Welcome to another Weekly Rewind. This edition could either be considered overdue from last week or early for next, depending on whether you’re a glass half empty or full kind of person. I’ll let you decide. I was trying to think of witty things to link with the number 103 but I’m drawing a blank. The only two examples I can come up with are the Peugeot 103 and the Manchester radio station Key 103, neither of which seem particularly relevant. If you think of something I’ve missed stick it in a comment at the bottom. There’s no prizes, it’s just for fun. Maybe I’ll invent some arbitrary points system like have on Q.I and award you a million points. Anyway, let’s stop this nonsense and begin ploughing our way through the last 10 days or so…

I believe I last left things late on the afternoon of Monday January 16th, so let’s pick up there. I went on to broadcast Linux Outlaws with Fab in the evening. You’re probably tired of hearing me say this but it really does seem odd that we can be 247 episodes into this podcast now. As we close in on 250 episodes and 5 years in the business of pod, I don’t think either of us ever imagined this popularity or longevity could happen. The show was fun as always and I edited it later that week. You can grab it now as Episode 247 – “Poke Him With Your Pipe Old Boy”.

On Tuesday I got a nice visit from my mum and we found some time to catch up. We also did some cooking and she taught me a new chicken dish. I’m not bad at cooking but I think I need to expand my repertoire a bit. I’ve considered a cookery class, maybe I’ll look more seriously at that as the year goes on. I went to band practice in the evening as we prepare for an upcoming 20lb Sounds gig. I won’t go on too much about it now as there’s many more band practices to mention. I did some work on my websites and began the long process of migrating all my music to Bandcamp.com. If you check out danlynch.bandcamp.com you’ll see that all the stuff from my main site is uploaded now. I just created an album and put it all in chronological order. You may wonder why I would choose to do such a thing but as I recently discussed I want to get more serious about music professionally. The migration isn’t all about making money and the album is actually free to download. It just seems sensible to keep things in one place and I’ll be doing the new acoustic album on there soon. I’ll redirect danlynch.org/music and look at incorporating the design. Bandcamp do mp3, ogg, FLAC and almost any other format you could want, plus I really like their simple management tools.

On Wednesday it was the big SOPA blackout protest and in accordance Fab took down Sixgun.org. The most noticeable take down was probably Wikipedia. It seems as though the legislation has been postponed (not killed or abandoned as some believe) and it’s a victory for all involved. We still have a lot of work to do though and the war isn’t over. If anything it’s just beginning. I have to confess I didn’t take this site down or RatholeRadio.org, not because I didn’t believe in the cause, more out of a lack of time and planning on my part. I feel a bit guilty about that but I’m pleased to see the protest had some effect. On the day I was also set to appear on FLOSS Weekly and the TWIT Network took and interesting stance. I joined Simon Phipps to interview James T. Nixon III about file storage solution FreeNAS. The show was in black and white to highlight the protest and we spent a long time discussing SOPA. You can download it as FLOSS Weekly 198 – FreeNAS.

On Thursday I got on with some Drupal stuff on various sites and also attended Jelly Liverpool down at LEAF. In the evening I stopped by the Merseyside Skeptics meeting at The Head Of Steam pub on my way to band practice. They’ve been having some PA problems and getting bad feedback. My friend Siobhan asked me to have a look. I wasn’t there too long and I don’t think I really offered much by way of a solution but hopefully it helped a bit. I then went to rock out with the 20lb boys. On Friday I edited the Linux Outlaws recording from Monday and prepared Rathole Radio for the weekend. Saturday involved more RR prep and then a Liverpool LUG afternoon meet at Studio 2, Parr St. The turnout was low unfortunately and most of the meet involved paying pool with Bob and Steve. Not a bad way to spend your Saturday though by any means. I was scheduled to appear on the Alt3rd Egos podcast in the evening to talk about comics. So I nipped over to Forbidden Planet to do some research. I am a comic book fan and I own plenty of graphic novels but I’m not up on current happenings in the medium at all. I know there’s been a big fuss over the changes to the DC Universe but that’s about it. I headed home and waited for the show but as time went by I began to wonder if I’d messed up the timezone conversions. Eventually I got a message off one of the hosts saying they’d had a family emergency and couldn’t make it, which is understandable. I wished them the best and we planned to reschedule. After this I went to catch up with friends at a whiskey party. I’ve never been to a whiskey party before but my friend Rachel is off to Australia and was emptying the drinks cabinet before packing up the house. I was ashamed to admit that I don’t really drink whiskey, or spirits of any kind for that matter, but it was actually really fun.

