This is what I’m listening to this weekend. All of these were released or re-released during the last 3 weeks. It’s only February, but there’s already so much great new music this year.

A while ago I wrote the following in a blog post that was mainly about Reddit:

2024 is a year I will not forget in a hurry, and has definitely seen a change to the way I buy and consume music. It’s been less about vinyl, more about CDs, and has also seen a shift to rediscovering old favourites rather than hunting down new music every week. Some of this is likely to do with the fact that a few very old favourites have released great music this year, but maybe it’s also just down to the fact that as I get older my musical taste has just settled. There is still a lot of new music here though, and quite a few artists I’d not heard of a year ago as I continue to discover some of the newer punk/hardcore releases that sit nicely beside artists I was listening to decades ago.

We had a short power cut earlier this week, which was a good test of the power resilience we have configured in the caravan. We are using some kit that requires constant electricity to function, but try and ensure that anyone who is working can continue to work for a few hours in the event of losing electricity.

Over the last two years I have found myself listening to a lot of heavier music, and even some heavy metal, which is a new genre for me. I don’t know lots about this music, but I did think it was worth writing a list of things I’ve enjoyed, as a subset of a longer list that will follow later in the month.

I have been experimenting with LM Studio over the last few days. This is a tool that allows me to run large language models locally on my computer, making it ideal for when I’m travelling or spending time somewhere with a slow or unreliable internet connection. It’s cross-platform (Windows, Silicon Macs and Linux), and has so far worked on every machine I’ve tried it on, although not always with the default settings.

Yesterday was the release day for the new album by The Cure. I used to try and pick up their albums on release day when I was younger, but don’t think I have managed to do so since Wish as very long time ago.

It’s been another good week for new music. I try and listen to a few new things every Friday whilst working, and this is the selection I chose yesterday:

New music that I have enjoyed recently includes:

I’ve been researching off-grid lifestyles for a while. Not because it’s something that I think would fit the way my family need to live, but because there are definitely things we can learn from people who have chosen that kind of life, and who are making it work.

A couple of months ago I gave a series of talks on creating team charters. As part of my preparation for this piece of work I asked myself a number of questions about what a team actually was, and what sorts of questions teams should be asking themselves regularly. Some of this content was used in the talks, but I’ve tried to make this article more about teams than team charters, as I’ve written and talked about these a lot elsewhere.

I’ve made some major changes to my Ubuntu installation script over the last few weeks. Mostly because I finally replaced the hard drive in my laptop and needed to do a clean installation, but also because I wanted to try and get DisplayLink drivers installed by default, which has historically been a pain.

Earlier this year I ran out of space to store records. I could ship a load of old ones to our storage unit, but I really do like having my music around me so that didn’t feel like a good idea. I was also noticing the the already high price of records was creeping up, from £20 to well over £25 in most cases. So apart from a few new releases from Wrong Speed Records, I’ve not bought vinyl at all this year, and have instead reverted to either digital music or CDs.

I’ve been meaning to try and set up a pipeline that achieves the following:

The Corne is a 42-key split mechanical keyboard. The Corne I started with is the RTG model, ordered from Mechboards. I have also now built a few from scratch, using whatever the cheapest kit Mechboards sell is. These are what I use now, anywhere that I use a computer for any length of time.

I’ve worked for my current employer for 24 years. On the day I had my interview I bought two albums on the way home. Once was Kid A by Radiohead, the other was Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven by Godspeed You Black Emperor!. It amuses me that this week I’m writing about two records that are made by some of the same people, and then one that definitely wasn’t.

Reflecting on Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan (a book I have been reading and thinking about a lot recently), I think the concept of organisational debt is key. This would be anything where the way the work is being done slows down delivery or adds unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. In my organisation we have loads of this, and I wonder if we would do better at getting rid of it if we referred to it as debt.

I have been following the XZ backdoor vulnerability story with interest. Not just because I use Linux and therefore it affects the technology I rely on, but also because I’m interested in the people and processes that underpin open source software, and software development in general.

Excerpts from my journal over the last few days that fit the themes of this blog.

It’s yearly review time, and as usual I’m very much enjoying reflecting on all the great things my team have achieved over the last 12 months. There are a couple of fairly new things we have added to our yearly review process that help us focus on the right things, and make the conversations more meaningful to us:

As we prepare to start our third year/season of splitting our time between Birmingham and the Isle of Wight, I thought it was about time I blogged about my current travel setup. In this context, “travel” mostly refers to what I use on the island, but also partly to what I use when I am somewhere that isn’t one of the usual paces I live or work.

These are the records that have been the soundtrack to my 2023. If 2022 was a bad year for the world, then 2023 was more of the same, with a side-dose of personal horror. I did the exact same job for a whole year for the first time in a while, but everything around me seemed more chaotic, with ill health and general disruption not too far away. I suspect my musical choices have been influenced by that, although it certainly hasn’t been consciously.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 23.10 on my laptop last night. It took less than 20 minutes, and so far everything has just worked.

After over 3 years of mostly remote working I very interested in seeing how other people set their home offices up for maximum productivity. I’ve made a lot of changes since the start of 2020, and I suspect many other people have as well. I had intentions a while ago to make a long list of people who have inspired me with their setups, but have only just got around to posting that list (which I will likely add to later).

I have been experimenting with NixOS for a few weeks, and whilst I’m not ready to run it on my main machine, I think I could if I had to. These notes are all the things I had to search, or experiment with, and are largely here for my reference, although if they help someone else then that is great.

The Cantor is a 42-key split mechanical keyboard with an aggressive stagger. I have built a few of these, both for my own use and to sell.

The Ferris Sweep is a 34-key split board with an aggressive stagger. I have built a few of these, both for my own use and to sell.

I often download albums that have been made freely available, and then end up buying the record anyway. It’s definitely a way I have discovered new music for a while, and very rarely leads to me not giving the artist money for something, even if it is not that particular record.

These are the records that have been the soundtrack to my 2022. It’s been a good year for music, but a bad year for the world. There have been positive changes in my personal and professional life, but otherwise this is likely to be a year that is remembered for all the wrong reasons.

The Corne is a 42-key mechanical keyboard. These are my notes on building and configuring it. Largely for my own benefit.

After a bit of work yesterday I’m actually really happy with this board. I bought it because I wanted something fairly conventional that I could flash with autoshift so that it could be used as a backup keyboard when I’m travelling (I use a Planck as my main keyboard).

I’ve been thinking about mobile computing a lot recently. Now we are splitting our time between Birmingham and the Isle of Wight I have found myself using my laptop more and more (after it sitting largely idle during lockdown). I have also found myself starting to value portability much more, after a couple of years of building and optimising a powerful desktop computer connected to three large screens.

What can I say about 2021 that has not already been said? It has been another very challenging year; both for the world in general but also for the world of music. I have not experienced live music at all this year, but made up for it by buying a lot of records (and tried to buy them directly from the artists where possible, because people need to make a living). Music has always been very important to me, but never more so than now. These are the records that made this year better, or at least acted as a soundtrack to the bad bits.

My adventures in mechanical keyboards led me to building a Planck this week. A Planck is a 40% ortholinear keyboard with no dedicated number keys, and only 47 keys in total. It was more straightforward to build than I expected, and I’m slowly getting used to typing on it. It’s probably not something I would ever want to use as my main keyboard unless space was at a real premium, but adapting it to the way I work will be an interesting challenge, and might even mean I end up writing a custom i3 config file just for this keyboard (because I use numbers a lot, and it doesn’t have any).

I bought this a while ago (with a decent discount) because I wanted a cheap hot-swappable keyboard to test different types of switches I might want to put in my main keyboard. After using it in anger for a few days while I’ve been off work I actually think it compares very well to more expensive options, and it’s the only 60% I’ve found so far that could maybe replace my Motospeed CK61 as the keyboard I reach for which I want a loud 60% typing experience on my downstairs computer.

Recently I found myself needing to make a DVD from a recorded stream (of a family funeral that my Mum couldn’t attend because of covid). This is not a task I normally do, and I thought it was worth writing up how I did it in case I ever need to do it again.

This weekend I finally got round to finishing off building my new keyboard (GMMK 60% with Gateron yellows and some generic black Glorious keycaps that are better than £18 keycaps have any right to be). This will almost certainly be my main keyboard eventually, because it’s so great to type on. I’m not sure it will be with these keycaps though. They look pretty when they are backlit, but they are very different to what I’m used to, so let’s see how long they last.

I’ve managed to attend a lot of the talks at Debconf21. This was also true of Debconf20, but I very much feel like I’ve understood a lot more of what is being talked about this time, and I’m also very happy that I was sent a conference T-shirt and badge so I can participate fully in the experience.

I used Reddit quite a bit around a decade ago. Mostly for keeping up to date with Linux and other computer-related things, but also to understand the kind of things people were generally interested in and talking about (became small talk is a thing, and I’m terrible at it). I drifted away a few year ago, but since the first lockdown started I’ve found it a useful source of information about things I’m interested in.

I’ve been using mechanical keyboards for a while now, but the fact that I’m working in more than one place now has required me either carrying a keyboard everywhere I go or having more than one keyboard. I have of course chosen the latter, and it seems that customising keyboards has become a new hobby.

Yesterday I spent the day working on a script to install my usual working environment on top of a clean install of the (soon to be) current version of Debian. This is a fork of my Ubuntu scripts that I use to set up all my machines.

Last night I was experimenting with ulauncher as a way of easily launching apps on my computer. After using it for a few hours it seems like something that I might want to start using all the time, but it also made me start looking at other launchers like Albert which seems a little harder to install but which promises to search across my applications, my local files, and the internet.

I’ve been subscribed to the Rough Trade Club for a few years now, and receive a monthly record with a few other interesting bits of paraphernalia thrown in. The records I get are rarely bad, and many of them are things I would buy anyway, but the selection this year has been particularly strong, and If I had to only listen to these records for a whole year then I think I would be OK.

I use a fairly eclectic range of hardware and software, and keyboard shortcuts are required to get it to all work together. This list is mainly for me, but I’ve split it up by device/application in case it is of any use to other people with similar setups.

I’ve been maintaining an up to date list of what hardware and software I use since I discovered Uses This a few years ago. It used to live as a page in my blog, but I like to maintain an up to date version so I can keep track of exactly what I’m using and how it changes over time. Every couple of years I post a snapshot as a blog post to track the passage of time. This is one of those snapshots.

I had my new computer delivered this week. It was good to install it from my own scripts, copy across my dotfiles, and just carry on working.

When I first install Oracle Linux 8 a lot of software I want to use isn’t available. But we can fix this by adding another repository.

I’ve been doing some experiments with LXD on Ubuntu and I thought it was worth publishing some of the notes I made myself so that when I come back to this at a later date I can remember what I did.

2020 has been a strange year. We all know that. Live music hasn’t really been a thing since March, and so many more people get to listen to music throughout the day thanks to working from home being much more common than it was before March. I think both of these things have probably influenced my list of favourite albums this year, and so I’m going to split it into two lists - one of traditional albums that are best listened to in sequence, and one of the music that soundtracked my working days during those rare few moments when I was not in Zoom or Teams meetings.

This Christmas I set up two small VMs in Oracle’s cloud; one running Oracle Linux 8 (which I’m trying to learn at the moment), and one running Ubuntu (with my standard VM/container build). I’ve written these notes largely for me, but maybe someone else might find them useful too.

A few months ago I wrote about how I had started attending a few listening parties to replace the lack of live music in my life. As I’ve got an automation (via IFTTT) that outputs everything from my calendar to a spreadsheet then it’s fairly easy for me to know how many “a few” actually is.

I’ve been running a lot of experiments using Multipass, which is a (fairly) new application for deploying and working with containers on various operating systems (including all the ones I use). I’ve now set up a script to deploy these containers on any Ubuntu machine I install, and thought it might be worth sharing the script that I use.

I’ve been talking and writing about music a lot over the last week, and am part way through writing up my thoughts on what live music might look like when we all emerge from lock down. In the meantime, my response to Jehnny Beth on how I listen to albums. Jehnny’s question was:

i3 is a window manager for Linux that I’ve been using for the last few weeks. It’s a fairly steep learning curve, but definitely brings some productivity gains. i3 is a tiling window manager, and by default will fill up the whole screen with applications. So if you have one application open it’s full screen, if you have two open then they each take up 50% of the screen, etc.

I’ve been maintaining a lock down blog since the start of April. Reading through it I note with interest that there is very little there that I wouldn’t want on the public internet, and that a slightly redacted version might serve as a decent record of these difficult times. I could just dump these into my regular blog, but as with my cycling blog and my micro-KB I thought it was worth keeping it separate (because containers are still important to me). I think this might be the one that aggregates to Twitter (for now) though, as I’m hardly prolific enough anywhere else to make copying and pasting links into Buffer a particularly time consuming task.

I’ve maintained my own scripts for updating software on a few Linux distributions for a while. This weekend I decided it was time to consolodate all my installation and update scripts in one place, and amend them to reflect the new ways I work with Linux (both in using i3 as a window manager and relying more on WSL and Multipass).

One of the last social things I did before lockdown was the 6 Music Festival (and an excellent non-festival Jehnny Beth concert that is probably the musical highlight of my year so far). I’ve been trying to do more live music (combined with cycling adventures) and this sort of event really works for me as it takes me to a different city and builds in enough time to properly explore.

I realised this week that I have a single blog post for all my other Album of the year lists, and would probably regret doing 2019 in sections at some point. This blog post addresses this issue, and also has undergone some light editing to preserve the narrative.

I attended a talk by James Stanger from CompTIA at the SITS17 conference in 2017 (I totally forgot I’d written these notes until now). He talked a lot about the sort of skills and knowledge that world class Service Desk staff needed to have, and it dovetailed nicely with a list I drew up myself a couple of years earlier, and also with ideas from other presentations from the same conference.

I’ve posted writeups of 10 records I really loved this year on Facebook and in a couple of previous blog posts (part 1 and part 2). There is more though (there always is), and there are some records that I’ve really enjoyed but I don’t really have anything to say about. This is the full list:

I’ve been compiling a list of my favourite records of each year for a decade or more. This year I’ve listened to music slightly differently; with monthly Spotify playlists on shuffle during train journeys and walks, but otherwise by putting a record on my record player and listening to the songs in the order they were sequenced. This is the second half of the list (the first half can be found here).

I’ve been compiling a list of my favourite records of each year for a decade or more. This year I’ve listened to music slightly differently; with monthly Spotify playlists on shuffle during train journeys and walks, but otherwise by putting a record on my record player and listening to the songs in the order they were sequenced. I’ll share a few of my favourites over the next few days just in case anyone is looking for new music to get them through the Christmas period, starting with something that came out during a surprisingly warm February.

