Adventures In Open Source

Hi folks, just a quick note to let you know that the interview I recorded with the Open Source Musician podcast a few weeks back is out now, for your listening pleasure… I hope I can’t remember what I said at and I need to listen to it again but it went pretty well from what I recall. Massive thanks to Dan and Steve for kindly inviting me onto their show, I had a great time. You should really check them out if you have any interest in making music and or audio seriously with on Linux. They’re the only show I know of covering this area and they do a great job of informing and entertaining.

I was interviewed in episode 35 which you can now download.

It’s even spurred me into working harder on sorting out music production on my Ubuntu Studio set up this week. I still use Windows XP for the odd music job which I’ve always been honest about. However, all podcast production and other audio is done on Linux and has been for a very long time I’m proud to say. I’ve got some hardware gripes with a possibly faulty audio card but I’m on the case now. Earlier today I started working on a new blues song in Ardour. It wasn’t planned but a nice riff popped out of my brain and I started recording, I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve not had time to produce much music in the last few months and I don’t see that changing very soon, but I do want to do more music on Linux and really see the how strengths and weaknesses stack up. It’s long been a goal of mine but time just hasn’t allowed it. Hopefully that will all be fixed in 2010!!

Ok enough rambling, enjoy the interview. See ya,

Dan

Digital Britain Report

Hello folks, today I have a very serious matter to discuss with you. The Digital Economy Bill is being passed through parliament in the UK right now. This is the law which would allow UK citizens to be disconnected from the Internet on the accusation of file sharing or piracy, not conviction, accusation. As a musician, online broadcaster and member of the Open Rights Group this is obviously an important matter to me. At the moment certain members of the government are trying to force this bill into law without a proper debate in parliament. This is a bill which goes against the advice of the Government’s own Digital Britain report published last year, which clearly stated Internet disconnection should not be used as a punishment.

I have written to my local MP today to ask them to call for a full debate on this before any law is made. Whatever you think of the Digital Economy Bill and whichever side you consider yourself to be on, passing this law without so much as a proper discussion has to be wrong. It doesn’t benefit any of us. Don’t let large media companies make laws like this through the back door, demand proper democracy! Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while but I’m finally back with another Weekly Rewind. I missed last week because I was too busy, so I’ll try and briefly recap the last 2 weeks events now. It’s been an exciting and slightly hectic time of late. Much OggCamp business, some web development stuff, live talks and other things. On this bright Sunday afternoon I’m getting some spare time and it’s going into the much neglected blog. So let’s get into it.

There’s been a couple of Linux Outlaws releases since my last update. We’re up to episode 140 now, which I can still scarcely believe considering our expectations when we started the show. It continues to go from strength to strength and for that I’m very grateful. You can join us for the live show from 7pm GMT on Mondays. The IRC channel has been crazy during the show lately and we seem to average over 100 live listeners and viewers now. It doesn’t sound much and as a proportion of the 58,000 downloads per month I suppose it’s not, but the live interaction really makes a big difference and I’m glad people enjoy it. I also did another Rathole Radio last Sunday night which you can download at your leisure. I finally released the tickets for the live gig and so far they’ve sold ok but I need to sell a lot more to break even. Much time was spent this week licking envelopes, writing notes and posting those out. If you want to come along please buy tickets in advance from the website. Thanks! I also got a new logo for the show this week and I’m really pleased with it (see image below). It was created for me by graphic designer extraordinaire Scott Jones of Bad Format and we’ve also been doing a fair bit of website work together lately. I’m mostly hacking Drupal sites, customising modules and so on. I’ll give you more details on that when I can in future. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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