On Sunday I headed down to Dale St for another 20lb practice and we got in gear for our gig on Saturday Feb 4th at The Zanzibar.  I’m really looking forward to it as it’s a Saturday night and I hope we can get plenty of people along. It’s only £4 and the doors open at 8pm. If you’re in the Liverpool area come and join us. It’ll be fun. In the evening I broadcast Radio Radio 70 and had fun chatting with the listeners. That was released on Wednesday this week. Check out my slightly ropey version of “RE: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton. I had fun learning that. On Monday it was back to Linux Outlaws and the recording of episode 248. That isn’t out yet at the time of writing but should be soon. On Tuesday I headed up to Edge Lane for a day’s video production course with Chris Chadwick of The Hatch. He’s a top bloke and we had a really good day. Spending time with real video experts makes me realise how little I actually know about this though, I’m trying to get up to speed. I headed to LEAF in the evening with Neil on PodFactory business. We streamed the BigSWIG event live and it all went very well. SWIG is a Liverpool WordPress users group and this was their first big live event. The audio wasn’t quite as good quality as I would have liked due to a last minute workaround. It seems our video conversion box is on the fritz. It did the video as normal but the audio wasn’t playing ball. I had to put that into the internal sound card on the laptop. As some of you will know they never sound good and often pick up mains noise. Despite this the SWIG people seemed happy and I was pleased we could help them out. I’ll be working on that audio problem for next time and packing my USB sound card in case we need it. Finally on Wednesday (25th) I sat down and wrote my first article for Seven Streets, a popular Liverpool news site. I’ve been asked to do a monthly tech column and my article was about indie gaming culture. I don’t know if they’ll think it up to standard but hopefully it’ll be published soon. I’ll let you know.

There’s bound to be a couple of things I’ve missed but for now that just about brings us up to date.

Upcoming:

Tomorrow night I’m be on the rescheduled Alt3red Egos podcast talking about comics and so on. There’s no live stream but I’ll let you know when it’s published as a podcast. On Sunday I plan to finally get down to recording this acoustic album and in preparation I’ve been playing the keyboard a bit of late. I’d like to do some of the songs on piano, so we’ll see how that goes. On Monday night we’ll have more live Linux Outlaws. You can join us at sixgun.org/live from 8pm UK time. There’s chat via the IRC channel and a live audio stream. It’s an hour later than normal as we’ll be recording another Leave Your Hat On with LO community legend Jezra. On Wednesday I have another FLOSS Weekly booked in. You can tune into that live at twit.tv/live from 4:30pm UK time, an hour earlier than usual. At the weekend it’s TEDx Merseyside and I also have the 20lb gig in the evening.  Then on Sunday (Feb 5th) there’ll be another live Rathole Radio from 9pm. Other exciting things are happening right now and I’ll tell you more about all of those as they develop.

Until next we meet, take care of yourselves.

Dan

Hello again and welcome to another Weekly Rewind. Updates and tales from the interesting (or not so interesting) happenings in my life. We’re just over a week from the last article so that’s not bad going. Only 1 day late. Let’s begin with Sunday night, January 8th…

I broadcast episode 69 of Rathole Radio and it went pretty well. There was some lively chat going on in the IRC and it seems the new website is holding up well. I need to fix a few things on there still but you know how these things are. You’re never 100% done, at least not if you’re a hopeless perfectionist like me.

I'm a total night owl

On Monday Jan 9th I got up quite a bit earlier than usual in an attempt to start a new regime. I decided I need to add a little more structure to my life and begin separating work and leisure time more clearly. I don’t have a 9-5 job or any strong routine, outside of podcast schedules I suppose. This makes most people think “lucky bastard, doing nothing all day”. In fact what happens though is I work on 10 different things pretty much all the time. There may not be a clearly defined clocking on time, but there’s also no clocking off time so it’s difficult to unwind. I always work late nights and weekends. I rarely watch films, television, play video games or do anything like that really. Now I’m not trying to make you feel sorry for me, put the violins away. Compared to a lot people my life is very easy. I just think I should make some attempt to get more in sync with the rest of the world. I also hope it will help me be more productive and enjoy some time off. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. Time will tell.

One of the first things I did on Monday in my newly defined office time was arrange to have our band PA collected by courier and taken to Newcastle for repairs. It died on us just before Christmas but luckily it’s still under warranty and they should repair it for free. I also got quite a few things ticked off my list of jobs which I was pleased with. Monday is of course Linux Outlaws night and I got ready to record the show live with Fab. At this point the Internet gods decided to mess with me and we spent the next hour trying to get our VoIP communication working. It seems like it’s either something going wrong with my broadband connection or the new studio PC. I’ve tried to trace the problem but typically it hasn’t happened since. The show went well once we did get started and you can download it as episode 245 – “Dirty I/O”. On Tuesday I continued hammering my way through a back list of jobs. I also released the episode of Rathole Radio from Sunday, fixed some CSS problems on the 20lb Sounds website and edited a video for LEAF. Hopefully you’ll be able to see that soon. I then contacted some venues about booking gigs with the band and there’ll be more on that in a moment.

