Planet LivLUG

100. Carry a notebook at all times to make a new 101 list

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I carry a notebook with me everyday to make a note of any new goal ideas.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: For the most part, generating this list of goals was quite easy, however, I’m sure I will come across further goals I could add to the list. The easiest way to keep track of any new goals I want to achieve is by carrying a notebook at all times and making a note of the new ideas should I wish to do a further 101 in a 1001 days.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

065. Send a secret to Post Secret

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I send a secret to Post Secret.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: Every Sunday, I read Post Secret. Generally, there is at least one secret on there per week that could have come from me. I’ve never sent a secret into Post Secret, but I do have a couple of secrets that I’d love to send in and get off my chest. I’m not necessarily bothered about them being posted on the website, but I do think sending them in would be very liberating.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

034. Scrobble 100,000 songs

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I scrobble a total of 100,000 songs.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I love music. My tastes are pretty eclectic, and I can’t imagine a day when I don’t listen to some form of music be it on the radio, my ipod / cd’s or on the numerous music channels on the TV. It would be nice to see just how eclectic my music taste is, and to keep track of the music I listen to. I don’t believe there is a better way than by scrobbling tracks, but I believe I need a specific number of tracks in order to consider this goal complete. The tracks I’ve listened to will be updated on my Last FM page.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

053. Become first aid certified

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I obtain a first aid certificate.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I used to be in the British Red Cross as a child, and I’ve always wanted to get a full first aid certificate.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

097. Take a photography course

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I complete a photography course.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I’d love to be better at photography, be it using film or digital. I hope that doing a photography course would teach me about composition, and about using different photography techniques to create some amazing shots.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

093. Buy a digital SLR

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I buy a digital SLR camera.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I bought Andy a Nikon D60, and I’m completely jealous of it. Seriously, it is amazing. So I’d love to buy my own digital SLR camera, preferably a Nikon, so I can share lenses with Andy.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

099. Watch every Sci-Fi film mentioned in the Rocky Horror Picture Show

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I watch every film that is mentioned in Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I love this film. It is my all time favourite film, and I know virtually every word to it. There are loads of sci-fi films mentioned throughout the film, particularly in the lyrics to the songs, and I would love to watch every cheesy B movie mentioned within Rocky Horror.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

075. Stop drinking carbonated drinks for 1 month

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I go one month without drinking any carbonated drink.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I am a complete coke-pepsi-fanta addict. Anything fizzy and caffeinated I will drink. I know that it’s not good for any part of me to be drinking these drinks, so I hope by giving them up for a month will enable me to give them up for longer, hopefully permanently.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

069. Have tarot cards read

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I have tarot cards read.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I’m quite sceptical about tarot cards and whether they are accurate or not. A couple of my friends swear by them though, and I am curious enough to want to try them out.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

101. Have a party to celebrate the completion of 101 goals, or the end of the 1001 days, or both!

2010-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I celebrate the completion of the 1001 days or the completion of all of my goals with a party with my friends.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I think completing the 1001 days / 101 goals would be worthy of celebration, so that’s what I intend to do.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

Photo Scope available for free

2010-07-21T11:19:17+00:00

I have just released an ad supported version of my photo location tracking android app. If you are interested in photography and would like a way to keep track of photo opportunities check it out.

Weekly Rewind #62

2010-07-05T14:42:58+00:00

Hello everyone. This week’s update finds me sat enjoying a sunny Sunday evening and unable to move after the delights of my home made beef Cannelloni. Ok not completely home made, I have to admit the Cannelloni was bought from a shop but the sauce and other things are original. It was delicious and I’m now stuck to my chair with a full belly. Putting this fascinating information aside though let’s talk about what happened this week.

On Monday I released a new episode of Rathole Radio. Episode 29 to be precise, the one I pre-recorded before England’s dismal World Cup defeat to Germany. I had to put the media files for this show on my Dreamhost account because I’d hit my data limit for the month on Libsyn. I can host up to 250mb of files on there which might seem a lot for a fortnightly podcast but in reality it works out at 2 episodes of the show. It’s released at 128kbit quality so the music is listenable, if not pristine, and also there’s an ogg and mp3 version for each one. I usually scrape in at about 240mb a month. It seems that because months are not exactly 4 weeks long over time you end up with 3 episode release dates falling in one calendar month. I could up my Libsyn account to the next level but it seems pointless for the odd time this happens and besides it would be expensive. All fascinating stuff for you I’m sure but this is really a long winded way of explaining why you might experience a slightly slower download for this show. It should all still work fine though.

Static Gallery, Liverpool

On Tuesday I got to work on one of my first custom Drupal modules. It’s been a bit hit and miss so far, but I’m attempting to use the hook_user function to log visitors to a site into an external forum at the same time. This is done via SOAP messages and web services. Once (if) I get it all working I’ll explain the process. I needed to do this for one site and decided it would be good to make it a reusable module with some simple settings in the admin area. It’s got some way to go but I’ll let you know how it turns out. In the evening I went out to see the band and we worked on more new material. We should be recording some of the songs soon to share with the world. I really hope people will like them as much as I do. Time will tell. Wednesday saw the inaugural meeting of Social Media Cafe Liverpool at the Static Gallery in town. I headed over to see some friends there and ended up operating the sound desk and also performing the crucial and highly skilled job of pressing the button to change slides for one speaker. We had a talk about data analysis from Liverpool Daily Post Digital Editor (that’s a title and a half isn’t it?) Alison Gow up first. Alison helped me promote OggCamp and my gig earlier in the year. She’s a great speaker and everyone enjoyed it. There was an interesting talk about Foursquare followed by WordPress guru Dave Coveney which the crowd seemed to appreciate. I stood behind the bar for the talks and even ended up serving drinks at one point. I actually quite enjoyed being barman for a brief moment there. I was even asked by someone later on if I “owned the bar”, which was funny. I wish. There were about 70 people in the venue which doesn’t sound a lot but it was packed and also a really hot night. I was sweating like mad. The whole event was a success and the plan is to hold them every month I believe with interesting speakers and guests. I look forward to it.

On Thursday night we did the first live episode of Linux Outlaws in 2 or 3 weeks. It felt amazing to be back in the saddle, if you’ll pardon the pun. We recorded for about 2 hours and chatted to people in IRC as we went along. It made me realise just how much I’ve missed doing the show during our short break. I’m still working on editing that but it should be out very soon I promise. On Friday I nipped over to a printing shop in Liverpool to pick up some Linux Fund posters for Barcamp Blackpool. I was asked if could take them with me and being the nice chap that I am I agreed. That brings us neatly onto Barcamp Blackpool actually.

JonTheNiceGuy giving his talk

On Saturday morning I set off for Blackpool in the car, only to realise about 15mins into my journey that I’d left my phone on the bedside table at home. So, after a little boomerang trip I was off Northwards again. I haven’t been to Blackpool since I was a kid and for some reason it’s always seemed like a massive journey up there in my mind. In fact it’s a lot closer than I remember from childhood, only 90mins in the car. That’s less than the average episode of Linux Outlaws. Perhaps it’s because I was a kid it felt like a longer time back then, you get bored quicker and it’s not long before the “are we nearly there yet?” instinct kicks in. Anyway, I followed my sat nav until I saw the Blackpool Tower on the horizon and I knew I was in the right place. The Barcamp was held at the casino in the Blackpool Pleasure Beach theme park. They’d arranged discount parking behind the casino itself but being predictably late I missed all the spaces, so I drove around a little bit and found a £7 all-day car park not far away. After claiming my badge and checking in I was informed that it was “pie time”. The mind boggled as to what that could mean but it turned out it literally meant free pies from a van in the car park. I know how to time and entrance. I bumped into my good mate JonTheNiceGuy (AKA Jon Spriggs) and we took our place at the back of the now massive pie queue snaking around the car park.

A sunny day at Blackpool Pleasure Beach

It was a really hot day and Blackpool was packed with tourists as you’d expect. I saw the donkeys all lined up getting their EU sanctioned 15mins break. I don’t know if it was the EU or someone else but I remember all the fuss when the law was brought in saying animals had to have a set break. It must have been a slow news week. The first session I caught after lunch was an introduction to sign language and it was fascinating. I learnt to sign my name and most of the alphabet, I say most of the alphabet because I’ve forgotten some of it now, not because they didn’t show us the whole thing. I don’t know why but learning those few signs made an impression on me and it’s definitely something I’d like to continue in future if I can. Next I went over to see another mate Les “Quarter” Pounder at his Ubuntu demo area. I also saw @heeed, another podcast listener and OggCamp survivor helping out. Les showed me his Joggler (no that’s not code for anything). It’s an O2 touch screen tablet which runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix beautifully. The only thing I can’t understand about the Joggler is why they don’t have a battery pack for it. You have to plug it in and I’ve been told that’s because it’s designed to be more like a digital photo frame than a mobile device. Next up it was Jon’s session about his Campfire Manager software in a nearby room. I really enjoyed his talk and I’m a fan of Campfire, we used it to organise OggCamp after all. It seems not everyone in Blackpool is so keen though and there’d been some heated words on the mailing list over it’s use for the barcamp. We had a good discussion, together with some of the people who weren’t as keen and I think some good suggestions we made. Later in the day I scrounged an Ubuntu 10.04 CD from Les and installed it on my laptop. Right in the middle of the main room as there was a talk going on. I’ve been so busy this year that my distro hopping has really suffered, it feels nice to be on a different distro at last. I’ve even moved the window buttons back to the right with a quick Gconf hack. Some people may think that petty of me but it really wasn’t natural having the window controls on the left. When I want to close a window I automatically click the top right corner and I’m not alone in that.

I chatted to many other folks around the venue and generally had great day. I have to say Gemma Cameron (@ruby_gem) did a great job of organising it all and it was good to finally meet her in person. They even had bars of Barcamp Blackpool rock which was a great idea. For foreign readers and anyone else who doesn’t know what rock is (in this sense), it’s a type or hard candy sweet that Blackpool is known for. It’s basically pure sugar as far as I can tell. I stayed for the evening party where we had a buffet and live entertainment from a magician, the £500 free bar didn’t last long but that was nothing to do with me. I was driving, but I enjoyed a free coke or two. So after a great day I went to see if my car was still there and enjoyed the drive back home on quiet empty motorways. I made it back in just over an hour which must be some sort of record. Sunday was a lot quieter and it needed to be, I was tired after a long week. I spent most of it getting used to the new Ubuntu.

Upcoming:

Next week we’ll have the release of this Linux Outlaws episode I’m working on right now. There’s another LivLUG (Liverpool LUG) meeting on Wednesday night at 7pm and I’ll be there. Come down to Bold St and join us if you’re within striking distance of Liverpool, details and directions are on the website. There’ll be more Rathole Radio on Sunday and much else besides no doubt in the coming days. For now though I think I’ve gone on enough so I’ll speak to you next week with more dispatches from the front line. Take care till then.

Dan

Weekly Rewind #61

2010-06-28T23:31:24+00:00

Hello folks, welcome to another of my Weekly Rewinds. Just a little slice of what’s been happening in my exciting (probably not that exciting) life of late. It’s been an odd week really, up and down. Truly embarassing World Cup showings from the England team, balanced out with writing new songs and having fun with the band. I suppose that’s how life is supposed to be though isn’t it? It’d boring otherwise. So, let’s get on with it.

We didn’t do a live Linux Outlaws on Monday night because of the many World Cup distractions, but we’ll be back with avengance very soon don’t worry. The last recorded episode was released over the weekend by Fab. Episode 156 “Blame The Uwe Seeler” tipped the scales at 2 hours long, so there’s been plenty of content lately. We’ve had good feedback and I hope everyone enjoyed it. I’ve realised how much you miss doing the live show and interacting with people over the last couple of weeks. I’ve haven’t had this many free Monday nights in a very long time. If this keeps up I may have to take up knitting or something… nah, I’ve had plenty to do actually. On Tuesday I ended up doing some unexpected Javascript hacking (the best kind I’m sure you’ll agree) for a new website. A friend asked me to help them out and it was a tougher job that I’d expected. For a guy who started his programming life with Java I really should know more about Javascript. I had to fix up a scrolling image carousel and it proved very tricky. Before the fellow geeks deluge me with comments and emails, I know the main thing Java and Javascript have in common are the first 4 letters of their names, but I still feel I should know it better. You can’t deny that the syntax is similar if nothing else. I was victorious in the end and I got the function working as needed. Perhaps I could be good at this programming thing if I tried harder, I used to be ok at it hehe.

Sticking with that theme I did some Drupal work on Wednesday and fell even deeper in love with Drush. I’ve talked about this before but if you’re managing Drupal sites and you don’t you Drush you need your head looking at. Being able to update all your modules and even the Drupal core with a simple command “drush pm-update” is a godsend. There are far better developers than I who could tell you about this, but I’ll try to write some little articles or even make a screencast soon. In the evening I went down to see the band and we worked on a new song. More on that later.

Chester Uni Coat Of Arms

Thursday involved much more admin and hacking during the day and then Chester LUG in the evening. I watched Stuart Burns give his talk and demo on RPM and Yum, a subject I know a little about but I’m certainly no expert. He showed us some cool tricks and it was a very enjoyable talk. Going back to my old stomping ground of Chester University for the LUG meet felt strange. It’s actually the 2nd time I’ve done it now but 10 years ago I was beginning life as a student there. How time flies. Friday was a little quieter during the day as I caught up with jobs and then tried to relax a bit. In the evening I headed over to Liverpool to see the Liverpool Acoustic Live gig at View Two Gallery in Matthew St. I met a my friend Anna from Scribblepool there and we watched a great show together. Any of you who know Liverpool and particularly Matthew St won’t need to be told this, but it’s one of the nosier and busier parts of the city on a Friday night. Lots of shouting and groups of drunks hanging around, what we lovingly refer to around here as “nob ‘eds”. I’d never been to the View Two gallery before, or even heard of it, but it’s like a little oasis between the noisy bars and clubs. I turned into the little entrance door opposite Cavern Walks and preceeded up the many stairs that followed, nearly broke the handle off the door and terrified the two ladies at the desk, but eventually made it to my destination. Inside was a wonderful art gallery with all kinds of interesting paintings, sculptures and artifacts. I’ll definitely have to go back and look around the place properly sometime.

The gig was held on the top floor and man it was hot up there. Not much ventilation either as 50 of us crammed in to see the show. I finally managed to meet Graham Holland of the Liverpool Acoustic Spotlight podcast and he greeted me with the line “I was listening to you in the car today” which seemed funny. I’ve chatted to Graham online a few times but we’d not met in person so it was good to finally put a face to the name. We were treated to 4 great acts starting with Wirral singer-songwriter Pete Cunningham, followed by female singer Dogstar and then Mark Byrne. I hadn’t heard of Mark before but his set was incredible and culminated with probably the best version of “Bad Moon Rising” (by Creedence Clearwater Revival) I’ve ever heard. I’ll be chasing him to come on Rathole Radio at some point in future for sure. The final act was Canadian singer Lorelei Loverage and her band The Harem. They were brilliant and played for about an hour I think in the end. The whole group were clearly talented musicians in their own right, all 7 of them. She had 2 backing singers, 1 playing a banjo, 2 percussionists, a bass player and an electric guitarist, to go with the acoustic she was playing herself. The sound they made was terrific and the room had a really great acoustic to it I thought, no pun intended. I had a fun night and met many interesting people, I’d recommend it to anyone. Check out the website to see future gig line ups. They play all of the artists for the upcoming gig on the podcast the month before so you can get an idea of what to expect, and it works very well. The venue is only small and tickets are very limited but it’s well worth trying to get hold of one if you can.

Justice, Howard Webb Style

On Saturday I spent a fair bit of time preparing my playlist for Rathole Radio on the following day and then relaxing in the sun watching football, it’s a tough job but someone has to do it. I actually pre-recorded the show on Sunday lunchtime because of the big England V Germany game later on. My good friend Howie of Lone Gunmen fame played the recording for me on the stream at the usual time. I went to watch the match with the band and a load of other friends. It turned out to be a pretty depressing affair as we were deservedly smashed by Germany 4-1. Despite what you may hear about legitimate goals not being given we needed a lot more than that to bail us out this time. Tonight everyone has been raving about the performance of the English referee Howard Webb in the Brazil v Chile game. How we cling to the straws of success. Perhaps we should give up football alltogether and see if there’s a refereeing World Cup we can enter instead, we might do better at it. Despite the obvious downer of the match the band got together afterwards and we played for about 3 hours straight, almost getting 4 original songs together. It turned the day around for all of us I think. Once we have the songs properly worked out the plan is to record them and finally share what we’re doing with all you lovely people. I have a feeling some of you will like it. I hope so anyway. That brings us neatly up to today, so you’re all up to date.

Upcoming:

We’ll be doing a live Linux Outlaws on Thursday night this week instead. It’ll be the usual time of 19:00 UK time so mark your diaries. I’ll see you there in the chatroom for some fun. I can’t wait to get back into the swing of a live show again I must say. I’ll be doing much more music, hacking and other shennanigans throughout the week. Apparently Wednesday is Social Media day I’ve just been told. I’m dubious about the over use of the term “social media” these days but I think the idea is a good one. There’s the first ever meeting of the Liverpool Social Media Cafe at Static Gallery 6pm on Wednesday. I’ll be heading along to see what it’s all about and catching up with many good friends from the Liverpool geek scene. If you’re in town come and say hello. I’m not sure exactly what other delights this week holds for me yet but I’ll relate those to you next time. Till then take care of yourselves and been good… and if you can’t be good hide the evidence… or get a good lawyer… or both, yeah probably do both

Dan

Weekly Rewind #60

2010-06-20T22:53:48+00:00

It’s time for another Weekly Rewind and we’ve made it to the big six zero woo hoo. We should have gotten here a few weeks earlier but I’ve missed a few posts. I’m sat here on a sunny Sunday evening watching the delights of the 2010 Football World Cup in South Africa. I say “delights”, but to be honest the tournament hasn’t been great so far. The first round of matches were pretty awful and it’s hard to remember a good one. Thankfully though it has improved and we’ve seen more goals and excitement in the second matches. I know not all of you are interested in football so I’ll move on, but I warn you there may be (read: will be) more World Cup talk as we go on

On Monday I released a new Rathole Radio. I haven’t heard much feedback from it yet but I think people enjoyed the show, there’s been plenty of downloads. I enjoyed making it anyway and the show really relies on listener input, song suggestions, emails, live chat and taking part in votes. I want it to be a 2 way experience wherever possible and I’m thinking of ways to finally make the website the all encompassing digital masterpiece I want it to be. I have some ideas for a suggestion box and perhaps even bringing a social networking element to it all with Drupal. We’ll see how that progresses and of course I’ll keep you up to date on developments. We didn’t record Linux Outlaws live on Monday night because of the World Cup schedule (oops I mentioned it again), but fear not as we recorded a show on Tuesday. I did the preliminary editing and shipped the audio files back to Fab the next day.

