Weekly Rewind #49

Welcome to another Weekly Rewind. It’s been a little quieter for me in the last 7 days, but only marginally. This update finds me sat at home in the kitchen, contemplating what to make for dinner. Fried rice is looking favourite right now, but I’m sure this sort of riveting information is not what you’re hear to read. So let’s get on with it.

On Monday we did a Linux Outlaws live show as usual, streaming video and audio as we went. There was some confusion when someone in the IRC channel told us Max Spevak (Fedora Community Manager) had left his post. It turned out they were “thinking of someone else”, but I guess the lesson is don’t always trust the wisdom of IRC, especially on a live show. They’re generally right on most things though to be fair, and having the stream has actually cut down the amount of email corrections we get. If we say something outrageously wrong someone will usually pick us up on it and we can fix it immediately. It’s nicer than getting 20 emails telling you the same thing for the next week. Somehow we ended up doing some pretty poor impressions of Shabba Ranks at the end of the show. Quite how these things occur I’m never sure, but if you want to find out you should join us live on Monday nights at 7pm GMT. I processed the audio from the show the next day and Fab released it as episode 133 “Shabba!” on Thursday. I also released a new Rathole Radio on Monday afternoon. It featured an interview with Creative Commons metaller Jono Bacon and it’s been pretty well received. A few people only tuned into the show because of Jono’s presenc,e but said they liked it and would come back in future which is nice. I need to build up the listenership a bit. Moving to Libsyn has meant I get far more accurate stats, and they don’t make as pleasant reading as I’d hoped. Perhaps it’s because of my very eclectic music taste that a lot of people don’t “get” the show, I don’t know. But I shall persevere and win them round eventually. Speaking of which, I received a very nice review for Rathole Radio from Peter Cannon. He’s not a man to mince his words and despite only catching the show by accident I think I may have won him over. If I can manage that then I’m sure more will follow. If you listen to Rathole Radio and enjoy it please help spread the word to other music fans you know. Go on, I’ll be your best mate.

A picture of Kryten from Red Dwarf
Kryten (from Red Dwarf)

I spent a fair amount of time writing my long N900 review this week. I published that late on Friday night, technically Saturday morning but who’s counting. I’m enjoying the device a lot and today I discovered how to sync the internal calendar easily with my Google calendar which is nice. I’ll write some tips on that and post them during the week, it’s actually very simple. I’m also going to get hold of the Maemo SDK and see what I can do with it. I’ve mentioned my Python darts scoring program before. It actually runs on the N900 pretty well already, but I’m curious to see if the VM included with the SDK makes development quicker. I also want to investigate packaging that for the device. It will all make good experience for future writing. I’ve been called into action a few times in the last 7 days as family geek. You know how it is, you’re the one in the family who knows about computers so you end up fixing them for relatives, friends and sometimes people you’ve never even met. I wrestled with an ailing Vista laptop but discovered the hard drive was actually failing in the end. For once it wasn’t Windows fault, who would have guessed. On Thursday night I went to Chester LUG and bored everyone senseless with the N900. They seemed pretty interested actually and there was even excitement as I installed Vim on it in the pub. How geeky.

I’ve continued to email up a storm with Oggcamp organisation and progress is good. Next step is hitting the sponsorship trail with a vengeance. We’ve had some false starts on this but with a large bill for the venue and other things hanging over my head, my mind is pretty focused. If by some chance anyone reading this wants to help out with sponsorship please drop me a line. We’d be very glad too hear from you.

Yesterday I edited the next Software Freedom Law Show and you can hear that on Tuesday. It includes my friend Bradley Kuhn trying to impersonate Fab and mostly failing to be honest. It’s very funny though. Check it out. In other business I also found time for a trip to Bolton this week and to make myself look stupid on Wii Tennis. The two are unrelated however hehe.

Upcoming:

So, tomorrow there will be more Outlaws live in the evening. I’ll be doing much more work on Oggcamp and I’ll prepare another Rathole Radio for the weekend. I also intend to get distro hopping again on my main laptop and I’m thinking it might finally be time for a BSD. I’ll report back on how that goes and also on my many adventures with the N900. It’s Liverpool LUG on Wednesday night and I know at least one other member has an N900. So we can both “engage smug mode” as Kryten would say, and piss everyone off. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you next week.

Dan

2 Comments

  1. @mike – Thanks, I’ll have a look. I’ve run NetBSD on a server in the past but it’s not going to cut it as my desktop OS, it’s not meant for that though I admit. FreeBSD is a possibility. I’ve heard that PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are good options for new users on the desktop. They aren’t as big as the other projects though as you say. I’ll keep your advice in mind, cheers.

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