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

As promised, here are the slides from my recent talk about podcasting and web broadcasting at the Think Visibility event in Leeds. These slides may not seem that useful on their own but hopefully you can glean some helpful information from them. The talk lasted about 35-40mins and I spent a long time talking about each slide but I’m afraid I don’t really have any written notes, I improvised a lot, as most people will attest I can waffle with the best of them. I did say I’d write out proper written notes to go with each slide but in reality I’m far too much of a lazy arse for that, sorry The event was about promoting yourself or your product on line so I tailored the talk a bit to this goal, it’s not just a general talk about the techinicalities of podcasting.

If you download the ODF source file (made in OpenOffice.org of course) you can see some notes attached to some of the slides but it’s hardly comprehensive. I will make a proper screencast as I’m much better at talking than writing and I hope it will make the whole thing more interesting, I can also show videos and have some fun. I’ve been testing out Record My Desktop and it’s going well. Should have more on that soon. I just realised it had been a while since I promised to post these slides and I should get it done.

This was my first time using the SlideShare web service but it seems to work well and I’m pleased they accept ODP format presentations

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The Weekly Rewind

Time for another Weekly Rewind, hard to believe this is the 4th one already, but then I’ll be saying that with each new one forever now probably. Much as I’ve done with Linux Outlaws, we’ve done 80 episodes now and that honestly still surprises me but since about episode 10 I seem to have been saying, “wow I can’t believe we’ve done [insert ep number] episodes of this”. So what happened this week then? Well, it’s been pretty busy and very interesting, so let’s get into it.

Monday night we were set to record Linux Outlaws 80 but had to cancel when something came up at the last minute and Fab couldn’t make it. I wasn’t really worried, the only problem being that I’d already announced it would be live and gone around whipping everyone up. I sat in the IRC channel for a couple of hours talking to people and explaining what was going on, trying to make up for it I suppose. We actually recorded the show on Tuesday lunch time (UK) instead. It wasn’t ideal as most people were out at work, college, yoga class or some combination of the above but the live stuff is improving I think, and it was only our 3rd attempt at streaming the recording. I even mixed in the music live so felt like quite the radio host, it was great fun.

Me, in slightly odd stance

I spent Tuesday night and most of Wednesday afternoon editing the show. Then got the files to Fab for release while I shot off to the Liverpool LUG meeting in the evening. I was my customary 40mins late and unfortunately missed Graham’s talk which I’m sorry about. I’ll really have to stop thinking I can get places in half the time it actually takes to travel there but what can I say, I’m an optimist at heart. Once they invent the teleporter I’ll be sorted… ok, I won’t I’ll probably still be late but it’s a thought. Had a great time chatting to everyone as always, there was lots of interesting talk about Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Chris Morris and other random stuff. We also interspersed it with some techy subjects too though. I really urge you to try and find a LUG (Linux User Group) or some other kind of geeky social group in your area if you can. I’ve benefited from it greatly in the last year or so. There really aren’t many places you can get a laugh from a joke about Cron and what could be better than that? They should be cherished. Thursday and Friday I did various stuff but most of it wasn’t that interesting or worth reporting, sorry. Spent quite a while working on my talk for Think Visibility as it approached rapidly.

Tim Nash doing strange things with buckets

So that brings us neatly to the Think Visibility event which happened yesterday. I enjoyed a largely quiet train journey to Leeds on Friday afternoon, apart from a very loud hen party discussing who their favourite serial killer was further down the carriage. I kid you not, at one point I actually overheard “yeah Myra was ok but you can’t beat Fred and Rose for me”. There’s not a lot you can say to that apart from “who’s for Harold Shipman?”, so I turned my music up and tried to block it out. Friday night we had a speakers meal and I met some really lovely and infinitely knowledgeable people, then promptly lost to most of them at pool in the pub, the Guinness didn’t help. It was a good night. I gave my talk about podcasting at the event on Saturday and it went pretty well I thought, wasn’t busy, however there was a small but perfectly formed group of about 15 people who kindly listened to me. We had some good questions and a bit of a discussion at the end. I was going to post my slides here as part of this write up but since I’ve already managed to ramble up to 700 words it’s probably best I leave that for another day, when I can go into more detail.

I had a really great time and have to give a big thanks to The Hodge(tm) and all the others for working so hard to make the whole thing happen. I think the attendees really enjoyed it from speaking to people and the speakers certainly seemed to. I also got a chance to try Wii Tennis for the first time at the after party and I got hammered by pretty much everyone at that too. I should have stuck to pool but never mind. I know everyone in the entire world has a Wii by now but I still don’t and I’ve hardly even had the chance to play on one either. Really cool little things and a part of me will always love Nintendo even if they’re not open source. I had an 8 bit NES in the 80′s as a kid and I loved that thing to death (not literally, for the dirty minded).

The pictures from Think Visibility were taken by sk8geek and posted on his Flickr account, used with his kind permission, you can see the whole lot here

Upcoming:

So, this week I’ll be recording Linux Outlaws tomorrow, barring any sudden emergencies. You can tune in to hear us recording the show in the afternoon (UK time) if you like. Just head over to http://linuxoutlaws.com/live and you can see it there. Announcements will be made on our Identi.ca and Twitter accounts but we suspect mid afternoon. I don’t know exactly what I have planned for later in the week but no doubt things will appear on the horizon. I’ll finish and publish my Debian Lenny article this week, scouts honour. I’m actually typing this on Ubuntu 8.10 as I needed something I could install quickly for my talk and that was the first CD that came to hand as I dashed for the train, so perhaps I’ll do an “apt-get dist-upgrade” and try out the latest alpha of Jaunty (9.04) before moving onto Sidux as promised and then checking out Arch properly. We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned for all that and of course my fabulous slides from the podcasting talk…

(announcers voice) Warning: the aforementioned slides may not actually turn out to be as fabulous as previously claimed, all purchases are subject to terms and conditions, call now!