On Wednesday I was busy doing CSS hacking and other bits of coding for a project. It’s been a good chance to get deeper into Drupal development and hopefully it’s something I can explore more in the future. I’m trying to brush up on my PHP skills and I’m working my way through a number of programming books, at varying rates of speed, if the word speed can really be applied here. I think I’ve talked about this before but for all the stuff I’ve done with Drupal, WordPress and other PHP web applications, my knowledge of the language itself is still a bit lacking I feel. I’ll fix that in time though. On Thursday night I went back to Fallen Industries rehearsal rooms to make some noise with the band. It went pretty well but it was a very hot night and we were all tired from a long day. It showed at times I think, playing with the band is always good fun though and I’m still looking into getting more gigs. We played our first original tune “Jimmy Carter” through a few times. I’m working on other new ideas and I hope we’ll have something decent recorded and ready to present to the world fairly soon. I need to get my guitars serviced and fixed up in the meantime. I could probably do it myself but finding time is tough and I think they’d benefit from a professional eye. I’m also looking into getting a new slightly bigger amp. It’s one of those things with bands, there’s always a battle for who can be loudest just underneath all the niceties hehehe. I don’t really want a larger amp to be louder though, just to get a fuller tone and a bit more bottom end in the guitar sound even at lower volume. I’ll let you know what I decide on.

Drupal 7 On My Server

On Friday I finished off some outstanding jobs and did various bits of server admin, making development clones of some Drupal projects I’ve done back on my own server. This should allow me to test out updates and changes without breaking live sites. I could do without angry phone calls asking “WHERE’S THE WEBSITE??!!!”. I learnt quite a bit from all the server wrangling and I know a few people want me to talk more specifically about programming projects and experiences here. It’s something I’m just getting back into more recently. I’ve learnt the power of Drush this weekend I must say. The name is short for Drupal Shell and it’s a module I have used in the past. I wanted to administer and upgrade about 5 different sites on one server but wasn’t looking forward to all the copying of files, messing around and goat sacrificing that involves in Drupal. I simply installed Drush on the server and copied the file into my system path. Then I could call Drush from anywhere I wanted and use the package manager to do all hard work for me. I broke sites a few times, swore a bit, scratched my head and fixed them again for most of Friday. I’ll try to give more in depth details on Drush and other Drupal stuff in coming weeks, but for now there’s a list of articles on developmentseed.org. I also downloaded a development version of Drupal 7 and tested that out. It’s really slick and they seem to be moving down the WordPress route with the admin controls (see the pic), a long overdue improvement in my view. I found I had to upgrade my version of MySQL to support Drupal 7 and it seems I was well out of date anyway with MySQL 4.1, official support for that actually ran out a few months ago, doh! I used the tools in CPanel (yes I’m a cheat) to build a new version of MySQL 5.0 (5.1 would have broken a few sites sadly) and then recompile Apache and PHP to match. After some initial problems with the YUM package manager locking on my CentOS box I got it all working, or so I thought. So now happy with MySQL 5.0, Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.3.2 I went off to watch the England game that night. The less said about that match the better to be honest, it was truly truly woeful. We played so badly that the lads were struggling to pass the ball 5 yards to each other. It was like watching a bunch of school kids… a bunch of school kids who’ve never played football before and don’t even like it. We drew 0-0 with Algeria and I the nation was united in a collective facepalm. We can still go through to the next round by beating Slovenia on Wednesday, but the way this is going who knows if we’ll do that. I always try to be optimistic. It wouldn’t be a proper World Cup is England played well know would it?

On Saturday I discovered my server tinkering the day before hadn’t gone fully to plan. I thought I’d checked every website to be sure it worked but RatholeRadio.org was definitely broken. Thanks to Fab and all the others who pointed that out to me online. I discovered in the end that my WordPress theme was incompatible with PHP 5.3.2 and the upgrade from 5.2 had broken it. I swapped the theme and fixed that error pretty quickly but then discovered an old phpBB site was badly broken by old incompatible code. I couldn’t really do much to fix that without rewriting some major customizations to the system. I didn’t fancy it to be honest and instead I rolled PHP back to version 5.2.13 which fixed everything. You live and learn I guess and I still enjoy poking around with servers, how much they like it though is anyone’s guess. Over the rest of the weekend I’ve sorted out some housework, watched a lot of football, played a lot of Super Mario Bros Wii and generally relaxed. It’s good to cut loose sometimes.

Upcoming:

I’m not sure what’s happening with the Linux Outlaws schedule just yet but we’ll have plenty of shows coming out over the next few weeks don’t worry. I’ll let everyone know more as soon as I can. I’ll be hacking plenty more PHP, CSS and… whisper it.. Javascript in the coming week which I hope will go well. I’ll examine Drupal 7 some more but sadly I don’t think the modules and other things I need will be ready to use in time for an upcoming project. I think it’ll be a few months before we can seriously start moving over to Drupal 7 but it’s showing promising signs. I’ll be playing with the band some more, hopefully writing new tunes and there’s also Chester LUG on Thursday night. I’ve missed quite a few meetings now since Christmas and despite previous failed promises to fix it, I’m determined to succeed this time. I also have tickets to see the Liverpool Acoustic Live show on Friday night at the View Two Gallery in Matthew St. Come down if you’re in the area it looks like a fun night. Till then take care of yourselves and I’ll catch you on the flipside. Right now I think I hear the washing up calling me, though I’m doing my best to ignore it

See ya,

Dan

Leaking CV joint boot/gaiter repair on the MK5 VW Jetta/Golf

2010-06-19T17:16:13+00:00

Please note that this procedure is definitely not for those that have never wielded a spanner before; if you are in any doubt whatsoever consult a qualified mechanic. This procedure involves disassembling part of the suspension, which is absolutely safety critical. If you break it, it’s not my fault.

I recently did the 50k mile service on my 2007 Jetta and noticed that the wheel and suspension components were covered in grease. Closer inspection revealed that this was leaking out of the CV joint boot around the larger metal clip. The CV (Constant Velocity) joint transits drive from the engine to the wheels and has to deal with the fact that the wheels aren’t in a constant position due to moving around on the suspension. It consists of the joint itself, on the end of the drive shaft, which is covered in grease — with a large plastic boot over it to keep the grease in, and water and dirt out. The boot is kept in place with a small metal band at one end, and a large metal band at the other end.

As I did not fancy paying approx £150 to get this fixed, and I try to do as much maintenance as I can myself, I read quite a lot of material including:

Erwin (official VW manual – useful, but often requires the use of proprietary VW tools)
The VW Golf/Jetta Haynes manual (pretty poorly written and hard to follow as there are very few diagrams)
Various forum resources such as this, this, this and this thread on UK-MKIVs.

Before I started, I was not sure if the boot was damaged and would have to be replaced entirely. After withdrawing inspection, and removing the large metal band, it was clear that the boot was not damaged, simply the large metal band had come loose and started to leak. However, as a large amount of grease had leaked out, I needed to re-pack the joint with grease, and re-fit a new metal band.

You’ll need:

a decent jack
a decent large working area
socket set
torque wrench
CV boot pliers such as the Laser 4136 CV boot pliers
Latex gloves and kitchen roll for wiping up grease
a reasonably well stocked tool kit
Long breaker bar (600mm recommended)
CV boot kit (approx £20 from parts desk of VW dealers – part number 1K0 498 203) – this comes with a boot, small and large bands, circlip, and two washers
A new hub bolt (approx £3 – part number WHT 002 795)
Three new suspension link bolts (approx £0.50 each – part number N 103 320 02)

Please check with the dealer the correct parts for your car before buying them, they will be able to check it from the VIN number of registration number.

Start by chocking the wheels on the other side of the car from which you are working. I was working on the near side (passenger side), so chocked the front and rear wheels on the off side (driver side). Use Latex gloves (pack of 100 available cheaply online) throughout to ensure that you don’t have to spend the next week scrubbing your hands.

Remove the centre cap from the alloy so that you can access the hub bolt. There are two types of hub bolts, one is a hexagon bolt, the other is a 12 point. Mine was 12 point. The hub bolt retains the drive shaft in the wheel bearing. Removing the centre cap from the alloy is easiest to do by taking the wheel off, and pushing it out from the other side using a screwdriver or similar.

If you took the wheel off, re-fit it, and lower the car to the ground so that it is sitting on its wheels again.

Pictured is the Laser 4136 CV boot pliers, the 12 point socket piece to remove the hub bolt, and the centre cap after being removed.

Start undoing the hub bolt. This is done up very tight, which is why the car is still on the ground. However, you must not loosen the hub bolt by any more than 90 degrees whilst the car is on the ground, or you could damage the wheel bearing.

After you have loosened the hub bolt by 90 degres, loosen the wheel nuts, jack the car up, support it on axle stands, and remove the wheel as normal.

Most instructions say that you should mark with a pen or small screwdriver the position of the ball joint plate relative to the suspension link arm, and around the bolts (marked in red in the picture below), so that you do not need to get the tracking adjusted after reassembling. However, the holes in the suspension link arm on my car are not elongated at all, and the plate will only fit back in one position, so this did not seem to be needed for me. Worth doing any way, in case your car is different.

(Sorry for out of focus; my Canon 17-85mm lens cannot focus at such short distances).

In focus shot from another angle.

You next need to undo the three bolts that retain the ball joint plate onto the suspension link arm. These bolts must be replaced with new ones when refitted.

Fully remove the hub bolt. You will have to pretend that the hub bolt is removed on the photo below; this was taken out of order as I didn’t want to get grease all over the camera.

Being careful not to damage the drive shaft splines, push the drive shaft out using something fairly large and round; I found that a socket extension worked well.

Once the three bolts have been removed, you should be able to push the suspension up slightly, allowing the suspension link arm to fall down. It is only these three bolts that prevent the suspension from rotating around. So, after the suspension link arm is removed you should be able to rotate the suspension slightly to the right, about the shock absorber, allowing you to fully withdraw the drive shaft from the hub. This should give you enough space to work on the CV joint, which will be positioned roughly where the brake caliper is now. Remove the brake caliper also if you need extra space to work on the CV joint.

You will now be able to remove the large metal band from the CV joint using a screwdriver. It was at this point I found out at this point that the CV joint boot was not damaged at all, it was just that the metal band had become loose enough to leak. I therefore did not remove the CV joint from the driveshaft. I simply repacked the joint with grease (from the CV joint kit) and fitted a new large band.

Tightening up the band sufficiently can be tricky, it is stainless steel and needs a large amount of force to deform it to tighten it. Some resource say that you should be able to use a nail puller, but I found that it was not possible to apply enough force to tighten the band, even pressing down with as much weight as possible. I therefore improvised something out of a piece of wood and a satellite dish mounting bracket to force the handles of the nail puller to close.

Although this allowed me to apply more force, it broke the nail pullers, even though the band was still not very tight.

I strongly recommend that you use a proper CV joint pliers such as the Laser 4136. This has two 1/2″ drive holes in the arm so that you can insert breaker bars to gain more leverage to tighten it up more. I would recommend that you tighten it up by hand as much as you can, before starting to put things back together. This involves:

rotating the hub back into its straight position
re-inserting the drive shaft into the hub
re-engaging the suspension link arm with the bolts in the ball joint plate. This is done by lifting the suspension up slightly, until the holes align.
refitting the three new bolts, and use a torque wrench to tighten up to the correct torque – 60Nm according to the VW manual.
inserting the new hub bolt into the driveshaft and tightening it up; this will draw the drive shaft in as it is tightened. Put the car into gear, so that the drive shaft cannot rotate, to allow you to torque it to the correct torque – 70Nm according to the VW manual.

You can now work on further tightening up the large metal band. Put the car into neutral, and use the brake disc to rotate the driveshaft until the tightening loop on the metal band is accessible.

Attach the pliers.

I found that the best way to further tighten was to put the torque wrench up to its maximum value, insert it into the bottom square hole (the breaker bar was too long and can only be attached at 0, 90, 180 or 270 degrees, which isn’t flexible enough), and attach the socket arm to the upper hole with a short extension arm.

Pull down to tighten the jaws around the band, making sure that the extension arm does not unduly upset the balance. I found it easier to have only half of the jaws of the pliers touching the clamp at at time, and tightening each side at a time.

After tightening and wiping away excess grease.

You can now put the wheel back on, lower the car to the ground, and torque the hub bolt up further – it must be rotated a further 90 degrees, in addition to the 70Nm it was torqued whilst still in the air.

A final picture, showing all of the grease that previously leaked out and made a mess all over the alloy.

Weekly Rewind #59

2010-06-14T17:30:28+00:00

Hello again everyone, hope you’re all well. I missed another update last week and it seems to be becoming a habit lately. I had a solid run of weekly posts last year and I hope to resume that soon but a busy life gets in the way sometimes. I’ve had a good couple of weeks though with many interesting events, so let me tell you about them.

Last weekend I booked a rehearsal room with the band at a place called Fallen Industries on the Wirral. It’s nice and handy for us and they have a really cool set up (see pic below). On Saturday afternoon we blasted out the tunes for 3 hours in the blazing heat. I was tired after that I can tell you, but it was well worth it. Being able to play at full volume with a good PA, drum kit and amps makes a big difference and can only help our development I think. We’ve been working on our first original tune called “Jimmy Carter”. It all stems from a practice where somebody mentioned him and I immediately piped up with the trivia nugget “Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer”. It just sounded like the opening line of a song to us, so I went off and got working on turning it into one. We’ve got the structure sorted now and after some deliberation the lyrics are also in the bag. I’d written comedy verses about Jimmy White and Jimmy Hill but we decided to just keep the tune about Jimmy Carter rather than force in jokes. Ross came up with a great couple of verses. I can’t say I knew a lot about Carter but a quick look on Wikipedia provided plenty of material for lyrics. He’s related to Berry Gordy the Father Of Motown and also the late great Johnny Cash. You’ll be able to hear a decent recording of the song soon hopefully.

Fallen Industries

On Sunday I headed over to Liverpool for my friend Rosie’s birthday and somehow I ended up taking everyone to Riley’s to play pool. It was a good night. On Monday I got some work done during the afternoon and then prepared for the Linux Outlaws live show as usual. We had a good crowd and I think I everyone enjoyed it. I edited the recording between other jobs over Tuesday and Wednesday then shipped it back to Fab. It was released on Friday as episode 155 “There Is No Fabian Stable”. On Thursday night I went down to see the band and work on songs with the acoustic guitar for a change, we went unplugged. I think we could have 3 or 4 decent original tunes in the next month, if we manage that I’ll record an EP or something for everyone to hear. I should start looking for another gig really and get that booked too. It’s been 6 weeks since our first gig and we can’t rest on our laurels forever.

Most of the rest of my week was taken up with Drupal development for a couple of different sites. There was a bit of drama last thing on Friday as I got a call to say one of the sites wasn’t loading, and a very busy site at that. Just what you need at 16:30 on a Friday afternoon. After talking to the server admin and doing a lot of serious head scratching, I finally discovered the problem was an external service with an embedded widget on the site. Thankfully it wasn’t my fault for once. I disabled it and then dashed out to catch a train to Liverpool. I went for dinner with some friends at the Ego restaurant by the Philharmonic and enjoyed a lovely pepperoni pizza. We went to a pub around the corner afterwards and had a good night, until I realised I had 8mins to make it to Central station and get the last train home. I dashed off and just missed the train by literally seconds, not all was lost though as I managed to get the New Brighton train to get me much nearer home. I jumped in a taxi from Birkenhead in the end and made it home in good time. It wasn’t expensive either but I need to keep a better eye on those train times in future!

A Merseyrail Train

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time preparing Rathole Radio which was broadcast and recorded last night. Lot’s of friends turned up to listen live and that’s always nice, I’m really thankful for all the wonderful support I receive. I’m actually just working on the release of that episode as I write this. Multi-tasking like a good-un. I also watched England play out a disappointing draw with the USA in the World Cup on Saturday night. I hope we’ll improve as the tournament goes on, we need to, otherwise our World Cup will be over very quickly. Considering what a football fan I am it’s suprising it’s taken me this long into the post to mention the World Cup, but it started on Friday and it’s safe to say I’ll be watching with great care.

Upcoming:

We’ve actually decided to postpone the Linux Outlaws live show tonight because of the World Cup schedule, we’re dirty layabouts I know We’ll have a rearranged show later in the week. Stay tuned to our updates on Status.net for more news on that. I’m planning to hit the rehearsal room with the band again this week and test out the new song at full volume. I’m also just about to the release Rathole Radio so go and have a listen to that.

Photo Scope android app released

2010-06-11T18:37:29+00:00

I have now released an android app I have been working on recently. Photo Scope allows you to take photos with your phone and keep track of where each one was taken, so you can return when you have your camera or maybe when the weather is better and take the perfect shot.

You can take a look here for more details.

Changing the pollen filter on the MK5 VW Jetta/Golf

2010-06-10T13:06:38+00:00

The pollen filter filters air coming from outside the cabin via the ventilation system. As it’s heavily used throughout the year, in winter for demisting the windscreen, and in the summer for running the air condition, it can get dirty quite quickly.

Faults that can arise from a dirty filter include bad smells, lack of air flow, windscreen misting up.

Removal and replacing of the pollen filter is very easy, and is done entirely from the cabin. The only tool that is needed is a T20 torx screwdriver.