On Wednesday I joined Randal Schwartz to host FLOSS Weekly 197. My Internet gremlins seemed to have disappeared which was good. Our guest was Sam Aaron of the Overtone project. An Open Source music making framework written in Java. Well worth having a listen to that for anyone interested in synthesizers and new ways of making music. Following FLOSS I headed down to Dale St for a practice with 20lb Sounds and delivered some interesting news to the lads. I almost remember the conversation word for word. I said to them “You know I was gonna look for more gigs? …. I’ve got 3!”. Tony, the manager at The Zanzibar very kindly offered us 3 gigs, all on prime nights and we owe him a big thank you. Combined with the Rathole Roadshow at LEAF in April it means we have the first half of 2012 pretty much fixed up gig-wise. Here’s the line up:

• Saturday February 4th – The Zanzibar, Seel Street, Liverpool.
• Saturday March 3rd – The Zanzibar, Seel Street, Liverpool.
• Friday April 27th – LEAF, Bold St, Liverpool.
• Friday May 25th – The Zanzibar, Seel Street, Liverpool.

Ok so it’s hardly a world tour but it’s a good start I think. If any of you can come along please do, we’ll have a good time and it would be great to see you there. On Thursday we had another 20lb practice but my voice was shot. I’d been developing a cold all week and as I write this I still can’t shake it off. I can just about talk, but only like some weird cross between Ringo Starr and Barry White. Yeah I know, what’s different about that right? On Friday morning I met Neil and we discussed Open Source City business. Still a massive amount to do there but we’re starting to make progress. In the afternoon I got online and recorded a Linux Outlaws special with Fab and our guest Jonathan Nadeau. Jonathan has been on the show before but we dubbed him our official Accessibility Corespondent some time ago. He’s a blind computer user and offers us a great perspective on problems we don’t even think about as sighted people. Plus he’s a great guy and very funny. I don’t want to give the impression that his lack of sight is the only reason we have him on our show. Following that I recorded some lines for a radio play I was recently asked to appear in. It’s for one of our listeners and I’ll get you more details when I can. My character is a wise old warrior and I used my croaky cold voice to full effect. I hope I didn’t go over the top in a Christian Bale Dark Knight style though… “HE MUST HAVE FRIENDS!!!”. Not content with my day’s work I then wrote a Bash script to automate downloading and uploading the raw audio Bradley sends me for Free As In Freedom. It’s just a wrapper for a couple of rsync commands really but I was quite pleased with myself. I posted the code on Pastbin at the request of some people on Google+. It’s not gonna win any awards but it was nice to get it done.

Eddie Vedder, on stage

On Friday night I decided not to do any work and try to stick to my new routine. Instead I watched Pearl Jam Twenty, a documentary about Pearl Jam, one of my all time favourite bands. Back when I was 14 I would have given anything to be Eddie Vedder. Watching the film I realised something. I still want to be Eddie Vedder, some part of me always will. On Saturday I nursed my worsening cold and tried not to do too much. Then late in the afternoon I headed to LEAF for my friend Rachel’s leaving do. She’s moving to Australia with her husband which is all very exciting. It’s a big change but I’m sure it’ll work out for them. I got a chance to catch up with some other friends down there and had a nice evening. I didn’t stay too late and was home in time to watch Match Of The Day, rock and roll or what?

Yesterday I had did a lot of audio editing. First I assembled the next Free As In Freedom for Bradley and Karen. Then I moved on to editing the Linux Outlaws special we’d recorded on Friday. It took up most of the day but it felt good to get it done. I canceled band practice as I still had no voice but hopefully that’ll be back in a day or two. It better be back in time for our gig or we’re screwed. I’m trying to be good and rest it though. No attempts to sing at all while I recover. I’m even trying to talk less but not really succeeding. Come on, this is me after all.

That pretty much brings us up to date.

Upcoming:

In the next week there’s much podcasting to be done. Tonight we’ll record another Linux Outlaws, Internet gods willing. On Wednesday I will host another FLOSS Weekly, this time with Simon Phipps. Our guest project is FreeNAS and I can’t wait to hear more about that. At the weekend we’ll have more live Rathole Radio on Sunday night. Plus, on Thursday 19th it’s back to LEAF as Jelly Liverpool kicks off for 2012. I also hope to get back to singing again once my throat recovers. This cold has totally scuppered my plans of recording an acoustic album quickly. I’ll get that done as soon as I can but unless I decide to make it a Tom Waits tribute it’ll have to wait a little longer. Sorry Folks. I’ll report back on events next weekend I hope. Until then take care of yourselves and I’ll see you soon.

Dan

Hello and welcome to the first new Weekly Rewind since October 30th. It’s seems as if I got to number 100 and decided that was enough. It’s a nice round number certainly but I’m not done yet, I just got busy. It’s 2012 (I’m sure you noticed) and with the passing of the New Year I decided there were lots of things I should really get in order. One of those is keeping this blog up to date more regularly. Hopefully you’ll see these articles a lot more frequently in the weeks and months to come. Let’s talk about the first week of 2012 and what I’ve been up to…

Last Sunday it was New Years Day so I didn’t do a whole hell of a lot to be honest. Stayed at home, watched the telly, ate a nice dinner. The basics. On Monday I prepared for the first Linux Outlaws of 2012 which we broadcast that evening. It felt good to get back into the swing of another Outlaws year and it dawned on me, we’re heading for our fifth birthday this year. It’s not till September but still it’s strange to think we’ve been making the show all these years.

