Weekly Rewind #23

The Weekly Rewind
The Weekly Rewind

Sooooo, here we are at the 23rd Weekly Rewind. Doesn’t time fly? When you’re reading this waffle. Anyway, it’s been a reasonably quiet week by my standards but I have a feeling it’s only the lull before the storm. I’ll get into that later. For now let’s look at what happened in the last 7 days:

On Monday we recorded Linux Outlaws episode 102 and streamed it live as usual. Lot’s of people turned up and I think a good time was had by all. It was another epic show at just under 2 hours. We’ll have to work on trimming it down a bit, not that I don’t enjoy recording the longer shows but I know some folks have trouble listening to them. Much of the extra length of this show came in the form of an interview with my good friend Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Centre. Now there’s a statement I couldn’t have imagined myself making only a year ago. We discussed the recent community promise from Microsoft concerning Mono, and I think it was really valuable for people to hear. I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday editing the show while Fab was working hard testing some software for his employers, getting up at 5:30am is no joke! I’d rather be editing any day, that’s for sure. I shipped the edit to him on Wednesday afternoon and he managed to get it out later that evening, with all the shows notes and other work it involves. Very cool.

I spent a lot of time working on my presentation for Manchester Free Software for next week. Preparing some visual jokes and so on, which I hope will come off and not go down like the proverbial lead balloon. I’m going to be talking about audio production with Free Software at their meeting on Tuesday night (July 21st). It’s 7pm at the Lass O’Gowrie pub in central Manchester I believe. If you’d like to come along and say hi, please do; it would be lovely to see you. That’s probably not much use to all the overseas readers but of course you’re all welcome too, if you can make the swim πŸ˜‰ The talk will be filmed, in HD no less (lord no), so you should hopefully be able to see it in full even if you can’t make the trip. I’ll let you know more about that in due course.

Acer Aspire 5735Z
Acer Aspire 5735Z

I also found time to write a tutorial about installing Spotify on Linux during the week. It’s had a pretty good reception and I’m pleased at that. With all the laptop problems I haven’t been able to distro hop as I normally would and get material for longer articles. I’m going to phone Dell tomorrow and see what can be done to get the M1330 fixed. I’ve heard positive stories from other folks on Identi.ca and I hope they’ll replace the GPU or motherboard for free. Fingers crossed. I’m actually using a borrowed Acer Aspire 5735Z laptop at the moment with Ubuntu Jaunty installed. It’s a lot bigger than my M1330 but nevertheless it’s a very nice machine. Pentium Dual-Core T3400 Processor, 3gb of RAM, 250gb HDD and and Intel GMA 4500 graphics card with wholesome Open Source drivers. I’m pleased to report it supports Linux perfectly and it’s saved my bacon (nothing to do with Jono) this week.

I also edited the next Software Freedom Law Show on Friday, which you should be able too hear on Tuesday. Bradley is at OSCON in San Jose at the moment but he’s going to release it from there. The wonders of technology hey. I’m sure I did some other stuff this week but I can’t remember, so that will have to do you for now.

Upcoming:

A packed week coming up. I’m off to Bolton tomorrow afternoon and then back here in time for Linux Outlaws in the evening at 7pm (UK time). That’s 6pm UTC if you want to work out the time difference. On Tuesday it’s off to Manchester for my talk in the evening. There’s also Chester LUG on Thursday which I hope I can make it along to this time. We’ve been discussing a Linux event in the Chester area for some time and I’ll let you know as soon as I have any details regarding that. I also hope to get my laptop fixed by Dell and get back to distro hopping ASAP. I’ve got an ever growing list of candidates to test out, the Open Source world waits for no man… not even Linus.

See you next week everyone, have a good one,

Dan

Edit:Β  A quick check of my calendar today and I realised Chester LUG is not till next week. Doh!!

4 Comments

  1. Sorry to hear you’ve been having trouble with your trusty old Dell. Equally surprised to hear your experience with the Acer has been trouble free. I had a 5520G and could never get it to run Linux properly.

    Cheers,

    Mick

    • @ausimik – Hey good to hear from you mate, it’s been ages. The Acer worked surprisingly well for me. I was worried it wouldn’t support Linux at all because of previous experience with the company, but it works really well. Right down to the memory card reader. I’m sure Dell will sort the other one out. I’ve been told by others they send an engineer out quickly to swap the motherboard and/or GPU. They shipped some faulty video cards in their machines and I think they’re keen to make up for it and save face. They’ve had loads of bad PR from it already

  2. Just curious – what were you doing in Bolton, my old stomping ground (well, I did my degree many years ago at the old Bolton Institute of HE, before it became a Universty)?

  3. @David – I had a doctors appointment. It wasn’t actually Bolton to be fair, nearer to Leigh really. Between the two. I say Bolton cos most people have a grasp of where that is. I like it round there though, cool people. Always very friendly πŸ™‚

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