Weekly Rewind #73

Hello everyone, I know I start every post like this nowadays but damn it’s been 3 weeks since my last update. It’s been a busy time and I have much to recount but I’d like to start by sending good wishes to everyone suffering icy winter conditions, wherever you are. Kent or Kentucky… actually I doubt it’s that cold in Kentucky but never mind. You get the point, onwards!

I won’t recap every day from the last 3 weeks as that would be monumentally boring for both of us. Instead I’ll just pick out the highlights and split it into groups. Let’s start with podcasts, there’s plenty to talk about there. Linux Outlaws has continued like the unstoppable juggernaut (or perhaps pod-ernaut) it is. We’ve actually released 5 episodes since my last update and there’s always so much to talk about. Recently the Novell takeover has been big news for us Open Source geeks. They’re a big company and make SUSE one of the top Linux distributions, not mention the fact they own the copyright on Unix. But evidently they’re not big enough and we’ve covered that and many other stories in recent shows. Here they are in order:

Now you see what I mean about a juggernaut don’t you? It’s always great fun doing the show and I’m just pleased that people seem to enjoy listening to it. We recorded episode 179 on Monday. It’ll be out for your listening pleasure very soon.


Also on the podcasting front I’ve been busy as ever with Rathole Radio. There’s been two new episodes since our last chat. I pre-recorded and automatically released Episode 39 while I was travelling to the Public Enemy gig in London, which was incredible by the way. In the words of Comic Book Guy “BEST.GIG.EVER!”. I managed to schedule the publishing of the show in WordPress and it all seemed to work well. I also did another live Rathole Radio this Sunday and it’s available to download now. I hope you enjoy them both. I played my usual eclectic mix of the best Creative Commons and independent music, I also played a couple of live tracks as I normally do.

To wrap up the podcasting news, I’ve also been on FLOSS Weekly in the last 2 weeks, which is always a pleasure. You can hear Randal and myself interviewing the lead developer of CentOS on episode 142. I was interviewed about the band at length for the PentMusic podcast too. You can read more about all that kind of stuff on the 20lb Sounds website, which you should check out and sign up for if you’re not a member. The 20lb Army needs you!

In the past couple of weeks I installed the latest Ubuntu 10.10 on my studio machine and it seems to be working really well, once I put the buttons back in the right place (sorry Ubuntu fans). I’ll write a bit more about that in time. I used the new set up in taping FLOSS and also broadcasting Rathole Radio. It seems I should give Pulse Audio some credit, I’ve given it plenty of flack before, it does allow me to route my audio through the Ustream Flash client pretty easily. I plan to move to the new Linux Mint on my main laptop probably and again hopefully write about it in more depth. I realise it’s been almost a year now since I did any serious distro reviews but I guess life overtook me. I’ll get back into it eventually.

In terms of live events I was involved in running the 4th Ignite event in Liverpool recently. We set up in the Liverpool Medical Institute and I got a weird kick out of playing Public Enemy quite loud in there with all it’s portraits of past members and quite austeer atmosphere. There were a couple of technical hitches but it seemed to go really well overall. The sound is improving each time and I think that can only continue, we can still get better as any good perfectionist will tell you. I loved picking out tunes that I felt related to the talks. I played “Dirty Old Town” by The Dubliners to close Alistair Houghton’s talk about Hull. I have nothing against Hull it just seemed like a funny idea. I also played “Fight The Power” in honour of Patrick Stuart’s (not that one) talk about the evil nature of Powerpoint. Not many people got the musical references but I did receive some nice feedback that they enjoyed the funky beats. That’s enough for me.

More recently last Friday I went out in Liverpool with some fellow geeks as part of the Twitter Pub Crawl. We started in Hannah’s Bar and ended up in Studio 2 Parr St via many other places including The Dispensary and The Swan. It was fun and although I had a few pints and was half cut by the end of the night, I wasn’t ill and didn’t get my usual horrendous hangover. I stayed with my good friend Mr Adrian McEwen in the Georgian Quarter of town, or South Central as he likes to call it when he’s impressing people which his street knowledge, only messing 😛 I am looking to move over to the centre of town and that area is a good candidate. I enjoyed trying it out, so to speak. It’ll be the New Year before I can move but it is in my plans. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Finally on Sunday I went down to Wally Rd and we recorded a new track with the band. We have about 3 news songs at the moment which I’m very excited about. Our original catalogue is growing and if we keep this up we’ll have an album in a few months. We might release an EP before that, we’ll see. We got one new track down and while it still needs some work I hope to be able to share that with you soon. After a few hours recording I hot tailed it back home and did Rathole Radio in the evening. All while avoiding polar bears and snow drifts, it’s pretty cold in the UK at the moment. Not cold by other countries standards probably, but a lot worse than we expect at this time of year. That brings us pretty much up to date.

Upcoming:

We recorded another Linux Outlaws on Monday night as I’ve already mentioned. Tonight (Wed 1st Dec) as I write this I’ll be on FLOSS Weekly again, talking about GPLhost which looks really interesting. It’s very last minute for me to be promoting that now but it’s 5:30pm UK time. In about 2 hours from the time of writing. I will also be heading to the Welkin pub in Liverpool afterwards to meet up with the rest of the Liverpool LUG gang. That should be a lot of fun. Not sure exactly what else is planned for the rest of the week right now but I’ll be sure to report back on all developments as soon as I can.

Take care in that winter weather till then!

Dan

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