Things went well and everyone seemed to enjoy the broadcast on Monday. We used a new Bash script Fab wrote for the first time. It’s inspired by the one Tony Whitmore made for UUPC and showed off at OggCamp11. It times the segments and plays the musical stings automatically. It seemed to work really well and it’s an interesting addition to the show. The code is available on Gitorious if you want to give it a whirl yourself. Right now it’s very LO specific so you’ll get all our music as well. If you want to make your own version of Linux Outlaws it could be perfect. I edited the audio later that night before bed and got it in sync, then shipped it back to Germany for final editing. It’s not out at the time of writing but hopefully will be very soon.

Album song list, all 22 of them.

On Tuesday I began a list of things to get done this year. Part of that includes recording a solo acoustic album and releasing it properly. I want to use Bandcamp as the main hub but also get the album onto Amazon, iTunes and all those sorts of places. You can read more about the grand plan in my separate post. Comments and suggestions are all welcome. Wednesday saw the first Liverpool LUG meeting of 2012 and it went very well. A good turn out of people and some new faces. Unfortunately Studio 2 was closed so we went to the newly reopened Beer instead. They don’t mess around with names these days do they? “We’ve got a new pub, what shall we call it?…. BEER!”. I’m all for cutting to the chase, but I can’t help thinking a little more imagination could have been employed on this one. With the closure of many pubs and venues around Liverpool before Christmas I also hope this isn’t a bad omen for Studio 2. A place I like a lot.

On Thursday I rehearsed some of the songs for this acoustic album, did some of the Rathole Radio preparation and also went down to LEAF to catch up with the folks there. I also booked the venue for the 3rd annual Rathole Roadshow and I’m pleased to reveal the details. Well, the ones I have so far anyway. Mark your diaries people…

I have no idea about tickets, pricing or artists yet but I sincerely hope some of you will set aside this Friday night in April to join me. It’ll be fun, I promise! I also met up with my band 20lb Sounds on Thursday evening and we had a great rehearsal session. We’re working on a video for one of our unreleased songs which you should be able to see soon. I also need to rearrange the band website and generally get my arse in gear on that front. On Friday morning I had an early meeting at Static to discuss Open Source City and our grand plans for 2012 in Liverpool. We want to build a permanent festival (I recently learned this term) that helps promote Open Source technology but also creative arts and collaboration. It’s all a bit fuzzy at this stage but weekly meetings should help us flesh that out. Again, I’ll tell you more when I can.

Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski

I got some overdue video editing done on Friday afternoon and caught up on other jobs before friends came over for a film night. Andy (from LivLUG) and I came up with the film club idea back when we were travelling home from OggCamp last year. It’s taken until now to sort it out. I think it should perhaps be a monthly thing, if we can’t get together more often. We decided to kick off our screenings with The Big Lebowski. After that we ended up watching Tourette De France, a Keith Allen documentary I have on DVD. Next film on the list is either Clerks or Team America World Police I think. We haven’t decided yet.

Yesterday I finished the preparation work for Rathole Radio, which always takes a lot longer than I expect. Today I’ve caught up on email and generally pottered around. That brings us up to date for now. Let’s look at next week…

Upcoming:

Tonight I will broadcast Rathole Radio 69 from 9pm UK. You’re all welcome to join me if you read this in time. Tomorrow we’ll have more live Linux Outlaws. You can join us at sixgun.org/live from 7pm UK time. On Wednesday I have another FLOSS Weekly booked in. This time we’re talking to Sam Aaron about Overtone, an Open Source audio environment. Sounds right up my street. You can tune into that live at twit.tv/live from 5:30pm UK time. I’m sure there’ll be plenty else to report back on as well. So until next time I hope 2012 is kicking off well for you.

Take care of yourselves.

Dan

Singing at OggCamp11 - Photo by Hannah Greer

Hello again everyone, I hope your 2012 has kicked off well. It seems to have brought with it ridiculously strong winds in the UK, and many other parts of the world. So watch out for flying debris if you’re out and about. I’m writing today to share a plan that’s recently formed in my brain and also ask for your feedback.

In my recap of 2011 I talked about my desire to do more music this year, and also find a way of generating income from it. I don’t want or expect to get rich from music but I am considering ways to make a modest sustainable income. I’ve thought about this a lot in relation to my band 20lb Sounds over the last 18 months. I came up with very rough plans for subscription fan clubs, crowd-sourced tours, merchandise and much more. None of them have yet come to fruition but hopefully they still will. Leaving the band to one side for now though the new plan is fairly simple.

I’ve long threatened to complete a full length album but as yet I’ve failed to do so. Since I was about 16 I’ve made vague promises (to myself and others) to record and release more songs. There’s one problem with this though, I am a TOTAL perfectionist. Ridiculously so. Getting material together that I am both confident in and happy with hasn’t been easy. No longer though. The new idea is to record an acoustic album using just my Zoom H4 portable recorder and a couple of microphones. No overdubs, no extensive mixing, no effects, just live performances. If you’ve heard my acoustic tunes on Rathole Radio then you’ll get the idea. I might bring in a piano and my harmonicas but crucially it has to be stuff I can perform on my own, in one take. That’s the golden rule.