The part number for my Jetta 2.0 FSI is 1K2 819 653 B and should be obtainable from the parts desk of the VW dealer for around £15; check with the dealer for the correct part if you’re not sure.

Start in the front passenger footwell by undoing the three screws along the top of the picture, on the line just above the light.

There are also two plastic screws in the middle of the foam sheet which also need to be removed.

You should now be able to remove the foam sheet by unhooking it at the front and pulling it out.

At the back there is a plastic cover over the pollen filter, slide it to the left (away from the centre console) to unhook it. (The stuff on the carpet is all debris that fell down after removing the plastic cover).

You should now be able to withdraw the pollen filter from above the location where the plastic cover was removed from.

Re-fitting is a simple reversal of the above.

A comparision of the old and new pollen filter (old at top, new at bottom). The old wasn’t too bad, it was last replaced around a year ago.

WW2 Pill box on the shore of Llyn Ogwen, Snowdonia

2010-06-04T21:38:39+00:00

Whilst out walking in Snowdonia recently I noticed this pill box/bunker on the shore of Llyn Ogwen, Snowdonia – on the other side of the lake from Tryfan and the A5 road. It is located at OS grid ref SH 655 605 (latitude 53.125115, longitude -4.010738).

It is constructed from concrete and stone, and was presumably fairly well camouflaged, with a layer of soil and grass/moss on the top.

Unfortunately, the entrance has been filled with boulders making access difficult/impossible.

Old Lighthouse, Dungeness

2010-06-03T11:57:10+00:00

The Old Lighthouse in Dungeness took three years to build, starting in 1904. It was finally decommissioned in 1960. Today it is open to the public.

View from the top of the lighthouse out towards France. In the centre is the Dungeness station of the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway.

Interior view of the Lighthouse looking upwards.

Thankfully the lenses and lights at the top of the lighthouse are still in place.

Large bulbs:

Making telemarketers go away with Asterisk

2010-06-02T19:48:11+00:00

I run my own private Asterisk system for the house. This is in conjunction with a Linksys PAP2T (which is cheap, supports SIP, and you can plug two normal BT phones into), and Sipdroid running on my Android phone.

Although, this might sound a little over the top for a house, it does have a number of nice features. Like being able to make persistent nuisance callers go away.

As an example:

I edited /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf and found the section relating to my incoming call provider.

[draytel] exten => xxx,1,Dial(SIP/chris&SIP/mobile&SIP/flat,25) exten => xxx,n,Answer() exten => xxx,n,Wait(1) exten => xxx,n,VoiceMail(1001&1002) exten => xxx,n,PlayBack(vm-goodbye) exten => xxx,n,HangUp()

This code rings the two SIP extensions for 25 seconds, if there is no answer, answers the call, waits a second, before leaving the message in mailbox 1001 and 1002.

I modified it as follows:

[draytel] exten => xxx,1,GotoIf($["${CALLERID(num)}" = "01252555029"]?monkeys,s,1) exten => xxx,n,Dial(SIP/chris&SIP/mobile&SIP/flat,25) exten => xxx,n,Answer() exten => xxx,n,Wait(1) exten => xxx,n,VoiceMail(1001&1002) exten => xxx,n,PlayBack(vm-goodbye) exten => xxx,n,HangUp()

You’ll also need to add the monkeys section:

[monkeys] exten => s,1,ringing exten => s,n,Wait(10) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeysintro) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,Playback(tt-monkeys) exten => s,n,HangUp

This will ring the phone for 10 seconds, answer, and then play monkey noises, then hang up.

So, now, if the incoming caller ID matches “01252555029″, they are taken away by monkeys. The phone doesn’t even ring.

Bliss.

The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust London: an icy January 2010

2010-06-01T00:03:11+00:00

On 4th January 2010 I visited the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust London. It was cold, and as a result significant amounts of the water was frozen. This meant that the birds had to practice their ice skating skills rather than just swim around. Camere was the Canon EOS 7D with the 100-400mm L lens. Here are a few of my favourite pics.

Weekly Rewind #58

2010-05-30T22:36:11+00:00

Hello again everyone, it’s been a while since I updated you with events in my little world and I apologise for missing last week’s post. Things have been a little hectic around here. I expected they’d calm down after OggCamp but in fact the calm didn’t last very long at all, about 5 days to be precise. I’m busy again now with various endeavours but I’m having fun, and that’s the main thing. So let’s get into what’s been happening.

Last weekend there was a big BBQ here to celebrate my 30th birthday. Many friends and family came to eat, drink and be merry, and I think we all succeeded pretty well. It was good fun to catch up with everyone and a fitting way to see in my 30th year. It wasn’t actually my birthday till Tuesday (May 25th) but we’ll get to that soon. After a very late night I pulled myself together and went down to practice with the band on Sunday afternoon. It was an epic session in blazing heat and we all lost plenty of fluids that afternoon. It was only about 30C which I know will make many readers in genuinely hot countries laugh, but when you’re crammed in a tiny little room with no ventilation and you’re trying to ROCK, it’s plenty hot enough trust me. I tried out my new foot controller for the Line 6 Pod XT I use on my guitar. It makes a big difference to the sound of a 3 piece band like ours and we can really change the dynamics a lot more. Being able to stomp on a distortion pedal at key moments in a song is great fun. It makes me feel like a teenager again, bringing back memories of buying my first BOSS distortion pedal when I was 13, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. I also somehow found time to edit the Software Freedom Law Show on Sunday and do a bit of other stuff.

On Monday night it was Linux Outlaws live as usual and we had great fun with that. We’re past our 150th show now and it still seems to go from strength to strength, something I’m really thankful for. The IRC chatroom was buzzing away and everyone had a good time I think. Late on after the show I did the preliminary editing and synced up the recordings before shipping them back to Fab for editing. I also did a bit of work on a Drupal site I’ve been developing. This became a theme right through the week as I’ve been doing a vast amount of Drupal work lately. It seems this area might grow into something big and I would really like to brush up on my PHP and Javascript knowledge. I’ve bought a ton of books to help with that in the last 2 weeks. PHP has always been something of a blind spot for me really, I’ve just never gotten that far into it. I’ve done plenty of programming in other languages such as Java, Python, Ruby, C# and even VB.net, but for some reason I never really bothered with PHP despite the popularity of the LAMP platform. I’m making amends for that now and working my way through this pile of books. So I intend to master it in due course. I’ll let you know how that goes.

FLOSS Weekly 121 (feat me)

Tuesday was the big day, my 30th. I took some time out from work and just relaxed really. I caught up with friends and family and received an overwhelming amount of kind wishes from people on the net. I thank you all for that. My parents took me for a meal in the evening and I had one of the finest steaks I think I’ve ever eaten in my life at a nearby restaurant. It was lovely. Fab also published a special Outlaws episode dedicated to Fedora 13, released the same day. On Wednesday it was back to the grindstone, or the virtual grindstone in this case working on websites. In the evening though I was privileged to be a guest host on FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz. I’ve gotten to know Randal pretty well over the last year and he’s a great guy, it was fun to host the show with him. We interviewed Jonathan Simpson of Freenode about what they do. Despite some monumental Skype delay on my part I think it went fairly well. I’ve had a lot of really nice comments and I’d like to do the show again in future if the chance arises. The 3 second delay on my voice will have to be sorted out as it did ruin my comedy timing though, I think that’s possible with some network tweaks. It was released as FLOSS Weekly 121 and you can download it here.

On Thursday evening I went over to Liverpool to see the Sugar Hill Gang live at The Masque, a venue I know well. I once did a gig in there to an audience of one person, just one person in a massive empty room, but that’s another story. The Gang were brilliant and I also enjoyed the support acts immensely, including a local ska/rap group called The Elementals. I shall be looking them up for Rathole Radio I think. I was a little shocked when the Sugar Hill Gang picked up instruments and started jamming in the middle of their set. I didn’t know they could play, and man they can really play. They rocked the house with many of their hits such as Apache (not the web server) and Rapper’s Delight, the first successful rap record ever made. I lost count of the number of times they shouted “somebody… anybody… everybody, scream!!!”, which of course we duly did. I’d almost lost my voice by the end of the night from shouting “hey… ho!” and many other things, that coupled with waving my hands in the air (like I just didn’t care) was very exhausting. Many thanks to my friend Will for getting me a ticket as a birthday present, I couldn’t have asked for a better gig as the first of my 30s. On Friday I did much more Drupal hacking, amongst other things.

Over the weekend I prepared Rathole Radio and spent many hours trawling through music to find something that made the grade. I enjoy listening through records but some people mistakenly think I just play and claim to like everything I hear. I don’t, I just don’t slag off stuff I don’t like, I choose not to mention it and move on. I filter out plenty of music that’s not much good in preparing each show and I like to keep the quality up. If I like a record I will play it regardless of what other think, but I certainly don’t like everything. This evening (Sunday) I broadcast and recorded the show, which went well. That brings up right up to date.

Upcoming:

There’s plenty going on in the next week and I’ll be doing a lot more PHP hacking. I’ve been asked to talk about that in detail but I can’t do that just yet as the site I’m working on hasn’t been launched. Once I’m at liberty to discuss these projects I will, you can be sure of that. Exciting times lie ahead I think, it seems I’m becoming a serious web developer again after some quieter years. Tomorrow I’ll be out playing with the band again and working on new material. I’ve written a couple of songs and I’ll let everyone hear those once they’re ready. We’ll also do Linux Outlaws live in the evening as always. You can join us for that at LinuxOutlaws.com/live from 7pm (UK). On Wednesday (2nd June) there is Liverpool LUG and if you’re in the area please come down and say hello, we’d love to see you. We’ll be at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold Street from 7pm. There are other things happening in the next week that escape my memory now, but I’ll fill you in on those next time. Take care of yourselves till then and I’ll see you soon

Dan

Weekly Rewind #57

2010-05-10T18:08:21+00:00

Hello all, it’s been some time since I updated you properly on what’s been happening. Now that the OggCamp dust is beginning to settle though and life is moving back towards normality ( or my version of it anyway), I can afford to reflect a little on how things went. I’m not going to get into a detailed breakdown of every day events for the last 3 weeks I’ve missed, that would be like torture, for you and me both. So I’ll just concentrate on telling you my story of the OggCamp weekend itself.

The week leading up to OggCamp was very busy as I welcomed Fab and his party of four Germans to my home. We managed to find room for all the guests fairly easily with almost every room in the house doubling as an emergency bedroom, apart from the bathroom that is, nobody had to sleep in the bath but it was close. We even had an extra guest as Anna arrived the next day. It was nice to have a house full of people and everyone seemed to enjoy it, but I must confess it’s nice to get your own space back too after a week. I prepared for the Rathole Radio gig by practising with the band in between other jobs. On Friday 30th of April I headed over to Liverpool with my mate H and a car full of audio gear. He brought his decks to DJ at the gig and was a great help overall in setting things up. We dropped the kit off at Bad Format, did a little prep work and then headed on to meet Andy (another old friend and partner in crime) at the Everyman Theatre. He kindly lent me a lectern for OggCamp and we loaded that into my little car then took it to The Black-E. Now, the weather had been nice 2 weekends in a row leading up to this and I’d already given up any hope of it being sunny again, but I hadn’t quite expected the torrential downpour we had on Friday. As we tried to move the lectern from the car into the Black-E it was already filling up with water. I joked to H “If this rain keeps up we’ll have to turn this into a canoe!”. From there I dropped him back at Bad Format and ran backwards and forth with various kit throughout the afternoon and evening. I was also planning to check into the apartment we’d rented with friends for the weekend. Luckily Kevan managed to take care of this though and it took a load off me. A very nice place I must say and I enjoyed staying there, a large city centre apartment on two floors with plenty of beds and a cool open plan kitchen/lounge. It made a great base for a few of us but I still don’t understand why they could only give us one key to a 5 person apartment. We toyed with the idea of going to Rapid and getting some extras cut, but didn’t really get time in the end.

On Stage With Reflect Harmony Group

Back at Bad Format I met Attila The Stockbroker on his way into the club and we had a good chat. David Rovics turned up a little later and we got everyone sound checked and ready for the gig. Adrian McEwen and Andy Goodwin were helping me with the technical side of things. I’d been promoting the gig as and interactive online experience and we’d put a lot of effort into that side of things, even making a little robot audience member to interact with people. Adrian did some amazing work with an Arduino and some other components. There was however one slight problem. The club only let me know a few days before the gig that their phone line had been cut off, and with no phone line there is no Internet, great! I tried to arrange to hop onto the university wireless next door, that failed. I talked to other neighbours in the area but in the end we were stuck using a 3G connection by the window. Adrian and Andy tried really hard to get all this working and by about halfway through the gig we had a connection thanks to them and JonTheNiceGuy. I was so busy that the audience bot fell by the wayside as I tried to hold it all together introducing bands and generally being host. The Reflect Harmony Group were a brilliant opening act and I really enjoyed performing a song with them at the end of their set. Up next I introduced Attila The Stockbroker and David Rovics who did their thing for about 90mins to the delight of the crowd. During that time I was still trying to fix up the Icecast stream, video camera and other things. We got the radio stream up and many people heard it later I’m pleased to say. I played a set with my new band and that went down really well. We all enjoyed it and hopefully we’ll take the band a bit further and do more gigs, I’d really like that. Time will tell. I’ve released some of the audio from the gig in a special episode of Rathole Radio which you can download from the website. I hope you enjoy it.

After the gig I went out with David & Attila to show them to their hotel and sort out a few other things. This took a while longer than I’d expected and sadly the battery on my phone died at the same time. I had the key to our apartment, my friends were back at the club unable to contact me and wondering where I was. Luckily they managed to get into the apartment by talking to the people at the desk, but I was still gone a couple of hours. I didn’t realise but this really worried them quite a bit, leading to all sorts of crazy theories that I’d been killed or mugged and other such things. I was perfectly fine though and once I got back I convinced them of that. I know Liverpool pretty well and that’s not to say that something couldn’t happen to me here, but I keep my eyes open and I know the people and places to avoid well enough. I was sorry I’d scared them but the phone dying at a crucial moment was just bad luck. I collected some of the stuff from Bad Format before they locked up for the night and headed back to the apartment for some sleep.

Rafflecasting Again (Pic by m0dlx on Flickr)

Bright and early the next day OggCamp work began. I started at 7:30am I think but can’t really be sure as I only went to bed about 4am. We all headed to the Black-E just up the road and began sorting out everything for the day. There were lots of people running around and plugging things in, setting up stalls, testing projectors and much more. The main stage was pretty much ready to go which was great, I picked up my crew radio and proceeded to run around putting out various fires and seeing that things went well. We got a wireless network set up thanks to the wonderful folks at The Linux Emporium. There seemed to be a healthy number of people queued up outside by the time we opened the doors at 10am. Simon Phipps kicked off the event in style with his keynote about digital rights in the modern world. The speech was entertaining and well received, it led into many more great sessions across the weekend on various stages. I didn’t get to see many of the talks myself as there was always something to be done and a crew radio blaring down my ear. That’s one of the things you learn in organising events though. You don’t really get time to enjoy them, it’s about making sure things run smoothly and the people who attend enjoy it. Having said that I did get to moderate a panel discussion on the main stage in the afternoon which was a lot of fun. Sadly Ian Forrester from the BBC was ill and couldn’t make it. As he and Simon Phipps were lined up to be on the panel we had to quickly fill the slots with some excellent people. I roped in Ade Bradshaw and Chris Proctor of LugRadio fame, along with Samantha Bail and Brad Pierce they did an amazing job. Finally, to close the first day we did a raffle on the main stage. There were so many great prizes it was hard to keep track of them all in my mind. Here’s the ones I remember: we gave away some Viglen machines, a Aleutia fanless PC or two, a 1.5 TB MyBook external hard drive, some Ubuntu backpacks and a stack of books from Apress and Wiley amongst other things I’ve forgotten. Last but not least it was my great pleasure to give away the amazing cuddly Ogg cushion made for us by Beccy Newborough. For me this was by far the coolest prize, and I said so on stage. It’s gone to a good home and I hope we’ll see more people creating them from the pattern Beccy made.

After a brief trip back to the apartment it was off to Studio 2 at Parr St for the evening festivities. A very cool venue indeed for any party and one of my favourite bars in the whole town. I was delighted we were able to get the place and while we didn’t have exclusive use we certainly took it over with OggCampers. It’s part of a working recording studio where many gold and platinum discs have been recorded over the years, I think a few people were impressed by that. I had a great time catching up with friends and I also tried to get around the tables and do my bit for the community. I wanted to get people’s thoughts on the event so far and make time to chat to them all for at least a short while. It’s hard to do this with a large group though and remembering everyone’s name isn’t always easy. I think I’ve become better at that and being in a room full of people who know your name while you’ve never even met them before is quite an experience. Everyone seemed to have fun and I left at about 1am to get back to the apartment with my gang. I believe some of the others were out much later but after working on the gig Friday night I was happier retiring to the apartment for a quiet drink and chat with friends. I forget what time I went to bed but it was much earlier than Friday I’m pleased to say and we had some amazing laughs in our little luxury pad, Will, Anna, Kevan, Alistair and I. The TV only seemed capable of showing one channel but it really didn’t matter as we had no time to watch it anyway.

Fluffy Ogg Made By Beccy Newborough

Sunday didn’t start quite as early, we left a lot of the stuff set up from the previous day. I collected my crew radio again and got to work making sure all the rooms were functioning. We couldn’t use the 3rd stage for a couple of hours in the morning as there was a martial arts class booked in there. I had agreed to this in the rental but I’d been told it was Tai Chi which is quiet and these guys made a lot of noise, they had very big swords though and I decided it was best not to upset them. The day went without a hitch and everyone seemed to have fun. I think the venue worked out well and despite some minor disagreements about covering up artwork we managed to settle in nicely. The event culminated in a live show from ourselves and the Ubuntu UK crew. I was late as usual and I arrived in the room to chants of “Dan! Dan! Dan!!!!” in a very Alan Partridge fashion. I suspect people think I was trying to make some kind of grand entrance but it really wasn’t that calculated. I was just late because I’d been working downstairs cleaning up the other rooms. The live show was fun and we will have the podcast ready for release later this week so you can all hear it too. At the end of the event we packed everything away in a surprisingly quick time, this was largely due to the amazing crew of helpers we’d been blessed with. Every one of them made the event possible in their own way and I’m really grateful for the support. After everything was packed away I was off in the car to unload it all again at home in my garage. Everyone else headed back to Studio 2 for post-event drinks. I had some dinner at home and then joined them later on. No rest for the wicked hey.

