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Jamendo.com - Creative Commons Music
- bySpode on11th July, 2008 inGeneral
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Apologies to Crazy Pete - I've hijacked his thread and changed the title. An obvious downside to my BlogThis modification is the inability to have multiple titles per discussion.
Pete first bought Jamendo.com to my attention and I have been using it for a few weeks now. By far my favourite band on there has been "Brad Sucks" with their album "I Don't Know What I'm Doing". I haven't been able to stop listening to it since I picked it up. It has a bit of a grungy sound, but without the attitude. Indie is probably the closest approximation but there is definite electronic influence. I'm somehow reminded of Gomez! The first four tracks of the album are all quite unique, but indicative of style for the rest of the album. If you don't like those, I probably wouldn't listen to the rest.
As Pete originally said, there is a fair amount...
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My Office
- bySpode on8th July, 2008 inGeneral
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I did a bit of work on my office today, and thought as it was tidy, I would take some pictures of it! You can see some more images on my facebook.
On the left, you'll see my Shure SM7A microphone with Behringer pre-amp. Then I've got two Samsung 22" displays. Underneath the desk I've got a Shuttle for work, and a full sized machine for gaming (which rarely gets turned on now I've got games working in Wine...).
The newest addition is the surface to the right. It started life as a corner unit with a lift up lid. I hated lifting a lid up as I had to take everything off the top. So I cut the front off. Then I took some chipboard and cut it to shape to fit my "room" exactly, before covering it in some of that vinyl sticker stuff to make it look nicer.
I'm using...
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Ubuntu 8.04 Gets Update
- bySpode on4th July, 2008 inGeneral
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Hardy Heron has had a luke warm reception at best by the community, made worse by Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) being one of the best releases to date. Yesterday, 8.0.4.1 was released, which offers to fix most of the complaints received. When I get round to it, I shall have to reboot my machine and see if my onboard sound finally works!
As I am now using Linux Mint, I was a little worried I would be left behind, but because of its Ubuntu origins I'm now fully up to date. As of yet, I've not noticed anything different, but then this is a bug fixing release and I've not been having any problems. This new ISO is essentially the previous version with upgraded packages and fixes, rather than an entirely new distribution in its own right. If you are using Ubuntu at the moment, your Update Manager should sort everything out...
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Wild Boys Still Shine
- bySpode on4th July, 2008 inGeneral
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I was lucky enough to be given 3 tickets to see Duran Duran at the O2 on July 3rd. At almost £50 a ticket, I probably wouldn't have forked out to see them, but I'm glad I went. The only Duran Duran album I have is their "Best Of", which I remember listening to obsessively for a short time while I was at University. I was very pleased to know every song in their set, apart from their new material. I was expecting a lot of new material, but it was more like 3 or 4 songs, and I have to admit I enjoyed them - enough that I imagine I'll buy their new album for a listen.
When Simon Le Bon came on stage, I was expecting to see some sort of 80s throw back, but he and the whole band have managed to find a look that's quite...
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Bob's Basement?
- bySpode on29th June, 2008 inGeneral
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Yesterday was an interesting day. Karl and I went down to our monthly KLUG (Kent Linux User Group) meeting, where as we were given a talk on BASH that left me checking my e-mail, followed by a talk on LaTeX. I wasn't expecting to find this talk interesting, but i was. LaTeX is a markup language that allows you to write documents/books/letters in a standard text editor - at a console for instance, which can later be processed into a fully formatted PDF file (as an example).
The markup isn't formatted related, but more a case of marking sections - like the beginning of a page, or a header. And then using templates, or your own designs, this information is processed and the output looks differently accordingly. The woman giving the talk (Julia) felt this was useful for day to day word processing, which I'm not 100% convinced on. However, I...
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Concert Tickets
- bySpode on27th June, 2008 inGeneral
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As the good weather is here, a lot of you are certainly thinking about live music and sporting events (I know I am!). Whenever I need anything, I tend to go straight to Google and see what pops up, but I was recently asked to take a look at Viagogo - a name I've seen pop up all over the place. As well as being official partners for events such as the Reading Festival, 02 Wireless or the Leeds Festival, they also have their own marketplace for buying and selling tickets online.
There were issues this year with Glastonbury tickets that were sold on eBay being canceled and Live 8 listings being pulled. According to the eBay T&C, you can only sell first time tickets (i.e. no reselling) so people may well be looking for alternative ways of moving unwanted tickets on.
Briefly looking over the instructions at Viagogo, it seems it...
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Encoding Video for the N95 8GB in Gnome
- bySpode on25th June, 2008 inGeneral
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Nokia has done a pretty good job of helping users get videos from your PC to the phone - that is of course, if you use Windows. For us Linux users, we are expected to fend for ourselves. But I have created a rather simple right-click script to convert your videos directly into N95 format.
The first issue I had was that the ffmpeg included with Ubuntu doesn't support H264 or AAC encoding - kind of essential. So the first thing to do is, is add the Medibuntu repository to my aptitude sources list. Then, a simple "apt-get update" and "apt-get install ffmpeg" and I was left with an ffmpeg version that supports H264/AAC. A few places also suggested installing the "libavcodec-dev" package. Frankly, the packages that need installing seems to vary from system to system, depending on what you already have installed.
One of the nice things about Ubuntu Tweak...
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VirtualBox 1.6.2 Brings Improvements, Removes Aptitude Updates
- bySpode on25th June, 2008 inGeneral
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I've been waiting to see what would change after Sun Microsystems took over the VirtualBox project. I've noticed for a while that my Synaptic updates have been complaining of the VirtualBox repos not working, and I felt that perhaps it hadn't been updated yet to support Hardy. However, it seems that Sun has chosen to stop supporting updating of the Personal Use Edition via aptitude. This VirtualBox ticket explains it all.
Sun Microsystems
Unfortunately we will probably not be able to offer Debian repositories for future versions of VirtualBox, as we now have to comply with US export restrictions, which involve people downloading VirtualBox "clicking to accept" conditions.
The only way to support automated updates now, is to use the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox - but this is not as stable and doesn't have all the features that the Personal Use Edition has. I can only hope that Sun integrates...
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Have You Channel Flipped?
- bySpode on16th June, 2008 inGeneral
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Wil Harris invited me down to Brighton recently, to get in front of the camera for his Internet TV Station. Although I'm not adverse to stage or camera, presenting was a new experience for me, which I enjoyed immensely. We had a lot of trouble with sound on the day because of the wind, and a coach load of children, but you can't notice it in the final product. I do recall some slightly better takes than those shown, but perhaps the wind or our flaky microphone got the best of them.
This is the first in a 5 part series, where we talk about 4 different compact cameras. If you're lucky, you'll get to see me walk out of the sea, poorly imitating Daniel Craig (Wil's Idea). The difference is, Daniel walked into the Gym, and I walked into the Pub
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One More Reason I Hate PayPal
- bySpode on16th June, 2008 inGeneral
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Today, I finally managed to get my PayPal account back to normal standing. One of the final humps was that I had to confirm my postal address, by that of a phone call. They wouldn't accept my mobile number, and I don't have a land line of my own. There was also an option to have a letter send by mail - I asked for this twice, and nothing was ever sent through.
In the end I managed to persuade my neighbour (thanks Karlson!) to borrow his land line - bypassing the whole point of the system in the first place. An automated phone call later, and it was apparently confirmed. However, nothing changed on my PayPal account. I couldn't repeat the process as apparently a call was scheduled already. Did I get a reply to my support e-mail? No, of course not. Then today, I decided to phone the...
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