I posted quite a lot about my trip to Japan on Facebook, but never got around to posting it here (that’s what not having a day off since September does). The following is what I wrote at the time (with light editing where required), and there are also more pictures from the cycle tour of the Japanese islands on my cycling blog.

It’s national album day, and as is traditional I’ve spent today playing some records that mean a lot to me, and also some that are new. This is today’s selection.

I made some changes to this blog (and the server it runs on) tonight. It’s running in a new directory, on (technically) a new server, but should otherwise be largely the same.

The holidays seem a long time ago, and I seem to have spent most of the last 2 months at work. But I still have vague memories (and many photographs) of an enjoyable week of walking and relaxing in Cornwall.

The Easter holidays have been great. The weather was good, and while I didn’t stay more than 20 miles from Birmingham I did get out and about a lot. Highlights include an excellent British Sea Power gig at The Crossing (with great food and drinks beforehand at the Digbeth Works & Baked in Brick), three long bike rides (including finally exploring the Rushall Canal and repairing my first thorn puncture), and a lot of epic dog walks.

2018 has been a strange year in so many ways. I always said that I would try and buy less music this year, and instead, spend more time with the music I did buy. This has very much happened, but there is also very little on this list that wasn’t chosen by someone else (either as part of the Rough Trade club, or as a birthday/Christmas gift). That said, I love all of these records, and I think they represent an accurate summary of my journey through 2018.

It’s National Album day today, and I’ve spent the day listening to a few old and new favourites (with a short break to walk the dog once the rain stopped). This is what I ended up listening to:

I’ve been to a couple of very enjoyable concerts this year (Belle & Sebastian and She Makes War) and I’d very much like to go to more now the nights are drawing in and spending evenings outside is less appealing. I thought it was worth listing things I was interested in, just in case I know anyone who might want to come along.

I’ve used various ad-blockers over the years, and while they have all largely worked, they have also started to slow my browser down (especially on older computers). I read about Pi-hole a few times, but didn’t get around to actually installing it until this week. Now I have installed it I’m wishing I hadn’t waited, because not only does it lead to a largely ad-free browsing experience, but it also makes my older and slower computers noticeably faster.

Last year I wrote down a list of things I wanted to achieve and then evaluated how well I had done. This year I wrote a similar list but failed to publish it. 8 months later I’ve just found the list, and I’m amused to find that I’ve done fairly well, and even exceeded my own expectations in at least one area (I said I’d start cycling, but didn’t predict that it would become such a large part of my life).

I’ve been experimenting with Chromebooks for a few weeks now to try and come up with a low-power low-cost no-maintenance setup. There are a lot of very good blog posts covering the basics already, but I thought it was at least worth documenting how I got Ubuntu installed on my older Chromebook (which is a bit of a frankenstein that goes against the general ethos of not upgrading or otherwise tinkering with the hardware). This is probably best not attempted on anything with less than 32Gb of storage, and 4Gb of RAM is probably a good idea as well.

I’ve just cycled 500 miles to raise money for Good Hope hospital in Birmingham. I did it over a few weeks, interspersed with all the other things I usually do, which made it a lot more feasible than trying to do it over a weekend (which I also think would have killed me). 500 miles might not seem like a lot, but I had only been cycling for just over a month when I started (after 10+ years without a bike), and I knew that I would likely have to do most of that distance as part of commutes, hospital visits, shopping trips, and other scenarios that would require me to carry a lot of luggage.

I’ve been maintaining an up to date list of what hardware and software I use since I discovered Uses This a few years ago. It usually lives as a page on this blog, but as I’ve rewritten 95% of it today then I think it deserves to be a blog post.

The NHS have helped us a lot over the last few weeks. Without the NHS we would probably have remortgaged our house by now (or tried to), and we have met lots of skilled, dedicated, and above all nice people.

This blog post details the installation process for Ubuntu when I’m using it for testing web applications. The builds are designed to conduct meaningful tests on Oracle cloud applications but should be suitable for testing any similar web application.

This afternoon I cycled to the post office in Erdington town centre to collect my Rough Trade Club record of the month, which was the eponymous debut by LUMP (Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay). I don’t really have a bag that is ideal for both cycling and carrying vinyl (recommendations welcome), but despite a slightly unbalanced cycle home (I did a food shop too, so added weight and bulk to the already oddly shaped bag that seemed to want to end up on my hip rather than my back) it did remind me very much of the many times I cycled to record shops when I was younger, and how much more of an occasion it makes getting hold of new music that the straightforward but soulless downloading or streaming that is largely how most of us consume music in the iTunes and Spotify age.

At the moment I’m juggling hospital visits, work, being a responsible pet owner, and all the other things I do. This has lead to a few logistical challenges, but since I was kindly loaned a bike a couple of weeks ago I have found new ways to do everything I need to do and still manage to see new parts of my local environment.

A couple of years ago I built a media player using a Raspberry Pi and OpenELEC. I’ve made a few changes since I wrote that blog post (not least moving to LibreELEC), and have also made a smaller version of the same device that I use in hotels when I’m travelling.

As I think I’ve mentioned already, I’m trying to rediscover my music collection this month. I’ve made a playlist with a few highlights from the first couple of weeks of the experiment.

I’ve had to set up a few Ubuntu desktop machines recently, and I thought it was worth documenting what I install on each one, and how I automate those installations as much as possible. I wrote about this a few years ago but so much has changed with my setup that I thought it was worth revisiting these instructions.

The way I buy and consume music has changed recently. So far this year I’ve only bought 5 records (the three that Rough Trade send me, plus two Belle & Sebastian records that I pre-ordered last year). All my other music discovery has been via Spotify, and I find I’m using it more on my phone now, with a huge big playlist of new discoveries being the soundtrack to my commute. I also spent most of January and February listening to vinyl and CDs rather than music on my computer (at least when in my study - I still need digital music for when I’m travelling).

I probably listened to less new music this year than any year in the last decade, although I definitely listened to each new record more, which was very much my intention at the start of the year. I also reverted to buying physical copies of music wherever possible (either on vinyl or on CD), which lead to me setting up my old stereo in my study and only really listening to digital music through Spotify or when I was on the move.

This week I’ve attended a carol service, eaten nut roast, drank mulled wine, made an excessively glittery Christmas card, listened to Christmas music, and voluntarily walked in the snow. I think that means I’m actually celebrating Christmas this year.

This year I seem to have socialised over food a lot more than previously, so I thought it was worth listing places I’ve eaten in 2017 (in the UK) in case there is anywhere that people are not aware of. I suspect most of these will be in Birmingham or London, as that’s where I spend most of my time.

At the start of the year I wrote a blog post about things I might do differently this year. Not resolutions as such, just lines in the sand and broad statements of intent. As the year is nearly two thirds of the way through (how?), I thought it was time to look at those statements of intent, see if anything had noticeably changed, and note anything else eventful that had happened.

We went to Ikea today, ostensibly for a new desk for my study. Evernote tells me I did the measurements for this desk over two years ago, so it’s probably about time. As well as a desk, we also picked up a new kitchen table (replacing one that’s probably 15 years old) and a new coffee/gaming table for the living room (replacing one that’s nearly as old as I am). We also picked up some stools and a couple of iPad holders each to make it easier to use what are fast becoming our primary computers in a number of different ways. Everything smells new and wooden, and I love it all.

I recently curated the music for a birthday party where a fair portion of the playlist was taken from songs originally released in 1987 (with a side order of 1983, 1984, and a few old favorites for good measure). As a result of this, I spent a fair bit of the last few weeks listening to music from this era, and it struck me how similar 1987 and 2017 were, both in the types of music that were popular (at least to me) and also in some of what was going on in the news. 1987 was an election year too, with The Housemartins and The Blow Monkeys (amongst others) singing about the need to change a right wing female PM for something more socialist. There were also great records from The Wedding Present, Pixies, Sonic Youth, New Order, The Fall, The Cure, Depeche Mode, and the swansong from The Smiths (as well as several of their best singles). 1987 was angry, dissatisfied, and just under half of the country wanted a change, but that change didn’t come for another few years.

Yesterday we visited the town of La Laguna, home of two museums, but also a lot of other impressive things to look at (architecture, graffiti, churches etc.). For me this was the highlight of the week so far, and it allowed me to see how the area I’ve been staying in developed over the centuries, and how history touched it and shaped it to be what it is today.

I woke up yesterday feeling less than well, but soon made the decision that it was not going to stop me from interacting fully in the activities of the day. After breakfast we caught a tram, and then a bus, which took us through some fairly impressive scenery including cloud-shrouded mountains and the bluest of seas. The journey did not take too long (nothing does here - it’s just over an hour from one end of the island to the other), and we soon found ourselves in Puerto de la Cruz, which is in the north of Tenerife and is significantly more tourist focused than Santa Cruz. The differences could not have been more obvious - from the English translations on menus and street signs, to the amount of merchandise for sale in the shops and stalls that are everywhere. The day largely consisted of walking around and taking photographs (mainly of lizards- there were many lizards), and also getting coffee and snacks in a couple of places (where again the slightly inflated prices suggested a focus towards temporary visitors).

At some point I’m sure I’ll manage a week away from work without coming down with some sort of illness - this is not that week though. Yesterday started with a visit to see the festivities associated with the local holiday to celebrate the Canary Islands. There were stalls, singing and dancing, and far more people than I’m usually comfortable with. It was OK, but by the end I was starting to feel like I was coming down with some sort of head cold (although I did manage to wander around and take some photographs). This feeling continued throughout the day, and the evening ended up involving little more than watching a film (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children - which I actually found quite entertaining) and then going to bed fairly early. I then woke up in the middle of the night with a really sore throat, and this morning I’ve got most of the symptoms of a heavy cold, although my energy levels suggest I’ll be fine to do something today so I’m not going to let it stop me.

The second day in any new place is generally when I start to settle in. Yesterday was no exception, and included a trip to two supermarkets and several shops, an evening in a lovely outside bar, and then the first film of the holiday (Dr Strange, which I actually enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would). Everything here seems reasonably priced, with even quite decent wine significantly cheaper than the U.K.

Getting up at 3am was a bit of a culture shock. I usually get up at 6, so early mornings are a thing I’m used to, but even so I found it quite hard. We got to the airport just after 4, and grabbed breakfast at the airport. The food was slow to arrive, and slightly cold by the time it did, but was still very welcome. Coffee was also achieved, following which there was a painfully slow crawl from the gate to the plane, which ended up taking off about 20 minutes late due to what was described as “carnage” at the airport, but which just looked like mild disorganisation.

I’d rather be on the stage than in the crowd.

There is a lot of talk of politics right now. I think it’s inevitable, and it’s a good thing that people are talking (and thinking) about ways to make the world a better place.

I think I’m getting better at showing people things I’ve written. I used to be terrible at this; and at one point must have had hundreds of pages of writing that I had never shared with another person.

My travel kit (for non-work travel) now consists of:

I went in to the new Apple Store in Birmingham today. I’ve been meaning to go for ages, but as I’m not really in the market for anything new then I’ve not seen it as a pressing task. My main reason for going was to try out the keyboards on the new MacBook Pro to see if it’s something I could live with if I end up getting one at some point in the future. It’s very different to the keyboards I’m used to (the previous generation of MacBook Pro/Air, and also the Apple bluetooth keyboard and my Logitech solar powered keyboard). There is definitely less movement of the keys as I type, but my accuracy didn’t take a hit, and I think I could grow to accept it as a keyboard for everyday use. I also thought the screen was gorgeous, and that 8GB of RAM would be enough for most of what I use a laptop for these days, especially as the SSD is so fast. I’m not going to rush out and buy one, but I wouldn’t rule it out at some point in the future (although the touch bar still leaves me cold).

As I’m spring cleaning the house, so I’m spring cleaning this blog. I’ve just changed the theme, and I imagine I’ll be making a few other tweaks over the next few days while I’m off work.

I’ve been collecting statistics on all sorts of aspects of my working day for a while now. I record how long my meetings last, who they are with, how much time it takes me to get to them, and also track how much time I spend on courses, at conferences, and engaged in any social activity that takes place at lunch time or straight after work. By collecting data I can hopefully spot trends (like attending far more meetings than usual), which helps me with planning my time, maintaining work life balance, and ensuring that I factor in recharging time between events that are likely to leave me feeing quite drained.

I started this as a bit of an FAQ for strangers who try and get me to connect with them on Linkedin, or who want to post guest content on my blog, but I thought it was actually worth putting together something that articulates who I choose to follow and interact with on social media, and what criteria I use to make decisions around this sort of thing.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but a couple of conversations over the last few weeks pushed it to the forefront of my mind again. What I want to talk about here is burnout (and what it looks like), how I try and maintain work-life balance, and stress triggers and how to mitigate them. What follows is a what works for me, but hopefully there is something there that would be of use to other people too.

Homebrew is a package manager for command line tools on macOS. It can be installed by issuing the following command:

2017 is going to be a year of watching films, largely because of the wonders of Cineworld Unlimited membership, but also because I watched far too few films in 2016. The following are the ones I watched in the first month of membership:

What follows is instructions for creating a local HTML copy of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook (which is a very useful source of information for anyone working with any Debian derivative including Ubuntu and Raspian). All work related to this project was done on a Raspberry Pi Zero running Raspian, so I suspect it will work on anything running any Debian derivative (although Ubuntu 16.04 is the only other system I’ve tested this on so far).

It’s 2017. It’s been 2017 for a while, but as I was ill for most of the Christmas holidays, today is the first time I’ve really thought about the fact that it’s a new year, and that I’m back at work tomorrow.

In December I seem to have split my time between starting a new job and being ill. Neither of these are conducive to discovering new music. I did manage to stumble upon a few things though.

As always, I’ve listened to a lot of new music this year. It’s been my second year of collecting vinyl, and my second (and last) year of blogging about my monthly discoveries (2017 is likely to be a little too busy to commit to that for another year). This year I’ve split my choices into three categories - my top 10 albums by how many times I’ve played them, my top 10 vinyl purchases, and a selection of other things I’ve listened to this year that I really like.

I have discovered lots of interesting music in November, including the long lost Sea Nymphs album that was recorded in 1991 but only released this year (and which can be bought from the Cardiacs store. There was also a surprising electronic Lambchop record and an equally surprisingly angry Moby record.

I start a new job on Thursday. I’ll still be working for the University, but for a different department and on a different project. I’m currently at home using up the holiday I carried over from last year, and I’ve set aside today to update all publicly available biographies and blurbs to reflect this change, and also to try and ensure that Linkedin and Facebook represent my updated professional and personal networks.

There’s been a lot of talk on the internet over the last couple of weeks from people who were planning on buying a new Macbook Pro who have instead decided to move most (or all) of their workflow over to some sort of tablet (usually an iPad Pro). While I’m not quite there yet, I do find myself using my computer less and my iPad more, and I thought it was worth exploring exactly what it is that would stop me making this sort of switch.