Main stage before opening (photo by KevanV)

Overall I think the weekend went really well. It was the result of 4 long months work for me but it was all worth it just to see people having a good time. I was also pleased that quite a few people who’d never been to Liverpool before realised there’s so much more to this town than stereotypes would lead you to believe. It proved a great host city, as I always knew it would. I’m proud of this place and I certainly don’t try to hide it. We did have a lot of loud stag and hen parties around town for the Bank Holiday weekend but I don’t think they disturbed OggCampers too much. I’ve learned a lot of things from doing all this but I think the main one has to be not to run two events on top of each other. One event at a time is quite enough for anyone. The gig went well but the technical problems and other hiccups could have been fixed if I’d had more time to spend on it. I also think doing this on a Bank Holiday worked against us in the long run. We had a good crowd don’t get me wrong, but originally I thought we’d get more people because it was a holiday, in fact I think it meant we got less. People tend to have family things planned on holiday weekends and it also pushes hotel and travel prices up dramatically. You live and learn though, and I always learn best by my mistakes Thanks to everyone who came along and particularly all those who helped us out. Leave your thoughts on the weekend in the comments below if you like, I’d be interested too hear them.

Upcoming:

This hasn’t been a regular Weekly Rewind but I’ll still try and fill you in on what I expect to happen in the coming week. We should release the OggCamp Live podcast episode and another episode of Linux Outlaws we recorded reflecting on the event. I’ve edited a new Software Freedom Law Show this weekend and you should hear that soon. There’s a Liverpool Tweet-Up on Thursday night which I should be attending, I might see you there. At the weekend there’ll be another new Rathole Radio at 9pm (UK) Sunday 16th May. I also have a lot of new Linux distro releases to catch up on now that event madness is calming down. I want to get into reviewing and testing some of those as soon as I can. I’m meeting up with the band on Wednesday night and we’re gonna try and learn some new songs. We’ll also try some original stuff I hope and it’ll be good to get more gigs, I’ll keep you informed when I report back next week. If there’s one thing that remains to be said in the aftermath of OggCamp I think it has to be this… PHEW!

See you all soon, take care out there,

Dan

Sneek Peek

2010-04-28T01:14:00+00:00

Hello folks,

It’s been a long time since I updated the blog and let you all know what’s happening. Obviously I’m very busy organizing OggCamp and planning for the Rathole Radio gig at the moment. I hardly seem to get time to even post photos lately but you know what…..

The Kitchen/Practice Room

….I still find time to rock Hear for yourself , click the link below.

The Unnamed Band – “Jumping Jack Flash”

That’s a clip of the band I’ve put together for the gig. You’ll be able to see us in Liverpool this Friday. I play guitar and sing, we also have Gary on the bass and Ross on drums. I think it’s sounding pretty good, not a perfect recording but hey this just a mic in our practice room.

Hear the rest of the set at the gig Friday 30th April at 8pm in the Bad Format Social Club. You can watch and listen online at http://ratholeradio.org/live if you can’t be with us in Liverpool. Don’t miss it.

Hope to get back to writing more updates after event madness subsides. Take care one and all.

Peace,

Dan

The Man From Auntie

2010-04-20T22:16:54+00:00

Ok so I stole that title line from Ben Elton but it has been an exciting week. In keeping with my general “OMG I’m too busy to blog right now” demeanour of late, I just want to direct you towards my appearance on the BBC Radio 5 Pod’s & Blogs show this week. It’s only a few mins long but I was very kindly asked to come on and talk about Rathole Radio by host Jamillah Knowles. We recorded the interview last Thursday and had a really nice chat about all kinds of stuff. I recorded my end of the call, processed it and sent the audio to Jamillah as I normally do for Linux Outlaws. Apparently this impressed the engineers down at BBC central, so if you’re in need of any audio work folks give me a shout

Download the podcast here

I hope you enjoy the interview. We talked about Creative Commons and how it influences the show. The original chat was about 10mins but I expected it would be edited down. It sounds great anyway. I also managed many plugs for the Rathole Radio gig of course. Many thanks to @yaMatt for suggesting Rathole Radio to the beeb. The podcast is only available for 7 days apparently, I have no idea why but please download it now if you’re interested. Apologies if you’re reading this after that date.

I’ll give more updates in the coming days as and when time allows. There’s so much to tell you that I might have to write a really long recap (or perhaps a book) after the OggCamp dust settles. (Don’t mention dust to me at the moment, or volcanoes)

I’ll speak to you soon, take care of yourselves.

Dan

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a copy of the podcast here because it’s now gone from the BBC servers. I don’t know why they delete podcasts after 7 days but it’s their policy. You can download the show here. I will remove this file immediately if the BBC contact me with a complaint. I just want people to be able to hear the show and if anything that promotes rather then hurts them

Video: Blaggers Guide To Linux

2010-04-14T16:39:17+00:00

Hi folks. As regular readers will know I tend not to post links and smaller bits of info here but instead save them up into my big weekly recap articles. I’m so busy right now though that finding time for that is tricky and it’s also made me realise I might be better off posting some things separately. So, in that new vain I have a couple of items I’d like to share with you.

Firstly the video from my Liverpool Ignite talk in March is now online for everyone to see. I gave a 5 minute talk entitled “The Blaggers Guide To Linux” which oddly seems to be 7mins on the video. I don’t remember going over time though. As it’s only short it shouldn’t be a big commitment for people to watch and hopefully enjoy the content. I tried to convey why I think Linux is cool and why I care about it to a mixture of technical and non-technical audience members. I’ve also uploaded the slides to my talk in ODF and MS Powerpoint formats so you can reuse them if you like.

I don’t know the licensing situation with the O’Reilly logos I had to include but as far as I’m concerned any parts I created are under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales, like everything else I do. I hope you enjoy the video. There’s a second Liverpool Ignite event scheduled for tomorrow if anyone wants to come along. It’s Thurs 15th April 6pm – 8pm at the Contemporary Urban Centre in town. There’ll be an assortment of 5 minute talks on different topics. I’m not talking this time but will certainly be there and may even get roped into being MC. Who knows.

The second thing I have to tell you about is my guest post on the Liverpool Echo & Daily Post Tech Blog. It’s all about OggCamp10 and why people should come along and check it out, you can read it here. I’m very excited that it was included and I have to give a big thanks to editor extraordinare Alison Gow for her help. I’ll hopefully be doing more things like this to promote OggCamp and the Rathole Radio gig in the next couple of weeks. There’s not long to go now, how exciting!

I’ll write up some of the other events in the last week in the next day or so, it’s been a fun time. Speak to you soon, take care

Dan

Weekly Rewind #56

2010-04-09T13:08:38+00:00

Greetings one and all, and welcome to another very late Weekly Rewind. I’m so busy right now it seems impossible to keep up with the blog. Hopefully that will calm down after OggCamp. The last 10 days or so since my previous update have been exciting and I can’t wait to tell you about them. So let’s get cracking..

Going all the way back to Monday the 29th of March to begin I think. I recorded another Linux Outlaws episode with Fab as usual. That later became episode 143 “Lime Neeson”. We also released a special interview episode with Phil and Beccy Newborough of Crunchbang fame as number 144 at the weekend. We’ve already had some nice comments about that and I’m glad people seemed to enjoy it. It also took a lot of editing by Fab but he did a great job.

I’ve been chasing up a couple of tardy OggCamp sponsors and also doing much more work on the Rathole Radio gig. At the moment only about half of the tickets are sold and it could prove to be an expensive lesson in how not to promote a gig, but I hope plenty of people will turn up on the night and I’d like to see where all these Socialist Folkies in Liverpool have gotten to. I’m still £600 in the red but I’ve been pounding the streets putting posters up and I’ve also arranged a bit of local media coverage. It’s gonna be nerve wracking but hopefully it’ll all be alright on the night, as they say. I’ve also been arranging the production of canvas banners for OggCamp, hiring a large projection screen for the main stage, exchanging countless emails and phone calls with various people and generally trying to pull it all together. As I write these words there are only actually 3 weeks to the event, a sobering thought indeed. There’s a lot to be done but the exhibition has really taken shape now thanks to the stirling work of Laura Czajkowski who’s helping us out. The crew is looking good and combined with the podcasters it makes about 30 people working on the event. A mightly team of helpers who make a lot of what we do possible. I can’t wait to see how things go on the day. I’m not particularly looking forward to working till 2am on the Friday and then starting again at 8am for OggCamp but it’s only one weekend. It’ll all be worth it.

Sun Ra (jazz pioneer and nutter)

Back to last week then. On Thursday April 1st I went to the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall to see Jerry Dammers Spatial AKA Orchestra. For those who don’t know Jerry was founder of one of my favourite bands The Specials. He also founded 2 Tone records and led the Ska revivial in the UK, he wrote the anti-apartheid anthem “Free Nelson Mandela” and has also campaigned in a lot of other areas. He’s something of a hero to me and I couldn’t wait to see what he had in store. To be honest I didn’t know what I was letting myself in for, it was all really mental Jazz music. A 20 piece band all wearing strange masks and costumes as a tribute to Jazz pioneer Sun Ra. I’m not a huge Sun Ra fan though I respect his influence on music, had I known it was all going to be stuff like that I may have thought twice about it. I like Jazz as much as the next man but this was proper in your face Jazz, a Jazz sandwich made on Jazz bread with Jazz filling and Jazz flavoured crisps. About 75% of the gig was really good, the musicians were clearly excellent and I particularly thought the drummer was great. But the sound wasn’t good through the PA and it was hard to make out what each instrument was playing. Especially when 5 of the horn section are doing solos at once, seemingly not all in the same key either. I did enjoy it though and I’m glad I went. Quite a lot of people left half way through the gig and they obviously expected something more like The Specials. They did a Jazz version of “Ghost Town” but this wasn’t anything close to the original. A mixture of Jazz, funk and bits of world music. At one point a female singer came on and did a solo just by making animal noises, I kid you not. Madness… no wait not Madness that would have been Ska. I felt for the band because as a musician I can tell you there’s nothing worse than seeing people walk out as you’re playing, it’s totally soul destroying. I’ve experienced it and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. At the end of the gig we’d been sat there 2 and a half hours with no interval and we were ready to get out. The musicians paraded out through the middle of the audience and into the foyer of the building, playing their saxophones like a marching band and chanting. Most amusing I thought until my friend and I realised we couldn’t actually get out because they were in the way of the doors. After sitting through the very long concert we were in no mood to be held as jazz hostages when we could see the exits were so close. We ducked down the back stairs and found a way out unhindered. I have no idea how long the band marched around the foyer shouting “space is the place” but I wasn’t hanging around to find out. It was a bizarre evening but fun too and certainly gave me a lot of stories to tell, which is what life’s about when you come down to it really.

On Friday I headed back over to Liverpool to catch up with some friends and we went to play pool at a snooker hall in town. I ended up becoming a member of the club, the snooker club that is, it’s not a euphemism. Seemed rude not to since they made all 6 of us members so cheap, only a couple of quid each. You can hire a table for £3 an hour and it’s actually a really good way to kill a few hours and enjoy some sanctuary. I’m not very good a pool but I won a few matches during the afternoon. I did ok I think. At the weekend I prepared Rathole Radio and broadcast the show on Easter Sunday. Many people came along and joined in which I was pleased about. You can download the finished show now from the website. I also sold a couple more gig tickets. I’m slowly chipping away at that debt penny by penny. I decided recently it would be nice to play the gig with a band rather than just doing it on my own, so to that end I’ve enlisted the help of some friends Gary and Ross on bass and drums respectively. We had our first attempt at playing together on Monday. It actually worked out a lot better than I’d expected and I think we might be able to pull this gig off, even if it is in just 3 weeks. I’ll let you know how rehearsals are progressing but first I need to sort out my telecaster and clean it up in time. It’ll be fun to play a bit louder and I haven’t played just guitar in a band for years. I’ve mostly played bass so it’s nice to do something different and it’s quite liberating. I may be exploiting my new found freedom to do some mind bending solos but we’ll have to see about that. Needless to say my amp goes all the way up to 11

I’ll leave the other events of this week and write about them at the weekend. You’re pretty much up to date there.

Upcoming:

In the next few days I shall hopefully be having another practice with the band and sorting out more of the arrangements for upcoming events. I’m going to the Interface Amnesty event in Blackburn on Saturday with my good friend Adrian McEwen, where we will be attempting to construct our robot audience member for the gig. It may not be as grand as it sounds but it needs to be able to make noise and take part in some way. I’m also editing the next Linux Outlaws (ep 145) recorded on Monday in the next day or so. I had a pretty major fail with my recording but thanks to the audio from Ustream I think I’ve been able to salvage the show. There’s another Software Freedom Law Show to edit over the weekend too. No rest for the wicked hey. I’ll write another update of events this week on Sunday. Till then, take care of yourselves,

Dan

What’s In A Name?

2010-03-31T23:36:42+00:00

Apparently there’s quite a lot in a name actually. Especially when it comes to online handles and call signs, to use the CB radio terminology. People spend ages trying to think of the right nickname for them and then checking nobody else has taken it before embarking on their online lives. I never did that, you’ll be surprised to hear. Much like a lot of what I do there was no grand plan at all in the beginning of my digital life. I would just go around signing up for different websites under different names and not really thinking about it. I wasn’t heavily into social networks and other such things early on anyway. That was until I joined the microblogging service Jaiku in early 2007 and my life changed forever. I quickly became hopelessly addicted to chatting with my new friends and we started so many podcasts, websites and other things together it was amazing. Many of those people are still my closest friends now, both on and offline. I didn’t have any specific username in mind when joining the service as I said. My usual logic (I use the term loosely) goes something like this:

“What shall I call myself…?”

“Dan, yeah that’ll do.”

“How can that name already be taken? I’m Dan, this is an outrage!”

Then I would randomly try other things until I found something available and just take it. My name is quite popular and I’ve had trouble with this on many sites. There are more Dan Lynch’s in the world than you would realise, one of whom was involved in the actual creation of the Internet. So trying to get DanLynch as a username on most services is a pretty pointless exercise. On Jaiku I randomly plucked dantheman out of the air and quickly became well known as that. It wasn’t something I’d been called often but occasionally in my life the odd person had called me “dan the man”, and it had a ring to it. When I joined Freenode IRC I couldn’t get dantheman so I chose RealDan as a joke, to show I was the real Dan; in hindsight not a great joke I’ll admit. I am also known as MethodDan on many other websites and services now. This is a bit of a reference to my love of the Wu-Tang Clan. I used to joke around with some friends about the names we would have if we were a poor British imitation of the Wu. Mine was MethodDan after Method Man, my favourite member of the group and it also fit with my real name pretty well. I was just relieved not to end up being called Ol’Dirty Bastard to be honest hehe.

All in all this name proliferation has gotten out of hand. So after much thinking I’ve decided I should consolidate my username as MethodDan on as many services as I can. It’s usually available, much more so than any of the other names I’ve used. It will give me one online identity and hopefully stop further confusion. The first step in this process will be to change my Identi.ca username from dantheman to MethodDan. This should be pretty easy to do, I think I can do it without losing any subscriptions or followers. I will then change my Freenode IRC nick to match. I wanted to write about it here first so everyone knows what’s going on. I will start the process at the weekend.

I hope this move doesn’t make things difficult for anyone, but I think in the long run having one name will be a lot easier all round. So the names Dan… MethodDan

See ya,

Dan

P.S – I forgot to say, I’m not expecting people in the street to start calling me MethodDan or anything. This isn’t a Prince style rebranding, god no. Just that when I need a username for a website or something else I will use that, kthxbai

Weekly Rewind #55

2010-03-29T00:41:05+00:00

Well now, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I missed another weekly update last weekend, what with all the madness going on round here it’s not surprising. It’s high time (sadly not High Times) that I updated you on recent events in my little world. I’ll try to cover a bit about last week as well but I can’t remember much of it now. This is the way of life when you have a Swiss cheese memory (I refer you again to the earlier bracketed link). So let’s get into it.

Last weekend I broadcast and recorded a very special episode of Rathole Radio, special because it featured the first live song by a guest on the show. I can finally say I had my first John Peel style session, well kind of. I was joined by lovely Irish band I Am Not Lefthanded for a chat and live performance, which sounded amazingly good over Skype I thought. The interview seemed to go well, they enjoyed it, I enjoyed it and it seems the listeners did too. You can’t say fairer than that. I released the podcast on Monday afternoon if you want to check it out, you know you want to. I’ve been trying to sort out my Ubuntu Studio machine in the last couple of weeks in order to route Skype through JACK and do all kinds of other such funky stuff. I haven’t quite mastered that yet but I did manage to use it for Linux Outlaws on Monday. We did the live show as usual in the evening. I worked on the audio on Tuesday afternoon and then sent it back to Fab for final editing. He released the show later in the week as episode 142 “Stroking The White Cat”.

Gig poster

OggCamp business has continued as ever in the last 2 weeks. I’ve been sorting out exhibitors and trying to get all the other stuff in place for the event. I’ve signed all the paperwork now and Tony has sent payment for the invoice. That means we’re pretty skint until some more sponsorship money works it’s way through the pipes, but we’ll manage. I need to find a qualified first aider to attend the event, source a big projection screen from somewhere and a million other niggly little jobs. Despite all this I’m still really excited and enthusiastic about how good this weekend will be. All the work is definitely worth it I’m sure. I’ve also been doing more preparations for the Rathole Radio gig on April 30th and ticket sales still need an injection of life. I’ve sold under half the 200 tickets so far, so if you’re thinking of coming please buy tickets in advance from the site. I think things will improve as we get closer to the event, they better or it’s gonna be costly. You live and learn though I guess. I got some posters for the gig designed by Scott from Bad Format and they look really good. I got them printed out in Staples of all places on Wednesday afternoon. I also went to Bromborough Folk Club in the evening and played a couple of songs. I need plenty of practice before the gig and it’s nice to play at the club again after so many years away. I plan to head down there a couple more times before the gig next month to sharpen up my skills. It’s also a good place to promote the gig. I noticed when playing live however that my guitar really needed some TLC. Over the weekend I’ve cleaned it up and replaced the strings, tested out the built in pick up for the first time in about 8 years and generally given it an overhaul. I only ever use it as an acoustic but I’ll need more volume for the gig. The club will also let me test that.

