Podcast Season 3 Episode 18
Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: Time Circuits On!
In this episode: James Bond can now use LibreOffice, thanks to the UK Government’s endorsement. Valve’s new controller and Linux-based gaming PCs are here. JPEG could become hobbled by DRM and the NSA was listening all along. We’ve also got another new section, some great Finds and one of the most positive Voice of the Masses sections ever.
Sorry for the relatively poor recording quality in this episode. We had a couple of technical difficulties.
What’s in the show:
- News:
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LibreOffice has been rebranded GovOffice and is now available in the UK Government’s tech marketplace. The first official Steam Boxes are going to be available from the 10th November, and have already been reviewed. JPEG is being threatened with Digital Rights Management. And the NSA has probably broken the Diffie Hellman key exchange.
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- Finds of the Fortnight:
- Graham:
- CyanogenMod 12.1 is a great alternative to Android on your smartphone.
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- <pwaring> Certificates issued by https://letsencrypt.org will now be trusted by our browsers.
- <einonm> Red Hat has bought the orchestration platform Ansible.
- <Arthur_D> My find is that SimpleScreenRecorder is great for capturing game output.
- <Devilment> My find is Shell In A Box. A Web-Based SSH Terminal to Access Remote Linux Servers.
- Mike:
- Stuck at Munich airport with poor Wifi? SSH to an instance of w3m – the text mode web browser.
- Andrew:
- Fontforge is an awesome program for designing type-faces but it also has amazingly inspirational documentation that will get people up and running on the theory on type face design.
- The second one is a cool project headquartered here in Wellington, NZ. It’s open source group decision software called Loomio. Youtube has a good couple of vids on what it covers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1gLEAKPkOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZipyebSY2Lo
(huge thanks to Brendon for sending these in)
- Ben:
- In the UK, your television licence covers live streaming to your tablet/phone, but not if it’s charging outside of your registered address.
- If you’re signed into Google, searching Google for ‘find my phone’ will find your phone and allow you to ring it even if it’s in silent mode.
- Graham:
- Wheel of Hate:
- Voice of the Masses: Who is your Linux or Free Software Here?
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Send us your thoughts, or a recorded message, or this section might return next time.
If you can get to Liverpool in the North of England at the end of October, you must go to OggCamp.
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (62MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (85MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (24MB)
Duration: 1:07:10
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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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.
Hmm. Some alarming anti-BBC sentiment this time, chaps. Every democracy needs a national, independent broadcaster, and you can’t enjoy 100% of the content such a huge organisation produces.
Hi Huw,
Absolutely, such a broadcaster is vital. For me personally, it’s not about needing to enjoy all the content – there are plenty of programmes on TV and radio covering sports and events etc. that don’t interest me in the slightest, but I’m glad they’re there.
For me the issue is about quality. Over the years, BBC News seems to have turned into The Day Today, with ridiculous hype, “BREAKING NEWS” banners under the most trivial of stories, and annoying and pointless chit-chat between the presenters.
Some would argue that the Beeb needs to stay competitive with ITV, Sky etc. which have this ridiculously over-the-top presentation style. But I think as a national broadcaster with a license fee, the Beeb shouldn’t have to always worry about chasing ratings – and instead concentrate on being as informative and impartial as possible. (And I think, hype aside, they do a fairly good job.)
Just my two Frontier Credits!
I’m not against the BBC — I actually quite like it. It’s just that sometimes I wish it was optional rather than enforced.
Diktofon (one of the finds):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kaljurand_at_gmail_dot_com.diktofon&hl=en
DRM for JPEG is depressing, but I can see why people would want it. Just look at how many people have their photos ripped off (and sometimes used without permission in the national press!) and you’ll find enough motive.
I can understand it. Don’t like it though. There’s a magazine group whose website infuriates me because if you want to copy some text, you get a stroppy popup basically saying ‘STOP STEALING OUR CONTENT’. Every time that I saw that popup I have been doing something simple – copying a business’s name so I can do a web search on them to find out more about said that company.
It’s depressing.
Yep absolutely ridiculous.
In ep. 17 one of the panelists was thinking of switching away from firefox. I would suggest the palemoon browser, which is related to firefox, but not affiliated to mozilla.
http://www.palemoon.org/
I’ve been using it the past week or so, and it’s awesome.
I’ve got some technical issues to listen to this episode:
The voice of Ben is so distorted, I don’t know, with mechanical sounds… Very unpleasant to hear. I don’ t know which mike he is using but I advise him to use the same as Graham!