Yesterday appeared to be 1980s day. I created a playlist the day before called rediscoveries and listened to it for most of the day (with a brief break to listen to Hope Sandoval’s new record on vinyl). I can’t remember the last time I listened to Tears for Fears, OMD, Ultravox, Japan, Simple Minds, Furniture and The Associates, but it’s the sort of music that takes me back to childhood the moment I hear it. Other things from this era have stuck with me in the years that followed, but there is quite a lot about the 1980s that I very much left in the 1980s, as I left home, moved to a new city, and reinvented myself in the way people do when they go to University. Maybe in a few years time I’ll be ready to revisit the 1990s through a filter of nostalgia, but for now I’m content with enjoying music that sounded dated 20 years ago but that now sounds surprisingly contemporary.

Tonight I finally received two CHIP boards (sort of a cross between a Raspberry Pi and a Pi Zero). I’d kickstarted these about a year ago and totally forgotten about it, so it was a nice surprise. Whenever I get my hands on something like this the first challenge is to power it up, boot an operating system, and see what it will do.

Music I’ve discovered in October includes:

My next work machine will be a Surface Pro. I could have gone with a very nice looking Acer, but as I’m keeping my old Macbook Pro for a little while I thought portability should win out. I’m also spending a lot of time using my iPad, and I’m finding myself missing a touch screen interface when I don’t have one, and I’ll need to use enough Windows-only software in my new job to make using anything else an exercise in frustration.

September is always a busy month for me. It’s also a month where a lot of my favourite artists released records. This is just as well as I didn’t really have time to find much else to listen to.

I think I spent most of this month listening to a playlist of most of the recorded output of The Fall. This experiment may spawn a blog post at some point, but in the meantime here is a list of everything I listened to when I needed a break from the wonderful and frightening world of Mark E Smith.

I’ve been experimenting a lot with combining PDF files in interesting ways (largely to make a recipe book from all sorts of different sources). I’ve used Preview on my Mac for a lot of this, but have also done a fair bit of work in Ubuntu recently which required a slightly different approach.

There is a lot of music below, and it transpires that some of it was actually released at the end of June, rather than during this month as I originally thought.

My listening habits in June have been dominated by two records:

This weekend I’ve been setting up my latest Raspberry Pi (a version III, in a blue lego case, running Ubuntu) to display a video stream of what’s going on outside my house so I can watch out for deliveries etc.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been writing a presentation that I have to give as part of my ILM5 qualification. I give presentations fairly regularly (in fact I’ve given two since I started writing this one), but this one is different in that I’m being assessed on every aspect of it, and the assessment criteria is fairly specific.

I wrote about Pandoc last year, but I’m using it more and more and I’ve found myself editing the original post a fair few times. This is the updated 2016 version that gathers together useful commands I’ve learned so far.

I was at home a lot this month, using up holiday I needed to take, and also doing a lot of de-cluttering and technical projects around the house. I did listen to a fair bit of new music (as detailed below), but I also ripped around 100 old CDs to my computer, and so much of my fortnight off was sound-tracked by music from the 90s and very early 2000s, which I’d not listened to for the best part of 10 years.

The following instructions describe how I install Wordpress on Ubuntu. The instructions may differ slightly for other server environments, but the basic principles should be the same. This requires shell access to the server, but once it’s finished the Wordpress instance(s) should be capable of being administered through a web browser.

I’m quite pleased with what I’ve achieved over the last two weeks. This holiday was supposed to be a chance to recharge prior to a very busy period at work, but I think I’ve actually been about as productive as I normally am (just in different ways).

I’ve done a fair bit of Wordpress troubleshooting over the last few weeks, including moving sites from one server to another and upgrading server operating systems. While a lot of this isn’t probably that interesting, I did come across a few things that might help other people undertaking similar tasks.

I’ve had to set up a few Ubuntu desktop machines recently (for my own use), and I thought it was worth documenting what I install on each one, and how I automate those installations as much as possible.

April has been a good month for music. I’ve found plenty to listen to on freezing walks to the train station in the morning, and significantly warmer journeys home. I’ve bought a few records, spent hours listening to Spotify, and yet this list only really scratches the surface of the music that’s been released over the last month. It’s still a long list though, and probably about as much new music as I can reasonably listen to (as opposed to hear) in a month when I’m working every day and doing all the other things I do.

The latest module of my ILM5 training was called Managing for efficiency and effectiveness. I was a lot more comfortable with this as a subject than budgetary control, and my main learning point was that I was on the right track with a lot of the things I’m already doing, and that the way I organise myself and my time is fairly efficient and effective without me needing to make huge changes to how I work. I found it useful to compare the material in the session to research I’ve already done into Lean IT and Lean Six Sigma, and I’ll be doing further comparison once I’ve gone through Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt training which starts tomorrow.

My project for the Easter vacation has been to build a media player using a Raspberry Pi and Open ELEC. Setup was fairly straightforward, but I thought it was worth writing up anyway - especially as I’m probably going to make further changes to the setup as I find new features to add.

Software I use that I feel is somewhat noteworthy includes:

I’ve been very busy with the day job this month, and therefore finding new music has taken a backseat. Most of these were things were chosen/recommended by people who are not me, but I still think it represents a great snapshot of music released in March 2016. The Iggy Pop record in particular is excellent, and I don’t think anyone was expecting him to ever make anything so good again. I’m also very pleased with my Rough Trade album of the month for March, which is the debut album by Unloved. It’s difficult to categorise, but well worth a listen.

A while ago I blogged about the script I use to update my Ubuntu machines. Today it’s the turn of Mac OS X.

Lots of interesting music to showcase this month, including a Bowie tribute, a strong debut from Sunflower Bean and the second album from DIIV. I also can’t get enough of the Yorkston/Thorne/Khan record after being introduced to it earlier this month, and I’ve found myself listening to a few of James Yorkston’s earlier albums as well.

I attended the second module of my ILM5 training last week, which covered budgetary planning and control. This is an area of work where I don’t have a great deal of experience, but one which I feel I’ll need a decent grounding in if I’m going to move any further in my organisation. The content was about as dry as I expected, and I think I’m going to have to do a lot more reading and research before I submit my assignment next month. I’ve devoted the whole day to ILM work today, and as well as this reflection I’ve created documents for each assignment (with headings and sections derived from the question structure) and have also had a first stab at writing the first half of the assignment related to last week’s workshop. I’m not completely happy with what I’ve written, but I think it’s a good enough start that will probably just need editing down and re-ordering during my second pass at the assignment which I need to schedule in for some point next week.

January has been a month overshadowed by the death of David Bowie (amongst others), but has also seen the release of some outstanding records, including a few my long-time musical heroes of mine. The new records by Tortoise and Shearwater did not disappoint, and the Jesu/Sun Kil Moon record is a particular treat that reminds me a little of the Sun Kil Moon/Album Leaf collaboration from a couple of years ago.

I’ve just started studying for the ILM level 5 in Leadership and Management, which is likely to take up a fair bit of my time over the next six months. One of the things I’ve been asked to submit is a learning log, which details everything I’ve learned (and want to learn) and how it feeds into the work I’m doing. I also have to write reflections on each module in the program; starting with the Change & Innovation module I studied in December.

I’m always looking for new ways to make web content available easily, and Pancake is one of the best (and easiest) I’ve found.

I listened to a lot of music in 2015, but I also changed the way I listened to music. I stopped subscribing to emusic’s download service, and instead started buying CDs and vinyl again, both as part of Rough Trade’s album of the month subscription and by visiting record stores to buy things (something I’d not done for a while). I bought less albums, but spent more time with each one, and also had access to Spotify to listen to those things I wanted to hear but had no desire to own. By the end of 2015 pretty much everything about how I consumed music had changed, as as such I expect this list will reflect that change somewhat.

I didn’t discover much new music in December, and the one thing I did play over and over again was a compilation of tracks previously released in 2013 and 2014. I’d not heard of Golden Teacher until I received their record through the post, but I really like it (both the 8 song vinyl version and the 12 song CD). They remind me a lot of late 70s/early 80s post-punk/funk, which is not a bad thing for something to remind me of at all.

November is often a strange month for music. It’s not a popular release month, as records released in November are rarely established enough to feature in end of year lists (and in fact some end of year lists have already been published), and as such this list is quite short.

I’ve been using Ubuntu a fair bit over the last few weeks, both at work and at home. I have a number of projects on the go, and I’ve found myself needing to maintain a few different machines (both LTS and current) to run experiments on, and to built live servers and services.

It’s November, and like a lot of other people I’m attempting to write 50,000 words. At least 40,000 of those are going to be fiction (hopefully more), but I thought it was also worth trying to write down the other things in my head - the things that don’t really belong in a piece of fiction. I have no intention of posting them all here, but I thought a few fragments based on the sort of things I usually write in this blog wouldn’t hurt.

October saw the release of a few records that will probably make my end of year list. It also saw the release of records by some of my favourite artists.

I’ve been off work for three days this week. I had some leave from last year that I needed to use, and this was the first opportunity to take it. I didn’t have much of a plan apart from to listen to some music, read a book or two, and catch up on the episodes of Doctor Who that I’ve been ripping from DVD to my NAS over the last few weeks.

I’ve been meaning to set up a low-powered Linux machine for a while, but developing a new Ubuntu-based service at work made me realise that having something at home to experiment with would be useful. I wanted something with real hardware, but also something that wouldn’t use too much power or cost me too much money.

September was a month where I spent a lot of time at work and not a lot of time listening to music. Many evenings I found myself listening to Max Richter’s From Sleep as a way of winding down from a long and busy day, but I also watched a lot of TV (Lie to Me and a fair bit of sport), and well as being pleasantly surprised by New Order’s new record which arrived right at the end of the month. I think this review sums up my thoughts fairly well. The rest of these I’ve listened to a few times whilst commuting, but have not spent the time with them that I would have liked.

I’m particularly busy right now. It’s traditionally my busiest time of the year anyway, but it also seems like every project I’m working on is at a stage where it could easily become a full time job. I’m very conscious of this though, and I try and make sure that when I do get a whole day off then I do as little as possible to ensure I recharge my batteries.

This month I largely listened to my vinyl collection, including about a week where I had Jim O’Rourke’s Simple Songs on loop. I also (re)discovered Jethro Tull’s Passion Play (both on vinyl and the Steven Wilson remastered version), and have had a bit of a New Pornographers/Sea and Cake binge. As a result, I listened to very little music that was actually released this month until the last few days of the month, after which time things went back to normal.

I’ve recently found myself needing to do a lot of document conversion, and maintaining documentation that needs to be available in a variety of formats (HTML, Word documents, Markdown and PDF). My tool of choice for this sort of thing is Pandoc, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, although most of my usage so far has been on Linux (it’s a command line package that outputs to Dropbox, so it doesn’t matter where it runs really).

July has been an odd month. It’s the first month for a while I’ve spent an extended period of time in one place, and I suppose the music I’ve listened to has reflected this. I’ve had more time to read blogs and websites and hunt out new and unusual things to listen to, and I’ve also spent a fair bit of time reading this month, which tends to require a more ambient and instrumental soundtrack.

I’m off work this week, and I thought it was about time I upgraded the hard drive in my Mac Mini to an SSD. I’ve had this machine for just under 4 years, and it’s been my main desktop computer throughout that time. As such it’s got a lot of data stored locally, and while it’s backed up in three different places it’s still a 4 year old hard drive that is getting a bit slow and clunky.

It seems I’ve not listened to a great deal of new music in June. I suspect that a month spent all over the country might play a part in that. And yet, it’s been another month of established artists making unexpectedly good records. Franz Ferdinand & Sparks is a combination I would never have though of, and yet FFS is a great record. I am also very impressed with the new Faith no More record, which manages to sound a bit like old Faith no More and a bit like everything else Mike Patton has made in the interim. After preparing to be disappointed I’ve actually found myself listening to it a great deal. There is also a new Sun Kil Moon record, which has soundtracked my walks to work, and which pretty much picks up where the last one left off. I love it, but I suspect a lot of that love comes from a combination nostalgia and being at a similar place in life, and it may be something of an acquired taste (I acquired the taste for Red House Painters when I was at University and have lapped up everything Mark Kozelek has made since).

I’ve been involved in running a Hackathon over the last week or so. I’ve never done anything like it before, but it was a really positive experience that allowed University students to learn new technologies and then use them to build working software using Agile methodology. I was very familiar with some of the technologies used, and fairly familiar with working in an Agile fashion, but despite all that I still think I learned a few things over the week.

May was largely about some of my musical heroes making good, unexpected, and unexpectedly good records. It was also a month where I travelled a fair bit (June will also be one of those months), and as a result I probably didn’t listen to as much music as I would if I’d been at home all month.

A few photographs from my recent trip to Egypt.

This is probably not the album of holiday photographs that people want to see, but it’s one I’m quite proud of, and was a whole lot quicker to edit down than the colour ones. The idea behind this collection was that we carried my old iPhone everywhere we went, and just snapped random things with little or no thought as to the composition or subject.

I’ve recently been watching the US TV show Once Upon a Time. I saw the first two seasons a couple of years ago, but then decided to wait until it was all available on Netflix so I could binge-watch all four seasons. For those who are not aware, Once Upon a Time takes traditional fairytales and gives them a modern twist, and also draws in more modern fairytales from recent movies such as Frozen and The Little Mermaid. One of the main themes that runs through the series is the battle between good and evil, and specifically what makes a hero and what makes a villain. As someone who is more interested in the shades of grey that all characters (and indeed people) possess, it maybe doesn’t seem like this show is something that would appeal to me, but I really do think that no character in Once Upon a Time is wholly good or wholly evil. In fact, it is the way the main characters move between the two that makes it so interesting to me.

16th May

This is an updated version of something I posted a few months ago, but as some of my automation methods have changed I thought it was worth a rewrite.

I’ve travelled a fair bit over the last few years. Monthly trips to London, a few courses and conferences each year, and holidays to New York, Rhodes, Canada and Bulgaria. I love travelling (both the journey and the destination), but I also don’t like having to navigate trains and airports with large suitcases full of everything I might possibly need. What I’ve tried to do recently is to travel as light as I can, whilst still having access to everything I might need on the trip. This is partly about planning what I’m wearing in advance, but also about risk assessment. For example, I used to always take a spare pair of shoes with me when I travelled overnight. I don’t like having wet feet, and it seemed worth it at the time. After a few trips where wet feet didn’t feature I ditched the shoes, and accepted that I may one day need to buy a pair of shoes whilst travelling. So far I’ve not had to, but I can always use a new pair of shoes, and it makes my bag significantly lighter by not having to carry a spare all the time.

