Woody Guthrie - Note The Sticker

Today is polling day for the European Elections in Britain, I realise this is last minute but I wanted to remind everyone to use their vote. About 10 days ago I went to a Billy Bragg concert in Liverpool, I talked about it here on the blog. At that concert I signed up for a mailing list. I’d forgotten all about it until this morning when I received an email urging people to vote and stop the British National Party (BNP) and their racist agenda. I’ve already voted myself and talked to many others about it. Only last night we discussed it at the Liverpool LUG. The EU elections are all calculated on proportional representation, which means apathy is a real danger. At the moment people in Britain are fed up with politicians and politics in general, they have every right. The scandals over expense claims are ridiculous. There’s a real danger many people will simply not vote in protest, or far worse turn to a Fascist party like the BNP. If you don’t vote you are increasing the BNP’s percentage of the total outcome. All they need is for you to do nothing. Sleep now and we’ll wake up to a right wing nightmare. I may be late in writing this, I should have done it yesterday, but I hope maybe some of you will read it before polls close tonight.

This email really illustrates the danger in a far more effective way than I could, I wanted to share it with you: Read the rest of this entry »

The Weekly Rewind

O hai, it’s time for another Weekly Rewind already. It’s been an interesting week punctuated by some very cool events. It all started with Linux Outlaws 88 on Monday night, as my weeks always seem to do these days. We got a bit closer to starting the show on time but unfortunately my ISP decided to cut me off just as we were due to start. There wasn’t a lot I could do about it but luckily we only started about half an hour late. For us 30mins late is practically early, if that makes any sense. We recorded about 2 hours worth of material and I managed to dodge the editing bullet this week, sorry Fab Despite the technical adversity the podcast was released on Wednesday night as normal, that’s mainly due to Fab’s hard work in editing. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirate Bay

Yesterday saw some pretty monumental news as the administrators of The Pirate Bay – one of the top BitTorrent trackers – were convicted by a Swedish court and handed down hefty sentences. The trial had been going on for some time, and it looked as though the Pirate Bay guys were actually winning at one point; on the 2nd day in court prosecutors were forced to drop some charges. Yesterday though the guilty verdict was announced and the 4 men were convicted of “assisting the distribution of illegal content online”. The penalty was a year in jail for each of them and a $3.6m (£2.4m) fine. There’s been a ton of stuff written in the wake of this and I won’t bore you with the same critique as the major news media, but I do want to address one thing. The impact on artists themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Tributes At Anfield

Hey folks, please forgive this off topic post but today (April 15th) is a very significant day. If you listen to the podcast or read this blog, then chances are you’ll have heard me mention my love for Liverpool FC. One of the local football teams, that’s soccer to some of you. I try to keep this blog on the topic of FLOSS and technology, occasionally music and politics creep in, but every so often I stray in order to mention something outside of that field. This is one such occasion.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster. On the 15th of April 1989 ninety six Liverpool fans, men, women and children, were crushed to death and many more injured at an FA Cup semi-final game. They’d just gone to watch a routine game, leaving their homes in the morning as they would on any other match day. They never came home. I was 8 years old at the time and didn’t fully understand what was going on. It was a terrible tragedy that shook the whole football world and Merseyside particularly hard. What’s more, the failures of the local police and their part in contributing to the deaths has long been covered up. This lead to the creation of the Justice For The 96 campaign, which is run by families of the dead and it’s still going strong.

I don’t think there’s any need to go on about it more. I just wanted to post this information as my very small tribute to all those who died, and those who have had to suffer the pain of living on.  There will be a memorial service at Anfield today in a couple of hours. If you want to read more I’ve included some links below:

• Contrast.org/hillsborough
• Wikipedia Article

Thanks for indulging me, normal service will be resumed shortly but today, is a day to remember…

Dan

The Weekly Rewind

Hello folks, it’s that time again already so I’d better fill you in on events this week:

On Monday evening we did Linux Outlaws after a major delay and some technical problems. We were supposed to start at 7pm (UK) but ended up starting at about 9pm. Thanks to everyone who was so understanding and especially those who waited around for us. For those who didn’t wait, I really don’t blame you. It seems there are some issues with Ustream and audio breaking periodically. The joys of Flash, arrgh! Some people have to keep reloading the page during the show and I’m sad to say it’s hit and miss at best. We’ll keep looking into other solutions and let you know ASAP if we have something. I was looking at Icecast streaming myself a while back but was told by a lot of different people the bandwidth is a killer. If anyone has ideas on streaming solutions or you know a bit about Icecast; please let me know in the comments, it would be really useful. Read the rest of this entry »

Libre.fm

If you’re anything like me and you’re dangerously obsessed with music (I really am); then chances are you’ve already tried the music-based social networking service Last.fm at some time. Like a lot of web services it doesn’t give much away about how it works internally. This is fair enough and it’s their right to do that as a company of course but it goes against the principals of Free Culture and Free Software. Now there are plans afoot to create a completely free (as in freedom) alternative called Libre.fm. I’ve been on Last.fm for a couple of years now and the main benefit for me is keeping track of the music I listen to whilst also advertising my fabulous *ahem* taste and sharing with friends. It keeps track of the music you play through a back-end system called Audioscrobbler which records song names, artists, albums etc and shows them on your profile page.

Read the rest of this entry »