Weekly Rewind #24

rewindlogoGreetings 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.

Old Time Laptop
Time Laptop from 99-2000

On Wednesday I finally got around to ringing Dell about my faulty M1330 and I was really pleasantly surprised by their response. I even blogged about it. They sent an engineer (named Barry) on Friday to replace the motherboard on this machine because of the well publicised problems with Nvidia graphics cards. It works great now, and I’m made up to have it back. I can get back into distro hopping and reviewing in earnest next week. I haven’t done a decent review in a couple of weeks while I’ve been without my laptop, and I need to rectify that ASAP! The engineer was only here about 20mins and he did a great job. Even though the machine has been out of warranty for 6 months they still fixed it for free, so thanks to Dell from me.

Yesterday in a fit of exuberance I signed up for an Icecast hosting package just to try it out. It was only $10 per month and you can cancel any time, so I figure it’ll be a good way to get used to it. I can have up to 100 listeners at 64kbit, it’ll make a good test ground for Linux Outlaws and also Rathole Radio. I could of course have installed Icecast and set it up on my public VPS, where this very website is hosted, but as I have paying customers on here too it seemed a bit of a risk. I wouldn’t want to break the server and then have to explain to clients it was so I could “have a play with Icecast”, wouldn’t look very professional. This seemed a good way to experiment on another separate server. I mentioned the machine I got from Tim on Tuesday night already, but I actually found a very old laptop in my stash and revived it last night with Crunchbang 9.04.01. It’s an old Time laptop (no pun intended) from about 2000 I think, brace yourself for the specs: 800mhz AMD processor, 256mb SDRAM and 20GB internal hard drive. It runs Crunchbang amazingly well actually and according to Conky it only used 75mb of ram to boot the base system. That goes up when you start opening programs obviously but it’s a lot better than Windows XP ran on it, if memory serves me right. Users with real low-powered computers will laugh at that because it does have plenty of power to run Darkice and stream to the remote Icecast server, that’s all I want it to do. I’ll add an ALSA compatible USB sound card and it should do the trick nicely. My only worry now is the outgoing bandwidth on my ADSL connection. I emphasize the A in that ADSL because while it might be 16mbit down, it’s only 784k upload. I might be pushing it with VoIP, Ustream video and Icecast audio all demanding bandwidth at once. We’ll see how that goes. I’m going to be testing the new audio stream for Rathole Radio later tonight (9pm UK) if you’d like to join me. Head over to RatholeRadio.org/live for more details. Hope to see you there.

Upcoming:

So, in the next week there’ll be more Linux Outlaws as ever, I’ll process and release this Rathole Radio recording from tonight and also edit another Software Freedom Law Show. I’m feeling more and more like Leo Laporte every day, all I need now is some of his money. I’ll also get onto reviewing Pardus Linux 2009 in the next week, which a lot of people have requested and I’ll no doubt find plenty of other trouble to get myself into. I’ll report back as always next Sunday. Till then take care of yourselves and have a good week 🙂

Dan

6 Comments

    • @Barry – Bloody hell you’re right! #facepalm It has been quite a long week yes but plenty of fun. Thanks for pointing out my maths fail. I’ll make a minor edit to point out my fail before I get a flood of emails 😀

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