gphoto2 + F-Spot = win
Whilst I’m waiting for my MacBook to work its way from Shanghai to my house, depending of course on when Iceland stops its geological sneeze or the European aviation authorities decide that the danger has passed, I decided to see if I could find the best solution for tethered shooting under Linux. The advantage to [...]
A thank you
Jono William Aloycius O’Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and general all-round grand bloke today announced the Ubuntu rebranding. I’ve known about this for a while, because the Canonical brand is being refreshed too and we as a company were shown the new designs and asked for comments a few weeks back. However, this is a chance [...]
Why I Hate Freedom
Alright, alright, I admit it. I hate Freedom. Stuff your open source philosophies, your Free Software Foundation, your Libre / Gratis. Knackers to the lot of it. I want a Mac. Yes, I do, I want a Mac. I want a shiny, shiny MacBook Pro in all its aluminium unibody glory. I want to fondle [...]
Random thinkings
In bullet-point form, because I’m not capable of anything else right now. Banshee is being an arse on Karmic on my desktop machine. Can’t figure out why. It freezes up when playing big files (podcasts are particularly affected by this), plays too fast sometimes (so it sounds like I’m fast-forwarding through songs) and other times [...]
On diversity
I agonised a bit before writing this post, partly because it deals with someone who pays my wages, but mostly because I wasn’t entirely sure what ground I stood on, morally and philosophically speaking. I’m going to write it anyway, however, because it’s an interesting enough problem that I think writing it out will help [...]
Countdown: Days 100 – 91
One of the things I said I'd do with the Countdown project is produce a slideshow / video / thing every ten days or so so that people could catch up on the project. So here's the first ten days' worth. Enjoy! Countdown: The first ten days from Graham Binns on Vimeo. I've noticed that [...]
Crivvens! (A non-review of the Dell Mini 10v)
People who have been paying attention to my Identica feed of late will know that, in a fit of I-want-one-of-those, I bought a refurbished Dell Mini 10v. The idea behind this piece of technological frippery was that I'd have something to take with me when I really just want to carry a camera. The camera [...]
The usual group of awesome people
_DSC2570 Photo by Anna Rybacka, originally uploaded by kwwii UDS Karmic was held in Barcelona last week. This fantastic bunch of people are the people responsible for shaping how the Koala is eventually going to look when he crawls out of his pouch. Also, some set-up for the previous photo, because I’m a helpful soul: [...]
Some snaps from Berlin
I recently spent a week in Berlin for the Ubuntu Jaunty platform sprint. It was cold, fun, hard work… You know, the usual. Anyway, I took the camera along. Didn’t get many shots because, well, either I was too busy or it was too foggy or we were somewhere with utterly terrible lighting (a pox [...]
I just can’t stop my lips from flapping
The latest (and slightly delayed) edition of the Ubuntu UK Podcast is out, containing an interview with yours truly, alongside Matt "mdz" Zimmerman, Matthew "mpt" Thomas, Rob "lifeless" Collins and Stuart "aquarius" Langridge. So, basically, one dumb northerner yakking about Launchpad amongst a sea of scary geniuses, then. Link
Why Ubuntu matters
Jono Bacon posted a challenge of sorts to members of the Ubuntu community recently, which was this: If you have a blog or use Twitter or identi.ca, I would like to ask you to take five minutes to write down why Ubuntu is important to you, and what aspect of our ethos attracts you and [...]
Hello, Planet Ubuntu UK
This is just a quick hello to the readers of Planet Ubuntu UK, to which I’ve been added after joining the UK LoCo Team. Whether me being added to the planet is a good idea or not remains to be seen. I’m in the process of getting back to work on Launchpad after spending last [...]
Slightly Camp Jesus
Graham Binns posted a photo: Three hundred and sixty-odd days, day 346 Jono Bacon demonstrates that he is the messiah, and a slightly camp one at that. (The light is from one of the wall lights in the room that held Ubuntu AllStars; it was too good to miss, placement-wise). Strobist info: Camera-mounted SB-600 in [...]
Launchpad to be open sourced
Mark Shuttleworth, spaceman, ideas man, Ubuntu founder and fearless leader at Canonical Towers announced yesterday that Launchpad will be open sourced within the next 12 months. This is pretty cool news. With Launchpad, we make a big deal of supporting free and open-source software. Our aim is to provide a central platform through which people [...]
Creating a cult
I have had various reactions to my wearing the above at UDS today: From Bacon himself: "Oh. My. God." From Julian Edwards: "Wh?" From Dave Murphy: "I hope you’re not joining the Cult of Bacon. From one apparently insane UDS delegate: "Sexy" From two UDS delegates (including the aforementioned insane one): "Can I get one [...]
First UDS photos (of mine) online
I've started uploading photos of UDS Intrepid in Prague. Let joy be unconfined. You can find the photos here and everyone's photos here. I'll actually write a blog post about this tomorrow.
Urgent Ubuntu security notice
This will only apply to Ubuntu users (server or desktop). Anyone who's not one can probably look away now. An urgent Ubuntu Security Notice, USN-612-1, has just been put out. The full notice is here. An extract of the salient details: A weakness has been discovered in the random number generator used by OpenSSL on [...]
Second Edition Hardy T-Shirts are now available for preorder
Due to enormous demand the Canonical shop is now offering a second printing of the Hardy Heron T-Shirt, this time on sand-coloured cotton. From the shop: Due to unprecedented demand, we are producing a second edition Hardy Heron t-shirt. This edition is very similar to the limited edition t-shirt in design, but rather than including [...]
About that T-Shirt
You'll remember that I said, a while back, that I think the new Hardy Heron desktop wallpaper would make a good T-shirt? Well whaddaya know; thanks to Kat Kinnie of the Canonical marketing team there is now just such an item. I think I may be purchasing one of those…
Shuttleworth: “Ubuntu ‘reaping Linux dividend’
There's a nice story on the BBC news site: The public perception of open source software is changing fast, said Mark Shuttleworth, who leads distribution of the Ubuntu operating system (OS). "There has been a sea change in the way people think of Linux, which is very healthy," he said. "We have seen a real [...]
RedHat runs for the hills
Jorge Castro just sent me a link to this story from El Reg. From TFA: "The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative." So now you know. Hardy comes out next week, by the way, so feel free to [...]
Top commands
I don't do memes as a rule, but this one's been doing the rounds on Planet Ubuntu, so I thought I'd give it a shot, too. So, the results of the query are: graham@bloodnok: ~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " "}}'|sort -rn|head93 bzr66 python2.446 sudo44 cd39 grep22 make19 ls18 vim11 tail11 lpvim [...]
Get your arses to Ubuntu Live
If you're one of the people that's here for the technical guff rather than the writing or photography guff, you'll be interested (you will be interested) to note that registration for Ubuntu Live 2008 is now open. From t'website: Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, [...]