On Thursday I headed over to Liverpool to sign some paperwork at The Black-E and also distribute some posters for the gig in record shops and other places. I had mixed success and even got some very negative reactions in the Jacaranda. Not a pub I’ve ever frequented much but the barmaid told me in no uncertain terms they “don’t advertise gigs in other places”. Nice. Despite this I managed to get a few posters up in decent locations and retired to FACT for a coffee and some free wi-fi. I met up with some friends Adrian and Andy, then we went for pizza at the Albert Dock before Liverpool Twestival. The event went pretty well and it was good to catch up with friends. I was once again told I couldn’t distribute flyers for the gig though, other people had paid for the right to do that at the event apparently. I got the feeling it wasn’t really my day. I’m going to have to blitz promotion around Liverpool in the weeks before the gig though, whether people like it or not, hah!! With a hefty bill for putting the gig on I’d like to break even at all costs, pun intended. I have some backup plans to generate more cash, I may look into those soon.

On Friday I interviewed Phil Newborough creator of Crunchbang Linux and his wife Beccy for Linux Outlaws. Together with Fab we talked for about 2 hours and rambled on. It was fun though. You’ll be able to hear that very soon I hope. Yesterday I spent a fair bit of time fixing up the guitar and doing many other jobs. I also worked on the audio from the Crunchbang interview. Today has been quite quiet. My beloved Liverpool FC beat Sunderland 3-0 which I watched and enjoyed, I then edited the Software Freedom Law Show and got on with other work. I think that pretty much brings us up to date.

Upcoming:

We’ll do Linux Outlaws live tomorrow night as always. I’m also intending to install SimplyMEPIS 8.5 on my laptop this week and begin distro hopping again in earnest. I’ve downloaded the install CD and backed up my data. It’ll be fun to get back into some serious reviewing. On Wednesday I may head to the folk club again and test out my newly polished guitar if time allows. I have tickets to see Jerry Dammers at the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool on Thursday night and I’m really looking forward to that. I still need to find someone to go with me though and so far that hasn’t been easy. I’m amazed how many people don’t know who the founder of The Specials, 2 Tone Records and so many other things actually is. I’m sure I’ll find a willing gig partner eventually. There’ll also be more Rathole Radio at the weekend, so don’t miss that. I’m sure there’s a ton of other stuff I’ve missed but I think I’ve written enough for now. I’ll try to report back again in the next week. Exciting events are afoot and I will let you know all about them as soon as I can.

Stay safe out there and look after yourselves

Dan

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 7

2010-03-19T20:02:50+00:00

Well here it is, the last shot in the challenge. I've quite enjoyed it this week, I post a follow-up over the weekend with some more thoughts but for now the last image...

OSM Interview Released

2010-03-18T19:09:29+00:00

Hi folks, just a quick note to let you know that the interview I recorded with the Open Source Musician podcast a few weeks back is out now, for your listening pleasure… I hope I can’t remember what I said at and I need to listen to it again but it went pretty well from what I recall. Massive thanks to Dan and Steve for kindly inviting me onto their show, I had a great time. You should really check them out if you have any interest in making music and or audio seriously with on Linux. They’re the only show I know of covering this area and they do a great job of informing and entertaining.

I was interviewed in episode 35 which you can now download.

It’s even spurred me into working harder on sorting out music production on my Ubuntu Studio set up this week. I still use Windows XP for the odd music job which I’ve always been honest about. However, all podcast production and other audio is done on Linux and has been for a very long time I’m proud to say. I’ve got some hardware gripes with a possibly faulty audio card but I’m on the case now. Earlier today I started working on a new blues song in Ardour. It wasn’t planned but a nice riff popped out of my brain and I started recording, I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve not had time to produce much music in the last few months and I don’t see that changing very soon, but I do want to do more music on Linux and really see the how strengths and weaknesses stack up. It’s long been a goal of mine but time just hasn’t allowed it. Hopefully that will all be fixed in 2010!!

Ok enough rambling, enjoy the interview. See ya,

Dan

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 6

2010-03-18T19:08:36+00:00

Really ran short on time today, which I think is reflected in todays image. In the end I just played around using the contents of my pockets.

I think I'd better start planning for tomorrow.

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 5

2010-03-17T18:47:04+00:00

Here is my shot for day 5, it is St. Patrick's day after all.

Only two more days left...

Debate The Digital Economy Bill

2010-03-17T13:51:19+00:00

Digital Britain Report

Hello folks, today I have a very serious matter to discuss with you. The Digital Economy Bill is being passed through parliament in the UK right now. This is the law which would allow UK citizens to be disconnected from the Internet on the accusation of file sharing or piracy, not conviction, accusation. As a musician, online broadcaster and member of the Open Rights Group this is obviously an important matter to me. At the moment certain members of the government are trying to force this bill into law without a proper debate in parliament. This is a bill which goes against the advice of the Government’s own Digital Britain report published last year, which clearly stated Internet disconnection should not be used as a punishment.

I have written to my local MP today to ask them to call for a full debate on this before any law is made. Whatever you think of the Digital Economy Bill and whichever side you consider yourself to be on, passing this law without so much as a proper discussion has to be wrong. It doesn’t benefit any of us. Don’t let large media companies make laws like this through the back door, demand proper democracy!

If you live in the UK I urge you to write to your MP too and make them aware of the situation. I’ve copied my letter below. I sent this to my local MP Stephen Hesford today. You can find details of your own MP and how to contact them through the fabulous writetothem.com

Remember, they work for us and we have a right to ask them questions but please be polite at all times. Abusive rants will do our argument no good. You can also use the 38 Degrees website to make this process even simpler.

Thanks for reading

Dan

————————————————————————————————————

Dear Stephen Hesford,

I’m writing to you today because I’m very worried the Government are planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate. An important change to the law like this must be properly reviewed and debated in the house not just rammed through carelessly, as I’m sure you appreciate.

Industry experts, internet service providers (like Talk Talk and BT) and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill – yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a debate. This is obviously wrong, it’s no way to make legislation. Especially legislation that affects something so vital these days as Internet access. In today’s world we all need computer access to interact with even the government’s own services like the Inland Revenue, NHS, benefits agencies and so on. There is no burden of proof in this law, only accusation is enough to incur punishment. That has to be against the long standing principals of justice and equality we pride ourselves on in this country. Guilty until proven innocent is not justice in my view.

As someone employed in the IT industry for years and now a part-time broadcaster/journalist reporting on these matters, I worry that the people forcing this agenda don’t actually understand the full technical and social implications of their actions, not to mention the practical headaches of implementing this. What we need is time for proper research, debate and reflection, rather than a ham-fisted approach to something so vital. I am a musician and broadcaster who uses the Internet as an empowering tool that gives me opportunities I’d never get otherwise. I produce a podcast about Linux and Open Source software which now gets over 15,000 downloads per week. I believe everyone deserves the same chance to use the Internet to educate and inform themselves. There is some strange media coverage of this situation right now and the line that “the Internet is bad for musicians and must be stopped” is a complete misnomer. There are many professional musicians, artists and broadcasters on both sides of the argument. The likes of the Featured Artists Coalition (Radiohead, Billy Bragg etc) have condemned Internet disconnection as a disproportionate and heavy handed punishment. That voice needs to be heard in this debate too but it seems the people forcing this bill realise the power of the argument and would rather pass the law before it can be heard. We all want to help artists and musicians thrive in the new digital world and as a musician myself I have a vested interest in protecting that more than anyone. The Digital Economy Bill cannot be passed in it’s current state as it will do more harm than good, however good the intentions are.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask that you do all you can to ensure the Government doesn’t just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate. I am a member of the Open Rights Group in the UK and a look at their website http://openrightsgroup.org might also offer some useful information.

Thank you for your time,

Dan Lynch

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 4

2010-03-16T19:24:23+00:00

I took a walk today during lunch and discovered this statue in a local park.

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 3

2010-03-15T19:17:55+00:00

And now for the third image this week, I'm not really too happy with todays shot, I will hopefully get outside during lunch tomorrow.

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 2

2010-03-14T17:49:48+00:00

Today is day 2 of my 7 day photo challenge, so here is todays shot of a glass of red wine.

It was quite interesting trying to find something to shoot for today, I tried several things but I eventually decided on this glass of red wine.

Weekly Rewind #54

2010-03-14T16:39:16+00:00

It’s been a while but I’m finally back with another Weekly Rewind. I missed last week because I was too busy, so I’ll try and briefly recap the last 2 weeks events now. It’s been an exciting and slightly hectic time of late. Much OggCamp business, some web development stuff, live talks and other things. On this bright Sunday afternoon I’m getting some spare time and it’s going into the much neglected blog. So let’s get into it.

There’s been a couple of Linux Outlaws releases since my last update. We’re up to episode 140 now, which I can still scarcely believe considering our expectations when we started the show. It continues to go from strength to strength and for that I’m very grateful. You can join us for the live show from 7pm GMT on Mondays. The IRC channel has been crazy during the show lately and we seem to average over 100 live listeners and viewers now. It doesn’t sound much and as a proportion of the 58,000 downloads per month I suppose it’s not, but the live interaction really makes a big difference and I’m glad people enjoy it. I also did another Rathole Radio last Sunday night which you can download at your leisure. I finally released the tickets for the live gig and so far they’ve sold ok but I need to sell a lot more to break even. Much time was spent this week licking envelopes, writing notes and posting those out. If you want to come along please buy tickets in advance from the website. Thanks! I also got a new logo for the show this week and I’m really pleased with it (see image below). It was created for me by graphic designer extraordinaire Scott Jones of Bad Format and we’ve also been doing a fair bit of website work together lately. I’m mostly hacking Drupal sites, customising modules and so on. I’ll give you more details on that when I can in future.

New Rathole Logo

These events are all out of sequence now but let’s carry on. My 5min Ignite talk entitled “The Blaggers Guide To Linux” went really well on March 4th. There were about 50 people there and they seemed to enjoy it. Overall the night went brilliantly and I enjoyed the other talks immensely. There was quite a mix of art and cultural stuff and it fell to me to finish off the event with something geeky. I hadn’t intended to talk about Linux really, people expect that of me and I don’t want become a one trick pony (also the title of a good Paul Simon album BTW). It seemed to bring a nice balance to things though and people said they liked it. The after party at the Everyman Bistro was much fun and still continuing as I left at about 1am. The Ignite talks were filmed by a local media company so I hope I’ll be able to share that footage with you in future. It’s being edited right now I’m told. I think it will end up on the O’Reilly site somewhere.

OggCamp10 planning continues at pace. I’ve been chasing up sponsors a lot in the last 2 weeks, some of whom haven’t paid yet! I think we’re making progress though and I’ve also been inviting many interesting people from the Open Source world to join us. I had some drama with the venue and I have to confess it had me worried but it’s all sorted now. The person I was dealing with left the organisation and it seems the paperwork hadn’t been done properly, probably why they left. I had nightmare visions of 300 people stranded in Liverpool city centre with nowhere to go but thankfully that’s not going to happen. I went over for a meeting on Friday and we agreed all the details which was a major relief. I also met the lead tech at the Black-E and it turns out he’s a true Free Software beard, literally. He had the Stallman look going on and he’s a core developer on the Rivendell radio automation project. That’s really cool and it looks as though the technical requirements for the venue are all up to scratch. Sadly we won’t be able to use the historic dome at the front of the building as the main entrance now. There’s building work going on in the venue which should largely be finished by OggCamp, but they can’t open the dome because the roof may not be passed as safe for the public. I’ll be signing the venue agreement and sorting out payment in the next week. Then it’s on to writing the kit list and tech spec for the event amongst other things. I also have to do a full risk assessment which I haven’t done since I worked in theatres many years ago. I’m sure that’ll be as thrilling as it sounds. It’s usually a big bunch of paperwork to satisfy health and safety regulations where there’s a public audience.

Other things I’ve done in the last two weeks include:

Attend LivLUG and have fun socialising with everyone.
Produce another Software Freedom Law Show.
Rebuild my studio PC with Ubuntu Studio 9.10 and fix some hardware problems.
Lots of Drupal hacking and server admin stuff for various clients.
Learn the true power and beauty of Firebug for debugging a CSS stylesheet of over 1300 lines.
Get more slightly depressed about the sorry state of Liverpool Football Club.

There’s probably more stuff that I’ve forgotten but that about covers it for now, you’re pretty much up to date. I’ve had quite a quiet weekend by my standards and I’m in need of a break. A little time to unwind is appreciated right now.

Upcoming:

It’s Sunday afternoon and I don’t have too much planned for the rest of the day. I do have to edit a new Software Freedom Law Show and I’ll continue to tinker with my studio set up. I have Skype working through JACK now which is very exciting and after the bugs on Linux Outlaws last week I’m also going to investigate Ekiga and other FOSS alternatives. Skype has always been a necessary evil for me. It’s hideously closed source but the audio quality is so much better than anything else I’ve found, and as an audio engineer sound quality trumps all other considerations to me, even software freedom I’m afraid. I hope in future experiments with Speex wideband will help fix this, but when you’re pressed for time and you have a show to do you just want to press a button and have it work. There’ll be more Linux Outlaws live tomorrow night as always. I’ll also be doing Rathole Radio next weekend but I may manage to report back before that. There’ll be a ton of OggCamp paperwork, phone calls and so on, which have become a staple part of my life in the last 2 months. It’s all good though and the event is going to be worth it, you should come and join us if you’re within travelling range and don’t forget to come to my gig the night before, tickets on sale now at http://ratholeradio.org/gig

See you soon, take care,

Dan

7 Day Photo Challenge - Day 1

2010-03-13T21:25:05+00:00

I have challenged myself to take a photo every day this week starting today, I am doing this to force myself to spend less time working on my photos ( and to publish pictures more often). I generally spend too much time playing with photos and seldom actually put them online for any one to see.

Here is todays shot of a rose I took this afternoon.

I would love to have people join me in this challenge, so I have created a flickr group for it.

The Business Of Show

2010-03-10T21:05:44+00:00

Hey folks, I realise I’ve missed my usual Weekly Rewind but it’s been far too hectic around here lately. I will get back to it next Sunday I promise. One of the many reasons for my omission is because I’ve just put the tickets for my Rathole Radio gig on sale. I’m doing the whole system myself (right down to licking the stamps) rather than use a ticketing company because I feel it’s the right thing to do. Besides, the punk ethos has always been “do it yourself” and I abide by that. I hate these big companies and the way they screw over music fans, Ticketmaster being a prime example (allegedly!). Not that they’d be interested in my little gig, but I still wanted to make the process personal and keep costs down. I’ve had a few people asking questions about the organisation of the gig in general, so I wanted to clear up the details here quickly.

Printed Tickets

The tickets are for sale now though the Rathole Radio website priced at £5 each plus £1.50 per order for processing and postage. I’ve kept them cheap because it’s not a money making exercise. If I sell all 200 odd tickets I will just break even, and only then. I’m putting this on because I want to have something cool for everyone to do in Liverpool the night before OggCamp, I also get the chance to play a gig alongside some of my favourite artists and that’s my payment. I’m taking it easy on public promotion this week to give OggCampers the chance to get in first and get tickets, after that I will be promoting hard and selling to the general public, once they’re sold out I’m afraid it’s tough. The venue has very limited capacity so the bottom line is this… IF YOU WANT TO COME BUY A TICKET. A lot of people seem to feel they’ll just wander in on the night and that may not be possible.

David Rovics

So far I’ve sold around 40 tickets since Sunday and it’s great to see people posting on Identi.ca that they’ve received them, that’s very satisfying and rewarding. But I’m still £807 in the hole staging this (I have a spreadsheet) and that tends to focus your mind. I’m not complaining or bitching, I enjoy doing the work and I will continue to, I’m confident we’ll sell out. I just want to make sure everyone understands the situation. If you want to come along please book now before I start pushing tickets outside of our usual circle. Besides, it’s going to be a great night and you should come and celebrate music, technology and Creative Commons with us. I’m already discussing innovative ways to bring technology into this event with some hacker friends. We’re looking at message walls, live streams and perhaps a robotic (might be a slight exaggeration) audience member who can make noise based on the reaction of the online chatroom. It’s going to be something quite unique and it’s not to be missed.

I have no problem with OggCamp attendees not being interested in this or not wanting to come, that’s absolutely fair enough. But if you ARE interested book now or risk being disappointed and turned away. I want to avoid that wherever possible but limited space and financial constraints mean I have to be strict. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Tickets can be purchased direct from http://ratholeradio.org/gig

If you don’t have Paypal or for some reason don’t want to buy online, email show@ratholeradio.org and we can try to make alternative arrangements for you.

Thanks for reading this rant. Take care everyone a be lucky

Dan

Latest Shots

2010-03-07T21:00:27+00:00

I took my newly purchased 50mm f1.8 lens to the Chinese New Year celebrations in Liverpool, I have uploaded a few shots to flickr. I'm still getting used to getting my composition right without being able to alter the focal length.

Update: Fixed the white balance on the images to remove the blue tint.

Tip: Making Gmail Default In Firefox

2010-03-04T14:16:58+00:00

Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it.

Open the Preferences dialog in Firefox (on the “edit” menu in Linux)…

…go to the applications tab…

…type “mailto” in the filter box to bring up the mail settings. You can then use the drop down box to select Gmail, Yahoo or others.