I am on holiday this week. This is largely because I still had 100% of my annual leave left (it resets in September), but also because I’m going to be in Egypt for a week starting on Sunday, and I wanted to make sure I was rested and relaxed enough to enjoy the trip rather than needing to spend half the week recovering from a fairly long stretch without a proper holiday. It strikes me that I’m quite bad at being on holiday though, because I don’t really know what to do with myself without some sort of structure and routine to keep me focused on the here and now, so I decided this time that I would actually write down what I planned to achieve, and tick things off when I’d done them. So in other words, exactly how I approach the day job and anything else that requires me to exert effort towards achieving predefined goals.

I can’t believe it’s May already. And because it is May, it’s probably time for me to post a list of April’s musical new releases that rocked my world. My Rough Trade album of the month was by Wand, and came on delicious red vinyl. The rest of this lot is pretty delicious too though.

When I’m recruiting new IT staff one of the things I always look for is how computer literate they are. It’s a hard thing to work out, as it’s usually a mixture of what they know and what they have done in the past, but also how they think and how inspired they are by technology. I also try and think back 10 years, to when I was the person on the other side of the desk who was trying to blag that a whole load of dabbling with things at home was enough experience to allow me to support some fairly important systems in a large University.

How do you get in the zone? And by that I mean how do you prepare yourself to sit down and work on something for a long time (be that a piece of writing, a song or a computer program)?

March was a great month for music. Here are a few of my highlights.

I’ve spent a fair bit of this weekend reading through my notes from the conference I’ve just been at, and picking out some key concepts and quotes for a presentation I appear to be writing called “The future and how we get there”.

I thought it might be useful to mention that I turned off all email notifications on social media sites a few months ago. I do still get banner notifications on my phone, but I found myself ignoring the emails on the whole, and thought I’d remove a bit of noise from my inbox. I still regard myself as active on (in this order) Twitter, G+, Facebook and LinkedIn, but I also still very much regard email as my primary method of contact for anything urgent/important, be it personal or professional.

A section of new music I’ve stumbled upon this month. I owe a lot of this to Rough Trade’s albums of the month list.

I’ve been using Dropbox, Carbon Copy Cloner, iCloud, iTunes Match, Time Machine, Google Drive and Crashplan as part of my back up plan for a while. Recently I also added OneDrive and Copy, because they both give me a decent amount of cloud storage, and in the case of Copy it’s a decent interface to store large PDF files (such as downloads of Mac Format and Linux Format) that are too large for the Kindle app to deal with.

There have been a fair few great things released this month. The list below contains the things I can’t stop listening to right now

This year I’ve done things slightly differently in that I’ve not paid as much attention to how many times I’ve listened to something, but instead concentrated on how much I enjoyed it. Some records just can’t be listened to that often; they require complete attention and the kind of time commitment that I just don’t have most days, and I fear I may have left out a few such records in previous years.

I’ve been meaning to jot down a few notes about the latest product range from Apple for a while now, but work and travel got in the way. I now find myself with a largely free weekend, and I’ve also had time to visit the local Apple store and see a few of them first hand.

There is a meme going round about influential albums. I could probably list well over 100 albums that have influenced me a great deal, and I don’t really have any meaningful way to choose between them other than to just go with what feels right at the time.

There is a meme going round where people are asked to name 10 things beginning with a certain letter that mean something to them. I was given the letter S, and will attempt to come up with 10 things that are not people I know ( I could probably add another 10 if I include people, and I’m always wary of missing people out).

Over the last couple of months I’ve been reading The Nearly Complete Works of Donald Harington, which is a three volume collection that I downloaded from Amazon for 99p per volume (while they were on offer - they are slightly more now, but still very reasonably priced). I’d not read any of Harington’s novels before, but I had heard good things about them, and so thought I’d wade in at the deep end.

I am testing out my new Logitech K760 keyboard. So far it types really well, and although it makes slightly more noise, I think I will be able to get used to that. What is great about it is that it is solar powered, and it can be paired with up to three devices, which pretty much deals with the issues I’ve had with my existing keyboard. I didn’t want to go back to a wired keyboard, but I seem to be having to recharge my batteries every week or so, and I’m fed up of having to keep switching to my really awful backup keyboard. I would also like to be able to use my keyboard with my iPad on occasion, and this one allows me to do just that. It’s also set out exact like an Apple wireless keyboard, so I don’t have to relearn any muscle memory - I can just start typing and everything just works.

There is a meme going around where people are listing the 10 books that influenced them the most. I’ve been thinking about this for about a week, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a list I can live with (at least for today). These are in chronological order of me discovering them.

24rd August - From Rome with Love - Another Woody Allen film, and another one that I enjoyed without being totally bowled over by it. There is quite a lot going on, and the multiple narratives can get confusing at times, but it was well acted and directed, and I am certainly glad I watched it. One thing that struck me is that Woody Allen is looking really old (probably because he is), and I was also quite surprised by how much of this film was in Italian, as I wasn’t actually expecting that despite the title.

I’m a big fan of automating anything that can be automated, and I don’t like having to think about or do the same thing multiple times if there is a way round it. There are two main ways I achieve this:

I remember writing a blog post ages ago about how I’m one of the few people I know who doesn’t appreciate the presence of music when I’m working. This now isn’t true, and probably hasn’t been true for a year or two. Generally if I’m working (and music is an option), then I’ll listen to one of two playlists. One contains a great deal of post rock and other such things, and very much takes me back 15 years or so when I listened to very little else. There other one is a newer playlist, that is derived from a blog I read called Free Jazz (http://www.freejazzblog.org/). I don’t always find what they are blogging about on Spotify (some of it is fairly obscure), but I’ve built up enough of a playlist to make it worthwhile now, and I’ve found myself listening to it more, especially early in the morning. Both of these playlists contain largely instrumental music, and I find that it is the presence of words, rather than the presence of music, that I find distracting.

My film watching has been fairly sporadic over the last few weeks, due to being quite busy, and not having a great deal of energy in the evenings. I’ve found it hard to watch anything too challenging, and as a result I found myself dipping back into the sort of films I’ve not watched for a few years. I also found myself writing less about them, but hopefully just enough to make recording them here a worthwhile exercise.

I didn’t used to be a morning person, but now I am. I had to learn, because in 2004 I very quickly went from starting work at 2pm, to starting work well before 8. I have a few things that I think help, although I’m not always as good as I should be with some of them.

Astrologically I’m a Cancer. This means I’m meant to like staying at home (as well as water, kitchens, and moving sideways). I do like staying at home sometimes (especially when I need to recharge), but I also find travel very rewarding, and tend to get itchy feet if I stay in Birmingham for more than a couple of weeks. I think part of this comes from the fact that I’ve lived all over the country, and therefore have friends all over the country who I want to visit, but I think a lot of it also comes from the fact that when I’m dissatisfied with an area of my life I generally travel somewhere new, sample the greener grass on the other side, and then head home when I find myself missing things I already have. This in no way makes the travel meaningless or futile - it just contributes to a necessary process of reminding myself that all places have their benefits, and that it would actually take a really good offer for me to leave behind the life I have built up and move on to somewhere new.

I wrote most of this a while ago, but figured it was worth finishing off and posting here for prosperity.

This is another old post that never quite made it here. It’s probably about 3 years old at least, and is a response to a meme where I had to choose 10 things beginning with the same letter and write about them.

I get asked for advice on iPads a lot, and as a fair few people I know have just bought an iPad (or are thinking about buying one) then I thought I would articulate the thought processes I go through when making a decision about what to buy and what apps to install once I have bought it.

I was talking on G+ earlier this week about recruitment, and I was reminded of something I wrote a couple of years ago that I posted to a limited audience at the time. I figured it was worth posting a slightly edited version here, seeing as G+ isn’t great for finding historical posts, and everything here still very much rings true.

The new Morrissey album reminds me how much both Morrissey and The Smiths played a huge part in my musical upbringing. The Smiths were probably the first band who meant something to me at school, and while Morrissey has made a few substandard records, the new one is great, and is in fact the 4th consecutive album of his that I’ve loved, which hasn’t happened since The Smiths.

I was just flicking back through my historical blog posts for reasons. One thing that amused me is what I wrote at the end of my 2013 post celebrating our Green Impact campaign at work (http://teknostatik.co.uk/2013/04/24/green-impact/):

This week at work we have been working on a video to promote backing up data. The tagline is “what’s your backup plan?” - which has made me think about how I back up my data, and how well what I actually do measures up to what we recommend.

I thought it might be worth documenting the albums I’ve streamed from the Blue Note Spotify app -  (full list of content available here), which is a thing of wonder for discovering 1950s/60s jazz music (and in fact a lot of more modern music as well). My basic plan is to try and alternate between artists I’ve heard of and artists who are new to me, in the hope that I’ll broaden my knowledge of the genre, and maybe uncover a few hidden gems as well. I plan on choosing what to listen to largely by what the album cover looks like, and will probably try and concentrate on music recorded before I was born.

In my holiday writeup I mentioned I’d watched Factory Girl whilst I was away. As my viewing time is currently largely taken up with the World Cup, I thought I’d better write something about Factory Girl before I forget.

Yesterday we went on an excursion to the ancient town of Nessibar, which is full of old churches, historic buildings, and the kind of commercialism that reminds me of Venice at its worst. There was a lot to look at, but if we looked too closely or too long then there was the inevitable sales pitch, reeled out a hundred times a day, and as insincere as it was ineffective. I enjoyed looking around the churches, and took lots of photographs, but I do wish I could see places like this as they were in their prime.

Last night there was a heavy thunderstorm and a short power cut. We took photographs of darkened skies that erupted into occasional brightness, and drank wine and cocktails until it was time for bed. This morning there is still a coolness in the air, but it is dry again now, and the sand on the beach is firm enough for walking on.

I am writing this from a table on a sunny balcony in Bulgaria. The journey here was about as good as economy flying gets, which is to say it was draining and tiring without anything in particular going wrong. We arrived at our hotel in the early hours of the morning, which was a lot better than the people flying from other UK airports who had still not arrived 24 hours later.

I watched a couple of films last weekend which I totally failed to blog about, and seeing as I’m flying out to Bulgaria this afternoon and won’t be online for a week or so, I thought I would write about them before I leave.

25th April - Byzantium - I’ve been meaning to watch this for a while, and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a British/Irish vampire film, that twists the myth slightly, but that largely works both on a narrative and thematic level. Gemma Arterton is a lot better than I thought she would be, and Saoirse Ronan puts in a really good performance as an eternal 16 year old who demonstrates a spellbinding mix of youth and maturity. If you like vampire films then you’ll probably like this, and it is certainly in a different league to the likes of Twilight. I should probably mention that there is a fair amount of blood and bleeding in this film, but I suppose that is what you would expect considering the subject matter.

This week I am in London to attend a conference (the Service Desk and IT Support show - also known as SITS14). We attended this event last year, and it was useful enough to consider coming back again, especially as it is free to attend.

20th April - The Matrix - I picked this because I wanted something light to watch on Easter Sunday, and because I spent the holidays ripping old DVDs and wanted to actually watch a few of them too. Ok, It’s not that light, but it is at least in English and has a fairly easy to follow narrative. The Matrix is one of the first films I bought when I got my first DVD player, and I still have a soft spot for the whole series. I’m probably alone in thinking that this is the weakest of the three, but then it’s the only one I didn’t see in the cinema, and this is a series that really benefits from a big screen and the ability to totally immerse. I think I probably need to watch the other two films at some point soon.

I wrote this article for a blog at work, but thought a slightly tweaked version might be of interest to a few people here.

My project for this Easter was to set up some sort of storage solution for the vast array of music, films, TV shows and photos I have, and also to organise and catalogue them more effectively.

12th January - Battlestar Galactica : The Plan. I watched this on the back of re-watching the whole TV show over Christmas. As a companion to the series it works well, and I really enjoyed it, but as a stand alone piece it is somewhat lacking. It’s set at various points throughout the series, but contains spoilers that mean it should only be watched after everything else. I guess it’s the Battlestar Galactica equivalent of Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me, and if it is considered as such then I suppose it works.

I’m generally regarded as someone who is quite organised and productive, which still baffles me from time to time because I don’t think I’m that organised at all. Most of what I’m writing about here seems fairly instinctive to me, but in the hope that it might help someone ready this then I’ll try and outline how I organise my day, and how I maintain at least a demeanour of getting things done.

I’ve not done a post about my setup for a couple of years, and as a few things have changed I thought it was worth an update.

I thought I should start using Evernote, at least to see what the feature set was actually like. I must say I am quite impressed, especially as there are quite a few other useful products that plug into it. So far I have taken and annoyed photographs, collected a few recipes, and even handwritten some notes in my horrible and very much unpractised scrawl. All of these things sync to all my devices, and can be viewed easily and via an interface that is aesthetically pleasing.

The following records have pretty much soundtracked my year so far:

I should probably write proper reviews of some of these, but for now I will just make a list.

Four more movies, over two days. One of which is today. 29th December (a.m.) - Control. This is the story of the life and death of Ian Curtis (the singer from the band Joy Division) who was a big influence on me when I was a teenager, and who I know a fair amount about. I’ve heard everything Ian recorded, would count Unknown Pleasures and Closer as two of my all time favourite records (and Atmosphere as one of the saddest and scariest piece of music I’ve ever heard), and there are also aspects of his biography I can closely relate to. I’ve watched Control before, but it never ceases to thrill me from beginning to end, and it seems to be a very accurate account of the life of an interesting man who died so young but continues to influence people to this day. I only wish someone would do something similar with the life of Nick Drake, who I find similarly fascinating. As an aside (and tapping into one of my interests) Sam Riley (who played Ian Curtis in Control) ended up marrying Alexandra Maria Lara (who played Annik Honoré, who Ian had a strong emotional connection to towards the end of his life). It’s an emotionally intense film, and exactly the sort of connection that so often bleeds through into real life relationships.

This is something I wrote ages ago for a couple of people I worked with at the time, but I was reminded about it  couple of times over the last few weeks during conversations about small talk and acceptable conversation topics.

I’ve actually managed to watch a few movies over the last 3 months. Including ones that people might actually have heard of and/or seen. And as this list is getting quite long, I figured another blog post was in order.

This year, as well as a list of albums that I’ve liked and would recommend, I’m also going to try and narrow it down to 10 that are interesting, that I think people really need to hear, and that define 2013 for me.

I wrote this post for G+ to raise awareness of Depression Awareness Week in April, and as I’m planning a second post on the same subject then I thought it was worth putting the first one in the public domain so I can reference it.

Because I’ve been asked twice now, I thought it was worth posting a preliminary list of things I think might make my end of year list.

