’t often check my writings section – I have recently added two articles, an old one, and a new one.

The old one is my classic Rock with our PC that appeared in Computers@Home in October 1998. C@H has recently started hiding articles behind a subscription “firewall”, making many articles inaccessible. Since this is a strict no-no, I rescued the article and put it up on my site.

The new one is a small rant about Linux compatible equipment, and how even a little bit of checking will ensure that you don’t get into trouble with stuff you buy.

While on the subject – I recently received a warm email from a past reader of mine, asking about my older articles, and why PCQuest isn’t putting them up, or if I could do that, and also if I had the rights to my articles.

If you have read any of my past articles, you will know that I usually wrote about contemporary things – things that mattered at that moment. Today, many of these articles are outdated, hence it would not make sense to PCQuest to put all of them up.

But for historical and personal reasons it does make sense to me, and I am working on it.

Some articles, however, are relevant today, but don’t hold your breath waiting for PCQuest to put them up or make them easily accessible on their incredibly badly designed and mismanaged website. These articles I will slowly weed out and add to my Writings section.

Some of my articles were part of a package written by my company, Exocore Consulting, such as the incredibly successful PCQuest Linux issues (which were all done by us in-house, including the CD mastering). It would not make sense to separate my articles from the set. However, Exocore has now decided to make at least the most recent article sets available online, so when that happens, I’ll drop a note here. I have to invoke a slavery clause to get Exocore’s website under control and manageable.

The answer to the rights question is – yes, I have the rights to every word I ever wrote, because all my articles are given to publishers with “First Publishing Rights”, not ownership. That means that the publisher has the right to publish the article, but after that (typically a month later) I have the right to use the article in any way I deem fit, including republishing it.