The song list, all 22 of them.

I have a list of 22 songs, only one of which is a cover. It’s a good base of material so if I can’t get 10 or 12 decent songs together there’s no hope for me. I plan to get this recording done in the next week or so and I’m actually rehearsing for it now. The burning question is what to do with it once it’s completed.

In the past I’ve released everything free (in both senses) and I still intend to do that wherever possible. I will use Creative Commons licensing but I might invoke the non-commercial clause, which has long been a dilemma for me. I can’t help feeling that if I really want to make some money out these tunes I will have to keep at least some of them paid only. All this pre-amble leads me to some discussion points I’d like to get your thoughts on:

1. Firstly, would you be interested in this live acoustic album?

2. How would you feel about me using a non-commercial license? I’m thinking CC BY-NC-SA which is common for music. I know some people have idealogical objections to this but it seems the most viable approach.

3. A redesigning of danlynch.org because it’s never really grown the way I envisaged. The blog is about the only thing I use so maybe it should be the heart of the site. I could then out-source the music stuff to Bandcamp. A lot of my favourite independent artists have already done this.

4. I’d like to make physical versions of this album. CD’s are easy but I’d also like to investigate vinyl pressing. Would anyone be interested in those things? If so, what do you think is a reasonable price? I’m guessing some kind of pledge bank scheme will be needed for the vinyl to get it up and running.

5. I’m looking at using CD Baby to get my music onto iTunes, Amazon and other places. Does anyone have experience with this or perhaps a better solution? I’ll also look at Google Music if I can sell stuff outside the US.

Anything else you want to comment on or suggest please go for it. Use the comments on this post to keep it all central. Thanks!

That’s enough for now I think. I have a lot of rehearsing and arrangement to do on these songs. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

Speak to you soon,

Dan

My awesome 8-bit OggCamp shirt, designed by @fabsh

Hello everyone, I hope you’re all well. I thought it was high time I finally got back into the swing of writing. It’s New Year’s Day 2012 as I write this to you and I hope you enjoyed a great festive period. Whatever your denomination, or even if you don’t have one. It’s a perfect time to reflect on the previous year and that’s what I’ll focus on today. 2011 was a good year for me and I’d like to quickly recount some highlights.

Living In The City

I’d been planning to move to the centre of Liverpool for years but it was the start of 2011 when I finally found an available and affordable flat. I signed all the paperwork and got hold of the keys at the end of January, before promptly heading off to Brussels for FOSDEM. I didn’t even have time to move much stuff in before leaving. One of the first things I did upon moving to the flat though was get my stereo connected and listen to “Living For The City” by Stevie Wonder at a good volume. It seemed appropriate. It’s not long till my 1 year anniversary of being a city slicker now. I still love it here and fate (and landlord) willing, I’ll be here a while yet.

FOSDEM

At the very beginning of February I set off for Brussels. FOSDEM is the largest meeting of Free Software developers in Europe and it was my first time attending. Many people had told me about the event but I’d never had the chance to go before. Over 5000 geeks took over a University on the outskirts of Brussels and it was an amazing weekend. I made some great new friends and had a little more fun than I probably should have in the bars and pubs of Brussels at early hours of the morning. If you want to read more about that experience check out Weekly Rewind #79.

Rathole Roadshow 2011

The Rathole Roadshow 2011 Team Photo

Back in Blightly I performed a gig at LEAF on Bold St with my band 20lb Sounds. It was great fun and LEAF would increasingly become a part of my life as the year went on. Keeping on the musical front I organised the 2nd annual Rathole Roadshow at The Zanzibar in April. It went really well thanks to the help of good friend Adrian McEwen and others. I played with the band and we also had great performances from I Am Not Left-Handed plus Rob Warren & friends. Rob’s band later took on the name You Me Tree and they’re going from strength to strength. Keep an eye out for them in 2012. The whole event was streamed live in video and audio, with many people around the world joining in. That’s a real buzz I must say. If you want to hear the gig you can do in Rathole Radio 51.

Red Hat Summit – Dublin

In early June I went over to Dublin for the Red Hat Partner Summit thanks to a kind invite from Jan Wildeboer of Red Hat. He was a gracious host, as was everyone else at the company and I had an amazing time. I played live music on my acoustic guitar, took part in some sessions, and even got to interview Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who it turns out is a lovely chap. You can hear the interview here, and read more about my Dublin adventure here.

Interviewing Alexei Sayle

Alexei Sayle and I

I did quite a lot of interviews in 2011 but none springs to mind more readily than meeting  a hero of mine. Actor, Comedian and Writer Alexei Sayle. We sat in the office at News From Nowhere on Bold St and chatted for about half an hour. It was all a bit surreal but he was very nice and once we got over a slightly shaky start he opened up to me I felt. It was a good candid interview. We talked about politics, the entertainment business, writing, being from Liverpool and much more. You can listen to the audio on Rathole Radio.