That’s it, next time you click on an email link it’ll open a new message in your web mail. A simple little tip which everyone may already know but I didn’t until recently. This will of course work in Firefox running on any platform, Linux, Mac or Windows. The preferences link is under the “tools” menu and not “edit” in Windows, it may be different on Mac too. Hope this tip helps someone and gets your mail links fixed. Other web browsers are also available of course

Cheers,

Dan

Weekly Rewind #53

2010-02-28T19:48:24+00:00

It’s time for Weekly Rewind number 53 and for once it’s not late, wonders never cease. Since my last update included Monday and some of Tuesday of this week, I’ll just start from Tuesday and make this a little shorter. I’ve still been a bit ill this week at times but overall I’m feeling much better right now I’m pleased to say.

So, on Tuesday I synced up the audio from Linux Outlaws and shipped it back to Fab. It was a little bit longer than expected as I said in my earlier post, but I think we’ll settle into the new format with practice. That was later released as episode 137 “Bing!”. It seemed to be pretty well received and downloads for the podcast in general have been shooting up lately, good news. I think we might have finally jumped the shark. I also got on with sorting out sponsorship for OggCamp and various other things. We’ve been working on an advert to appear in Linux Format magazine very soon. They wrote am article about us this month in very kind terms and we appreciate the support. They’re even offering Oggcamp attendees 40% off a year’s magazine subscription. So, without further ado here are our wonderful OggCamp10 sponsors: (drum roll needed)

Media Partners: Linux Format Magazine

(trumpets)

I’m still working with some sponsors who are confidential right now, rest assured I’ll let you know as soon as I can. It may be a cliche but we really couldn’t put this event on without their support. It costs a lot of money and it would probably bankrupt us, we’re a non-profit community event. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. So a hearty thanks to these folks for their support, we appreciate it.

Zonker

Anyway, back to events of the week. On Wednesday I worked on some Drupal sites for a while. I’ll give you more details on those in coming weeks when I’m allowed but it’s quite exciting. I also did more research for my Firefox Mobile article and wrote up some notes. On Thursday I interviewed former OpenSUSE Community Manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier for Linux Outlaws. I’m still working on the audio at the moment but you should be able too hear that as a special episode next week. It’ll be about 45mins in total. It was a very interesting chat I thought. Sadly I missed Chester LUG on Thursday evening because I was still feeling pretty rough. I’ll have to make it up to them next month.

On Friday I wrote, edited, formatted and published my FF Mobile review with some screen shots. It’s been pretty well received so far and I hope people enjoy it. I think mobile web browsing is a big area right now, and with the expansion of the smartphone market that’s only going to grow. I also spent some time working on HTML and CSS for a client site on Friday night. Trying to tweak a style sheet of over 1000 lines that someone else originally wrote can feel like chewing razor blades at times, but I finally got somewhere by the wee hours of the morning. Over the weekend I’ve been working on the Zonker interview audio, answering tons of email and I’m now editing the next Software Freedom Law Show for release on Tuesday. I’m also working on my 5 minute presentation for the Ignite Liverpool event next week. More on that in a second.

Upcoming:

Next week I’ll be getting onto OggCamp exhibition planning now that sponsors are mostly sorted. I also need to start working on a technical plan with the people at the venue. We’re going to be doing Outlaws live on Tuesday night at 7pm rather than Monday. Then it’ll be LivLUG on Wednesday night and I hope to be in good shape for that after missing Chester. On Thursday night I’m going to be giving a presentation at the Ignite Liverpool event, part of global O’Reilly Global Ignite Week. The idea is that you have 20 slides and 5 minutes to talk. The slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. I wasn’t sure what to talk about but now the idea of a 5 minute “Blaggers Guide To Linux” seems good to me. I get so many emails, phone calls and face to face enquiries from people asking me what Linux actually is, I think it would be good to give a quick foundation. Hopefully I can make it funny too, I’ll try. Come along to the Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University at 6pm if you fancy seeing the result. You’re more than welcome. I’m sure there’ll be plenty else to get my teeth into next week. There’ll be more Rathole Radio at the weekend and I hope to have more news on gig tickets very soon. I’ll report back ASAP. Take care till then, see ya,

Dan

App Review: Firefox Mobile & Weave

2010-02-26T19:03:47+00:00

FF Mobile In Action

Today I’d like to tell you about Firefox Mobile on the N900, running in conjunction with the new Mozilla Weave web service. I’ve been testing them out on my handset for about a month now since the beta release of Fennec (the codename for Firefox Mobile). The N900 is the first device to get Firefox Mobile but it should also appear on Google Android phones in the near future. There is talk from Mozilla of an iPhone version too, but Apple are so draconian with 3rd party software I’m not sure that’ll happen. I just can’t see them allowing another browser on the iPhone to compete with Safari. (correction: According to Fab the iPhone has allowed some 3rd party browsers already, see link in comments) Anyway, here’s my thoughts upon testing Firefox Mobile for some time.

Facing The Critics:
It seems fashionable with some people to bash Firefox right now and use it as the butt of their jokes. I think many of them are too quick to forget the great work Mozilla have done for us in spreading Open Source software to the masses. Many users get their first exposure to the wonderful world of FOSS through the likes of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Sure it’s not perfect, it has it’s bugs and it can be slow at times too. But I think the emergence of real competitors like Google Chrome has and will continue to improve Open Source browsers in general. I like Chromium but Firefox is still the browser of choice on my desktop. Weave is also an interesting prospect and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. I was curious to see if I would like this new compact Firefox quite as much as I like it’s big brother.

What’s Weave?

Weave At Work

I mentioned Mozilla Weave earlier, it’s a new web service designed to make syncing your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, form data and even passwords easy over multiple installations of Firefox. Imagine you have Firefox installed on a few different computers around the house, a laptop and a desktop perhaps. Having them synced up and sharing data means you’re always up to date whichever machine you’re on. There have long been extensions to share bookmarks but this takes it to a whole new level. Add in the fact that Firefox Mobile supports this on your phone and it becomes a much more interesting prospect. Wherever I happen to be a quick click on my phone brings up all the tabs I have open on my laptop. This is all achieved by syncing the data to a remote Mozilla web server and then sharing it between devices. You have to sign up for an account with Weave which is free, but a lot of people will have serious security concerns about it. According to Mozilla the data is all encrypted locally before it’s sent to their server, so even they can’t access it without your permission. I still don’t trust it with precious things like passwords and form data though, perhaps I’m paranoid. I use Weave to sync browsing history, bookmarks and tabs. It’s very easy to change these settings and it doesn’t share your passwords by default, which is a good thing I think. It’ll be interesting to see if it takes off as the browser spreads to more devices.

UI Design:

A drag to the left...

Obviously mobile devices have much less screen real estate for developers to use and the last thing you want is to have your page blocked out by copious toolbars, “tool” being the operative term in that sentence. The N900 has a pretty respectable 800×480 screen resolution but I’m still pleased to see the Mozilla guys have thought about using it wisely. They’ve done this by hiding extra controls to the left and right of the main display area. You can expose them by dragging the page left or right with you finger. To the right you have forward & back buttons, a “bookmark this page” shortcut and access to the app settings.

...and a drag to the right

To the left you have tabs and access to Weave integration. I have to admit I was dubious about this interface design at first and I didn’t think dragging the whole page to the side would work. It actually becomes second nature pretty quickly and the ability to have multiple pages open in tabs is very cool. I also like the fact that the “awesome” bar works the same as its desktop counterpart. If you start typing part of an address you’ve visited before it will narrow down helpful suggestions. This actually speeds up browsing a lot and in my laziness I use this feature far more than bookmarks. Having it integrated with your other Firefox installations through Weave makes this much more powerful too. Firefox Mobile helps you fill out forms quicker and jump between fields which is handy. Overall the adapted UI works well, despite my initial reservations I got used to it very quickly.

Performance:
This is the area where most people have issues with Firefox and on a mobile device your patience tends to be even shorter. I have two browsers on the N900 right now: Micro B which is the official Maemo browser, and Firefox Mobile. There’s no doubt that Firefox takes longer to start up and performance is generally slower. The really odd thing about this is that both browsers are Mozilla based so they should be similar. I don’t know what they did to speed it up Micro B but they need to pass that knowledge back so Firefox can be improved. If only Firefox was under the GPL they’d have to pass it back (edit: Possibly not, see comments), but that’s another matter. In fairness the final 1.0 release saw a speed improvement over the beta and RC. Once the browser is loaded it runs quickly enough but does occasionally bog down and crash. I can hear the Firefox haters laughing in the distance. It still needs a little work in this department I feel.

Extensions, But No Flash:

Managing Extensions

Unlike Micro B I don’t seem to have support for Flash in Firefox Mobile. This may be because Micro B comes pre-tweaked as part of the OS, I don’t know. I have my issues with Flash but I do still find support for it important in browsers. Hopefully that will change as HTML5 takes off, but right now I still want Flash support sorry. I tend to switch to Micro B to use YouTube and other sites. Mozilla don’t want to distribute proprietary software and this is probably the main reason Flash isn’t pre-configured, a position I respect. It’s also possible that I could install it myself with a little hacking. Trying to do that automatically in the browser or via a .deb package didn’t work though. On a positive note you do have access to extensions in Firefox Mobile, which many people have become used to on the desktop. I have a few installed and the selection is growing all the time, right now the main one for me is Weave, I don’t use a lot else.

Conclusions:

The Awsome Bar At Work

I enjoy using Firefox Mobile, particularly in conjunction with Weave and I think there’s much to commend about it. However, I’m afraid the overall impression it leaves is of performance problems which still need to be fixed. Slowness and random crashes are not something most users will put up with, especially on mobile devices. I use Micro B a lot more on the N900 because it’s quicker and more stable. There are some interesting features in Firefox Mobile and I do think it has great potential for the future, it’s only just come out of beta so I don’t want to be too harsh. How it will fare on other platforms like Android I’m not sure. The N900 has pretty quick hardware and I shudder to think how slow it might be on a G1 or other handset.

At the moment the browser situation on the N900 is similar to the one I see on my desktop, and at the same time completely different. Bear with me I haven’t lost my mind. It’s great to have a choice of browsers and competition is always good. On the desktop I use Firefox 80% of the time and Chromium the other 20%. On the mobile though it’s Micro B 80% of the time and Firefox 20%. Once the performance improves and I fix flash support that balance may shift. For now though my verdict on Firefox Mobile 1.0 is nice try, I really like the potential, but come back when it’s a bit more polished.

You can download Firefox Mobile here.

Also check out the full slideshow for more pics.

Weekly Rewind #52

2010-02-24T15:34:42+00:00

Welcome to an incredibly late Weekly Rewind. I was hoping to get this out on Sunday but with all the preparation for Rathole Radio and that fact is was my good mate Will’s 30th birthday, things got away from me. It’s number 52, a whole year’s worth of rewinds. Although actually we passed the first anniversary a couple of weeks ago and I missed it, doh! People asked me what “special stuff” I was going to do for this fifty second edition but to be honest I can’t think of anything that special to do. I could look back at some highlights of the previous editions, but then I did that only recently in my review of 2009. So I’m just going to stick with the usual format in the arrogant belief that this is “special” enough. We’ll see if you agree by the end

I’m very busy with event planning at the moment and sponsorship stuff, a lot of which I’m not really at liberty to talk about yet. So if this update seems brief rest assured there has been plenty of OggCamp business and you’ll hear about it soon. It all began last Monday with another recording of Linux Outlaws, a recording which would become episode 136 “Make Love, Not Proprietary Software”. Following this blog announcement by Fab earlier in the day, we were experimenting with a new slightly leaner format. I think it worked well and the show was still 75mins long, hardly too short by any means. A lot of people told me they preferred it and we’ll keep trying to do that in future. Having said this on the last recording for episode 137 this Monday we went well over time. So I guess it’s a learning process. Personally I’ve long said that 60-80mins is the ideal length of show for me. That’s not to say I haven’t played my part in derailing shows and making them longer; I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but I do try to push us on and keep to some semblance of schedule. Some people completely disagree with my view and think the show should be 15 million hours long every week, which is cool, it’s nice that they feel they enjoy it that much. The amount of work this entails for us is what causes the problem though. Beyond about an hour show time the editing gets very time consuming and tiring. It’s a weekly show after all, so it’s not as if people don’t hear plenty of us anyway. Listenership has shot up lately which is fantastic, but I’m convinced keeping the show closer to an hour each week would make it much more accessible to a wider audience. I’ve now spent ages discussing not going on too long, oh the irony. Anyway, let’s move on (my catchphrase).

In the last 10 days or so I haven’t gotten any real distro hopping or writing done. Other things have overtaken that and I’m still trying to get back on track. Hopefully you’ll see a substantial article in the next 2 days. My February blog stats could certainly use it, there hasn’t been much to draw people to the site this month. I’ve also been a bit ill the last week and that’s slowed me down, I’m still trying to get back on a more even keel. Other things I’ve been up to in the last 10 days include: hacking Drupal sites, recording a new Rathole Radio, doing gig preparation and trying to sort out tickets for sale, constantly emailing and phoning people with OggCamp business and much more.

One particular highlight was last night, I attended my first Wirral Tweet Up event. I’ve been to many in Liverpool but missed the first Wirral one. I caught up with some good friends from the Scribblepool writing group and also met some interesting new people. It was an informal event held at Cromwell’s restaurant in Irby. Lot’s of hard work was put into making food and also making everyone feel welcome by proprietors Kay and Kate. I’d like to thank them for their work and also everyone else involved in setting up the event. It was a lot of fun. Many of my freedom crusading friends wonder why I go to these Twitter events and don’t just stick to Identi.ca only. I can see their point of view but the vast majority of the general geek community, not even the general public just techy types, use things like Facebook and Twitter heavily. I like to engage with them and help spread the word about Open Source, Linux and other things in a friendly sociable manner. The FOSS world can be incredibly insular and while I love my friends within it, there’s just no sense in preaching to the converted all the time. You have to get out and engage with others, get other points of view and expand your horizons, rather than just have your old views reinforced by a group of friends who agree. A good example is the fact that I was surrounded by iPhones last night and I casually worked the conversation onto the sat on the table N900 between them; what’s cool about it, Android, Linux and other mobile things. Not in a preachy way but just in general conversation. A lot of people had never heard of these things and took a genuine interest. I don’t expect all of them, if any actually, to run home and install a Linux distribution on their computer, but it’s a start. I’ve noticed the tendency within Open Source to think we are a bigger part of the tech crowd and society in general than we actually are. It’s good to get some perspective from people outside and bring that back to the group. It gives ideas for how we can engage with more people and improve what we do. It reinforces my beliefs in the principals of FOSS rather than weakening them. Enough rambling about that though.

I released a couple of albums on Jamendo last week. One of Kagnee, my old ska punk band, and another from an even older project called The Shed Collective. You can download, share and copy the music under the CC BY-SA license. It also prompted me to sort out my main site a little. If you look at danlynch.org/music you can see this starting to take shape. The list of tracks is easier to read and more compact but the RSS feed still works like a proper blog with full posts. My mastery of Drupal Views knows no bounds… ok, maybe a few. I’m going to keep working on that and making the content more useful as and when I get time. Eventually I’ll redirect shedmusic.net to it, as the old music blog is largely dead right now. Stay tuned for more on that.

Upcoming:

So in the next few days I should be off to Chester LUG tomorrow night with any luck. I have an interview booked with former OpenSUSE community manager Zonker for Linux Outlaws tomorrow, there’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show, more celebration of Will’s 30th (mine is looming in May) and a whole lot more OggCamp business. I hope I won’t be so late with updates next time but please bear with me, things are hectic. I’ll be in touch again very soon. Until then take care of yourselves and stay lucky,

See ya,

Dan

Weekly Rewind #51

2010-02-14T23:09:31+00:00

Evening everyone, it’s Sunday and you know what that means? It’s time for another weekly rewind. I’d like to start off by apologising for the lack of substantial articles in the last couple of weeks. Event organisation and other things have kept me so busy I just haven’t managed it. I’ve been meaning to get the distro hopping and reviewing under way again for a while. I even went as far as trying to install PC-BSD, only to discover it needs more disk space than I have available with my normal system partition layout. Luckily it warned me and I didn’t get as far as wiping my system. I’ll have to think about how best to fix this. I have some other things to write about, I’ll focus on those next week. So, let’s talk about what actually did happen.

We began on Monday with another live Linux Outlaws show as always. It was great fun and Fab released that later in the week as episode 135 – “So Good They Tried To Patent Him”. I also released a new Rathole Radio in the afternoon. I finally got around to making a Facebook page for the show as well. I don’t use Facebook much, but it seems the rest of the world does and I want to spread the word. Hopefully it will help get some new listeners on board.

Dave Lee - Drawing not be to scale

A lot of time this week has been taken up talking to various potential Oggcamp10 sponsors. I’m pleased to say we’re finally making good progress on that and I might not have to go bankrupt after all, which would be nice. I’ve also been working on some Drupal stuff and trying to organise my home site a little. It’s still a work in progress and it looks like crap, but the information is improving. I looked at some old albums I did as parts of various bands and other projects. I’ve uploaded some of them to Jamendo and if they’re approved I’ll post the links here soon. I’d like to get some of the music I’ve made over the years out there for others too hear, and with Jamendo I can do that under a Creative Commons license. Cool hey? I have some ideas to work on new music this year, but it may have to wait until the Oggcamp madness dies down. I’ll let you know.

On Friday night I tuned into The Bugcast live recording. The host Dave Lee was kind enough to play one of my songs and it was good fun chatting to everyone. Dave does a great job and I believe his wife Caroline usually co-hosts but sadly she was ill this week. They play some great music and make a really good show. Go and have a listen.

Ok I’m gonna keep this update a little shorter than normal, but there isn’t a lot else to tell at this time. I hope to announce some more Oggcamp related news very soon I promise. One of the most important things to remember is please book your accommodation now if you want to come. I’ve been saying this for a month but I’m still hearing from people who are taking their time. It’s a busy weekend, if you keep waiting you’ll have trouble finding anything. Head to laterooms.com and search Liverpool on the relevant dates. It’s the best resource I’ve found. I hope to see many of you joining us at the event for fun and Free Software.

