It’s a Mugs Game!

Only a few days left until OggCamp and things are really starting to come together. Today Dan emailed the team to let us know that the mugs Fab designed have arrived!

Last year we went for white mugs and they were pretty popular. This year we’ve used the OggCamp colour on smart black mugs. I think they look pretty awesome.

You’ll notice the little “Ogg” dude that Fab also designed. I think he fits in quite nicely next to the logos of all our fantastic sponsors, without whom this whole event wouldn’t happen.

Please buy goods and services from these lovely people!

Linux Format , The Open Learning Centre, The Linux Emporium, Viglen, Bitfolk, OpsView, Canonical, Recruit12, Linux Fund and Apress!

So come along to OggCamp on the 1st and 2nd May 2010 in Liverpool and buy one before they all run out!

p.s. we still have a very limited number of the white ones left over from last year. If you’re really lucky you might be able to pick up the full set!

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Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged | Leave a comment

Safe Email Addresses For Kids

Sophie – my 6 year old daughter – is on holiday from school at the moment and has spent a little time online playing on her favourite websites. Sometimes she gets asked for an email address to sign up for some kind of club. Today that happened and it lead to a conversation between Sophie and her mum which included questions like:-

“Why do you have an email address and I don’t?”
“Why do we use your email address for clubs I want to join?”
“Isn’t it like a letter, you hand me my letters, and I open them, isn’t email like that?”

..and so on.

Clare suggested that Sophie should speak to me (given I deal with all things technical in the house) which she’s not done yet. I wondered what other people did about online accounts for their children. Now of course being a geek I can easily setup an account for Sophie and give her access however there’s a bunch of issues here.

Firstly I don’t want random people emailing her so I’d need some kind of whitelist so that I can control who can mail her. This makes it difficult for her to sign up to web based services because I don’t know ahead of time where the mail will come from.

I could use greylisting with very long delays and watch the logs myself to see where the mail comes from and then manually whitelist accounts, but if she wants to sign up for something there and then she’s out of luck unless I happen to be there.

The fly in the ointment is that I use Google Mail for Domains for my personal mail. So I don’t have quite the same control over the configuration as I would if I hosted it myself and used postfix/exim/sendmail/whatever.

I could switch back to hosting my own mail but I flat out don’t want to, so that’s kinda out of the question. I could register a separate domain for Sophie but that seems messy. I could forward the gmail to another box which does the whitelisting perhaps?

Of course I could use the dismissive “you’re too young to have an email address” but I’d really rather not.

What do other parents do? Comments/input/suggestions very welcome.

Update: One suggestion made by my very good friend Adrian was that I should teach her to ‘tag’ her email addresses when signing up. That is, adding “+bbc” to the user-part of the address when she signs up at BBC sites for example, and +c4 at Channel4 sites.

Adrian also suggested that I setup a Gmail account for her, but that she doesn’t access that directly, instead I use fetchmail to my own box containing the whitelist, and Sophie should pick up mail from that box. That way I offload most of the spam workload to Google, and can easily implement a whitelist. I like this idea.

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Posted in Ubuntu | 47 Comments

The New TARDIS

Tonight saw the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who air in the UK. I sat down with Sophie, Sam and Clare to watch it and enjoyed it overall. I’ll reserve full judgement until the cast have settled into the roles a few episodes in.

But with this first episode we are left with so many new things to wonder about including a new Doctor..

His beautiful new assistant, Amy..

A new wardrobe..

Rory, the loyal but wimpy childhood sweetheart..

The dreamy, slight meathead, porn-o-holic laptop owner, Jeff..

..although, hang on, what’s that Jeff has on his laptop? It looks to be inspired by something familiar. Menu and shortcut icons top left, notification area in the top right, and a panel at the bottom of the screen as well. Maybe this guy knows more than he lets on! He can clearly make webcam work under his operating system of choice. A world leader in the making!



We also have a TARDIS refit to explore..

Many questions are yet to be answered such as ‘Will Amy get back for her Wedding?’, ‘Will she want to?’, ‘Where is the swimming pool, and when we find it, will we find the library too!?’. However one question about bugs me more than anything at all.

What car does this come from?

I know the BBC probably blew the budget making this in HD but seriously, a brake fluid (?) container from who knows what car (please, leave a comment if you do know :) )? I guess there are doctors, radiographers, physicists and all manner of other professionals who spot ‘parts’ in the new TARDIS, but this one just leapt out at me. Anyone else spot something out of the ordinary?

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Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged | 13 Comments

Join Us at OggCamp 10!

What is OggCamp 10?

OggCamp is a free software / free culture unconference organised by the presenters of the Ubuntu UK Podcast and Linux Outlaws. This year’s OggCamp will take place at The Black-E in Liverpool, UK on the 1st and 2nd of May 2010, 10am – 5pm both days. It’ll be 2 full days of Free Software, Free Culture and Free Thinking. We have a large venue booked and expect 200-300 people. If you want a chance to meet others who are passionate about technology and share ideas this is a great chance. We have many top FOSS developers from around the world joining us.

ENTRY TO OGGCAMP IS COMPLETELY FREE!

If you want to get a feel for the event, have a look at our recap of OggCamp 2009.