OggCamp

OggCamp11 was a highlight of the year for me. It was the biggest and best yet. In case by some chance you don’t know, OggCamp is an event organised by the combined powers of the Linux Outlaws and the Ubuntu UK Podcast. This year we held it in Farnham, Surrey and it attracted around 450 visitors. That’s quite amazing and meeting some of those people, discovering their stories and why they came to OggCamp in the first place was a thrill. No plans for this year yet but I’m sure the inevitable rumblings will start soon. I wrote a massive 5000 word account of my OggCamp weekend under the title “Fear & Loathing In Farnham”. It makes a good read if you have the time.

Music

Singing at OggCamp11 - Photo by Hannah Greer

2011 was a year filled with music, which always makes me happy. I played a lot of music, both with the band and on my own. Wrote quite a few songs, recorded some of them and did some gigs. I also saw a lot of great gigs and none better than Jimmy Cliff at the Liverpool Philharmonic in September. If you’ve never seen this man sing than you’ve missed out. He is a true reggae legend and possesses one of the greatest voices I’ve ever heard. As we progress into 2012 I hope to get more serious about music professionally. You might think that now I’m into my 30′s it’s a bit late for all that, but I hope not. I constantly see and hear people who aren’t as good as me with a guitar or microphone. That sounds really arogant but it’s the truth. It’s taken me a long time to feel comfortable saying that in public and now I suppose it’s time to see if I can really do this or not. In light of that I’m working on some new 20lb recordings and also planning an acoustic solo album. With any luck the acoustic album will be done in a couple of weeks. I’m going to keep it stripped down to live performances. One man, one guitar, one take, no gimmicks. I’ll let you know about that in due course.

Podcasting

Podcasting continued at full steam in 2011. I’m not even going to attempt to recall how many shows I actually recorded. Linux Outlaws broke the 200 mark and now we’re nearing 250 which is just crazy. We were voted best podcast by Linux Format magazine and that was a proud moment for us. Rathole Radio has also continued strong. I’ve just launched a new website for it and I still hope to improve that. RR is very much a cult show I would say. It doesn’t get anywhere close to the LO listenership and I’ll be trying to think of some more creative ways to expand the audience in 2012. Perhaps video will come in more. I shouldn’t forget of course to also mention my frequent appearences on FLOSS Weekly with Randal, Arron, Simon and others. That’s always fun and I’m very grateful for the opportunity they’ve given me. I arranged a few shows and hosted on my own as well in 2011. Last but of course not least I continue to produce Free As In Freedom for Bradley and Karen. I’m proud to do so and I think the work they both do is vital to the cause of software freedom.

Other Random Stuff

Now we reach the point where I can’t remember fine details so I’m just gonna share some other quick random memories via bullet points:

• Helping to run many Ignite, Jelly and Social Media Cafe events in Liverpool.
• Getting into video production with my good friend Neil Morrin and kicking off our PodFactory project.
• Playing lots of darts and getting quite good at times. I hit three 180′s this year, not in a row, over the course of the whole year. So I doubt Phil Taylor is panicking just yet but perhaps I’ll try to join a team in 2012.
• Fixing the network infrastructure at LEAF and generally geeking out
• Walking around Aldershot at 2 in the morning wearing a large Stetson hat is a vivid memory.
• I wrote a song about the unrest in Egypt.
• The LEAF birthday party in November was great fun.
• Spending time with my wonderful friends and family. A corny one I know but there really are so many people who make my life more worthwhile in ways they don’t even realise.

Looking Forward:

So where does it all go from here? Well, I wish I could tell you for certain. My life has changed a lot in 12 months but there’s still so much to do. I’d like to pursue music more seriously as I said earlier, do more writing, get some program code written and release some of the myriad projects that congregate in the back of my mind, produce many more podcasts and learn more about video production. Some of these things are already coming together. I’ve been asked to write a technology column for the popular Seven Streets website and that’s a great honour. I hope I can do it justice. I’ve also become a lot more involved with the wonderful folks at LEAF as I mentioned. I’ve been taking some video for them and I hope we can produce some really great content for their website this year. That will hopefully link in nicely with the PodFactory stuff I do with Neil. I’d like to get that off the ground and maybe even make a viable business out of it in 2012. Fingers crossed.

There’s all kinds of things I want to do. As usual I have 400 ideas a minute and I can’t keep up with them. I suppose most of all for 2012 I wish for health and companionship. If I can fix those things I’ll be a very happy man.

Thank You!

I wish the best for all of you and I thank you for reading my rambling blog posts in 2011, if you did. I’ll try to get the Weekly Rewind back into swing starting this weekend and I’m determined to keep the momentum up in 2012. Thank you for reading this and have a marvellous 2012… no matter who claims the world will end. Let’s deal with that when we get to it, race you!

