KDE 4 Review and Interview in LugRadio S5E10

In Season 5 Episode 10 of LugRadio, ‘One Foot In The Grave’, Jono Bacon, Stuart “Aq” Langridge, Chris Proctor and back-from-the-dead Matthew Revell review the newly released KDE 4 and then speak to Aaron Seigo and Will Stephenson of the KDE project to discuss it, Jono tells us why it’s all about the community in the final LugRadio Top Trumps and the presenters discuss the Fish shell, K3B, everybody’s laptop working apart from Aq’s and a listener review of the Nokia N810. Also in this episode, a call for papers and exhibitors for LugRadio Live USA 2008 and don’t forget that you can win an Asus Eee PC in the Pimp My LugRadio competition, details in the show.

You can get all this lunacy, along with the chance to win an Asus Eee PC at http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/93.

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Looking For a New ISP

I use a business ADSL line at home provided by my employer, but since I’m changing jobs, that’s going to go away so I need a new ISP. My blog and mail are also hosted at work, so they will have to hang off the end of the new line while I change and configure my new hosting. My current ISP is, well, work, as an Entanet reseller and I’ve been exceptionally happy with Entanet, but business lines aren’t cheap so I’m not going to migrate it to my private telephone number.

So, I solicit your opinion. I need the following things:

  • Static IP
  • No blocked ports
  • Free setup and activation

Now I know these things are provided by a lot of ISPs and certainly my previous ISP before I got a business line provided my company, Freedom2Surf, do this and so do pretty much all of the other Entanet resellers do, so this isn’t a problem really.What makes the choice difficult are the following:

  • I’d like ~800KB upload speed which is only available on the business connections with all of the above, as I’m going to have to host my blog and mail on the end of this line for a week or 4
  • At least ~50GB download allowance, preferably with extra allowances off-peak
  • Around £25 on an ongoing monthly basis, ignoring discounted months up-front

Extra bonus points for being able to provide extra no-NAT IP addresses either cheaply or at low cost. F2S used to charge £5 for an extra IP, I can’t see the situation now. Freeola (Entanet reseller) are offering 8 IP no-NAT free and are the clear winner at the moment, but none of them offer an 800KB upload without paying for the business package, which is on average a third extra.

Answers to this Dear Lazyweb in the comments. I’m willing to listen to people telling me to get cable, but Virgin Media support are said to be clueless, though if the price versus speed ratio is high enough that it’s worth me junking my BT line and ADSL kit for a wireless cable router, then I’ll think about it and hope I never have to speak to them. Ooh and Entanet and therefore their resellers are trialling 24Mb ADSL, though sadly my exchange isn’t due for this til 2011.

Dates for LugRadio Live USA 2008 Announced

Yes. I am going to San Francisco with my 3 fat LugRadio friends to spread to good word. That’s right, LugRadio Live is happening in the USA this year and nobody is going to be able to understand my accent or any of my jokes.

This season of joy will take place on the 12th and 13th April 2008 at the Metreon in SF. This means all you Americans should be thinking of pre-registering as there are limited tickets, see here for details as they emerge. We’re lining up some fantastic big-name speakers but we also want to hear from the little guys on the street doing cool stuff for BOFs, the exhibition and the 3 minute lightbulb talks. If you want to lead a BOF, promote your cool (ideally interactive) project or do a quick lightbulb talk, let us know by emailing show at lugradio dot org.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Lost Hours

I thought I would point out that I keep coming around, after what feels like several lost hours, staring at my Linux desktop and not really knowing what just happened for the last few hours. It’s happened quite a few times since the weekend and I was getting quite concerned, so I set up a web cam so I could tell the camera that it had just happened and then rewind the video to see what had happened in the preceding few hours.

The results were quite surprising. It turns out that these lost hours, and I mean periods of between 1 and 4 hours, have been spent playing Slam Soccer 2006 (aka Bolzplatz) 🙂 It’s a fun, cartoony 5-a-side soccer game, in the mould of, say, the old Spectrum and Commodore Matchday game series, with a kind of fun Nintendo feel, as opposed to say EA Sports’ Fifa soccer games.

