Hi folks. As regular readers will know I tend not to post links and smaller bits of info here but instead save them up into my big weekly recap articles. I’m so busy right now though that finding time for that is tricky and it’s also made me realise I might be better off posting some things separately. So, in that new vain I have a couple of items I’d like to share with you.

Firstly the video from my Liverpool Ignite talk in March is now online for everyone to see. I gave a 5 minute talk entitled “The Blaggers Guide To Linux” which oddly seems to be 7mins on the video. I don’t remember going over time though. As it’s only short it shouldn’t be a big commitment for people to watch and hopefully enjoy the content. I tried to convey why I think Linux is cool and why I care about it to a mixture of technical and non-technical audience members. I’ve also uploaded the slides to my talk in ODF and MS Powerpoint formats so you can reuse them if you like.

I don’t know the licensing situation with the O’Reilly logos I had to include but as far as I’m concerned any parts I created are under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales, like everything else I do. I hope you enjoy the video. There’s a second Liverpool Ignite event scheduled for tomorrow if anyone wants to come along. It’s Thurs 15th April 6pm – 8pm at the Contemporary Urban Centre in town. There’ll be an assortment of 5 minute talks on different topics. I’m not talking this time but will certainly be there and may even get roped into being MC. Who knows.

The second thing I have to tell you about is my guest post on the Liverpool Echo & Daily Post Tech Blog. It’s all about OggCamp10 and why people should come along and check it out, you can read it here. I’m very excited that it was included and I have to give a big thanks to editor extraordinare Alison Gow for her help. I’ll hopefully be doing more things like this to promote OggCamp and the Rathole Radio gig in the next couple of weeks. There’s not long to go now, how exciting!

I’ll write up some of the other events in the last week in the next day or so, it’s been a fun time. Speak to you soon, take care

Dan

I have something of a treat for you today. Well, I hope it will prove to be a treat anyway. It’s the long awaited video from my talk to the Manchester Free Software group in July. Not surprisingly it was in Manchester, at the Lass O’Gowrie pub. It’s just over 2 months since I made the talk, but I finally have the video for you all to see. Big thanks to Tim Dobson for taking this video, editing it and even uploading it to Archive.org, he deserves all the credit for that. Thank you also to Lucy for inviting me to speak, and most of all, thanks to the 30 odd people who crammed themselves into the smallest room known to man. It was hot, stuffy and not always so comfortable but I think it went well. It was great too see so many people there.

In this talk I take you through how I produce podcasts like the Software Freedom Law Show using only Free Software and Open Source solutions. Sound engineering is something I’ve done for a long time and it’s a real passion of mine. I hope that comes across in the talk. As you can see there wasn’t even a projector in the room, so I’m just using my laptop to try and show the slides to everyone. If you have any questions please feel free to post them in the comments here and I’ll do my best to answer them.

You can find the slides I used here, if you want a closer look.

I’ve embedded the video player from Archive.org but I also advise downloading the original Ogg Theora file. It looks slightly better. Hope you enjoy the talk, thanks

Dan

P.S – I haven’t actually watched this fully myself yet as I’m too nervous. Stupid I know because it’s in the past now but it still feels odd. I’ll be sitting down to watch it soon. I have to know what I said in case people ask questions anyway

Gnome Do

Just a quick post to clear up something we recently discussed on Linux Outlaws. I’m a big fan of Gnome Do, the little tool that makes launching apps on your desktop faster and easier. In recent versions – 0.8.x and above – they’ve added an animated dock which is imaginatively called Docky. I often use another dock on my systems called Avant Window Navigator and I like docks in general; the software ones that is, though the places where ships tie up are ok too I suppose. I do live near Liverpool after all and my granddad was a docker; I’m not sure what he’d make of Docky but we’re getting off the point here. I found that while AWN worked well for me Docky would freeze and the animations just didn’t work.

Read the rest of this entry »