LV podcast Season 1 Episode 1
Title: Be the change
Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
In this episode: We’re launching Linux Voice, a new kind of Linux/Free Software magazine that gives profits and content back to the community (but we need your help). Oh, and Debian switches to Xfce, and Linux Mint explains its updates policy. We now share the world with 2,000,000 Raspberry Pis and we have a very special podcast guest.
Remind people who may not know: if we don’t hit our target, all funders get their money back. But when we do hit our target, it’s going to be amazing!
What’s in the show:
- News:
-
Three ex-Linux Format staffers strike out on their own to launch a new magazine called Linux Voice. It’s being crowdfunded on Indiegogo, and it will give 50% of its profits back to the Free Software and open source community, and release its content using a CC-BY-SA licence after nine months. In other news, Debian is going to switch to Xfce as its default desktop. Linux Mint may or may not be more vulnerable because of its package update policy. Two million Raspberry Pis have been sold – many congratulations to Team Pi – and openSUSE 13.1 has been released.
- Things we found out in a week:
- Nick:
- Ben:
- Get .apks off Google’s Play store with evozi (great for Cyanogen mod users).
- Display formatted man pages from DuckDuckGo by preceding the command with ‘!man ‘.
- Andrew:
- The Sanctuary.
- IRC is ace.
- Mumble is like IRC for audio.
- Lord Chief Justice Thomas, the most senior judge in England and Wales, thinks Skype and FaceTime are great ways for defendants and witnesses to deliver their testimonies.
- The Part Where People Ask Us To Do Things:
- Vocalise your Neurons:
- Voice of the Masses: Who is the most important GNU/Linux/FLOSS person?
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We make up our own challenge for this episode and appear to be doing ‘alright’.
-
Mike was yodelling in the Austrian Alps this episode, so he couldn’t take part in the podcast, but he’ll be back next time. For now, we have some Neurons from Huw:
“This is the first time I’ve spoken my neurons, sorry I mean vocalised my brains, in ages. It’s a shame Graham can’t join you because I wanted to say that I’ve finally found a use for the activities in KDE. I’m using one for all my standard stuff, web browsing, email and whatnot. However, I’ve just started studying for LPIC-1 so now I have a separate activity in which I do all my studying…e-books, a console for practising, etc. I bet Graham would be proud! Keep up the good work and good luck with your crowdfunding campaign.”
Want your synapses to be sonically reproduced in the next podcast? Just email mike@linuxvoice.com.
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory and Nick Veitch.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (47MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (65MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (20MB)
Duration: 57:52
Many thanks to Evil Nick for allowing us homeless hobbits to record the podcast in his parlour. Thanks too for the biscuits, Nick.
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
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About The Author
Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
Metal 3d printing: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24528306
That's awesome. I believe the way these guys do it is a two-stage process, by printing the object in plastic/wax, then making a mould and casting the metal. It does work really well though.
https://www.shapeways.com/materials
I really hope for some awesome blender tutorials in Linux Voice! 😉
Not by me…
Seriously though, Blender is amazingly awesome and featureful. And I completely understand if you dedicate a month or so to learning it, you can do amazing things. But its interface is only usable if you happen to know all three billion possible keyboard shortcuts and can identify the purpose of buttons from their 8×8 pixel icons.
As I found when I wrote a tutorial on Blender in LXF134, four pages isn't really enough to do the package justice, which is why it doesn't get pitched very often. Half the article was spent explaining basic 3D theory and how to work the interface!
That said,once you get the hang of this and spend a lot of time with the package it's a very powerful tool that can be used to create 3D models and landscapes, animate them and/or turn it into a game 🙂
I mastered Lightwave, Real3d, Studio Max and even with some degree of confidence, Maya, but blender still eludes me. I think it is incredibly difficult to do a print tutorial on it, simply because of the way the interface behaves.
Like I said, I am not detracting from the awesomeness you can create therein, but it requires a lot of dedication.
Ben, your book is called Learning Python with Raspberry Pi. It's published by Wiley and will be released in March 2014.
Wiley are one of the publishers signed up for O'Reilly's brilliant DRM-free ebook shop and I imagine that that option will be favoured by many Linux Voice accolites. It doesn't have a listing there yet so I'll keep checking.
Thanks for the info Austin!
The date is subject to change. A couple of days before we launched Linux Voice on Indiegogo the publisher e-mailed me and asked if I could finish early. Needless to say, it's been hectic.
A bit closer to publication, I'll post full info about where it's available, etc.
No metadata on the opus file – is that something you could use some volunteer help with?
Congrats on the inaugural LV podcast! It was great to hear echos of the old TR crew over here on this side of the globe. Mike Saunder's voice was missed but Nick Veitch was a great addition to this episode, hope to hear more of Nick.
I realize that Graham is restricted by covenant ( I think that's how you Brits say it ) but any chance of an update? Any truth to the rumor that Graham has sworn off the whole Linux/FOSS movement as a fad? 🙂
Looking forward to future podcasts as LV gets its footing and establishes its own 'voice'.
Shhh…. "The whole Linux/FOSS movement is NOT a fad."
Yesss, a Graham sighting! Hope remains.
