Adventures In Open Source

Hey folks, I realise I’ve missed my usual Weekly Rewind but it’s been far too hectic around here lately. I will get back to it next Sunday I promise. One of the many reasons for my omission is because I’ve just put the tickets for my Rathole Radio gig on sale. I’m doing the whole system myself (right down to licking the stamps) rather than use a ticketing company because I feel it’s the right thing to do. Besides, the punk ethos has always been “do it yourself” and I abide by that. I hate these big companies and the way they screw over music fans, Ticketmaster being a prime example (allegedly!). Not that they’d be interested in my little gig, but I still wanted to make the process personal and keep costs down. I’ve had a few people asking questions about the organisation of the gig in general, so I wanted to clear up the details here quickly.

Printed Tickets

The tickets are for sale now though the Rathole Radio website priced at £5 each plus £1.50 per order for processing and postage. I’ve kept them cheap because it’s not a money making exercise. If I sell all 200 odd tickets I will just break even, and only then. I’m putting this on because I want to have something cool for everyone to do in Liverpool the night before OggCamp, I also get the chance to play a gig alongside some of my favourite artists and that’s my payment. I’m taking it easy on public promotion this week to give OggCampers the chance to get in first and get tickets, after that I will be promoting hard and selling to the general public, once they’re sold out I’m afraid it’s tough. The venue has very limited capacity so the bottom line is this… IF YOU WANT TO COME BUY A TICKET. A lot of people seem to feel they’ll just wander in on the night and that may not be possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for Weekly Rewind number 53 and for once it’s not late, wonders never cease. Since my last update included Monday and some of Tuesday of this week, I’ll just start from Tuesday and make this a little shorter. I’ve still been a bit ill this week at times but overall I’m feeling much better right now I’m pleased to say.

So, on Tuesday I synced up the audio from Linux Outlaws and shipped it back to Fab. It was a little bit longer than expected as I said in my earlier post, but I think we’ll settle into the new format with practice. That was later released as episode 137 “Bing!”. It seemed to be pretty well received and downloads for the podcast in general have been shooting up lately, good news. I think we might have finally jumped the shark. I also got on with sorting out sponsorship for OggCamp and various other things. We’ve been working on an advert to appear in Linux Format magazine very soon. They wrote am article about us this month in very kind terms and we appreciate the support. They’re even offering Oggcamp attendees 40% off a year’s magazine subscription. So, without further ado here are our wonderful OggCamp10 sponsors: (drum roll needed) Read the rest of this entry »

FF Mobile In Action

Today I’d like to tell you about Firefox Mobile on the N900, running in conjunction with the new Mozilla Weave web service. I’ve been testing them out on my handset for about a month now since the beta release of Fennec (the codename for Firefox Mobile). The N900 is the first device to get Firefox Mobile but it should also appear on Google Android phones in the near future. There is talk from Mozilla of an iPhone version too, but Apple are so draconian with 3rd party software I’m not sure that’ll happen. I just can’t see them allowing another browser on the iPhone to compete with Safari. (correction: According to Fab the iPhone has allowed some 3rd party browsers already, see link in comments) Anyway, here’s my thoughts upon testing Firefox Mobile for some time.

Facing The Critics:
It seems fashionable with some people to bash Firefox right now and use it as the butt of their jokes. I think many of them are too quick to forget the great work Mozilla have done for us in spreading Open Source software to the masses. Many users get their first exposure to the wonderful world of FOSS through the likes of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Sure it’s not perfect, it has it’s bugs and it can be slow at times too. But I think the emergence of real competitors like Google Chrome has and will continue to improve Open Source browsers in general. I like Chromium but Firefox is still the browser of choice on my desktop. Weave is also an interesting prospect and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. I was curious to see if I would like this new compact Firefox quite as much as I like it’s big brother. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to an incredibly late Weekly Rewind. I was hoping to get this out on Sunday but with all the preparation for Rathole Radio and that fact is was my good mate Will’s 30th birthday, things got away from me. It’s number 52, a whole year’s worth of rewinds. Although actually we passed the first anniversary a couple of weeks ago and I missed it, doh! People asked me what “special stuff” I was going to do for this fifty second edition but to be honest I can’t think of anything that special to do. I could look back at some highlights of the previous editions, but then I did that only recently in my review of 2009. So I’m just going to stick with the usual format in the arrogant belief that this is “special” enough. We’ll see if you agree by the end

