Weekly Rewind #5

Alex Furguson
Alex Furguson

It’s Sunday evening so you know what that means kids, it’s Weekly Rewind(tm) time again. I may sound a little croaky as I’ve caught some kind of bug and mostly lost my voice, apologies. I can hear the faint sound of cheering at that news but I’ll be making plenty of noise again very soon don’t worry. As I write this my throat is almost as red as Sir Alex Furguson’s face yesterday after watching his team get thumped 4-1 at home by Liverpool FC, my team. I don’t think it’s quite that red but it’s getting there, I love it when he pulls that face like a bulldog sucking a wasp 😀 So what happened this week? Well settle in and I’ll tell you…

On Monday I recorded episode 81 of Linux Outlaws with Fab and had great fun as always. I was a little unprepared technically this week though I have to admit. A lot of my studio kit was still disconnected after my trip to Leeds so I wasn’t able to play in all the music live for people but it was still a fun show and they seemed to enjoy it, which is all that really matters. Speaking of studio kit,  I’ve bought myself  a second hand Zoom H4 recorder off eBay but missed the delivery yesterday morning, damn! It records straight to SD cards and I’ve wanted one for quite a while. It will function as a backup recorder when we do the show and also prove useful for roving reports and interviews with it’s built-in mics. Really looking forward to having a play with that, I’m such an audio geek. I shipped the synchronized audio tracks to Fab on Tuesday who did a great job of editing the show and releasing it on Wednesday.

Zoom H4 Recorder
Zoom H4 Recorder

At this point I must confess I’m not 100% sure what I did over the next couple of days, I know I did something and got a fair bit off my TODO list, I just don’t know exactly what but I swear alcohol was not involved honest. I was hot on the trail of possible guests for the podcast and while I can’t reveal names just yet we hope to have some exciting interviews for you very soon. The guys at SUN were very friendly and helpful, so there’s a slight clue. One thing I do remember is watching Liverpool demolish the mighty Real Madrid 5-1 at Anfield on Wednesday night, I won’t go on about that having already mentioned the Man U result.

So now we get around to Thursday. Oh Thursday, what a day that was (sigh). Great in some ways and not so great in others. I’ve already written about this in detail but here’s the basic gist for anyone who missed it. Someone posted my Dvorak article to Digg.com where it promptly went nuclear and hit the front page. All this generated a massive amount of traffic which is great but it also drew the attention of someone who directed a DDOS attack my way for a couple of hours. This was all very dramatic and in hindsight actually quite fun, the traffic bump was certainly nice but it scuppered my plans to finish my Debian review on Thursday while I rn about putting my fingers into every increasing cracks in the server. On Friday I dealt with the aftermath, did some general jobs and also got a chance to revive an old netbook with the help of Unetbootin. A very cool little tool which will take any CD image and load it onto your USB stick as a bootable image. It will also download an impressive list of Linux distributions for you and load them automatically if you like, well worth a look I think. I installed Ubuntu onto the netbook using this method but can’t give you any more details at the moment because it’s a surprise present for someone shhh 😉

bkuhniswrong.png
bkuhniswrong.png

On Friday evening I had an interesting time testing out Ekiga and various VoIP configurations with Bradley Kuhn (SFLC) and Matt Lee (FSF). Matt will be joining us on Linux Outlaws 82 and Bradley is kindly letting us use his Asterisk server to record the interview which I’m very grateful for. It was hilarious listening to the two of them go back and forth about the speed of certain train routes in the Boston area. Matt was so adamant Bradley was wrong about this he even took a screen shot off the train company website and posted it under with the file name “bkuhniswrong.png”, that made me laugh, good stuff. You can see the resulting picture to the right there.

Over the weekend I installed Ubuntu Studio 8.10 onto the Linux partition of my studio PC and I’ll be experimenting with that over the next week or two. I previously had 64 Studio installed which I liked but wanted to try out some alternatives for curiosity. I also edited the next episode of the Software Freedom Law Show, finishing that this afternoon. You’ll be able to hear the results on Tuesday when Bradley releases it into the wild.

Upcoming:

Tomorrow I’ll be recording the interview with Matt Lee for Outlaws and also doing the rest of the show as normal. On Tuesday night I hope to head over to the Manchester Free Software meeting to see John Adams speak. This all depends how I recover from this bug but I do hope to be up to it. Moving forward I have some interesting ideas for new features here which will involve videos and screencasts, stay tuned for that and I will finish this Debian review sooner or later it’s inevitable. Much as I love Debian it’s oddly fitting how long it’s taking me to write this article, I’ll only release it when it’s ready hehehe 🙂

Right, now I shall crawl off in search of Lemsip. Take care of yourselves, see you next week

Dan

12 Comments

    • @mjjzf – Hehehe you’re eluding to Simon Phipps and I have to admit I did approach him but he’s off around the world. We’ll have him on in future though. There are quite a few big open source names working at Sun these days and I’ve got a list. I’m talking to people at the company who as I said have been very helpful, they’re keen to work with us. No more hints for now 😉

    • @Alistair – Thanks mate much appreciated. I will let you know, doing well so far. I contacted Simon Phipps but as I said he is busy right now, they came back with a list of very interesting names 🙂

    • @ChrisLAS – Thanks man I appreciate it. Takes a little bit of work but I like to try and keep people up to date, it’s not that much effort really 🙂

  1. @Fab – Thanks, I did struggle a bit this week remembering exactly what I’d done on certain days with all the excitement of Thursday but I got there in the end.

    • @Nik_Doof – Thanks, are you getting recorder envy? 😀 I’m happy to use it for recording LUG talks and such, provided I can get there on time as I said, doh! I will try harder. Could make good content for the LUG website perhaps 🙂

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