I am happy to write some Blender tutorials for the magazine, if you want them let me know – no payment required. Love the podcast, keep up the good work 🙂
Mr. Veitch makes an excellent addition, I hope he will be making subsequent appearances.
He was a little hard on Blender though. It's certainly hard to use and daunting to a new user but that's because 3D modelling (at the level at which Blender addresses it) is very complicated. Unlike, say, Gimp or Inkscape, Blender does have quite a refined UI (complicated, of course, but pretty fluid when you learn it), gets new features quite frequently and develops quite rapidly. I genuinely prefer using it to the alternatives (Max and Maya) which I certainly couldn't say of Gimp or Inkscape etc.. It's by far the most polished piece of FOSS creativity software.
Valve recently(ish) announced that they'd like to make Blender the default modelling tool for Source (which will become a more meaningful statement when Source 2 is released). And Valve certainly know their potatoes.
Avebury (and Silbury Hill) is/are awesome!
Excellent podcast. Thanks!
Hey, I also using Unity and quite like it. Maybe I'm the third person 🙂
There is something funky with RSS feed… Date, headline, description of last entry looks right… But it links to the very first Linux Lifestyle episode. 😕
Which feed? They all point to the correct file, as far as I can see (eg http://www.linuxvoice.com/episodes/lv_s01e01.opus)
In http://www.linuxvoice.com/podcast_ogg.rss
latest link points to the http://www.linuxvoice.com/podcast-season-1-episode-1/
instead of http://www.linuxvoice.com/lv-podcast-season-1-episode-1/
Link to the actual OGG file is correct, however if I go for the shownotes it opens the wrong webpage.
Ah yes, I see. Should be fixed now. Thanks!
I subscribe to the podcast Linux Voice from your link, there are no Episodes available
to download?
I found it , still under the Linux Lifestyle Podcast labeled Season 1 Episode 1 Nov 22, 2013
If you're looking for new weekly challenges I'd be interested in hearing your experiences of
a) setting up various Linux and BSD-based router/firewall distros e.g. pfsense, m0n0wall, Smoothwall and/or
b) running various Linux and BSD-based NAS distros (e.g. FreeNAS, OpenMediaVault, OpenFiler and possibly Synology DSM) and new-ish filesystems (ZFS and Btrfs with copy-on-write, deduplication, online checksuming, RAID-Z etc).
I challenge you to try and use the Mint Debian Edition for a couple of weeks! It's a fairly recent discovery in my case (I'd been using Fedora for the previous 18 months), but has actually been very useful to me it & it's the first rolling distro I've committed to my main machine.
*Currently* still using supplied Cinnamon desktop, but knowing me I'll probably wind up switching it to XFCE at some point…
I would think there's a lot less known people in the community that deserves a lot of credit for their work and hopefully you could find them and let them tell their own stories.
I would really like to see some bridge building instead of putting up walls or at least let different ideas meet in a respectful way (but at the same time lets please not forget just how fun FLOSS actually is). I superscribe to the ideals of Free Software without being a software purist myself on a list on important world issues software wouldn't make it to high but I personally find it important enough to feel that I should make a conscious decision about what software I do or do not use.
I don't really get why people become upset with GNU when they ask distributions to call it GNU+Linux as credit can be a big deal and I don't see how it's not deserved. I do see how people can get upset if you tell them that proprietary software is immoral but at the same time I do also get very confused about those people that apparently make use of and enjoy everything FLOSS provides but then at the same turn are ready to so strongly defend the proprietary mind-set.
I do believe that Linux on the Desktop got something very unique to offer their users namely FLOSS and of course the values that inherently follows like the openness and that there's an idea about a right and a wrong way to threat users that's the story that Mozilla is telling as fare as I'm aware. I appreciate the Debian approach as I understand it where the non-free software is mostly easily available but the user is made aware that's it's a choice to install non-free software by the small effort that has to be made in order to make use of the non-free software.
Not native English speaker so please do be kind.
Pre-ordered the book Ben, http://i.imgur.com/Iq2yUEc.png
The title is: Learning Python with Raspberry Pi…. For the record. I guess I should buy a PI now 0.o
What is up with the monkey sign joke? Which place that kid visited that makes it funny that he asked such sign? "Baily Monkey"? "Bali monkey"? "By Lee Monkey"?
Nonetheless, I'm still wondering if I will be able to buy the magazine, since Google Play does not make magazines available down here. Will it be a good idea to read it on a eReader such as Kobo Aura? Or should I buy something with colours? I want to fund the mag, but I won't if I can't subscribe/read it properly.
Take care, folks!
Hi! Get a digital subscription, and you'll be able to read lovely, clear, DRM-free PDFs on any device.
When it comes to 3D printing openSCAD is the way to go. It is very easy and convenient to use if you have some idea about programming. In the first place I was also scared about the programming interface but since I have tried it I never used other CAD software again. For text there is a library called write.scad: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16193
Btw. we are working on letting the penguin control 3D printers.
This for example is mine: http://bb-lcnc.blogspot.co.at/2013/09/another-success.html
http://thesaurus.com/browse/Awesome
can someone find a link to the source of the chrome extension please. I could not find it.