I’m very busy with event planning at the moment and sponsorship stuff, a lot of which I’m not really at liberty to talk about yet. So if this update seems brief rest assured there has been plenty of OggCamp business and you’ll hear about it soon. It all began last Monday with another recording of Linux Outlaws, a recording which would become episode 136  “Make Love, Not Proprietary Software”. Following this blog announcement by Fab earlier in the day, we were experimenting with a new slightly leaner format. I think it worked well and the show was still 75mins long, hardly too short by any means. A lot of people told me they preferred it and we’ll keep trying to do that in future. Having said this on the last recording for episode 137 this Monday we went well over time. So I guess it’s a learning process. Personally I’ve long said that 60-80mins is the ideal length of show for me. That’s not to say I haven’t played my part in derailing shows and making them longer; I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but I do try to push us on and keep to some semblance of schedule. Some people completely disagree with my view and think the show should be 15 million hours long every week, which is cool, it’s nice that they feel they enjoy it that much. The amount of work this entails for us is what causes the problem though. Beyond about an hour show time the editing gets very time consuming and tiring. It’s a weekly show after all, so it’s not as if people don’t hear plenty of us anyway. Listenership has shot up lately which is fantastic, but I’m convinced keeping the show closer to an hour each week would make it much more accessible to a wider audience. I’ve now spent ages discussing not going on too long, oh the irony. Anyway, let’s move on (my catchphrase).

In the last 10 days or so I haven’t gotten any real distro hopping or writing done. Other things have overtaken that and I’m still trying to get back on track. Hopefully you’ll see a substantial article in the next 2 days. My February blog stats could certainly use it, there hasn’t been much to draw people to the site this month. I’ve also been a bit ill the last week and that’s slowed me down, I’m still trying to get back on a more even keel. Other things I’ve been up to in the last 10 days include: hacking Drupal sites, recording a new Rathole Radio, doing gig preparation and trying to sort out tickets for sale, constantly emailing and phoning people with OggCamp business and much more.

One particular highlight was last night, I attended my first Wirral Tweet Up event. I’ve been to many in Liverpool but missed the first Wirral one. I caught up with some good friends from the Scribblepool writing group and also met some interesting new people. It was an informal event held at Cromwell’s restaurant in Irby. Lot’s of hard work was put into making food and also making everyone feel welcome by proprietors Kay and Kate. I’d like to thank them for their work and also everyone else involved in setting up the event. It was a lot of fun. Many of my freedom crusading friends wonder why I go to these Twitter events and don’t just stick to Identi.ca only. I can see their point of view but the vast majority of the general geek community, not even the general public just techy types, use things like Facebook and Twitter heavily. I like to engage with them and help spread the word about Open Source, Linux and other things in a friendly sociable manner. The FOSS world can be incredibly insular and while I love my friends within it, there’s just no sense in preaching to the converted all the time. You have to get out and engage with others, get other points of view and expand your horizons, rather than just have your old views reinforced by a group of friends who agree. A good example is the fact that I was surrounded by iPhones last night and I casually worked the conversation onto the sat on the table N900 between them; what’s cool about it, Android, Linux and other mobile things. Not in a preachy way but just in general conversation. A lot of people had never heard of these things and took a genuine interest. I don’t expect all of them, if any actually, to run home and install a Linux distribution on their computer, but it’s a start. I’ve noticed the tendency within Open Source to think we are a bigger part of the tech crowd and society in general than we actually are. It’s good to get some perspective from people outside and bring that back to the group. It gives ideas for how we can engage with more people and improve what we do. It reinforces my beliefs in the principals of FOSS rather than weakening them. Enough rambling about that though.

I released a couple of albums on Jamendo last week. One of Kagnee, my old ska punk band, and another from an even older project called The Shed Collective. You can download, share and copy the music under the CC BY-SA license. It also prompted me to sort out my main site a little. If you look at danlynch.org/music you can see this starting to take shape. The list of tracks is easier to read and more compact but the RSS feed still works like a proper blog with full posts. My mastery of Drupal Views knows no bounds… ok, maybe a few. I’m going to keep working on that and making the content more useful as and when I get time. Eventually I’ll redirect shedmusic.net to it, as the old music blog is largely dead right now. Stay tuned for more on that.

Upcoming:

So in the next few days I should be off to Chester LUG tomorrow night with any luck. I have an interview booked with former OpenSUSE community manager Zonker for Linux Outlaws tomorrow, there’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show, more celebration of Will’s 30th (mine is looming in May) and a whole lot more OggCamp business. I hope I won’t be so late with updates next time but please bear with me, things are hectic. I’ll be in touch again very soon. Until then take care of yourselves and stay lucky,

See ya,

Dan

Evening everyone, it’s Sunday and you know what that means? It’s time for another weekly rewind. I’d like to start off by apologising for the lack of substantial articles in the last couple of weeks. Event organisation and other things have kept me so busy I just haven’t managed it. I’ve been meaning to get the distro hopping and reviewing under way again for a while. I even went as far as trying to install PC-BSD, only to discover it needs more disk space than I have available with my normal system partition layout. Luckily it warned me and I didn’t get as far as wiping my system. I’ll have to think about how best to fix this. I have some other things to write about, I’ll focus on those next week. So, let’s talk about what actually did happen.

We began on Monday with another live Linux Outlaws show as always. It was great fun and Fab released that later in the week as episode 135 – “So Good They Tried To Patent Him”. I also released a new Rathole Radio in the afternoon. I finally got around to making a Facebook page for the show as well. I don’t use Facebook much, but it seems the rest of the world does and I want to spread the word. Hopefully it will help get some new listeners on board. Read the rest of this entry »

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