Don’t worry, I’ll blog about LUG Radio Live as soon as I’ve recovered enough to do so. It was brilliant though. 
Now, on to business.
One of the things we’ve been trying to do with the Ubuntu UK Podcast is make it a collaborative effort. Both in terms of where the content comes from (the UK Ubuntu and Linux community, not just four presenters) and how the podcast is produced. For the first few shows I ran the mixing desk, edited the segments and mixed the show, but this was never the long term plan. More recently, Ciemon and Alan have both been editing away on segments, meaning that I don’t have to spend the equivalent of two days editing the podcast segments for each episode. 
The next step was to get other people mixing the show for release.* This involves inserting the music, fading, adding filters and generally trying to iron out the bumps which cause us to get so many e-mails in the first few releases.
This process is basically impossible to describe over a medium like IRC. We had talked about having some tutorial sessions after a recording session, but frankly at the end of a recording sessions we are all just about ready to collapse and it never happened. So I took a leaf out of Alan’s book and created some screencasts of how I mix the podcast. It was pretty easy to do, technically and Alan persuaded me to let him put them online for public consumption. Now, these screencasts were designed for internal consumption only, so I wasn’t worrying too much about fluidity and energy in the commentary. However, with that caveat stated, you can get the first part (of thirteen) of Mixing A Podcast In Ardour.
* Actually, I plan to do screencasts of the editing process too, it’s just that it’s a bit easier to play around and find out what works with editing than it is for mixing.
The Ubuntu UK Podcast has actually gone and hit that watershed of reaching double figures! In one way it seems like we’ve been going much longer. Our presenting style is maturing and we’re spreading the load of editing and mixing the show through screencasts. In fact, I edited very little of the last two episodes, which was great! Highlights of the first ten episodes for me are (in no particular order):
- The FOSDEM material and the Becky Hogge interview in particular. And Dave posing for a photo.
- Dave’s pronunciation in the pronunciation segment.
- Interviewing guests in the studio (i.e. my front room)
- Interviewing guests on the phone thanks to the wonder of VoIP.
- The Mark Shuttleworth special.
- Interviewing all those people at UDS!
- Piling up CDs in a pub car park.
- Getting all sorts of stuff to give away.
Which brings us to what is in episode 10 itself:
In this episode:-
- Discussion:
- Watching video content on Ubuntu
- Podcast now available in transcribed form!
- Sarcastic News
- Selling Ubuntu without using ‘Freedom’ in the sales pitch
- Competition:
- We announce the winner of the Canonical Store Voucher this month
- We start a new competition where we give the Wraith PC from Efficient PC! Just answer the question set out in this weeks show, and you could be the proud owner of this PC!
That’s right, the Ubuntu UK podcast episode count is almost in double figures! After a very late episode 8, due partly to me having a general anesthetic we’ve pulled out, well, a stop and got episode 9 out only very slightly late. Actually, this episode and the last one have mostly been edited by Alan, although I’ve still mixed both shows. It bodes well that we’re able to distribute the workload of producing the show across multiple people. Hopefully it will mean that everyone gets to relax occasionally. There’s still a way to go though, and to that end I’ve made a series of screencasts to educate my fellow Ubuntu UK Podcasters on how I go about mixing the show in Ardour. They’re not polished, but I wonder if there would be interest in releasing them to the wider community?
No Ciemon in this episode, so Laura deps. In this episode:-
- Discussion:
- Competition:
- The competition from Episode 8 is still open. It will end on the 12th July. (we have extended the competition due to the last episode being late).
Go and get it!
Day two of UDS in Prague yields two new videos:
You can find these and other videos at the Ubuntu Developer channel.
The first two videos from the conference are available on youtube.
More videos will be available over the rest of the week from the Ubuntu Developers YouTube channel. Subsequent videos will be in the correct aspect ratio, I promise. (Youtube doesn’t like widescreen clips apparently.)
Following a conversation on my first night here, I present:
http://www.isdeprecated.org
Suggestions for additional alternative subdomains gratefully received.
The anticipated fourth episode (yes, really, apparently) of the Ubuntu UK Podcast is out now. In this episode:
- Unix/Linux Malware & Security precautions,
- Interview with Ian Ozsvald from Showmedo,
- A short phone call from Mark Shuttleworth,
- Plus the sarcastic news,
- And a competition to get money off Ubuntu schwag.
