Sooooo… time for Weekly Rewind number 39, and this update finds me sat in my front room nursing a beer late on a Monday night. We just recorded another Linux Outlaws earlier and it was a lot of fun as always, I’m pretty tired now though. I getting later with these updates which were originally meant to be every Sunday, I seem to get busy or distracted. The problem is I’m leaving it so long that I’m actually having trouble remembering what i did last week now. That’s not a good sign. So let’s get into what I can remember anyway.

On Monday night we recorded Linux Outlaws 121 and streamed it live as usual. That show was actually released later in the week by Fab, after some more sterling editing work. We also launched our new online merchandising store with Zazzle.  That’s the name of the company by the way not an adjective, or some corporate buzz word. I have visions of people in boardrooms right now saying “can we deliver the figures with more zazzle next time Damien?!”. We’ve long agonised over merchandising for the show and I have to take much of the blame for the delays in getting the stuff out there. I’ve spent over a year trying to find decent suppliers for bulk orders of t-shirts in the UK and largely getting nowhere. I’ve always thought we should have as many options as possible, but “our print on demand” offerings from Cafepress could be problematic for people ordering overseas. The company is based in the US, and I found when ordering from the UK I got stung with hidden import taxes by UK customs. It’s a bit silly for a show based in Europe to have this situation, but finding decent merchandise manufacturers on this side of the pond has proved a lot harder than I could ever have imagined. Luckily Fab has been looking into it too and he discovered that Zazzle is a popular option with many of the people he talked to in merchandising forums. They have deals with the customs offices in most of the major markets and they include those fees up front. It makes things quite expensive in my opinion, but personally I’d rather know what I’m paying at the start rather than get a shock later. If you want to see the latest options for merchandising we have Zazzle stores for the UK, Germany, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Have a look at this forum thread, which contains most of the information right now.If you order from the online store for your country you get better deals on shipping etc. Read the rest of this entry »