Essentially you control the players as you might expect but you can pick where you start, in a village league, or another division and build up your stadium with the money you earn (if you start in the village league, you start with a mud patch and trash cans for goals), or you can quickstart a single game or World Cup tournament. And yes, this runs on Linux (the Mac and Windows too).

It’s not perfect however. It’s quite hard, or at least I’m not very good, even after about 8 lost hours of playing. The sound is a little crackly on my uber-powerful laptop, but fine on my ~4 and half year old desktop. And my wrist hurts too from playing too often (not the kind of wrist problem you were thinking…). Also, it requires Java and the Sun Java still isn’t completely Free (in the Open Source sense, for non software Freedom people). I haven’t tried a Free Java, like GCJ, but the game itself is Free under the GPL, though you can donate 10 Euros and get the Gold Edition with a built in team and stadium editor. The other downside is that there don’t seem to be proper Linux packages, just a tarball of the game binaries which you run manually. It also seems to leave my desktop resolution in the game resolution, which I have to change back.

All in all it’s a really fun, addictive game and I’ve lost hours so far, you should too. (Thought: online multiplayer would be nice :))

LugRadio Season 5, Episode 9: Time Gentlemen Please

In Season 5 Episode 9 of LugRadio, ‘Time Gentlemen Please’, the first episode of 2008, Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Chris Proctor and Adam Sweet speak to Sacha Goedegebure of the Peach Project to discuss the latest open movie to come out of the Blender Project, Aq tells us why software Freedom is important in LugRadio Top Trumps, the presenters talk about whether Linux distributors tie their server and desktop products together to make them work better and more easily at the possible expense of other distributions. Also in this episode, the dates for LugRadio Live USA 2008 are announced, Chris gets wound up about the RMS v OpenBSD argument and your emails are once again read out and then roundly insulted. Don’t forget that you can win an Asus Eee PC in the Pimp My LugRadio competition, details in the show.

You can get all this rubbish, along with the chance to win an Asus Eee PC at http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/92.

You can also Digg it here and Slashdot it here.

It’s a Happy New Year

Well, it’s been ok so far, but I have reason to be optimistic. I’ve been feeling really run down during December, feeling quite ill even, with no sign of any cold or flu like symptoms. But, since around Boxing Day I’ve been feeling better, aside from an unscheduled intake of alcohol one evening and too many late nights and early afternoons (which weren’t alcohol related).

Well, I generally don’t do New Year’s Resolutions, but I have 2 main plans for the early part of this year and I’d say they are modest by most standards, which means they are achievable.

  • Enforce a strong sleeping pattern

I’ve never had a much of a sleeping pattern, due to leaving school and becoming a musician, followed by being a student again, I’ve always slept when I felt like it and got up when I felt like it, with the exception of working days. So, having a predilection for working on computer related challenges in the evening and being of the dog with a bone variety when it comes to finishing things, come the weekend I tend to start something and then keep going until I’m satisfied with my progress enough to call it a night and go to bed. This might be somewhere between 1am and 5am. It gets later the longer I go between having to get up to go to work, which in turn means I get up later the days afterwards. The longer this goes on, the harder it gets to break out of it and the worse you start to feel, so I plan to force my fingers from the keyboard by a specified time, organise myself for the following day and then go to bed by a particular time every night. Hopefully, this will see and end to the boom and bust attitude I have towards productivity and sleeping and the withdrawn figure people are becoming used to seeing.

  • Change jobs

Yeah, I’m looking for new job. There’s no special reason why I’m looking to leave my present job, just that I’ve been here for a few years and I feel it’s time for a change to continue developing my skills and refresh my approach and now is a good time for my employer also. Ideally I’d like to work in a reasonable sized company where there is an existing team of network/system admins or technical staff. I look forward to playing with lots of new hardware toys, learning to use certain technologies that I’ve not had much experience with yet and becoming more adept at programming.

If I find the right job then it will be a great year as I tend to catch fire when I am enthused by a new challenge. Here’s to 2008.