My Bank's Computer

Please forgive the forthcoming rant, but I wanted to relate my recent trials in trying to send some money to Germany via electronic transfer. As some of you will know I went to Germany last month to visit my Linux Outlaws co-host Fab, and also attend Linux Tag 2009. It was great fun and obviously there were various costs for hotels in Berlin and travel, amongst other things. I wanted to send some money to Fab to cover these things and a bank transfer seemed the easiest and quickest way to do that, or so I thought. I knew I needed an IBAN code and the SWIFT code for his bank, I thought this would be enough. First off I looked for a way to arrange this with the Natwest Online Banking site, which at the time of writing still hasn’t been updated to accept Firefox 3.5, but that’s another matter. It seems you can’t do International transfers online. I was disappointed by that but it seemed fairly reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »

Portland, Oregon

Well well well, do I have some exciting news to share with you today. You may or may not know that the Linux Foundation – employers of Linus Torvalds himself – are holding their first ever annual conference this year in Portland, Oregon. They’re calling it LinuxCon and it’ll be 3 days where some of the best known names and brightest minds in the Linux world can come together… oh, and me!! I might bring the brightest mind quota down slightly, but it’s probably a good thing for the averages anyway. Yes that’s right, I’ll be going to LinuxCon on 21st – 23rd September this year in the good ol’ US of A. My good friends at the Software Freedom Law Centre in New York are going to the event too. You’ve probably heard me mention that I produce their podcast; if not, stick around 5 minutes and you will. Oh I just did, never mind. Bradley even offered to let me share his hotel room if I had trouble finding accommodation, but I snore so badly I really couldn’t do that to him. When we went to Berlin for Linux Tag, Fab only lasted one night in the same room as me. I do snore pretty loud I’m told, though personally I’ve never heard it, so I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Above all it will be a great chance for me to finally meet Bradley and Karen in person, I’m really looking forward to that. I’ve been working on their show for about a year now and it’s always been a lot of fun to produce. I think they do important work on behalf of all Free Software developers at the SFLC. Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings all and welcome to another Weekly Rewind, number 24. Half way to the meaning of life, which as everyone knows is 42. (EDIT: Thanks to Barry for pointing out in the comments that 24 is not half of 42, FAIL!!! It realy has been a long week ) Expect a reprise of that reference sometime near Christmas I imagine when we hit 42. It’s been quite a week and for some reason I’m sore as hell today. I think I must have done something to my back, it’s killing me but enough complaining, let’s get into what happened in the last 7 days:

On Monday night we recorded and streamed Linux Outlaws 103, which at the time of writing still hasn’t actually been released yet. Fab has had a hell of a busy week and I believe he’s actually working on it today. It takes a lot of time to edit and produce a show every week so I’m sure people understand. We’ll have it out ASAP. On Tuesday night I headed to Manchester to give my talk about audio production with Free Software. I’ve written a bit about already so I won’t go into all the details again here, but I had a great time. I’m told it was a record turnout for Manchester Free Software so that’s very satisfying. I hope everyone who saw it enjoyed the talk and I’ve had some really nice feedback. There was HD video taken on the night by Tim Dobson, and I hope you’ll be able to see that in the near future. He also gave me an old PC to set up as an Icecast streaming machine for Linux Outlaws, how cool is that? More on that later. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night (July 21st) I gave a talk at a meeting of the Manchester Free Software group. It was about audio production with Linux and Free Software. Basically how I produce many podcasts and other things using only Free and Open Source software. I wanted to upload the slides and share them here with everyone. I hope they’ll be interesting and somehow useful on their own, but don’t worry there was HD video taken on the night – courtesy of Tim Dobson – which I hope to be able to share with you very soon. Everything is available under a Creative Commons license, naturally.

Download The Original ODF Presentation File

I wanted to say thanks to all those who came along and crammed into that room (literally) to hear my talk. We couldn’t have gotten any more people in if we’d tried. The talk seemed to go well, with a live demo of some tricks I use in Audacity, and a good discussion about how we can improve music production on Linux. I’m going to be using some of the feedback people gave in a new project. As the slides say, I think audio production on Linux is already at a more than proficient level, but music production with synths, drum samples and so on still has some way to go. I think we can improve things with a little more communication and perhaps organization. The first step is addressing the problem and defining it, then we can really start to fix it. I’ll be testing that theory in future.I have big ideas as usual and this time I hope the amount of time and effort required to realise them will be available too.

So, I hope everyone attended got something useful out of the talk, or at least had a laugh at some point. Thanks to Lucy for inviting me to speak and everyone else for making me feel so welcome. Keep an eye out for that video in future

I’ve mentioned in recent Weekly Rewinds about intermittent problems with my trusty (now not so trusty) Dell XPS m1330 laptop. It seems I’ve fallen foul of the known defect in some of the Nvidia cards shipped by Dell. I’ve had my machine just about 18 months now and I’ve always loved it. In recent weeks though the screen started flickering randomly, I got funky blue lines all over the place that make you think you’re having an acid flashback, and finally it packed in completely. Dell released BIOS updates last year to try and limit the damage this problem would cause, I upgraded to them quickly but it seems it hasn’t saved me. Now when you turn on the power the display doesn’t really show anything, after a few mins you just get weird vertical lines on the screen. It can’t be used at all sadly. I thought about making a video of what it does but then I found there were already videos all over Youtube of the same thing. I’m naturally lazy and I’m not going to duplicate the effort, so you can see what happens in the video below. Read the rest of this entry »

The Weekly Rewind

Sooooo, here we are at the 23rd Weekly Rewind. Doesn’t time fly? When you’re reading this waffle. Anyway, it’s been a reasonably quiet week by my standards but I have a feeling it’s only the lull before the storm. I’ll get into that later. For now let’s look at what happened in the last 7 days:

On Monday we recorded Linux Outlaws episode 102 and streamed it live as usual. Lot’s of people turned up and I think a good time was had by all. It was another epic show at just under 2 hours. We’ll have to work on trimming it down a bit, not that I don’t enjoy recording the longer shows but I know some folks have trouble listening to them. Much of the extra length of this show came in the form of an interview with my good friend Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Centre. Now there’s a statement I couldn’t have imagined myself making only a year ago. We discussed the recent community promise from Microsoft concerning Mono, and I think it was really valuable for people to hear. I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday editing the show while Fab was working hard testing some software for his employers, getting up at 5:30am is no joke! I’d rather be editing any day, that’s for sure. I shipped the edit to him on Wednesday afternoon and he managed to get it out later that evening, with all the shows notes and other work it involves. Very cool. Read the rest of this entry »