I realise I haven’t posted here for a while, not since LugRadio Live that is. One of the reasons for this is the fact that I’m moving to a new place at the end of the month. I have also been very busy at work, trying to earn some extra money for some new furniture etc. The only personal free time I have left basically goes into research for and production of the show right now. Dan’s been very kindly helping out with editing the last few shows, but all this doesn’t leave me much time to do any other things nonetheless.

This has, some time ago, led me to the conclusion that I need to streamline my online presence a bit — I’m spread way too thin, so to say. I have therefore decided to close my personal blog since I don’t write much there anymore and am primarily using “micro-blogging” services like identi.ca these days anyway. Those are simply a way more time-efficent way to update people on what I’m up too. It’s also very liberating to write in these condensed 140-character blobs somehow. So, if you want to know what I’m doing right now, check out my identi.ca stream. There is also Dan’s presence and a general Linux Outlaws account where I post updates about the show’s production and aggregate Dan’s and my stream. Speaking of identi.ca, we have just recorded our second interview for the show, this time with identi.ca mastermind Evan Prodromou — it turned out really well, I think. Expect a release tomorrow. I am also working on setting up our own Laconica server so stay tuned for that as well.

In other news, we recently reached episode 50 as you might be aware. I have created a few torrents with all episodes up to #50 and some extra stuff to celebrate this, so check them out and seed the stuff if possible. I am also currently spec’ing out a project (I think I mentioned it once or twice in passing on the show) that will eventually play a big role in the re-organisation of this site, so please understand that I’m aware of the issues with the podcast feeds and the archive as far as access to older episodes is concerned and I am aiming to fix that in conjunction with the re-org.

As you can see, the show is continuing to go places and I expect to have more time for it again once I’ve moved into my new home. We are currently hovering at ca. 3,000 downloads per episode per week (mp3 and Ogg combined) and I am hoping we can increase this by further promoting the show and introducing some more interesting, new elements like the interviews. As always, please leave comments on any of this in the forums. I really hope you are continuing to enjoy the show and I’m looking forward to many, many more episodes and many, many new listeners. You’ll see more of me once I’ve settled into the new place. Until then, keep listening and stay free!

Dan and I recorded episode 37 of the show yesterday — and then discovered that we had lost Dan’s side of the recording. Stupid me also forgot to get the analog backup going as well, so we lost it all. This is especially a shame since it seemed to be a really funny recording and I was pretty happy with how the episode turned out. Ah well… Back to the drawing board, I guess. We’ll have a second try at this later in the afternoon.

I mean it is pretty amazing that we made it as far as episode 37 of the show at all. As I am sure I have mentioned before, we never expected to get this far when we started doing the show (not with more than maybe twenty people listening anyway, that is). We may be a bit slow as far as lead time is concerned — our gap between recording and releasing seemed to have become a bit hefty lately (entirely my fault) — but I hope you can forgive us that since I’m rather a bit late and have good content and audio quality than releasing crap. This show shouldn’t be your premiere source of Linux news anyway; it’s conceived as more of an in-depth roundup of the week’s stories with a few interesting opinions (ie. rants) thrown in to spice things up. As far as I see it, as long as we don’t burn out and the show stays interesting for you, I’m fine.

Anyhow, we’ll try another recording later today — maybe we can pretend to be all informed and prepared for once, having read all the stuff already. Well, don’t get your hopes up. But I’m sure it’ll be funny nonetheless. Expect lots of in-jokes at the failed first recording attempt… I guess this stuff just happens. One just has to move on, try to learn from the mistakes made and don’t look back too much. Beer usually helps with this…

Well, as you might have noticed, the server went down once more. Sorry again for any inconvenience the latest outage might have caused. This time it wasn’t my fault. Our server exceeded another limit, in this case its memory allowance. Dan actually had to upgrade us to a business plan. Seems like we were not only pushing considerable bandwith, but there is also quite a bit of load on the server. As you can see from the graphs, our downloads as well as the feed subscriptions are constantly increasing. At this rate we are gonna need dedicated hardware pretty soon…

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is great. When we started this little project, I would have never dreamed of even getting 1,000 downloads per week and we have well exceeded that by now. This whole thing is really amazing and the support we are getting from you on a day-to-day basis makes it well worth it. As for the server, we’ll get something worked out. I just hope we can avoid further downtime from now on. Doing the show is mad fun and I won’t let any silly technical difficulties stop us. As Dan said on the forums, these seem to be minor growing pains that will just make us stronger in the long run. Just like the real outlaws we are, we won’t give up without a last stance! Just bear with us here…

Yes, yes, yes… I realise the site was down for most of today. I am really sorry for any inconvenience that this might have caused. We had to roll back from last nights backup and sadly have lost some forum posts and some registrations along the way. This also meant that the Ogg feed was unavailable for quite some time.

It all started with the fact that our site exceeded our self-imposed bandwith limit for Dan’s server yesterday evening. This caused a first downtime. We increased the limit and decided to move our Ogg files (which were being hosted here on this server) to Libsyn as we already did with the mp3 files quite some time ago. Because of that, I decided to upgrade this site to Drupal 6 to take advantage of the new views code in that version which would’ve come in handy to generate the new Ogg feed. I also customised a new theme to go along with this and went ahead to implement all that this morning. Sadly my upgrade didn’t go so well: My personal shipment of Drupal fail arrived and wiped out the whole public directory for the site. Luckily Dan had his cpanel handy and was able to rescue me in the nick of time.

