After my rant this morning it appears that the whole “?podcastgate” thing is now over. I can now resubscribe to the podcast and know that overnight my podcatcher will download the file safe and sound for my listening pleasure.
I’d like to thank Aq for making the change, and Jono for his email. I guess we can draw a line under this now.
LUGRadio is now into its fourth series. A Linux-based podcast with a massive listenership and following, it’s grown from a chat between four members of Wolverhampton LUG to probably the most listened-to Linux-based podcast in the world. I didn’t listen to much of the first series because I found the constant swearing, shouting and laddishness hard to stomach. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no prude, I swear far too much and have quite a bit in geek-common with the four guys who make LUGRadio, and I like the guys. I just found the first series hard to listen to. Since then they’ve improved the audio quality, had more discussion and tempered some of the language, soI have subscribed. I also chat in the #lugradio channel on Freenode regularly and have met all four of the guys in person. So this blog post isn’t from some random bloke who has downloaded one episode and then fired off a rant.
I have recently acquired an old HP Omnibook xe4100 laptop. As part of my maintenance and to hopefully resolve a technical issue with the machine, I thought I´d update the BIOS on the machine. I visited the HP website and downloaded the appropriate package containing the latest BIOS for my machine. The update came in the form of a Windows ¨EXE¨ (executable). From past experience these have been self-extracting ZIP files which are easy to manage on non-Windows platforms. On Linux the InfoZIP ´zip´ program can strip off the SFX stub from a self-extracting ZIP file, and indeed the ´unzip´ tool can extract the file directly.
HP appear however to use a windows based application to package the files which makes things only slightly more difficult.
Saturday 16th September 2006 was the 3rd official Software Freedom Day. The objective being to promote awareness and use of Free Software.
I had already asked Canonical to send me some extra Ubuntu Linux CDs for free via their ShipIt! service, which arrived in plenty of time. All told I had about 150 Ubuntu Linux CDs to give out that I’d ordered, and some I’d collected via other means. I also ordered some Software Freedom Day official T-Shirts and balloons from the guys organising things in Australia. They also arrived in plenty of time. I asked on my local LUG mailing list if anyone would like to do “something” for SFD, and after a brief discussion and some suggestions I decided that rather than attempt to do something locally, that we would team up with Greater London Linux User Group.