This weekend I have been making sure that all my devices are running the latest version of their OS, and also that they are fully backed up (and that the backups work).  This is something I try and put aside some time to do every month or so, and whilst it can be dull, it at least means that everything is working as efficiently as it can do when I am going through a period of being busy and productive.

Despite being very busy over the last few months, I have still managed to keep track of everything I’ve watched (apart from TV shows, which probably deserve their own post/project).

Yesterday we did all the walking in the world, or if not all the walking then enough to result in a huge purple line drawn around several major chunks of the city. We explored beaches and parks, main streets and backstreets, and saw everything from the most opulent parts of the city to the areas which demonstrate a level of deprivation I have not seen for a good while. I always say that when I visit cities I want to experience everything they have to offer, and to try and discover what it would be like to live in them. There are plenty of places here that I would happily live in, but also areas that made me feel very conscious of how privileged I am to be in this city and to have the opportunity to briefly explore areas that the people who reside in them would probably give anything to escape from.

(Written yesterday)

I am sitting in the Hilton Hotel at Heathrow Airport, where we are staying before flying to Canada tomorrow. It is a lovely hotel, with free wifi, great food, and a real sense of space and relaxation.

It’s just struck me that none of the 5 records that totally blew my mind during the grunge era could actually be classified as grunge.

Today I started using my new iPad mini to do as much of my writing as possible. I wanted to see if it could replace my laptop for short non-work trips, and was interested to see if writing on this device would seem natural, or if the user interface would get in the way of my creativity.

This weekend I am being organised and productive, but only with things that don’t involve going outside (or moving much). The heat and my general allergy to summer are knocking me out a bit, but I’ve still managed to get up to date with backups, testing, organising music and movies, and other computer related tasks.

Last.fm says these are the twenty 2013 releases I’ve listened to the most this year.

This weekend I have been experimenting with Gmvault (http://gmvault.org/) in order to back up my various Gmail and Google Apps accounts to my computer. I’m using Mac OS X, but almost all of this will work with Linux too.

This summer I will be spending two weeks away from home, during which time I will spend a fair amount of time on aeroplanes (two international flights, plus two local Canadian flights) and in hotels. I am quite used to hotels, and carry around a fair amount of technology designed for hotel living, but this trip is going to be more challenging, and I think I need to plan in advance what clothes, accessories and gadgets I need to keep me productive and connected throughout such a long trip.

There has been so much good music released over the last few weeks. Unfortunately this has coincided with me being very busy, and so I’m still very much playing catch-up.

More for my reference than anything. The command to start up a simple web server in the current directory on OS X is:

17th April - Closer. I’ve seen this before, but it didn’t make a huge impression on me for some reason. This time I enjoyed it a lot more, and I think it covers a lot of themes that interest me right now. I would recommend this one to most people actually, and think it could provoke interesting thoughts and conversations.

(originally posted as http://greentechteam.org/site/green-impact-at-the-it-service-desk)

4th April - Cosmopolis. Adapted from a Don Delilo book by David Cronenberg, and scored by Metric. All people I respect greatly. It’s a well made movie, and one that I enjoyed (although I can also see why a lot of people might not have enjoyed it). I also intend to listen to the soundtrack on Spotify, because I think it really works on several levels.

Over Christmas 2012-13 I set out to watch (on average) a movie a day. I then continued the experiment over the Easter vacation (which is much shorter, but where they should still be time to watch a few things).

The second half of my quest to get into the habit of watching high quality cinema again.

I think 30 choices is appropriate again this year. They are in vague order (certainly near the top), but I think some of them really depend so much on what sort of mood I’m in on a particular day.

Over Christmas I set out to watch (on average) a movie a day. This is what I chose (and why) over the first few days.

I have all sorts of things planned this Christmas, some of which may happen and some of which may take a little longer to reach fruition.

I often get asked to recommend music, which I’m often very bad at because I know from experience that a lot of what I listen to might not be to everyone’s taste. But if I was recommending some music from this year (or from recently but that I largely discovered this year) then my list would look something like:

I’m quite impressed with the new version of Ubuntu, and because it’s a LTS release it means one less VM I need to maintain during the next release cycle. I generally keep a VM of the latest LTS and release version, as well as tracking the development version from Beta 1. This results in 3 VMs (or two if the current release version is also a LTS).

I’m currently on holiday in Rhodes. I’ve just finished the 7th book I’ve read since I got here, and I’m really appreciating having the Kindle with me as it has quickly become an important part of the technology I carry with me when I travel. It’s interesting to see what the other guests are using actually - there are a few laptops, lots of phones, but not much in the way of kindles or other ebook readers. A fair few people are accessing the internet from the hotel lobby, and it is certainly more socially acceptable to do so then it was a few years ago, although some older people still blatantly disapprove. There are also many many internet cafes in the general vicinity, and I get the feeling that although this is a sleepy tourist area it is also fairly well connected. The signal here is strong, and the speed is comparable to UK broadband.

A few notes largely for my own benefit.

I’ve just updated the theme on this blog to the 2011 Wordpress default (it was still on 2010). I’m still unsure as to whether I prefer it, but it was time for a change.

A couple of years ago I documented the hardware and software I use as a homage to http://usesthis.com. I thought it was probably time to update it.

By this time tomorrow I will have successfully implemented the support of Mac OS X in my workplace. It’s been a long 14 month slog, but I’ve learned a lot about Macs, project management, and a fair few things beside. I’ve also lived pretty much wholly in Mac OS X since April 2011, which scared me at first but now feels oddly familiar.

These are the 30 records I couldn’t live without in 2011. Some more than others, but they all deserve a mention.

My day job is currently taking me deep into the heart of Mac OS X. It’s not a bad place to be, but it requires me to think in a slightly different way. Thankfully I don’t really have to touch Windows at the moment, which means I’m only bouncing between OS X and Linux, which isn’t too far to jump, and feels quite comfortable now.

I’m liking Google+ a lot so far. It looks like Google have taken everything they learned from Buzz and Wave, everything they’ve borrowed from Facebook, and a few other nice features, and rolled them together into something I think I’ll probably use quite a lot.

I’m not sure how I missed this one.

Kickstarter is a website where fans of artists and musicians can fund new records or performances, in return for receiving advance copies of the art form in question.  It is a funding model that interests me, and it gives me quite a buzz to receive advance copies of records I would have bought anyway, with the knowledge that I played some sort of part in creating them. The latest record to come out having been funded via this method is Marissa Nadler’s eponymous album, which is a really beautiful collection of songs.

Today was a day for doing computer-related things. I’ve had a brief play with Gnome 3 and Unity (again), and still found both of them getting in my way a lot more than I’m used to. I will persevere though, because I figure that eventually I’ll end up using one or the other, and could actually do with knowing about both.

As I’ve said previously, I’m a fan of new software, but also of stability. So today I decided I needed Iceweasel (Firefox) 4 on my Debian virtual machines (it’s been a quiet day and I was doing a bit of sys-admin work). As it turned out it was practically zero effort, as all the instructions were already written.

I love new things.

As part of my role, I am involved in recruitment within my team. This involves reading through a lot of CVs and application forms and trying to work out some sort of correlation between a person’s job title and what they actually do. And it’s not as easy as you would think.

I have so many things I want to write about right now. Starting with some of the really productive conversations I’ve been having with staff and students about how they use IT, and ending with everything I’ve learned over the last few days at the UCISA conference in Edinburgh. I reckon that’s probably at least a few thousand words of writing, but as I’ve got a few other things to get finished first, I thought I’d at least make a list for my own benefit.

What I want from my next netbook/small laptop:

I figured it was time I got round to finishing off a few blog posts that have been sitting around in dropbox for what seems like weeks. First off is my attempt to build a really fast and light installation of Debian or Ubuntu for netbooks and virtual machines.

Repurpose and Upgrade Your Old Technology This Weekend.

January is usually not great for new releases. But this week so far I’ve taken delivery of new albums from British Sea Power (which I’d highly recommend) and The Decemberists (which Amazon seem to think I deserve two days before it’s available in the shops). I also think we may be getting new albums from both Amanda Palmer and The Indelicates in the next couple of weeks, which I’m very much looking forward to.

My album of the year has never been released in January before. Maybe this year it will be.

This is a list of every album I’ve encountered that was released in 2010 and that I think is worthy of praise. The top 10 are in some sort of order, the rest are just listed in the vague order of how many plays they got on last.fm, rather than in any order of how much I like them.

I’m not sure the concept of singles still really exists in the digital age. It probably should if any of the following are in danger of extinction though.

What I’ve tried to do is to look at songs that don’t appear on albums, or that act as an edited preview for an album. These are in no order, and are clustered by artist. The hyperlinked song titles point to when you can get the song (not always for free I’m afraid), and there is a youtube link as well if I could find one.

The Veronica Falls - Found Love in a Graveyard  (youtube) and Beachy Head (youtube). The Veronica Falls sound like they recorded all their records in 1986, despite probably not having been born in 1986. Think jangling guitars, and a weird cross between Morrisey and Siouxsie that works in a way it probably shouldn’t. Neither song reaches the three minute mark, and both are better for it.

Amanda Palmer - Do You Swear To Tell The Truth The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth  (youtube) and Map of Tasmania  (youtube). I lke Amanda Palmer a lot, but both of these took me a couple of listens before they started to worm their way under my skin. I think they’re both still available for free as well.

British Sea Power - Zeus (youtube) and Living is so Easy (youtube). Both of these were released for a very limited time for free, and are edited previews for the Zeus E.P. and the Valhalla Dancehall album (due out in January). I’ve been a fan for years, but these two songs would probably be on this list even if I wasn’t.

The Japandroids - Art Czars  (youtube) and Younger Us  (youtube). A band I discovered last year, and who make loud guitar music of the sort I play a lot when I need to wind down after a hard day. This year they have released a few things, but these two are probably the most representative.

Ash also released a lot of new singles as part of their A-Z project. I’ve at least heard most of them, but am not quite sure which ones I’d recommend. In fact I’d probably recommend picking up the two CDs that compile all 26 singles (and a bit more), because I’ve got at least 10 of their singles on heavy rotation, and they are all good.

This Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy phone running Android. I’ve never had a phone that could do much more than make phone calls and send text messages before, and my new phone feels a lot more like a small computer than anything I’ve owned before.

I was having a conversation recently about backups, and how Dropbox is great for ensuring that you don’t lose valuable files. However, the free version of Dropbox can only handle a maximum of 8Gb, and once you start looking at music and photographs then I think most of us would probably need a paid Dropbox account to make this method worthwhile.

Over the last few days I’ve been writing two assignments for the management course I am currently undertaking, and it’s surprised me how easily I’ve slipped back into being able to write a large amount of fairly literate text in a short amount of time. I genuinely enjoy writing, and at various points in the past have spent a fair amount of time on all sorts of writing projects, but I’ve not really written anything more involved than a blog post for a few years now.

I’m on a course on Thursday and Friday of next week, and one of the things I’ve been asked to bring is an up to date CV. Now, I’ve worked for the same employer for 10 years now, and we have an in-house application process which involves filling in a web (previously paper) application form. This means it’s been at least 10 years since I’ve really needed a CV (and subsequently at least 10 years since I’ve tried to write one).

So yes, tomorrow I will be writing my CV from scratch, which is something that actually fills me with a great deal of trepidation. Largely because I can remember the last 10 years with a decent degree of clarity, but everything prior to that is a bit hazy and is likely to be full of gaps and vagueness. But at the same time I think it will highlight exactly how far I’ve come in the last 10 years, which might be an interesting exercise if nothing else.

It’s purely academic of course. I have no intention of applying for anything new at present, especially as I only signed my new contract last week.  But I’d also hate to turn up on Thursday without one, because I hate being unprepared and I do actually see the value of having a document that summarises all my achievements to date.

Hopefully by Thursday I will have a CV, and also a vague action plan to update it before 2020.

Artist embeds USB file-sharing network into walls.

I’m currently in York, staying in a very nice hotel for three days. I like this hotel because it provides free wifi and enough tea and coffee to get me through an average week. These things are important, and I think I probably judge hotels quite a lot on their ability to provide me with the facilities I actually need, as opposed to ironing boards and hair dryers and things I generally just don’t use.

So yes, this hotel seems to tick all the boxes. I’ve often said I could easily live in a hotel room if there was a decent net connection and easy access to food. This is the sort of place I mean.

Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Chokehold of Calendars.

New BlackBerry PlayBook & Tablet OS at BlackBerry.com.

Instapaper is something I think I’d use a lot if I had an ebook reader. Basically, it takes web pages and turns then into ebooks for offline reading. At present it’s not a great deal of use to me, but for anyone with an ebook reader or an iPad it might prove very handy.

I’ve just been linked to from http://usesthis.com/community/. This makes me happier than it probably should, and may bring the occasional new reader (and fair few more spammers, who I’ve already had the joy of blocking).

It’s good to take a week off work when I’m actually not too tired or stressed to enjoy it.

This weekend I’ve largely caught up on washing, shopping and other dull household tasks. I’ve also watched the whole of season 1 of Twin Peaks, in readiness of season 2 arriving on Tuesday. What with that and with my current aim of watching every season of X Files as fast as Love Films can send them to me, it seems like I’m going through a bit of an early 90’s phase as far as TV watching goes.

I’m hoping I might soon be at the level where I can concentrate enough to watch a whole film, and eventually to read a book. The fact that I used to do these things all the time makes me realise how far my concentration has lapsed over the last few years, and I’d really like to watch a few films in the near future without my mind wandering off somewhere.

I’ve also been checking out my extensive collection of archived MP3s, and copied a few GB of stuff I’ve not heard for years to my computer and iPod. I think I’m at a point where having all my electronic media in one place would make me happy, and I’m in the process of sourcing out a solution to this issue.

This makes me sound busy, although it is all largely an illusion. Despite all this apparent activity, I have still found plenty of time for doing what I can only really describe as absolutely nothing. It’s the kind of inactivity that is only really possible when there are no distractions, and I think this weekend has probably been my longest consecutive distractionless period for years.

Talking of distraction, and of music, I was having a quite interesting out-loud-thought on Thursday about listening to music when I’m working. I’m probably the only person I know who doesn’t find music in some way useful when working, and I think it’s largely because I listen intently to music, and find it very hard to concentrate on anything else because I tend to give it my full attention. I’m generally ok with instrumental music that I know really well (like Jim O’Rourke’s “Bad Timing”), but anything new, or anything with vocals is going to draw me away from what I’m doing. I’m also very bad at doing (or thinking about) anything else when I’m listening to music through headphones. It makes me feel closer to the music, and the thought of putting headphones on to “get into the zone” for coding or other development work just seems alien to me.

It’s taken me far too long to write this, for this very reason. But I think I’m done now.