Take care,

Dan

Wow… well this is embarrassing isn’t it? You skip writing one post and all of a sudden it’s 2 months later. I’ve been fairly busy since the end of October, that goes without saying. But I’ll endeavour to write up a proper review of my year over the next week. This is just a quick post to let you all know that I’m still very much alive and to thank the kind people who told me they miss the Weekly Rewind. Yeah there were a few, honest. I’ll get back into regular blogging swing in the New Year.

I do have a small treat for you though. One of things I’ve been doing lately is video editing and animation. So here’s a quick stop motion clip I did a few weeks ago. This was only a test to see if the method worked to be honest but it came out looking ok.  I can’t really draw but that’s supposed to be an L appearing and fading away. I’m going to use a technique like this to make titles for some videos I’m doing. I also used my dartboard as it was the only thing I could use chalk on in my flat. I know, I’m just so manly, ha ha. The lighting isn’t great so you might need to squint a bit.

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and New Year and as always thanks for your support throughout 2011. Take care of yourselves and I’ll race you to 2012

Dan

Wow, we’re finally here. The 100th Weekly Rewind. It’s been a long road and by my calculations longer than it should have been. If I’d managed an update every single week since starting this series in early 2009 we’d have hit triple figures some months back. But you know what? I firmly believe quality is more important than quantity in all parts of life. Often I’ve just been too busy and it reminds me of one of my favourite quotes. I believe it was John Lennon who said “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans”, or words to that effect. Anyway, the last couple of weeks have been interesting and eventful, so let’s talk about them.

We last spoke on Thursday October 15th and I’d like to pick things up from the following weekend. I mentioned that I was heading up to Barcamp Blackpool and I duly did so on the Saturday. I always forget how close Blackpool is to Liverpool really. In my mind it seems far away, possibly due to childhood memories of long car journeys. It’s only about an hour in the car but when you’re a kid that feels like an eternity, there’s only so much entertainment you can glean from the 400th game of I Spy. I arrived just before the event kicked off which is a novelty for me and immediately ran into friend and cohort Les Pounder of Blackpool LUG. I’d taken my Zoom H4 recorder along at his request. He had 2 other audio recorders and we decided to try and cover as many different talks as we could by splitting up. As always there was a great atmosphere and the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Casino is a good location for a Barcamp. For the uninitiated a Barcamp is basically an unscheduled event where people come along and pitch talks or sessions about whatever they want. It tends to be dominated by geeky topics but is by no means restricted to this. There were people making cakes, badges and all kinds. It was great to see Peter Cannon of The Dick Turpin Roadshow there and catch up. He’s a good mate and a top podcaster too. He may be embarrassed by me saying this but the stuff he’s been doing with Matt Copperwaite in the last few months is really good. He brings an interesting (sometimes controversial) perspective to Open Source topics and I think we need that in the community. We caught some talks and hung out with the Blackpool LUG crew in their Ubuntu demo area. At some point Les came over and said “Dan, do you fancy doing a podcast?”. With so many podcasters and generally opinionated people around it made sense. After lunch we spotted that one of the talk areas – known as The Flying Handbag – was free on the schedule board. I talked about all this in my recent post but apparently this area was comically named after a well known Blackpool gay bar. I’d never heard of it but then I don’t go to Blackpool often, I liked the name anyhow. As it turned out someone else was using the space when we arrived and they didn’t look willing to move. We wandered around and finally found a reasonably quiet spot by the gents toilets. Somehow I always end up recording interviews around the toilets at conferences. You have to try and find somewhere quiet and it always seems to end up being in some back corridor, usually by the toilets. At least I’m consistent. So we camped out on the stairs for about 45mins and recorded a great discussion. See the full post to find out more and download the show.

(BC Blackpool photo below by Jez Page)

The Hodge & Ruby Gem playing Rock Band @ BC Blackpool

As I always say with Barcamp events one of the best things for me is meeting and chatting with people outside the FOSS community. I love our community don’t get me wrong, but we can be too insular at times. We have to be able to relate to others and discuss things properly, otherwise we’re going nowhere. Pete had travelled up with a mate of his – also called Dan – who works for Microsoft. You may shudder at that thought but he’s a lovely bloke and he confirmed my view that there are some great people working at MS, even if the actions at board room level leave a lot to be desired. We had a good chat about all kinds of things and I really enjoyed it. Perhaps the company would be better off if they let the decent people there have more influence. I also got to see Jon Spriggs (AKA JonTheNiceGuy) and his growing family. He and his wife have rather wisely named their young son Daniel and it was lovely to see them all doing well. This is rapidly turning into a post solely about Barcamp Blackpool. It is well worthy of it’s own post but I don’t have time for that right now, so let’s press on.

On the following Sunday I did some more practice with my band 20lb Sounds and then headed home to do another live Rathole Radio in the evening. The show went very well and everyone seemed to enjoy joining in. That’s the best part of it for me, seeing people enjoy the music and also each others company. You can grab Rathole Radio 63 right now and hear for yourself.