After the backup was restored, I created the new views in the old way and backported the theme I had created. I also tweaked the forum theme a bit to complement this. I then moved the first Ogg files over to Libsyn and redirected the feed accordingly. The Ogg feed should be fully funtional once again. This new setup doubles our bandwith costs but I saw that coming anyway. I am really glad that you all are listening to the show and the minimal Libsyn fees are a small price to pay to continue this amazing journey full of fun! If you enjoy the show as much as we do, you might want to consider pitching in and donating a small amount to our tip jar (in the right sidebar) — I don’t want to pressure anybody to do anything though and this is of course entirely up to you. As I said, the fun of doing this is well worth it in any case. If you still have problems with anything on the site, please leave a message in the forums and I’ll fix it as fast as I can. Hope y’all enjoy the new look!

I wanted to appologise to all of you who might’ve waited for the coverage of the recent SCaLE that we announced we might do. Unfortunately, we kind of lost contact with our correspondent down there who had a quite busy time and some family-related problems on top of that. I’m pretty sure he went to the expo but just couldn’t get around to do something for the show — which we totally understand and I hope all of you listeners are with me there. If anyone attended SCaLE and you want to tell us about your experience, please write us an email or jump on the forums and do so!

I am definitely going to cover CeBIT (which is the biggest IT trade show in the world) for the show this year, so stay tuned for that!

As I have mentioned before, I was in dire need for a new production machine since my current laptop was getting very unreliable. This week, my shiny new Dell XPS m1330 arrived at my doorstep. The thing has 4 GB of RAM, a 320 GB hard drive and generally kicks ass all around. I am currently in the process of setting up the new machine and moving all my production assets over. I have already installed Mint 4.0 on it after I couldn’t get Ubuntu Studio (which I wanted to use originally) to even recognize the soundcard properly. So much for audio/video editing on that thing. Go figure…

Anyway, Mint runs great and supports all the features of the laptop out of the box. Even the media remote and build-in camera work. The fingerprint reader and build-in microphone are the only two things that need additional packages (which I am not going to bother with right now).

I expect to have everything moved over and set up by tomorrow. This means that we will have another little delay with the podcast this week but I am determined not to drop this week’s show. Please bear with us. This upgrade was a necessary step and I think a reliable recording and production machine will benefit the podcast in general a lot. I will give a detailed review on my experience with this laptop (along with photos of the unboxing) soon.

As you can see, I just finished the redesign of this site and the forums. The old themes were only meant as a placeholder anyway since I wanted something in a brown-related colour scheme. I think it matches the outlaw/western theme perfectly. As some unknown drunk famously said on Firefly:

“Your coat is kind of a brownish color…”

I hope you like the new look! If you have comments, or suggestions, please leave them here.

Just a short notice to wish you all happy festive days and a good start to 2008! I just posted the last episode for this year and will be on my way into the holidays tomorrow. I’ll be completely out of touch with the world until New Year, so don’t worry if you don’t hear for me for a while. I’ll be enjoying a quiet time with lots of books and good beer in the Netherlands.

I hope you enjoy our, slightly longer, holiday episode and I’m looking forward to many, many more podcasts in 2008! We’ll just skip a week so look forward to a new episode in the first week of the new year. See you then; enjoy the holidays!

We have decided to scrap the Pligg site in favour for some forums. There was not much going on over there lately and I also recently discovered some slightly disturbing security problems with the system that I didn’t really wanted to live with in the long run. Since a few people requested forums anyway and they can basically fulfill the same purpose as the other site but are much more versatile, we decided to switch. I sincerely hope this doesn’t cause too much of an inconvenience to people.

Registration is optional of course, but we hope that many of you will join us at the forums and provide us with feedback and valuable ideas for future episodes. If you prefer to just hang out and talk about other stuff, that is fine as well. I am looking forward to many fruitful and entertaining discussions over there!

Please note that the theme for the forums isn’t finalised yet — in the moment we’re running the default prosilver template. I am looking at customising the looks of the place soon, but I’ll probably won’t get to it until the new year. In the meantime, the functionality is all there, however, so head over there and enjoy yourselves!

As I had promised earlier and was requested by several listeners, I’ve come up with some designs for merchandise for the show. Several shirts for both men and women and a Linux Outlaws themed mug can now be purchased at our new store at Cafépress. I encourage you to go over there and check them out. We will make exactly $2 on every item sold through the store and I will use these proceeds only to pay for hosting and bandwith fees and hardware for the show. That is a reasonable arrangement, I think.

I have ordered samples of the items and will get back to you here on the blog about the quality once they arrive. I have ordered stuff from Cafépress previously, though, and both the items themselves as well as the print job have always been very high quality. In my experience, they are the best at this kind of thing. Nonetheless, I am pursuing alternative vendors, especially for us Europeans. If you have any ideas on this or if you would like additional products in the store, please let me know via the contact form. I would also really enjoy pictures of listeners with our products, so if you order some, feel free to send me shots of the gear in action. I really hope you enjoy these as much as I will!