Podcast Season 2 Episode 16
Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: Ghost in the machine
In this episode: The NHS dumps Oracle for an open source solution. Five million GMail account details have been leaked. There’s a MEGAsync GUI client for Linux and the Free Software Foundation and Debian are getting together to help with a free software hardware database. We’ve got our usual array of finds, possibly a neuron or three and a rather complex Voice of the Masses.
(psst, you should still go to OggCamp!)
What’s in the show:
- News: In the UK, the
- Finds of the Fortnight:
- Graham:
- Fez is still a wonderful game. But there won’t be a sequel from Phil Phish.
- Tame touchpad multitouch on a Synaptic’s touchpad with xSwipe.
- Andrew (sorry for the glitchy recording):
- LibreOffice can open CorelDRAW files from 1999.
- Mike:
- It’s illegal to own a guinea pig in Switzerland.
- Chocolatey; it’s like apt-get, but for Windows.
- Like Doom? Enjoy Rogue? You’ll love DoomRL.
- Ben:
- Ben now lives in the house of a probable serial killer.
- It takes two weeks to get an internet connection in Bristol.
- You can disable background data usage in Android.
- Graham:
- Vocalise Your Neurons:
- Voice of the Masses: Do you like systemd?
-
Many thanks to all our ace neurons this episode! Don’t forget, you can give your brains a Gloucester/Bristol accent by emailing them to mike@linuxvoice.com.
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (44MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (58MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (18MB)
Duration:53:16
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
Wind sound effect recorded by Mark DiAngelo.
Related Posts
About The Author
Graham Morrison
A free software advocate and writer since the late 1990s, Graham is a lapsed KDE contributor and author of the Meeq MIDI step sequencer. @degville on Twitter.
Ben’s find of the fortnight: there already is a way to block “foreground” data – you disable the data connection. As for the ads you can easily block them from appearing by adding them to your hosts file. There is an android application called adaway that will do that for you if you don’t know how and will keep the hosts file updated with new advertisers. Your apps will continue to function but will fail to load ads.
You can also run a firewall on your android and decided which application is allowed to connect to the internet. You can even block google if you want to (it seems to send a ping to google’s server once in a while, the packet is far to small to contain any useful data).
Great podcast as always! In case you haven’t seen it already, there is an interesting video on Phil Fish and, more importantly, on the nature of internet fame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w&feature=youtu.be
And “Indygame the Movie” is worth watching (and available on Netflix).
Even worse – here in Birmingham – 6 weeks!!! That was to join plusnet. They told us they had to wait for BT engineers, and even though they were paying them a fee, they didn’t have any choice as to who did it.
Has Ben realy moved to bristol. The mobile signal in bristol.
Good luck with the new house Ben, and enjoy the 20 mph main roads.
Mobile signal is good
I’ve moved into a house built of stone — actual big slabs of stone. The mobile signal is great in the garden, but almost non-existent where I work.
I know Bristol roads aren’t great for drivers, but I can commute into the city center on my bike with less than 100m on busy road. It’s great!
I also suggest if you want to go to a leisure centre got to hengrove. They have public computers running linux
I was extremely disappointed not to get the globally influential Linux Voice view on Scottish independence this week. How am I expected to decided how to vote without the sacred opinions of my Free Software heros?
Just think your linux voice will more expensive going over borders
It’s complicated.
For subscribers, this will depend on what Royal Mail do — will Scotland get the same postage prices as they are now, or will it be the same as the EU?
In shops, the question is more tricky. Currently the UK has 0% VAT on books and magazines. However, if Scotland has to enter the EU from scratch, it’s not clear whether they will be allowed to continue this (it could be deemed an unfair government subsidy). I am not a financial politician, I have no idea what will happen about this. All I will say is that there’s a risk that we will have to charge VAT (or whatever Scotland call the tax) on magazines sold in Scottish shops where we don’t currently.
We don’t want to increase the price if Scotland becomes independent, but it’ll depend on factors outside of our control.
I work for the NHS. They say it’s the second largest employer after the chinese state army. Or something.
The backbone of our blood results system runs on AIX, but most webpage stuff is windows. We have a specialist prescribing system at our hospital – but not sure what the servers run on.
The NHS hackathon sounds awesome. I might visit.
Linus has weighed in on Systemd.
http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65402-torvalds-says-he-has-no-strong-opinions-on-systemd
Thanks for the mention haha. My account was on the list, but I have two-factor enabled, so people can try to get into my account and they will fail :D.
For anyone who, like me, was wondering what game it was that was mentioned in the Vocalise Your Neurons section, it is Ryzom, a free-to-play MMO. http://ryzom.com/