15 albums in 15 minutes is what I’m aiming for here. I think the idea is to pick the 15 albums that define me and have stayed with me through the years, but I have a feeling this is going to concentrate on my late teens/early 20s more than it probably should.

So here goes…

For a couple of years in the late 90’s, I couldn’t really afford to buy new music, and lived a fair distance away from any decent record stores. I think it’s probably the only time in my life when I’ve felt totally disconnected from the world.‏

These days, thanks to the wonders of the internet, it’s possible to listen to new music every day without spending a penny, although thankfully I’m now in a position where I can justify a 50 song a month emusic subscription and can buy a few other bits and pieces of music each month without it really impacting on my standard of living.

I’m not sure if this makes me feel more connected, but it certainly makes me happier.

This week I’m listening to a lot of music released on the Captured Tracks label. They don’t release music on CDs, only on vinyl, cassette and digitally, and they remind me a lot of how Creation and Cherry Red were in the 80’s. They also are home to Wild Nothing and Veronica Falls, who are two of the groups I’m listening to a lot at present.

I’ve also recently discovered The Love Language, and am also very much enjoying the new albums by The Arcade Fire and Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan. I am also not yet anywhere near bored of the Indelicates album, and there is another one on the way soon as well.

2010 has been a good year for music, and promises a few more interesting releases in the autumn.

Since I started working exclusively on laptops, I’ve been backing everything up to a 500gb external hard drive. This is working well, but I do sometimes miss having an “always on” desktop computer that acts as a repository for everything I’ve ever owned.

It’s been a week for exploring new technology. After my iPad adventure, I also got to spend a bit of time with Ubuntu Netbook Edition this week. Now, I’m a big Ubuntu fan, but I have never been particularly interested in running anything but full-fat Ubuntu on my netbook. I still feel like this, but after doing a couple of wireless setups at work I have gone as far as creating a USB version that I can play around with when the mood takes me. On first impressions it seems very fast, and while the interface is slightly alien, it does make sense on a smaller screen, in the same way that the new ambience/radiance themes only make sense on a big screen.

I also spent a couple of hours working on one of the new Macbooks today, testing how mail.app and iCal integrate with exchange. I’ve not explored this side of Mac OS X for a couple of years, and was very surprised as to how far things have come. I think we’re getting to the point where the default calendaring and email software are finally ready for the business desktop, and I feel I could easily do 95% of my job on this Mac.

I finally got to spend an hour or so with an iPad on Friday.

I think that the iPad is a great piece of tech, although it is a little overpriced for my tastes. It handles web browsing and email very well, it looks great, and it seems fairly responsive. The on screen keyboard is totally instinctive, and this is coming from someone who is quite picky about keyboards. I found it easy enough to type in a few web addresses, send an email, and scribble a few lines of text. And this makes it perfect for at least half of what I do on the web.

I’m less sure it could replace my netbook as something I could write on though. And If I did get one then it would probably have to end up replacing my netbook because I wouldn’t want to carry two computers around all day. That said, I’m not sure the iPad counts as a computer anyway, despite being quite capable of doing most of what most people use their computers for.

I think my overwhelming feeling about the iPad is that I like it a lot more than I thought I would. But that I probably won’t get one…yet.

In my last post I mentioned The Setup. This is my attempt to answer the questions.

I am a big fan of The Setup, which is basically a bunch of people talking about what hardware and software they use to do their job. I sometimes think I should answer these questions a couple of times a year, just to track the changes in the way I work, but mostly I find myself thinking about my dream set up (the last question they ask everyone is about their dream set up).

Over the last few weeks, I’ve found myself running out of quality time to do things. It’s not that I don’t have enough time as such, it’s just that when I get to the point in the day where I’ve done everything I have to do, I find myself with very little energy to do the things I want to do.

This state of events does not surprise me. Every area of my life is at least as busy as I would like it to be, with some areas taking more time than they really deserve. And I actually think the fact that I’m fairly good at work-life balance is contributing towards my general feeling of not having enough time. As work gets busier, I think I subconsciously try and take on more outside of work to maintain the balance and the level of productivity I’m currently at. And while this is great in the short term, I think I hit the point last night where I realised I just didn’t have any energy left to devote to anything (be it work or non-work), and that what I really needed was to spend some time somewhere isolated and uncluttered to recharge my batteries.

I plan on doing very little this weekend, which should help a great deal, although I’m already feeling hot and sticky and it’s not even 9am.

I really like the idea of GoogleCL, and think it has a lot of potential to make my life easier, seeing as I use a fair few google products (specifically Google Calendar which I use to organise my whole life).

It’s fairly basic at the moment, but I think with a bit of development it could be a powerful tool. I particularly like the ability to add and remove calendar entries from the command line, the ability to query different calendars, and the fact that I could (should I wish) delete every entry on my calendar containing a specific keyword with one command.

For example, google calendar list today title gives me a list of everything I have to do today (times would be great, but I can’t seem to get that to work as yet), and google calendar add "Dinner with Steph tonight at 8pm for 2 hours" will add a two hour appointment to my default calendar. If I had a calendar specifically for dinner appointments (called Food for the sake of this example), I could add the previous command to it by typing google calendar add --cal Food "Dinner with Steph tonight at 8pm for 2 hours" instead.

I think I need to experiment further with this, because it has great potential.

So yes, it’s the yearly evening to sit in front of the TV and encounter more dreadful music than I do in the rest of the year put together. I do like the Eurovison song contest though, although not for the reasons I like other music (any other music). It’s cheesy, it’s dreadful, but it also makes me laugh and makes me glad that for the rest of the year I get to listen to music that actually says something to me.

This week, I’ve been exploring Corporate Records, which offers music on a “pay what you want” model that I quite like.

Things I’ve downloaded so far include:

Another of those posts that are largely for my own benefit.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in various image editing programs recently (largely GIMP, but with a bit of Inkscape on the side). Yesterday it transpired that a folder of 24x24 images needed to be made slightly smaller as a matter of some urgency. I had a feeling ImageMagick would probably do the job (it usually does), but I couldn’t remember how.

It’s actually fairly straightforward. Navigate to the directory containing the images (via the terminal) and then enter the following command:

mogrify -resize 20x20 *.png

Which will resize all PNG files to 20x20 pixels.

This can obviously be altered to cater for different sizes and file types. So yes, ImageMagick saved the day again and I actually managed to leave work on time.

My day job currently involves a lot of development work, and not a lot else. As a result I’d pretty much decided that I would try and do different things while I was on holiday.

So yes, apart from a day of testing beta versions of Ubuntu/Mandriva, an hour yesterday reading about the basics of Ruby (and making Hello World), and an hour this morning reading through the Rhythmbox bugs that are getting hugged tomorrow, I’ve done nothing with my computer above the level of just using it.

This has left lots of time for general relaxation (which I’m rubbish at), interspersed with shopping (I now have more than one pair of shoes again), cooking (which I never tire of) and the first part of the tiding/de-cluttering which needs to happen before our new kitchen is fitted in the summer. There was also some family-based socialising, a wedding, and a great plumbing victory which finally fixed the flood in our kitchen (involving the realisation that the plumbing in our house is ever weirder than we thought).

There was also the less wonderful realisation that Bennett’s Bar turns into a trendy disco on Thursday nights that directly precede Bank Holidays. I’m glad I won’t have to have this realisation again.

I’m back to work tomorrow, and I’m actually looking forward to getting on with things. I’ve got a couple of hard deadlines coming up in regard to the release schedule of what I’m working on, so the time between now and 21st June looks madly busy (apart from May half term which I have booked as leave). I should also get round to organising some sort of release/birthday party, as the two are so close to each other.

I should also make a concerted effort to write blog posts more often than once a month.

Yesterday I spent a few hours testing the latest beta versions of my two favourite Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Mandriva). I often get torn between which one of these two I’m going to use, but generally plump for Ubuntu when some particular bit of software I want to use either isn’t available for Mandriva or I have to spend too much time making something work and not enough time actually using it.

So far my thoughts are:

I’m not sure I like the new Ubuntu theme. But I should probably mention that since I started using Ubuntu in 2005 I’ve not used any default theme for longer than a day, and have instead largely stuck with the default Gnome theme (currently Clearlooks), or anything that is blue and doesn’t get in my way.

I’m a great fan of user interface, and think a good interface is integral to a pleasant computing experience. But I also believe in the freedom to make my computer look however it needs to look to be productive for me. I’ve had a play with the beta version of 10.04 tonight, and it took me about a minute to get it looking identical to what I’m used to.

This largely means that although the new theme is not to my taste, it will in no way make me less productive. And being productive is all I really care about because the quicker I can do what I need to do on my computer, the quicker I can be spending time doing the things that really matter.

This weekend I decided to try and use different tools to perform my usual computer-based tasks.

This morning I’ve been thinking about mortality, and about all the people I see and talk to (and all the people I don’t see and don’t talk to but still care about). If I knew that I only had one remaining conversation with each person, what would that conversation involve? What things have remained unsaid that should have been said years ago? What unfinished business needs to be resolved before it is too late?

The truth is, none of us know how long we’ve got. Maybe it’s time to start treating every conversation as the last one we might have with that person, because, eventually, one of them will be.

This week I have been on leave. I’ve not really been anywhere, but have largely spent the week either at home, or out with family.

My plans for the week were to reinstall my laptop, get my hair cut off, and do something about de-cluttering the house. It’s now Thursday, and I’m well on track to get all of the above done (with only some of the clutter still outstanding). I’ve also eaten well, slept properly, and generally managed to avoid stress, impossible people, and other such things.

On a technical level. I’ve not done anything too productive, but have been playing around with Google Sites to see what sort of things it is capable of. So far I like the RSS features, but am not really seeing anything that would make me move away from Wordpress in the near future.

I’m back to work on Monday, and am sort of looking forward to it. I think this probably makes me sad.

This weekend I decided to reinstall my laptop. Largely because it’s been through two Ubuntu upgrades (8.10 –> 9.04 –> 9.10), and also because it was still on an ex3 file system and my netbook on ex4 is a lot snappier with less memory. I also wanted to reclaim the disk space previously used for Vista, which was largely going to waste.

My method for re-installation is as follows:

For a good few years I’ve been using Livejournal as a feed reader, with the idea being that if I was reading what my friends were up to anyway, I might as well intersperse it with news and other things that interested me.

Fast forward a few years, and I realise that over 95% of what I get through LJ comprises of feeds from other websites. So this weekend I’ve been setting up my Google Reader account to pull in every single unauthenticated feed I currently view through LJ, as well as feeds of every website I visit at least once a day (including a few from Facebook which deserve a post of their own at some point due to the pain of getting them working). The theory is that I will be able to access most of what I want to read in one place, and that when I’m doing my daily trawl of interesting things I won’t get distracted by memes, games and other less educational content.

Of course, I have no intention of leaving LJ and Facebook behind (just yet). I’ll just be using them for their intended purpose rather than trying to shoehorn them into directions they were not meant to go.

I was going to write a post about the iPad, but I think most of what I wanted to say has been expressed in quite a few other places. Largely, I think it looks pretty, but the lack of customisation and multitasking mean that if I was to get one, I don’t think I’d get the use out of it that the price tag would require, although I do concede that this product is going to appeal greatly to non-technical users.

I did a fair bit of work on this about a year ago, and then never got round to writing it up. What I was trying to achieve was to have a minimal virtual server running in VirtualBox, which could been seen from the outside world and would appear to all extent and purposes to be a real physical machine.

This evening I’m dabbling with RGB MusicLab. It claims to turn images into sound, and from my first couple of experiments it seems very interesting. I think whoever created this likes free jazz and post rock, but that is fine because so do I.

I don’t really know where to start when trying to draw up a list of songs or albums that sum up the last 10 years. 2000 was a long time ago (10 years, in fact), and I’m not sure I can be truly objective when comparing things I’m listening to now and records that I remember being at least as important at various other points in the last 10 years. I love the new Flaming Lips album, but is it really better than Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots? Is In Rainbows better than Kid A, or was it just released more recently? And is it really possible to sum up a decade in a list of records?

Calculated using the same algorithm as the last two years, and only including albums actually released this year.

We are now in New York.

I’d considered moving my email to Google Apps for a while. Largely because most of the webspace I have here is taken up with this blog, and I found myself having to use complicated backup methods to ensure I didn’t lose mail. So on Friday night I set up teknostatik.org with Google Apps (Mail, Calendar and Docs only at present), and I now have 8Gb of email storage (as well as a backup of everything useful from the last 5 years). I’ve also configured all my other addresses to point at the new domain, so that anything I get sent will still reach me (I had a couple of mail blips recently, the last one on Thursday/Friday), but anything new I send out will come from andy @ teknostatik.org. While I’m still using Thunderbird at present, I do have the option of the gmail interface should I choose, and I think I’ve managed to set up IMAP so it works exactly as it did before.

So yes, all change here, but hopefully a change for the better.

I think I might have already written about Mozilla Weave, but as there is a new version out today I think it warrants a mention. Weave does one small thing, but does it very well. That small thing is that it takes your preferences, history, bookmarks, tabs and saved passwords (if you have saved passwords) and syncs them with other instances of Firefox. I find this invaluable, as I often hop between my main workstation and my netbook, and it basically lets me bookmark things for later and have them show up on all my computers. Between this and Dropbox, I pretty much have access to everything important wherever I am, which helps with productivity, and ensures (theoretically) that I don’t forget things.

• The Complete Guide to Google Wave

• Lots of Google Wave bots 

This week I’ve largely been:

I’ve just watched the latest two episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Yes, it’s kids TV, but it’s also something any Doctor Who fan needs to watch.

It’s on iPlayer as of now:

Episode 1
Episode 2

At various points in the last few days I’ve been fairly convinced that I’m ill. I’ve had a sore throat, various wheezing fits, and a general sense of tiredness that sleep does not fix.  The annoying thing is that each “episode” only lasts a few hours and then I feel fine again. Maybe it’s my super-immune system kicking in, or maybe I just need a holiday and I’m not ill at all.

In other (more relevant) news, I’ve been losing myself in the new Flaming Lips album for days. It’s epic (over an hour and a half if you download the iTunes version), and a very challenging listen, but if you like music that makes you think and that is a little (lot) to the left of the mainstream then I’d very much recommend it. I’m also liking the new Califone album (for those times when I need to be soothed rather than challenged), but have otherwise not bought a great deal of new music recently.

Of course, by “recently” I mean this month.

To me, Windows 7 doesn’t seem much of an improvement on Vista. What is does do is return to making me think that the look and feel was modelled on a child’s toy. With XP it was Fisher Price, with Vista it was some flashy Japanese toy that looked good but no-one played with. And with 7 it is Lego. Just look at the dock and tell me I’m not right.

I’ve written about this before, but after reading the whole book this weekend I thought it was worth another mention.