Upcoming:

As I mentioned at the top, my distro hopping has stalled at the moment, hopefully I’ll fix that this week. I plan to write about my experience of testing Firefox Mobile and Weave in the meantime. There will also be another Linux Outlaws live show tomorrow night and I hope you’ll join us for that. Don’t forget Rathole Radio next Sunday Feb 21st at 9pm too.

Take care everyone and have a nice week,

Dan

Weekly Rewind #50

2010-02-07T23:47:16+00:00

Greetings all and welcome to Weekly Rewind number 50. The big “five oh”, I’m referring to the number there and not using ghetto slang for the police. I do listen to a lot of hip hop but it hasn’t completely taken over my brain just yet. I once got a royal ripping (Liverpool slang for skitting) from my band mates for using the term “five oh” as a police car drove past. We laughed hard about that. Anyway this is all by the by, so let’s get into it.

On Monday we recorded another Linux Outlaws and streamed it live as usual. Unfortunately Fab has been ill this week so best wishes to him, despite this he still got the show out on Friday though. Nice work! On Tuesday I worked on some audio stuff along with many other jobs. I put some stuff together as an audio trailer for OggCamp10 and released that here later in the week. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends on Tuesday night which was nice. On Wednesday I attended LivLUG where we had a fascinating talk about ZFS and BtrFS from Tom Hall, a storage and filesystems guru. Tom’s a good speaker and it was very entertaining. One of the LUG members (Neil Bothwick) later described it as a bit of a Jim Bowen moment though. For those who have no clue what I’m on about there, ZFS is under a license not compatible with the Linux kernel, so it’s doubtful we’ll see it in there any time soon. Jim Bowen is a British game show host famous for saying “…and here’s what you could of won”. Jokes are always better when you have to explain them aren’t they? I wasn’t sure Jim Bowen’s fame had spread from far from these shores yet, but it made me laugh anyway..

Thursday was pretty quiet and I got on with jobs but on Friday I went over to Liverpool on the train. I had a meeting at the Bad Format Social Club, the venue for my Rathole Roadshow gig and sorted out some arrangements for that. I then walked up to the FACT building for lunch with some friends and potential sponsors. I have some good leads there but we could always use more. If you or your employer would be interested in sponsoring OggCamp please drop me a line. Finally, I popped into the Black-E to sort some stuff some out with them before hopping on the train home. I used the N900 to keep up with emails and everything else during the day rather than taking my laptop, and I got a surprising amount done on the device. It did affect the battery life a little as I used it much more heavily, but it was a good test. I don’t normally go out for the day like that without a laptop if I have work to do. I listened to some teenage lad on the train trying to convince his mum he “really needed an iPad”. “It’s not a toy it’s for serious work, I’m going to do spreadsheets on it” he pleaded. I resisted the strong urge to jump in with a comment like “Spreadsheets my arse, it’s a big iPod Touch!! You can’t even install software on it. Get a proper computer you idiot” but it wasn’t easy. He kept looking over at the N900 to try and work out what it was I was using. Some sort of iPhone he hadn’t seen perhaps? Thankfully not. I engaged “smug mode” and remained quiet.

On Saturday I was interviewed for the Open Source Musician podcast which was a lot of fun. I was honoured to be asked on the show but felt like a bit of a fraud. I still have a dual-boot setup on my studio machine. I use Ubuntu Studio a lot but it does also have Windows XP on there which I occasionally use. It’s not a secret, I’m open about it, but it’s not something I’m proud of either. I’ve been “in the process” of going 100% Linux in the studio for about 18 months now. I never seem to get the time to actually concentrate on it with so much else going on. I’m proud to say I do all of my podcast production on Linux, but music is still a work in progress for me. I’m only 70% there. Must try harder, as it would probably say on my school report. Finally, today I streamed and recorded another Rathole Radio show which was great fun. I played a wide range of music and had a lot of fun as always. I’ve processed the audio just now and will release it tomorrow. It’s getting too late to do it tonight.

Upcoming:

Not sure exactly what I have planned in the next week but I know something will take up my time. I’m not 100% sure if Fab will be fit enough to do Linux Outlaws tomorrow night either, but hopefully so. I didn’t get chance to install a BSD and test it this week. I still need to do that for a review. I’ll also be doing much more Oggcamp business and trying to move all that forward. We made good progress on sponsorship this week and that’s my major focus right now. There’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show to produce and much more besides. Join me next week to find out what unfolds.

Take care,

Dan

OggCamp10 Trailer

2010-02-04T23:33:27+00:00

Evening all, I just wanted to share with you something I’ve been working on this week. It’s an audio trailer for our OggCamp10 event on 1st-2nd of May 2010 in Liverpool, UK. I threw this together quite quickly with a short script and some sound effects. It came out well though and I hope you enjoy it. Obviously this is licensed under Creative Commons, as with all my other work. So if you’d like to use it in any way feel free. It’s a promo after all so I hope too hear it everywhere!!

Ogg Version (1mb)

Mp3 Version (1mb)

FLAC Version (3.5mb)

The work contains some samples taken from FreeSound.org and in keeping with their CC license I’d like to thank dobroide for the pedestrian noise, and rutgermuller for some extra footsteps. The music is an old track of my own which isn’t actually released yet. I’ll get the full version uploaded as soon as I can. Oggcamp business has me very busy right now. I will also be making a shorter 30 second cut of the ad very soon.

That’s all for now, take care out there,

Dan

Weekly Rewind #49

2010-01-31T21:46:45+00:00

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.

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

Handset Review: Nokia N900

2010-01-30T01:06:36+00:00

Nokia N900

It’s been a while since my last substantial review but I’m back with something a little different for you today. I’d like to talk about the Nokia N900 Linux-based phone I’ve been testing for the past 6 weeks. It’s the first Maemo powered device to feature phone functions. Does this move signal a new direction for Nokia? Nobody seems quite sure just yet, but the hardware and software are causing a lot of interest in the Linux community. Here’s my thoughts on the experience so far.

Vital Stats:

Processor: ARM Cortex-A8 600mhz, PowerVR SGX graphics
RAM: 256mb
Storage: 32gb internal memory, 16gb MicroSD slot for expansion
Camera: Carl Zeiss, Tessar 2.8/5.2, AF 5MP
Operating System: Maemo 5 (based on Debian)
Kernel: 2.6.28-omap1
Connectivity: GRPS, EDGE, HSDPA, HSUPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, DLNA, Infra red, microUSB v2.0
Other Features: FM Radio transmitter, GPS, TV-out

Introduction:

Back of Device

In the interests of full disclosure I should start off by pointing out a couple of quick things. Firstly this handset was sent to me for trial by Nokia, I didn’t buy it and it has to be returned at some point. I’ve had it 6 weeks at the time of this writing. Secondly I’m no phone expert. I haven’t used a lot of smartphones, so I can’t compare this directly to Android devices or others. I’ve only used them in passing. I do know a thing or two about Linux though and hopefully that will balance this out.

With Google Android making weekly headlines at the moment it’s an interesting time for Nokia to bring out their first proper Linux-based phone device. Of course you’ll never hear them refer to it as a phone. They strictly only call it a mobile computer and they’re keen to differentiate between this and their Symbian smartphones. Exactly where a smartphone ends and a mobile computer begins I’ll let you decide, I’m not sure I know. Whether Nokia like it or not though people will compare the N900 to the iPhone, Palm Pre and various Android handsets on the market. I’m not convinced this attempt to brand it as a mould-breaking device will work for them. However, the thought of Debian on a proper working phone certainly excited the kilt wearing geek within me. I’d seen a lot of N900 reviews online and I was very keen to get my hands on one. They’re quite expensive handsets at £500 from Nokia Direct in the UK. The best deal I’ve seen on contract here was £35pm for 24 months on Vodafone (handset included), but it did come with a good amount of phone minutes, SMS and “unlimited” data. As much as any of these contracts are ever truly unlimited. Vodafone is the only network officially carrying the N900 here in the UK right now. There are rumours that it will be available on other networks in future. I guess we’ll find out.

Hardware:

Keyboard Open

Let’s begin by talking about the hardware you get for your money. The handset is heavier than most other similar devices I’ve tried but only slightly, and it does include a slide out hardware keyboard. It’s solid and well built. It feels very similar to the HTC G1 in form. You get a pretty impressive 32gb of internal storage and this can be expanded to 48gb with a MicroSD card slot. The card slot is located under the battery cover though, so you can’t swap cards easily which isn’t ideal. In practice this hasn’t been a problem because I tend to just put a card in and forget about it. With 48gb of memory to play with it’s not as if I’m going to run out any time soon. It’s a generous amount by any estimation. The processor is an ARM Cortex-A8 which runs at 600mhz and there’s also 256mb of RAM. Even when running 4 or 5 applications at once it doesn’t seem to struggle. You do get the occasional slowdown when a particular application hangs, but think is a software error in those applications rather than hardware. The experience has been very smooth and slick overall.

End View

The main data connection is through a MicroUSB port on the top of the phone. If you’re on Windows you can install the Nokia PC Suite software for syncing your calendar and contacts, but I’m not keen on that. Besides I’m a Linux desktop user anyway and there’s no Linux version. Perhaps this is a blessing as much as a curse. I am pleased to say the device works perfectly as a mass storage drive on any platform via USB. You can also charge it from this port using the standalone wall charger or a computer. The 5 mega-pixel camera seems very good for a device of this kind. It’s a Carl Zeiss optic and while I know nothing about photography, I’ve been assured by friends that this is a good make. The way I take photos I need all the help I can get. There’s also a standard 3.5mm mini-jack connection which is a must for me. I hate proprietary headphone connections with a passion. Then there are the usual power, volume, camera and lock buttons you’d expect around the periphery of the handset. You also get a stylus tucked away at one end. At first I expected to hate using the stylus, but it’s actually quite grown on me. The touch screen is good enough to use with your fingers, which I do 90% of the time, but occasionally when doing something that requires more fine accuracy I pull out the stylus.

Size Comparison

I’ve heard many friends complaining about the battery life on their G1 or Hero and I wasn’t looking forward to charging my phone every 8 hours. This hasn’t been the case at all though. I don’t use the device heavily for phone calls but I am always using data for email and other things, playing music and even using the FM transmitter. Despite all this I get well over 24 hours out of one charge. I’ve been very happy with that. I get a solid and quick 3G connection with O2 UK. I downloaded a 52mb podcast file over 3G to test this. It came in at 600kbps all the way. That’s almost as fast as I get on wi-fi, impressive! You can also use WLAN, BlueTooth and even the Infra Red port for connectivity if you want.

The GPS seems pretty good but the mapping application is let down by the lack of decent maps for me. OVI maps don’t contain the same amount of data as Google Maps from what I’ve seen. You also don’t get turn by turn directions when using the GPS in the car. This may well be fixed by software updates in future. I’ve heard more 3^rd party GPS apps for Maemo are in the pipeline.

Overall, the hardware is one of the most impressive things about the N900 for me. I love being able to jump in the car, start a podcast and then just press the FM transmitter button to play it back through the radio. You could of course use an external FM transmitter with any device, but having it built in just feels cool. Every time I switch it on I half expect Q to pop up and say “pay attention 007”. Nokia have always made good hardware and this is certainly true here. Most people’s issues with them over the years have been more with their software. So let’s discuss that next.

Software:

One Of 4 Desktops

As I mentioned earlier, the N900 is the first Maemo device from Nokia with phone features. More precisely it comes with Maemo 5, the latest iteration of their Debian-based operating system that won many fans on Internet tablets like the N800 and N810. I’ve only used those devices in passing, but I’ve always heard good things about Maemo from friends. I’m a big Debian fan, and the ability to install a .deb package on your phone has always appealed to me. There are many Maemo repositories containing thousands of packages Linux fans will know well from their desktops. Gpodder, Pidgin, Firefox and Vim to name just a few. Ok, so maybe Vim is more for the hardcore geek I admit, but it is in the repos along with QEmacs, which made me laugh. You can get root access to the N900 any time by typing one command in the X terminal window. A handy feature which in turn means you can run “apt-get install <package>” to install things. A feature to make any Linux fan need a change of trousers if ever I’ve seen one. Of course the first thing I did when I got the N900 was jump into a terminal and install Nano with Apt-Get. That’s pretty damn cool on a phone.

Multiple Apps At Once

The Maemo 5 interface works well with the touch screen and proper multi-tasking is a big bonus. A lot of other phones will run more than one app simultaneously these days (iPhone users look away now), but this is really well implemented. Switching apps is easy and the visual effects on the desktop are almost Compiz-like. The menu system is intuitive enough but I do have one slight problem with it. There’s no obvious way to close some things at first. You have to tap on the desktop outside a menu to go back a screen. It’s easy once you learn how but some clearer instructions would be nice.

The only really negative experience I’ve had so far with the N900 was updating to a new firmware using Nokia’s NSU software. I wrote about this at length on the blog, so I won’t go over all that again. For me the update process needs to be significantly improved if Nokia want ordinary users to buy into the N900, both literally and metaphorically. There are some other areas that could use a little polish. The built-in email client for example isn’t great, it needs to be improved. You can supplement it with other 3^rd party apps but this isn’t a long term solution. The dialler on the other hand is very good and has pretty much all the features you would expect. It’s cool to have Skype and Google Talk integrated too. You can call people on Skype directly from your phone book if they’re online, or to a phone if you have Skype Out minutes. I don’t know many other phones that do that at the moment. The included web browser is also excellent. You get full flash support and the full web experience on the device. Nothing is missing. You can also install Mozilla Fennec and have a choice of browsers, which I’ve done.

My Python Gtk App Running

One of the most common digs I hear from Android users is that the N900 is tied to the Ovi Store for new software. I certainly wouldn’t argue that the Android Market is a lot bigger and more popular, but the N900 is in no way tied to Ovi for getting software. There are 1000s of packages in the Maemo repositories and you can also run any Python software with a Gtk or Qt interface. Pretty much everything on the Linux desktop then. I was even able to run some Gtk applications I wrote myself just by copying the source code over to the device. The next stop is to look at packaging this into .debs for easy sharing with other N900 users. For hackers and Linux geeks alike I think this could make a very interesting prospect. The software is still evolving though and I’m keen to see what’s planned for Maemo 6, the odd rough edge is apparent at times. For the average person in the street the convenience and simplicity of the Android Market is probably a winner right now, I can’t argue against that. One of the big buzz phrases you hear from all these companies is “developer mind share”. Basically this means getting developers excited about coding on your platform. I suspect giving these devices to developers and sending them to bloggers like myself is intended to achieve that. For a developer wanting to make a living purely from selling mobile apps it’s hard to see the attraction of the N900 right now. Ovi doesn’t have the user base of the iPhone App Store or Android Market. With so many handsets already running Android and more in the pipeline, I think this is the place for mobile developers to be right now. I really like Maemo 5 and there are already plans for Maemo 6. It has the solid base you would expect from Debian and they’ve built well on this in adding polish. If Nokia put more weight behind it we may see it grow, but with only one device running Maemo 5 and only one more planned for 2010, it’s not going to be easy.

Conclusions:

Getting A Feel For It

This has very much been a Linux users experience of the N900, rather than a phone expert or an average end user. But then I think this is precisely the core market for the device. In many ways it feels like what we all hoped the OpenMoko project would become before it petered out. A really good Open Source Linux-based phone with slick hardware, root access and the ability to run your own code without restrictions. It’s not quite as open as the Freerunner admittedly. You can’t get schematics for the hardware but this is as close as I think you can get right now. Lots of people tell me they can do the same things on their Android devices and this may well be true. I’d need to compare how much effort it is to jailbreak an Android phone.

The biggest barrier for the N900 at the moment my well be Nokia itself. Many people disagree with me on this point, but I think they should be pushing it more. It’s an exclusive hacker device right now both in price and visibility. It’s still new so perhaps it’s a bit early to judge their promotion efforts yet. Developers may get excited by the full Python implementation and ability to use familiar Linux toolkits. My advice to Nokia right now (not that I doubt they worry about my advice) would be to release a rapid application environment for Maemo. Something akin to Quickly on Ubuntu. You could even port Quickly over to the device. It would speed up the appearance of new apps and fuel demand for the handset. An easy to use virtual machine for testing your applications on any desktop would also be very handy. It all depends how much effort they want to put into it. Android developers can already target their apps at devices from within Eclipse. (EDIT: Apparently the Maemo 5 SDK includes a VM, I haven’t tried it yet though)

Threaded Conversations

The question everyone is asking me now is “will you buy an N900 when you have to send that back”? I honestly don’t know for sure yet. I use a lot of Google applications and the integration offered by Android is appealing to a freedom hater like me. I’d like to try an Android device properly for a few weeks to really compare them. £500 is a lot of money for a handset, but then this no ordinary handset. I can almost see why Nokia insist on calling this a mobile computer now. It’s half netbook and half smartphone, whether there’s really a market for that we’ll have to see. If the next model (presumably the N910) makes as much forward progress I think Nokia may yet surprise a few people who’ve written them off. The hardware is excellent and the software feels 90% there, it just needs to cross that final hurdle.

If you’re looking for a consumer-ready, fashionable Linux-based phone platform with a big app store I’d direct you towards Android. However, if you’re a Linux user interested in trying something more like the desktop platform you know and love, the N900 is perfect. I’m really happy with the N900 and each day it moves a little closer to the centre of my heart, is there a doctor in the house? I hope we see many more devices running Maemo in the near future and much development. That’s what it’s going to take for the Android crazed public and media to notice it in the wake of things like the Nexus One.

Upcoming:

I’ll continue to test and write about my experiences with the N900 of course, but I should really get back to distro hopping on my laptop. It’s been a busy start to 2010. I do have a few potential targets for the next hop in mind. If you have any suggestions or requests please feel free to send them to me or leave a comment. Also if someone wants to send me an Android phone to compare with the N900 feel free, it’s not likely but no harm in asking hehe…

Weekly Rewind #48

2010-01-25T01:18:24+00:00

It’s another Sunday afternoon and that means I’m sat with my laptop typing away as usual. Not what most people would call a relaxing Sunday, but it seems to work for me. I’m preparing for another Rathole Radio tonight and doing a few other things. Allow me to update you with recent events in my life. Here comes Weekly Rewind number 48.