Keeping with podcasts there was another live Linux Outlaws the following Monday and also the long awaited second episode of Leave Your Hat On with LivLUG cohort Andrew Bates. Fab edited both of those together and released them as the week went on. On Wednesday night I got something to eat with Adrian, Andy and Neil. We also went for a few drinks. Ending up at one of my favourite locations, The Grapes. It was a strange night and my memory is fuzzy but I do remember requesting that the DJ play War by Edwin Starr, then dancing around with the landlord singing “What is it good for?! Absolutely nothing. Say it again y’all!!” hehe

On Thursday it was Jelly at LEAF again and I went down to check that the wifi kit was all working properly. I’ve also been working on some video and audio stuff with them, we hope to use that as promotion for the venue. In keeping with this goal I recorded a great gig there on Saturday night with Neil. The event was run by local promoters Harvest Sun and featured an American band called Other Lives. I hadn’t heard of them before but I was thoroughly impressed. Well worth checking out. All of this recent video activity has made me realise one thing important though, I’m really going to have to build myself a faster studio computer. Openshot has done a great job for me but editing together DV footage from 3 different cameras with a separate audio track requires some real CPU grunt. I don’t think the old AMD processor in there right now is up to it. Hopefully I can get hold of a new motherboard and something like an i5 processor.

Getting back to 20lb business, I released the first new studio recording in quite some time recently. It’s had a really nice response for which I thank everyone. The song is called Rip It Up and you can grab it from our website. We also just wrote another new song in rehearsal that is going to be really good. It’s tentatively titled “Enemies” at the moment but that might change. I’m really proud of the lyrics and I feel like I’m finally getting to grips with writing decent lyrics now. It’s something I’ve always found to be the most difficult part of songwriting but I think age helps, and perhaps the confidence it brings. Our drummer Ross is away in China for a while so I plan to work on other recordings with Gary and hopefully also do some acoustic stuff on my own. I might even do some acoustic videos since life has drawn me in that direction of late.

This Wednesday I appeared on FLOSS Weekly again with Randal. Our guest project was web2py which I didn’t know much about until I researched it. It’s a Python web framework originally developed for academic purposes by Massimo Di Piero and he explained to us how it’s expanded from there. It’s a really good discussion and I encourage you to download the show if you have any interest in web frameworks, Python or even High Energy Physics, which Massimo teaches.

I’ve also been grabbing all kinds of stock video footage from LEAF this week. Yesterday I watched a panel event in the afternoon and nipped back in the evening to catch up with the Craft Creative people. It was interesting stuff and hopefully you’ll be able to see some of the results in the coming fortnight. I’ll keep you posted.

As always there’s a ton of other stuff I could tell you about but time is pressing on us. So let’s leave it there and I’ll endeavour to share more of this video, music and other stuff with you ASAP.

Upcoming:

It’s Friday afternoon as I write this and I’m hoping for a slightly quieter weekend. There will be more live Rathole Radio on Sunday night. Plenty more Linux Outlaws and other Sixgun Productions stuff, along with hopefully a chance to install and review the new Ubuntu 11.10. I’ve played with it on other people’s machines but I should really do a meaty review. I’ll let you know about all this when time allows. Until then stay safe, look after yourselves as the cold winter nights draw in and be good. If you can’t be good at least hide the evidence.

See ya,

Dan

Hello all, apologies for the lack of Weekly Rewind updates lately. Things have been crazy. I do have a rather special treat for you today instead. A podcast recorded at Barcamp Blackpool on October 15th 2011.

Let me fill in a little background detail to this. I was in Blackpool catching up with my fellow podcaster Pete Cannon of Dick Turpin Roadshow fame. Our good friend Les Pounder of Blackpool LUG came over and asked “are you two up for doing a podcast?”. Of course we were but had no idea what about or what the structure would be. We also didn’t book a space on the barcamp schedule board. This was all very last minute. One of the talk areas at the barcamp was named The Flying Handbag after a well known Blackpool gay bar apparently. This caused much hilarity. We saw it was free and planned to record our discussion there. Upon our arrival another bloke was already there waiting to start his talk and he didn’t look too impressed by our rag tag bunch.

So off we wandered in search of another recording location and ended up sat on the stairs by the gents toilets in Blackpool Pleasure Beach Casino. You can hear what followed next. A rambling and fun conversation between 6 opinionated blokes, with some additional comedy value added by the really loud hand dryer noise coming from the toilets.

Ladies and gentlemen we present….

DOWNLOAD MP3

Running time: 50mins (ish)

The culprits are:

• Les Pounder
• Peter Cannon
• Dan Westley (Our Microsoft spy)
• Tony Hughes
• Heeed (Michael)
• Dan Lynch

This was a one-off thing really and I don’t know if there’ll ever be more. We all live in different parts of the UK so it might be tricky. Hopefully we’ll get together at another event in future and chat some more.

NOTE: Before a ton of people leave angry comments that there is no Ogg version, I am aware of this. I just don’t have the space, time and bandwidth right now to do two versions and I chose mp3 because more people can play it. Like it or lump it Feel free to make your own Ogg version though or do whatever you want with it.

You can leave comments here and let us know what you think.

Enjoy!

Dan