It’s a book about communities, written by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager). What I like about it is that it gives a great insight on what it is like to be part of a community where creative people work together to make something great, but where the reward is not financial. I think anyone who is involved in any sort of voluntary activity would get something out of it, and I’m certainly looking at my own community involvement in a new light as a result of reading it.

The Art of Community is available to buy (or to download for free) from http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/.

I’m really taken with the debut album by The Big Pink. It reminds me of all sorts of other things, but above all it sounds like a record that really belongs on 4AD records. I’m partly reminded of The Wolfgang Press and Dif Juz, but also a lot of 90’s shoegazing bands.

It’s certainly well worth 11 emusic credits, and probably worth a lot more than that.

I’ve been back at work a week now, and it really does change the way I listen to music. Over the past week or so I’ve actually only really listened to things whilst travelling to and from work, so at least half of my listening time is taking place quite early in the morning (where I prefer to listen to quieter and slower music). This has lead to me spending a lot of time with the new Yo La Tengo album (which I’d recommend as a good starting point), and also with the (still) brilliant Wilco album, which gets better with every listen, and which might even be my favourite album of theirs now.

I rave a fair bit about Ubiquity, but there are also a few other things from Mozilla labs that look promising. Last night I installed Weave on a couple of my computers, and am actually very impressed. Weave takes your Firefox history, bookmarks and tabs and syncs them across multiple machines. It worked flawlessly for me, and I would certainly recommend it to people who move between computers a lot.

I love my Dell Mini, but there are a couple of “features” added by Dell that drive me mad. One of these is called Maximus. It’s an application that tells any window that opens on the desktop to open full-screen. It’s particularly annoying with applications I’ve added myself (like Empathy), as the default applications seem preconfigured to ignore it. I’ve had a poke around in gconf-editor (install it with sudo apt-get install gconf-editor if it doesn’t exist already), and the key that needs editing is called /apps/maximus/exclude_class (see below for details):

This looks interesting, and can be applied to all communities, not just those of a technical nature.

I’ve read a few bits and pieces during pre-release and it makes a lot of sense.

Despite the fact that I don’t use Gmail as my primary point of contact, I do use most of Google’s other tools quite a lot. In particular, I’m a big fan of Google Calendar, Docs and Groups, and I use all of them for various work and non work projects. It’s now possible to share documents and calendars with all members of a particular group, which makes administering sharing a whole lot easier.

So yes, if you’re still using yahoo groups for your project, or you still rely on a word document emailed around with “tracked changes”, then there is a viable (and easier) alternative.

I’ve had an account on http://susestudio.com/ for a few weeks now, but have only really had a couple of chances to play with it. The basic idea behind the site is that anyone should be able to create a customised Linux distribution that perfectly suits their needs (providing those needs involve openSUSE 11.1 or SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 or 11). Normally I do this sort of work on Ubuntu, using Ubuntu Customisation Kit, as detailed in a previous post. This suits me, because I use Ubuntu in a production environment and it makes things easy. But I was interested in how this new software would work for someone who had never used openSUSE for more than a few minutes.

fortune | twidge update actually works as expected. Add cron to the mix, and you can automate random utterances to appear on twitter when you are away from your computer or otherwise engaged.

Various freely available MP3s by Portugal. The Man - I’d not heard of this band until about 3 hours ago, but am actually quite taken with them now. It’s American indie with a strong side order of psychedelia, and I think I could handle a whole album of this easily.

During my recent trip to London, I decided that I’d try and stay online as much as possible, whilst at the same time not paying for (or in fact stealing) an internet connection. It was actually a lot easier than I thought, and made me realise that if I lived in London I’d not really need a 3G dongle or an internet capable phone in order to conduct my online life on the move.

I’ve been after a command line based microblogging tool for ages. I think Twidge might be just what I need.

I’ve been trying out Suse Studio over the last couple of days. It’s a build service for livecds and software appliances, and it really is so easy to use that I think most non-technical users could get to grips with it. It’s invite only at present, but I got an invite just by asking (and I’m not exactly known for my love of the distro).

This guide has all the required info, and worked like a charm on my netbook running 8.04 and my laptop running 9.04 (although it was simpler than the guide suggests in both cases). I’ll hopefully write a more comprehensive guide at some point soon, because I think 3.1 is something that people should consider upgrading to.

James Blackshaw is a London based guitarist who creates 12 string guitar and piano based instrumental soundscapes. I’d been meaning to check out his work for a while, but only got round to downloading this album yesterday (another case of needing to burn a few emusic credits quickly). Each of the five tracks is different, but they gel together quite nicely to make something that manages to be both melodic and experimental at the same time. He’s been mentioned in the same breath as a lot of guitar greats, but I’d actually throw Jim O’Rourke or one of the other Chicago scene improvisers into the mix, as this music makes me feel the same way Bad Timing did when I first heard it. This music does not need vocals, or lyrics, or drums. It just needs to be listened to with an open mind. I think I’ll certainly be checking out his extensive back catalogue over the next few weeks.

The nominations for this year’s Mercury Music Prize have been announced. Usually I have a fairly clear idea of who I think should win, but this year I’m torn between Florence & the Machine, Bat for Lashes and The Horrors. I’ve played all three to death this year, and I think all three artists really deserve a bit more acclaim and money. It also makes me want to check out the nominations I’ve not heard of, as generally I end up quite liking everything that gets nominated.

This week I’ve been looking at a few OpenOffice.org extensions that might make my life easier. One that certainly will is the Sun Wiki Publisher. Basically it takes a document, logs in to a particular instance of Mediawiki, and converts that document into a wiki page (including table of contents, headings etc.). I’ve tried it with a couple of complicated documents and it did a fair job of converting them, and it is certainly something I will be looking at further at work this week, as I think it might solve a couple of long standing problems.

Something else I’ve stumbled upon today is an extension that allows me to post straight to my blog from OpenOffice.org. This post is largely an attempt to get it to work, so I’ll not say anything more than that for now.

Albums of the last 3 months (as a follow on from the first three months of the year):

All the media hysteria about Michael Jackson dying reminded me of a little know freely available hip hop album made by Rhymefest a couple of years ago as a tribute to Jackson (albeit a quite tongue in cheek one). It’s still available from the artist’s website to stream or to download, and is certainly a lot more interesting than anything the man himself made in the last 20 years.

I’ve been testing out Windows 7 at work for a couple of weeks now, largely because I need to keep abreast of developments in new operating systems (and then identify issues with supporting them).

I may get round to reviewing The Mars Volta, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Placebo, but as you can read about all of these in a fair few other places I thought I’d concentrate on a couple of months worth of free music (all licensed under Creative Commons so download away). The Sound of Music by Pinkle

As I’ve often said, “Ubuntu on the desktop, Debian on the server” is the way to go. That said, I’ve mixed and matched the two a fair bit over the past couple of years, and would now say that as Ubuntu is ready for the server, so Debian is a damn fine desktop distro which is also surprisingly easy to set up to play every possible kind of media file I can throw at it.

I’ve always liked concept albums. From Genesis and Pink Floyd to the Mars Volta and the Decemberists, I’ve always loved collections of songs that tell a story. But the one band who are probably the most overlooked in this area are The Hold Steady. I think it’s largely because of the genre they work in. You don’t expect the band often refered to as the best bar band in the world to weave the sorts of stories that flow from song to song (and in their case from record to record). And while I think that the new Decemberists album is probably the best concept album of this year, I think “Stay Positive” by the Hold Steady is up there with it (albeit in a very different way). If you listen to all four Hold Steady albums one after the other it is possible to trace the stories of the main characters, but mainly what you get is a snapshot of a world full of dealers, pimps, hoodrats and voyeurs. It’s a fascinating world, but not one I would want to be a part of, and it is as far away from the traditional fantastical idea of a concept album as you can get. But in the end I keep coming back to their records, and keep wanting to piece together the underlying narrative behind the songs. And that is exactly how I’ve felt about every concept album I’ve ever loved, which suggests they are doing something very right.

One question I get asked a lot is some variation on “what computer should I buy?” My answer usually involves asking what it is going to be used for, what the budget is, and if the user has any preconceptions regarding the OS of the machine.

Posted largely because I’m far too brain dead to finish any of the half-started posts about computers and/or music that I’ve started over the last few weeks.

I’ve narrowed down what the problem is with my (otherwise fully functional) iBook. It basically won’t recognise the charger until the battery is totally drained. This would be quite annoying if it was still my main laptop, but as I replaced it with a shiny Sony Vaio at Christmas then it’s actually not a massive problem and just means I run it off the battery until it dies and then recharge it. The battery itself seems fine (it gives me about 3 hours of use on average), so it should theoretically have a little life left in it yet.

I’ve just installed the latest version of Foresight on my spare laptop, so I thought I’d investigate the package manager, conary, which is something I’ve never used before, but which looks like it could be as useful as apt and urpmi.

I’ve finally got round to installing the KDE version of Mandriva 2009.1 in a VM on my laptop. I’d been holding off, because I don’t really use KDE, and I wasn’t too impressed with how the other major distributions had implemented KDE4 (which is basically a total revision of every aspect). Happily, I can easily say that this is the most usable implementation of KDE4 I’ve ever come across, and it does a very good job of not getting in my way whilst still enabling me to be productive.

Another “so I don’t forget it” post.

I don’t write about emusic enough. I signed up a few months ago on a 50 songs a month package, and have downloaded countless really good songs that I would never have bought otherwise. This month I’ve concentrated on new releases, and have downloaded the new albums from Super Furry Animals, The Thermals, and Camera Obscura (as well as a smattering of individual songs). I’m aware that you need to have a fairly eclectic taste to get the best out of emusic, but I would really recommend it if you like Indie music and are organised enough to remember to download all your monthly allowance.

I’ve been doing a bit of work on Mandriva recently, and I always forget that there are two places you need to change the host name before it “takes”.

This should work on any recent version of Mandriva, but specifically on 2009 (current) and 2009.1 (cooker).

So far so good, but as always, your mileage may vary. It’s the first one I’ve built on a VM (my physical build machine died), but it installed fine on my EeePC, so hopefully all will be well.

This is how it works…..

I reviewed the first Abscondo album a while ago, and actually still listen to it a fair bit. So I was actually quite nervous about downloading the second one in case it didn’t live up to my expectations. Thankfully Stages builds on Midnight Snow, whilst at the same time not deviating too much from the style that made the first album so enthralling. It’s mainly all about the lyrics, which make me think a lot, and which are both political and personal without making me feel uncomfortable. There are also a couple of melodies that stick in my head like glue, which makes me think I’ll be dipping in to this album over and over again.

As of 4pm tomorrow I’m on holiday for 10 days. It’s the first break of any length I’ve had for a few weeks, and I am very much looking forward to it. Last time I was off I ended up spending most of the week working on various projects, but I do intend to make at least a half hearted effort to step away from my laptop for a few hours each day and actually enjoy the sunshine.

I will also review some music, seeing as I’ve actually been asked to by some of the people who make it (which still scares me).

Of course, it would be a good time to upgrade all the computers to Ubuntu 9.04, but I think I may wait a couple of weeks for that.

According to last.fm, the list goes like so:

This week I’ve been installing various things on the collection of SD cards and USB sticks I have lying around. Fedora 11 is looking very good, and runs like a dream on my EeePC. TinyCore looks interesting, and boots in about 10 seconds, but I don’t think it’s what I’m looking for other than as a curiosity. SystemRescueCD looks useful, and pretty much does what it says on the tin.

I’m keeping all three for now, although I still need to make an installable version of Ubuntu 9.04 at some point this week.

And now to prepare for another day involving more people than computers.

Albums I’ve enjoyed over the last couple of months include:

I’m largely posting this because I’ve had to do it twice recently and forgot how to do it both times.

The command to convert a whole folder of images from .bmp to .jpg (on Linux, obviously) is:

mogrify -format jpg *.bmp

It’s really that simple, and is actually a lot quicker than I thought it would be. You need ImageMagick installed, but most distros will have that by default anyway.

This is largely a response to a thread on an email list regarding IRC clients. I thought I’d make a list of what I use now, what I’ve used in the past, and what is actually out there.

I think the answer is in the question really. Static websites fail because they are static, and never change unless it is someone’s job or responsibility to change them. So many times I visit a web site related to some project or other that I’m interested in, and feel like I’m probably the first person who has looked at the site for months, despite the fact that I’m fairly sure the project is still active.

This could probably be summed up in a few words (the words being “use symlinks”).

Over the last week or so there have been a few occasions where I’ve felt like I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall regarding some project or other I’ve been working on. And on each occasion I’ve ended up getting past the brick wall following advice/information from someone else, and on some occasions actually learning something I would never have learned otherwise.

I’ve been involved with various voluntary communities and societies over the years, and have always been interested in how they regulate and reward their members without there being any sort of financial reward mechanism.

I think this is still the best guide on how to report bugs that exists.

Today I’ve played around with Planet (the software behind Planet Gnome, Planet Debian and lots of other planets), and installed a demo version on our home server. It’s actually quite straightforward, and I think I could theoretically get something up and running quickly if required. Of course, it does require people to have publically available blogs which could be an issue in some circles I move in.

I get a fair bit of email (up to 100 messages a day), and I think it could be quite easy to get swamped, and to miss something important. Over the last year or so I’ve been looking at methods of dealing with email, and in particular have explored variations on Inbox Zero.

This afternoon I did a bit more work on our home server (the one I built from bits of my old dead PC).

A couple of things have changed about the way I buy music:

So where do you start? There are obviously thousands of hours of recorded sound available legally for free, but it is quite easy to get lost, and to end up with a large amount of downloaded music that is not representative of what is out there.

This post came about due to an issue with NetworkManager connecting to our wpa-enterprise authenticated network at work, but demonstrates that there is more than one choice when it comes to almost everything on Linux. It’s not too fiddly, and I’ll hopefully have a rebuild of Ubuntu incorporating these changes within 24 hours.

So far this weekend I have:

On Sunday I finally got round to replacing my dead desktop computer. As planned, I ditched the idea of buying another desktop, and decided to get something that would replace both the dead PC and my slowly dying 5 year old laptop. I ended up with a Sony Vaio laptop that is far more powerful than both computers put together, and which pretty much caters for all my computing needs (with my EeePC still very much in use for lunchtime browsing and computing on the move).

EfficientPC are now selling USB devices pre-installed with Ubuntu (from 2gb up to 16gb). I blogged about how to make these last week (see here), but this gives another option for people who don’t already have the hardware/software required to make their own.

This week I’ve been looking at ways of setting up alerts that only actually happen when I’m sitting in front of my computer to read them. This has lead to me using xmessage. For example:

I’ve not blogged about Ubiquity for a while. It’s a Firefox extension that I use every day to do all sorts of things (updating twitter and complex calculations mainly). The latest version is out today, and has gone a long way towards making it ready for the masses to use.