It began as weeks often do for me with a live Linux Outlaws show on Monday. Much fun was had, much geeky talking was done and I’m pleased to say many people joined in. I also did more ringing around and emailing as Oggcamp organization carried on apace. I’ve been doing a lot of Drupal hacking and coding for a website project this week too. I finally got past chapter 2 of my Drupal Pro Development book after about a year, and I’m starting to understand writing your own modules as well. I’ll try to write more about that as time goes on. On Tuesday I processed the audio from Linux Outlaws and sent it back to Fab for editing. He released that as episode 132 “The Denty Dent Client” on Thursday. I also sorted out my vote for the Open Rights Group board elections and posted that off. Any other members should have a read through the candidates information and get their ballot papers in before February 15th.

I wrote about my trials with the N900 in great detail and published that on Tuesday. It seems the information has helped a couple of people and I’m very glad too hear that. I finally got the Oggcamp hotel booking site sorted with the Tourist Board but sadly the results aren’t as great as I’d hoped. The hotel rooms seem quite expensive and I found I could bring up many more options just by searching myself. They have been helpful, but I think perhaps they’re expecting a more corporate conference where everyone stays at expensive hotels and bills it to their employer. Oggcamp is a community event and our attendees are different. I’ve spent time researching and compiling travel and hotel information for the website myself. I’ve also put a nice image of the venue on the front page. You can see all that at oggcamp.org of course. If anyone has problems finding somewhere to stay or they need travel advice I’m happy to point you in the right direction. My email address is on the website. I’m taking my self-appointed role as “Open Source Ambassador For Liverpool” quite seriously. The big tray of Fererro Rocher is on order.

Severed Fifth Album Cover

Despite organisational work and PHP code I’ve also moved my mobile from Orange to O2 this week. I have a much better contract and data allowance to use with the N900 now, and as soon as I switched to the O2 SIM I got a full 3G connection. It seems the best option where I live. Orange weren’t happy obviously but I found their tone and attempts to dissuade me a little insulting. The told me that they could offer me a massive 50mb of data per month for £15 and proceeded to tell me how massive this allowance was and how I would never use it all. That’s one podcast to me or a few big email attachments. I’d already told him I was Linux journalist and I’d been sent this phone by Nokia to test. Despite this he seemed to think I didn’t know what a megabyte was and could educate me. It was very condescending and didn’t help his cause. I’ve been a loyal Orange customer for nearly 10 years, never missed a bill, ever. In return I at least expected not to be treated like I’d just had a lobotomy. He didn’t even know what Linux was, which led me to wonder just who the computer expert in this conversation actually was. Anyway, enough complaining it’s done now. The PAC code arrived in the post after a couple of days. I expected it in an email or SMS instantly as other companies do, but at least they sent it in the end.

I’ve been collecting tracks and preparing questions for tonight’s Rathole Radio most of the weekend. I’ll be joined live by Jono Bacon of Ubuntu and Severed Fifth fame. I plan to chat to him about Creative Commons and the options available to musicians online. There’ll be plenty of metal in the show of course but I also have some electro, some baggy indie and even some ragga music to keep it varied. It’s gonna be good. To round the week off yesterday I heard that my interview with Def Net Media had been published, and it came out really well I think. I rambled on as I normally do, why use 2 words when 15 will do hey. Let me know what you think if you read it.

Coming up:

There’ll be more Linux Outlaws live tomorrow night which you should come and join us for. I’ll also release the Rathole Radio podcast from tonight and write a long review of the N900. There’s much to talk about. I also expect there’ll be more OggCamp news, Drupal hacking and other shenanigans going on. I’ll report back next week. Till then, take care of yourselves.

Dan

Reflashing A Dead N900

2010-01-18T23:08:50+00:00

In my last Weekly Rewind I alluded to a dramatic episode I suffered with the Nokia N900 at the weekend. I wanted to tell that story in full and I figured it deserved it’s own post. I’ll also try to offer a little advice about flashing Maemo devices from a Linux desktop, based on my relatively limited but successful experience. There are already very good guides for this around though, so I don’t want to just duplicate them.

N900 - Keyboard Open

I was lucky enough to be sent an N900 for testing and review purposes by Nokia before Christmas, a lot of you reading this will know that already. Lately some software updates to Maemo 5 (the N900 operating system) have been rolled out, and of course I wanted the latest greatest versions. I received one update about a week ago over the air, which means there was no need to do anything more complex than press “yes” on the phone and let it do it’s thing. It all worked beautifully and I was very impressed. However, when I was prompted about another available update later in the week the process was anything but smooth. Little did I know it but my problems were just beginning. I tried to apply the second update on the phone in the same way but was told I needed to connect the “Nokia Software Updater” tool via a PC. It seems this happens if you have certain testing repositories enabled on your Maemo device like I did, it can cause package conflicts. I’m not averse to using the official software to perform an update if needed, but what I am averse to is the fact that this software is only available for Windows. I’m a full time Linux user as most of you will know and considering the the N900 is a Linux device you’d think they’d have a Linux updater too.

Nevertheless I managed to procure a machine running Windows XP and install the update software. I connected the phone and ran the process as instructed. At first all seemed well, it downloaded the new firmware image and rebooted the phone into what I believe is known as R&D mode. After a while though I noticed the progress bar had stopped moving and I became worried. I left it for over an hour and still no movement. Obviously I wasn’t about to pull the plug out and permanently kill the phone, not without a gun to me head anyway. I waited and waited, then I waited some more. It must have been 2 hours in the end but finally a message came up on the PC screen telling me the update had failed. I closed the program down and looked at the phone, it still seemed to be locked in R&D mode. An attempt to reboot it manually did nothing and I was starting to believe I’d royally screwed the thing for good. I removed and replaced the battery to see if this would reset the device. It didn’t, by this time I was pulling out the little hair I have left.

Figure 1

It seemed as though the Nokia update software had wiped the phone and then promptly crashed before copying over the new firmware. I was wondering how I could explain all this to the company when when sending the device back when I hopped on Identi.ca to talk to people about it. The wise and good friends I have there seemed to know a lot more about this and suggested I try to reflash the device and perhaps revive it. There’s a Linux tool for that I was relieved to discover. I was keen to try it ASAP but the Maemo dev website was actually down for server migration over the whole weekend. This was Saturday night and I was facing a long Sunday without knowing if I still had a phone or not, good timing on my part. I transferred the SIM to my old handset so I could still make calls and twiddled my thumbs. Actually I did do something useful as I read on this guide how to set the phone into R&D mode ready for flashing. It involves some pressing of keys and secret hand shakes which I’ll describe in more detail in a second. With this done I was able to see the device on my laptop by running an “lsusb” command in a terminal. To my huge relief it identified itself as “Nokia e61 (Firmware Update Mode)” and I was starting to believe I could pull this one out of the fire. Hopefully it would be receptive to reflashing.

The following day my good friend Andy (@oscillik) from LivLUG kindly offered to upload the latest N900 image and Flasher 3.5 tool (yes it’s really called Flasher, I had a giggle as well). Here’s the process I went through to flash the device.

Firstly I installed the Flasher-3.5.deb file Andy sent me on my Linux Mint desktop. You can download it here, now the server is running again.
Next I opened a bash terminal and tried running a “Flasher-3.5″ command to see if it had worked. I also checked in the Synaptic Package Manager (see figure 1)
In the terminal I ran “sudo flasher-3.5 -F imagefile.bin -f -R”. You need to replace imagefile.bin with the proper location and name of your image file obviously.
The terminal prints out “Suitable USB device not found, waiting”.
Next you need to unplug your phone from the computer if it’s connected and open up the internal keyboard. Hold down the U key on there while reconnecting the USB cable to the device. The phone should now enter R&D mode and the computer will see it.
The Flasher will now start doing it’s thing and copying the firmware to the N900. (see figure 2)
Wait a few minutes and the phone will eventually reboot into the newly installed firmware.

Figure 2

It’s not that hard to do but it does involve a few steps. To my huge, HUGE relief this actually worked and my dead N900 came back to life. Like a phoenix from the flames. I’ve never been so happy to hear that annoying Nokia tune in my life. My phone desktop came up pretty much as it had before but with some app icons missing and sporting the original blue N900 theme. I’d made some backups of the data on the phone and also used the internal backup application to store contacts, settings and other things. I restored the backup and it rebooted the phone once again. All of my music, videos and other data were still intact on the device. That was about 12gb of data that I didn’t really want to have to transfer over again. It seems the N900 has some fairly sensible partitioning going on internally. When you wipe the device firmware it only clears the OS partition and leaves the rest alone. That’s very cool. I still couldn’t restore all my applications from the backup though because the repository server was down, the same server it seems. The backup just stores the names of your installed packages and reinstalls them from the repos, like any good Debian system should I suppose.

As of today the repository server is back up and I restored all my applications in one go. The phone is exactly as it was before I broke it and I now have the latest firmware too. It was an emotional journey but I made it in the end. Thanks to the help of friends online, for which I thank them. I’m not sure what happened with the Nokia Software Updater (NSU) and I’m told this is not uncommon for NSU to break by people who’ve used Nokia devices a lot more. If that’s true then Nokia really need to sort this software out, I was convinced I’d bricked my phone and any novice user would be totally lost. I’m hoping the updates will be “over the air” in future, with a solid wifi connection there’s no reason for them not to be. I suppose it shows us one thing, that the N900 while being a lovely device still has some way to go on the software front. If it’s going to be used by Joe Bloggs in the street then the updating processed needs to be… well… updated. Excuse the awful pun.

I hope perhaps this information is useful to others who’ve suffered failed updates and broken phones too. I’ll be steering well clear of the NSU in future and as a bonus it means I don’t need to deal with Windows either. Result!

Dan

062. Develop my own photographs

2010-01-18T19:07:12+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I develop my own photographs in either black and white or colour.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: I love film photography. In fact, I prefer it to digital. I’ve recently started using black and white film in an Olympus Trip 35. I’d really like to try and develop my own photographs, partly because I find places that develop photographs are too happy to try and “fix” what they deem to be problem photographs. Maybe I’d purposefully took a photo that would be over exposed. There’s so many pictures that may be missed because of commercial development places. At least if I developed my own I could judge whether they were any good by my merits.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

061. Complete Project 365

2010-01-18T18:52:10+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I complete project 365.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: Project 365 is a documentation of a year of a persons life with one photo representing each day. Essentially, its a way of encouraging myself to take more photos by taking a photo a day. I’m not the greatest photographer, but I really enjoy it and would love to get better at it.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

084. Go to a service at a Baptist Church

2010-01-18T18:46:16+00:00

I consider this goal complete when/if: I attend a service at a Baptist church.

Why it’s on my 101 goals in 1001 days list: As with Goal 74 I have no idea what a Baptist church service would entail, but there is a Baptist church less than 5 minutes walk from my house, so I think attending a service would be a good way to find out more.

GOAL STATUS: Not yet started.

Weekly Rewind #47

2010-01-17T20:33:31+00:00

As a great rapper (Rakim) once said “It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t ‘ve left you…”, ok so it hasn’t been that long but I did miss my last Weekly Rewind. Things have been pretty hectic lately and something had to give. It’s not a great a start to the New Year, but it is only the 2nd week I’ve missed in almost a year now. So I’m not doing too bad. Anyway, I should get on with telling you what’s actually been happening since last we met. Let’s do this.

On Monday we recorded and streamed another Linux Outlaws as usual. It was a really long show in the end but we had fun and hopefully everyone listening did too. Fab gave his thoughts on the Motorola Milestone, which he’s been sent for review. It sounds cool and I’ve had my own phone drama this week. More on that in a future post, it’s too big a story to fit in here. I was also busy making phone calls and talking to people about planning for OggCamp10 on Monday. We officially announced the date and location on the microblogs and caused something of a storm. If you didn’t see the blog announcement I also slipped out on Tuesday here’s the low down. May 1st-2nd 2010 at The Black-E in Liverpool there’ll be a weekend festival of Free Software, Free Culture and fun. There’s also the Rathole Roadshow gig that I’m planning on the Friday night (April 30th) to kick the whole thing off in style. It’s going to be epic and you shouldn’t miss this weekend if you’re within travelling distance. I know some overseas readers obviously can’t make it, I’ll try not to bore you with endless OggCamp news in the coming months.

The Black-E

On Tuesday I released a new Rathole Radio from the previous Sunday, did some writing for the blog and also did some work on a Drupal site. That programming and admin work has been quite frequent in the last 2 weeks and I’ll give you more details of that in good time. At the moment the site isn’t finished and I can’t really direct you to anything substantial. Soon my pretties, soon. I noticed later in the week that the Rathole Radio downloads were slow and erratic. It seems I’ve outgrown the temporary solution I used to get the podcast up and running initially. I’ve been hosting the media using Dreamhost because its cheap and easy, but the speeds are so slow now and downloads are failing mid way in some cases. I finally bit the bullet about bought some space on Libsyn, then moved over the latest episode and updated the links on the main site. We use Libsyn for Linux Outlaws and it’s always been really good for us. It also means I’ll get better stats and I can see just how popular the show is. Overall the move is a good sign really, it means enough people are downloading the show that it needs more capacity now. As problems go, it’s a good one to have I’d say. I’ll move the older episodes over too, as and when time allows.

Let’s fast forward a little to Friday. I went over to Liverpool for a meeting about the gig I’m arranging at the Bad Format Social Club in town. It went well and I also got some other business done. I visited The Black-E again and took lots of photos of all the rooms we’ll be using. I also got floor plans and other details to help us work out where things will go. I sent this information to the rest of the planning ground and in time I’ll share pictures with everyone on the main OggCamp website. Linux Outlaws 131 was also released on Friday. A little late due to the fact that both Fab and I are very busy, but he did a great job of editing as always. Over the weekend I’ve edited the next Software Freedom Law Show and done a few other jobs. I did have a major disaster where I thought I’d killed the N900 completely with a failed software update too. With a bit of hacking and some help from my friends though I’ve brought it back from the dead. It was touch and go for a while there. I won’t write all the details here because they’re too long and the story deserves its own article. Expect that tomorrow or Tuesday.

Gifts From Greece

Another thing I’d like to mention from the last couple of weeks is a package I received from Greece. It was from Rod C Johnson, a listener of Linux Outlaws and valued member of the community. As you might have guessed from the name he’s not actually Greek but an American who moved over. We affectionately nicknamed him Ramrod on the show and luckily he doesn’t seem to mind that. He sent me a package containing a bottle of olive oil made on his farm and also a load of other amazing things. I was delighted and humbled by the gift. I’ve already used a little of the oil in some cooking and it’s beautiful, so thanks very much Rod!! You can see a picture of the package to the right. I should also point out that the green stuff in the bags is tea, before the swat team knock my door down. The generosity, grace and good will of our fans never ceases to amaze me. So thanks to everyone who makes our community so great.

Upcoming:

Tomorrow there’ll be another Linux Outlaws live in the evening. Why not come and join us live in the IRC chatroom and get involved, it can be a lot of fun. Visit linuxoutlaws.com/live and hop into #linuxoutlaws on Freenode at about 7pm GMT tomorrow. I’ll write up my adventure with the N900 and publish that soon. I’ll also try and get back into distro hopping and reviewing as things calm down a little. There’ll be more hacking with Drupal and god knows what else. So stay tuned and I’ll report back. Thanks for reading and take care till next time.

Dan

P.S – The quote at the start is from “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B and Rakim, in case you didn’t know. Listen to it, it’s a classic piece of hip-hop.

Unexpected Fox

2010-01-13T23:01:11+00:00

This morning just as I was leaving the house I looked into the garden. As well as yet more snow, I saw this beautiful fox. Standing there in the daylight in the open.

I grabbed my camera with the 17-85mm lens and managed to get a few shots before he wandered off again.

I put a bigger lens on and managed to get a few more snaps before he disappeared again. About 100mm focal length on a 1.6x crop camera, so about 160mm.

Before soon he wandered off again.

More pics.

Winter Trees

2010-01-13T22:57:55+00:00

Yet more snow pictures. Again took last Monday.

Posted via email from tensixtyone shorts

OggCamp10 Is Coming!

2010-01-13T01:21:41+00:00

Something awesome this was comes…. yes that’s right we’re going to do another OggCamp this year. The first one was such a success and we all enjoyed it so much that we just had to really. It’s a bit earlier in the year this time and it’ll be in Liverpool rather than Wolverhampton, but we sincerely hope you’ll come and join us. I’ve been very busy since the New Year putting all this in place. I’ve braved the ice for meetings at various venues, set the phone alight with negotiations and I’m pleased to say things are really coming together. We announced the dates and other details on Linux Outlaws last night. They’re also all over the microblogs, but for anyone who missed it here goes…

Date - 1st and 2nd of May 2010.

Venue – The Black-E, Liverpool, L1 5EW.

Website - OggCamp.org

Free Software, Free Culture, Free Thinking!

Don’t forget to get here on Friday the 30th and attend my Rathole Roadshow gig to kick the weekend off in style. It’s a Free Culture music gig featuring David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and myself, all playing live along with other guests to be announced. I’m working with the hotel arrangements with Liverpool Tourist Board right now. More details to come very soon. It’s a popular weekend being a Bank Holiday though and a popular destination, so book early! Keep an eye on the website of follow us on Twitter and Identi.ca for updates. For those who might be curious about the name, Ogg is a free and open media container format, it’s a barcamp style event and the 10 has a double meaning, it’s the year 2010 and also it’s a binary joke for all the geeks.

The venue is massive and the building is incredible, it’s going to be an epic weekend and it’s in one of the best cities in the world. Ok so I’m biased, but trust me. We need as many people to fill up this place as possible. Come and see us!!! …or I’ll come and find you

You can also sign up on Facebook if you’re a Facebook user.

Regular readers will notice I missed my Weekly Rewind this week but I’m afraid I’ve been so busy I can’t fit it in. I’ll do one next week when things calm down a bit I promise. Thanks for reading.

Dan