What is an Barcamp/unconference?

More formal conferences have the usual people speaking every time; an unconference is an opportunity to interact with new and interesting people. There won’t be a published list of speakers before the event, everyone generates content on the day. That can include you! The schedule is decided by the attendees and we’ll have a voting system for that.

See what others are already proposing – http://ideas.oggcamp.org/talks

What Is An Ogg?

Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source. OggCamp is about technology, Open Source and Freedom, but also about music, art, politics, community, creativity and much more. We chose to use the term Ogg because for us it reflects all these things pretty neatly.

Get Involved

Please add your own ideas for talks and activities to our public wiki help make the event what you want it to be! It doesn’t even have to be about technology strictly, it could be anything. We have about 60 slots available and all are welcome – ideas.oggcamp.org

You can also meet other attendees on IRC in #oggcamp on the Freenode network.

If you have a project you’d like to promote or exhibit about you can email the organising team – oggcamp@ubuntu-uk.org

Come and join us, it’s going to be a great weekend. There’s travel information and much more at http://oggcamp.org


Also See The Rathole Roadshow

OggCamp 10 is preceded by a special free culture gig on Friday April 30th 8pm (the night before). It’ll be at the Bad Format Social Club in Liverpool. Kick off the weekend in style with live music from David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and Rathole Radio host (and Linux Outlaw) Dan Lynch, among other guests. Tickets are £5 in advance and can be bought from the website right now.

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Ubuntu One Music Store Public Beta Begins


The Ubuntu One Music Store has entered Public Beta!

Testing

As with everything in Ubuntu Lucid, the developers are keen to get people testing the store before Lucid is shipped at the end of April. If you’re running Ubuntu Lucid either on bare metal or inside a Virtual Machine, it would help greatly if you could take some time to test this new functionality. So far only a very limited number of beta testers have been using the store, so opening up the store to public scrutiny should generate plenty of feedback to the developers.

Those users running Ubuntu Lucid (which will become 10.04) can access the Music Store by opening the Rhythmbox music player.

I would recommend that testers should read my previous blog entry Getting Ready for Ubuntu One Music Store Beta first, and make sure that Ubuntu One file syncing works before trying out the store. I’d also recommend reading the Ubuntu One Music Store FAQ as many common questions are answered there.

Free Downloads

People testing the public beta of the store may want to consider getting started with free music available in the store rather than spend money whilst testing. The free music available in the store is listed at the 7digital UK free mp3 downloads USA free mp3 downloads pages.

Simply locate an artist in that link and then search for them in the store within Rhythmbox. You should find some free tracks mixed in amongst paid ones on some albums.

Regional Considerations

It’s been mentioned before in the Ubuntu One Music Store FAQ, but it’s worth re-stating here that there are multiple separate stores for different territories. The selection of music available in each store differs based on deals between the upstream music provider (7digital) and the major record labels. The stores are:-

  • UK
  • USA
  • Germany
  • Rest of the EU (i.e. not UK and Germany)
  • Rest of the World (i.e. none of the above listed countries)

It’s worth noting that the store uses geo-ip location.If you’re in a region other than your normal ‘home’, you’re going to see music appropriate for your current location. So for example as a UK citizen when I’m at home I’ll see music available in the UK store. When I am travelling abroad I will see different music.

Accessing Your Music

The music you buy will be synced to your Ubuntu One storage first then downloaded to all the machines you have connected to your Ubuntu One account. If you happen to be at a computer which isn’t connected to Ubuntu One file sharing – or perhaps it’s not running Ubuntu (shock!) then you can still access your music from the Ubuntu One website

Buying Music

Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that there are no show-stopping bugs which cause users to spend money and not get their music, take into consideration that this is beta software. There is the outside chance that something could go wrong causing your music not to download, but that’s about the worst that could happen.

In the early days of the store there was a great bug which resulted in the first track of an album being downloaded, but none of the subsequent ones! After a couple of days the bug was sorted and all the tracks subsequently appeared in my music collection.

Filing Bugs

As with any software the Ubuntu One Music Store has bugs, and they’re tracked in launchpad.net. What’s a bit tricky here is that there are a few components working together to present the store, so any bugs that testers find might not actually be with the store code itself, but might only be discovered when using the store. The three main areas where bugs occur are the rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store plugin, Ubuntu One and Rhythmbox itself.

It’s my understanding that bugs should be filed against the rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store plugin and the developers will triage and re-assign accordingly. The best way to file a bug (once you’ve checked to see if one already exists) is to open a terminal and execute this command:-

ubuntu-bug rhythmbox-ubuntuone-music-store

This will collect all the necessary detail required by the developers and upload it to launchpad, then take you through the process of searching for existing similar bugs, and then filing the bug if a sufficiently similar one isn’t found.

Bugs might also occur in the upstream partner store from 7digital.com. However again it’s best to file those against the plugin and then during triage the developers can decide where the problem really lies.

If in doubt, file new bugs against the plugin. Of course as with any bugs it makes sense to look for existing bugs first rather than create new ones. Although if new bugs are created which mirror existing ones then the people triaging the bugs may well mark them as duplicates.

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Posted in Ubuntu | Tagged | 32 Comments