Download it from:
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2008/04/23/s01e04-such-an-easy-question/
This episode started recording within two hours of touching down at Heathrow from San Francisco, so I was pretty jetlagged during the recording. Yet again I’ve tried something new with the sound, but unfortunately the raw recording was distorted in places. I’m blaming that on the jetlag. It was also our first phone interview, which I think went pretty well thanks to Daviey’s SIP phone. People who have moaned about the levels should be happier with this episode, but there’s still more to do to get things sounding even better of course.
The third episode of the Ubuntu UK podcast, “Help me”, is now out and available from:
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2008/04/07/s01e03-help-me/
In this episode we talk about the command line versus GUI, Mythbuntu, podcast production (by popular request) and give our take on recent FLOSS-related news.
What was different about this episode? Well, we recorded it at a different location. We had a different cake. (Carrot, and very nice it was too.) Some of us forgot our microphone technique. The builders outside started a generator during the first segment. There was a problem with the signal levels onto the recorder, which means some peaks are bit distorted. I’ll pay more attention to this next time and hopefully provide a permanent fix soon. And one of the channels was inverted for some reason which caused a few extra hours hassle and brown trousers!
For those of you following my trials and tribulations with the audio, I’m not as happy with this one as episode 2. But where the audio is a bit dodgy it’s only as a consequence of trying to make it better. So that’s alright.
Ciemon Dunville, Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Tony Whitmore with Dave Murphy present the second episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast.
In this 40 minute episode we talk about:-
- Interviews:
- How low can you go - putting Ubuntu on small or low resource hardware.
- Pronouncing names associated with Linux.
- Would you go back? What would you do if there was no more Ubuntu.
- Feedback from the first show.
Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986.
Download the show here.
This was a much tougher episode to record than the first one. I don’t know whether we all felt under pressure or we were distracted by things going on in the real world, but the recording session really felt like hard work. That and we only had one interview pre-recorded so had more material to cover. When it came to editing, I realised we had recorded some usable stuff after all!
Hopefully the people who wrote in about the levels will be happier with this episode, although, yes, yes I know I’m too quiet in the final link. We’ll get there.
Today has seen the launch of a new podcast from the Ubuntu UK team.
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org
In this episode:
- A brief into to the cast, some history of how the podcast was conceived.
- Discussion on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site.
- Introduction, discussion on why it’s there.
- Talk about some of the top ideas
- FOSDEM 2008 - Interviews with:-
- Andrew Waffa, developer from the Bongo project
- Bongo is the FOSS lightweight webmail and calendar client, Andrew tells Dave and Tony about how this exciting project has been progressing.
- Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group
- Jan Claeys from the Belgian Ubuntu LoCo Team
- Jan tells us where the Belgian LoCo team started and what they do to promote Ubuntu.
- Pimp the Ubuntu Demo day
The feedback so far has been almost universally appreciative, which is fantastic. That’s the pimping over with, here come the personal comments.
I enjoyed being involved with the production of the first episode particularly as it allowed me to play with audio equipment and editing software, which I really enjoy doing. I hope I don’t get too precious about it in the future, but I like getting it all set up just right and producing a clear recording.
I’m pretty pleased with the end result, although I know it’s not perfect. I need to balance the music level with the speech sections better. I need to ensure we get a higher level recorded in the “studio”. Some edits could have been better, although there’s probably not much more I could do with the stuff recorded on location. There are many in there which aren’t audible at all.
It’s exciting that the whole Ubuntu-UK LoCo can contribute to the show, it will be great to receive content from the wider community. It’ll be interesting to see how much content is forthcoming, but we’ve got lots of ideas for content too.
It’s been great to watch the team, the four presenters featured on this first show and Schwuk, preparing the website, graphics and back-end. Everyone has done their bit and it’s been great to watch everyone play to their strengths. I am more than happy to leave wordpress tweaking to others if I get to play with audio files.
Oh, and don’t forget to listen to it:
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org
I found this article very helpful when getting a 32-bit application running on my 64-bit Linux installation. Using the tips described here I was able to find which libraries the application was looking for but which weren’t installed in the 32-bit library root. In this case it was the USB libraries. I was then able to unpack them to the correct location, after which the application to started up and seems to work just fine.