I’ve just mixed a whole load of previously unheard music from Jamendo in with my usual playlist in Rhythmbox. I’m not going to try and describe any of these (apart from calling them indescribable), but I think there are things here that people will like.

I’ve now (finally) got two-way OpenID support built into this installation of wordpress. What this means is:

I’ve written these instructions (371.6 KB PDF) for work, but think they might be useful in all sorts of other situations.

The PPC version of Debian Testing seems to solve all the problems I’ve been having with my iBook.

It’s a wiki, and it’s a damn good idea.

As promised, a top 20 just including freely available music released under a Creative Commons license.

As always, these are determined by number of plays per track, divided by number of tracks (with anything available for free hyperlinked).

I’ve just converted the latest Ubuntu build of nautilus-dropbox into something that will work on Mandriva (download .rpm). Again, this was done more to solve a problem of my own than anything else, but others are welcome to it as always.

I’ve made an effort over the Christmas break to try as many new (or long-unused) software packages. This is party to ensure that I stay up to date (I can just about justify not knowing the inner workings of Vista, but not being able to configure Kmail is just embarrassing), but also because I will soon be buying a new main computer, and am still undecided as to what OS to run on it.

I’ve just stumbled upon this net label, whilst trying to determine which year the Wind Whistles album was actually released in (the answer being 2007 and 2008 in different places).

I’ve written about Death by Panda before (around the time I was listening to “House Made of Glass” on repeat). Since then there have been three further albums, all of which explore an area of music that can be disconcerting, but that does a damn fine job of sounding both computer-generated and very human.

While I’m off for Christmas, I thought I’d spend a little time getting to know KDE4. To stop me cheating, I installed the latest KDE version of Mandriva One, which means I’m without a fair few other things I’m very reliant on.

I wasn’t sure I needed to upgrade this website to Wordpress 2.7 (the latest version of the blogging software which acts as a front-end for everything else here), but as I missed the last couple of releases I decided it might be a good idea.

Ubuntu Customisation Kit is a great bit of software that allows Ubuntu disc images to be customised and then rebuilt. Uses I’ve found so far include:

It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally finished the upgrade. Everything seems to work, and my desktop now looks slightly different as a result:

I’ve used Evolution as my main mail client for ages, but it really doesn’t like my EeePC, so I thought I’d give Thunderbird a try. Not only does it display all my folders and messages far more clearly, but with the addition of a couple of extensions it makes navigation and moving messages a whole lot easier.

I’m sitting in the Green Room in the OLRC on Selly Oak Campus. The Green Room is what used to be the Literature Hall, where it housed books between 800 and 899 on the Dewey Decimal System and also hosted a vast array of teaching resources. Now, it is a new Learning Space, with comfy seats, plasma screens, and wifi access. Think a cross between a really posh living room, and a space-age cybercafe and you won’t be far away. Everything here is new, and is designed to give the students of the 21st century what they need to be productive. There are no books, no journals, and no remnants of the past here. It is exactly the sort of space I would have liked to have when I worked here, and I imagine that students love it. I say “imagine” because I am currently the only person here and can’t see or hear another human being. Yes, it’s Saturday, but I think that with a bit more publicity and promotion this could turn into a flagship learning space and could really put both the Univeristy and Selly Oak campus in particular at the forefront of innovative learning spaces. And that’s something I never thought I’d say when I walked through the doors of this building for the first time over 8 years ago.

If I was buying a new PC, I think I’d get it from EfficientPC. 8Gb of memory and 3Tb of storage for under £700, or more realistically some decent PCs that blow anything I use now out of the water for around £300 means it would actually be possible to buy a new PC for less than the amount of money I have left in my bank account at the end of the month.

I was going to write something about an album by a new British folk singer that I downloaded yesterday, but then tonight I stumbled upon a newer mini album and thought I should probably lump them both together as two records that anyone who likes folk music, music with lyrics, or just music should download and play to death. Robin Grey likes Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen a lot. He also knows how to write songs, carry a melody, and has a decent grasp of crafting unusual but still accessable lyrics. I’ve played “Only the Missile” a few times over the last 24 hours, but think that “I Love Leonard Cohen” (particularly the title track) shows even more promise, and certainly stands head and shoulders above certain other British singer-songwriters who get played on the radio a lot and have the first name James.

This is not a post about any of the things I usually blog about, but I thought it was worth making a note of.

It’s out, and it’s available from here.

I’m not sure whether music can be called as product. But what I do know is that I’m a consumer of music, and as a consumer I like to have some degree of choice over where I obtain music, what I pay for it (if anything), and what I can do with it once I own it.

I’ve just upgraded with no issues whatsoever, and am now trying to make my laptop look as different as possible.

Severed Fifth is the musical alter-ego of Jono Bacon (a name that might be familiar to many Linux users). The album is available from here (various formats), and while it is proper metal, it is also oddly melodic in places. I think if I’d not weaned myself back on to this sort of music with the new Metallica album then I’d hate this. As it is, I think I actually quite like it and would recommend it to anyone who likes their metal fast and loud.

I think Gnome-do is going to end up on the list of my favourite pieces of software.

I was sceptical that a Linux distribution with no proprietary components at all would do everything I need it to. But 30 minutes after burning the CD, I’ve got a pretty desktop, a working wireless connection, and what seems like quite a fast and user-friendly interface.

I was looking at Wiki Widgets today, and in particular how to integrate Google Calendar and Twitter with Mediawiki.

I’ve been thinking recently about how we (and by we I mean anyone involved in any activity they wish to promote) can get information to the largest number of appropriate people, with the least amount of effort. This interests me because I’m involved in a fair few activities which would benefit from further participation, which will only happen if people know they exist. Software projects need developers and testers, LARP games need players and musicians need people to listen to their music, or at least to know they exist.

http://torrent.mandriva.com/public/ has everything you may need. Known issues are at http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Errata

Is this the answer to late night flame wars?

I’ve just upgraded my iBook to the beta version of Ubuntu 8.10.

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been piloting a laptop surgery at work. We’ve had several EeePCs bought in, and the general consensus of opinion was that they loved the hardware, but that Xandros looked ugly and wasn’t very functional. So what we’ve been doing is offering either Mandriva 2008.1 or the netbook respin of Ubuntu as an alternative (either on the internal SD card or on an external device). Feedback has been good, and I’ve had a few very productive chats with new Linux users over the past few days which have made me realise how vitally important user interface is. Users don’t want their computer to look like a dumbed down version of their last computer, but they do want something that is instinctive, stylish, and doesn’t get in their way.

I think I’ve made my desktop look sufficiently like a default “install”.

I’m running RC2 of the latest Mandriva from a live-cd to test a couple of things out, and thought I’d have a look at how KDE is doing. It’s pretty, but doesn’t seem anywhere near as instinctive as Gnome.

I’ve built an RPM that installs fine on my installation of Mandriva 2009 (RC1).

Seeing as everyone in the world is doing it.

I downloaded this album because I liked the front cover. It reminded me of “Funeral” by The Arcade Fire, and I thought that as The Rest were also Canadian they might be operating in the same sort of area. Reviews of this album have even likened it to The Arcade Fire, but also to U2 and other fairly large and commercial bands.

British singer/songwriter Sean Wright has been releasing one full album a month for the past year and a half. A couple of weeks ago I started to dip into these, and have so far downloaded about 30 songs, all of which I like to a greater or lesser degree.

Kouki deleted all their albums from Jamendo, which is slightly annoying as I’d only got about half way through downloading them.

I must have listened to about 24 hours worth of new music this week, and as I’m off work on Monday I might even get a chance to review some of it.

Icarus Crash are a melodic hard rock group from Malaga in Spain. They sing in Spanish, with a few English phrases thrown in on occasion (I think).

Again, a really simple command to pull up a google map.

I installed Google Chrome on my windows PC at work today). So far I think it’s ok, not anywhere near as useful as Firefox, but certainly has some interesting ideas. The buzz surrounding it suggests that we are likely to see a lot more of it in the next year or so, so watch this space.

sudo apt-get install gwibber

I’ve been experimenting with Mozilla’s new (very much still in development) Ubiquity tool, which does a lot of what Quicksilver and Gnome-do can do, but is also expandable to an almost unlimited degree.

I was going to wait to review this until Sunday, but as I’ve listened to it a fair few times over the last 24 hours I thought it was worth sharing.

I’m experimenting with using Empathy for all forms on online communication. The following instructions show how to set up Empathy to access the #camuk channel on DarkMyst’s servers.

I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago (maybe longer) on how I sometimes really like to listen to songs sung in languages I don’t understand. I think I’d rather not know what the lyrics mean than to hear them and be disappointed that they don’t do the music justice. I’ve been listening to a lot of music in foreign languages recently, but also a lot of instrumental music and things that fall somewhere in-between.

My much loved Belkin keyboard croaked it yesterday (or at least several of the keys now refuse to work). Today I bought an Advent ADE-KBW100, largely because it is slimline, quiet to type on, and didn’t break the bank. It claims to only be compatible with various versions of Windows, but not only does it work perfectly with Ubuntu, I can also use all 18 of the hotkeys without any further installation of drivers (which actually makes it more compatible with Ubuntu than with Windows XP).

http://teknostatik.co.uk/jamendo.php

I’ll update this as and when I find new things.

It’s a very quickly thrown together MySQL database with a PHP front end.

After taking my Eeepc away on a trip to Italy, I’m now starting to work out what applications I need and don’t need. The following is what I’m actually using (or am keeping because I think I might need them):

Tuesday 19th August, 8:00 PM

We have decided that trying to get to Birmingham airport for 4:30am from our house is non-viable, so we’re staying in a hotel near the airport tomorrow night.

Due to weddings and holidays, I’ve got a 10 album + backlog of things to write about. But as I’m off on my travels tomorrow I thought I’d mention a couple of the albums I’ll be taking with me to keep me occupied at the airport and on the plane to Verona.

Not as hard as it sounds. Mandriva’s version of Gnome is heavily themed, but the theme can be made to go away in the usual ways.

As I did last week, I’ve written a few notes on things I’ve downloaded this week. All are rated on the Sound Opinions “Buy it/Burn it/Trash it” scale.

Over the last few weeks I’ve not had an office, or even a proper place where I could set up a computer and work. As a result of this, I’ve been exploring the concept of mobile computing (using laptops for everything, and working wherever I could get a wireless signal). It’s been quite eye opening; and has actually made me more productive because it was meant if I am working on something that requires tranquillity I can move somewhere quiet, whilst if I need collaboration and input I can move my laptop to where the people I need to talk to are working.

As a result of this, I’ve got used to carrying a laptop with me wherever I go. This has lead to increased shoulder muscles (both laptops I’ve been using are on the heavy side), but has also lead to me being able to write a quick blog post, check email, or work on the fly wherever I am. At the end of each day I’ve synced all my data back to a central server, so that everything I write on any computer is all stored in the same place (and is the most recent version thanks to the wonders of rscyc). This also ensures that if a laptop I’m working on gets lost or broken then I don’t lose too much in the way of data.

My new office is finished now, but since I have just bought an EeePC I still plan on using the mobile computing model on occasion, because I think it really does work.

I’ve finally got round to getting an EeePC, and so far I’m really impressed. I’ve installed the latest version of Mandriva on it, and have a very functional Gnome desktop, which does everything I need it to do.

Every few months I like to change my working area around, and try undertaking familiar tasks in a new way. Having a new office has intensified this, and has lead to me re-evaluating my working area at home as well.

As I did last week, I’ve written a few notes on things I’ve downloaded this week. All are rated on the Sound Opinions “Buy it/Burn it/Trash it” scale, and the theme for this week is artists who have several albums available for free, and who are at least starting to make a career out of music.

This weekend has been very busy with wedding preparations and socialising. However, I’ve still found time to install the latest version of Wordpress on this blog, set up some backup scripts for all my home and work computers, and also to install KDE4 on my laptop.

As promised, a few scribbles on things I’ve downloaded this week (mostly from Jamendo). All are rated on the Sound Opinions “Buy it/Burn it/Trash it” scale.

The new Girl Talk album is now available for somewhere between free and whatever you want to pay for it.

For anyone looking for something off the beaten track to listen to, http://www.jamendo.com/en/ has lots of free/creative commons music, some of which is actually rather good.

This is interesting, and it actually works really well. Not something I think I’ll use a great deal, but I thought I’d at least bookmark it in case I need it in the future.

Wilco are today’s featured article on the Wikipedia main page.

As people may know, I’m a big fan of many of the so-called Web 2.0 technologies (although less of a fan of the term itself). I’ve been blogging since 2001, and like to at least create an account on anything new that comes along, just to see if it can add anything to my online life.

“The Slip” now available for free download.

Wi-Fi detector shirt.

Doctor Who is back on 5th April.

The video for one of the tracks from the new R.E.M album is available for free on the UK iTunes store at present. It’s been up a couple of days so could disappear at any point.

The Charlatans have joined the digital revolution.

For anyone who has ever worked on a helpdesk, let me introduce George.

Do you believe in ghosts?

Maximo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures
Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Rilo Kiley - Under the Blacklight
Radiohead - In Rainbows
Saul Williams - The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust
The New Pornographers - Challengers
Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes are the Dark Horse
John Zorn - Six Litanies for Heliogabalus
Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City
Je Suis France - Afrikan Majik
Dean & Britta - Back Numbers
Chris Cornell - Carry On
Tim Fite - Over the Counterculture
Okkervil River - Golden Opportunities
Ryan Adams - Easy Tiger
Malcolm Middleton - A Brighter Beat
Tori Amos - American Doll Posse
Kaiser Chiefs - Yours Truly, Angry Mob

Worked out through seeing which albums got the most plays in iTunes, with a bit of seasonal adjustment for those released towards the end of the year - These are not really in any order.

Free time, it’s like free money really. Free money is things like lottery wins, tax rebates, and one-off performance related bonuses. The kind of money you can spend without guilt because it doesn’t feature whatsoever in your budget. Free time covers things like bank holidays, getting up an hour early by mistake, and finding yourself sent home early due to a bomb scare. I find free time quite productive, because somehow it doesn’t even occur to me to do things I need to do, meaning I can instead concentrate on fun things that might contribute to my general well being in a more abstract fashion.

2005 was the year I learned about computers, and learned that it is possible to jury rig old equipment to deal with today’s tasks with a bit of elbow grease. It was the year I rediscovered Dylan, Fairport Convention, and other folk-rock goodness. It was the year I bought more new music than any time since my late teens. It was the year where I rediscovered old friendships, and cemented a few newer ones. And it was the year when I finally found a job that stretched me and gave me a sense of worth.