Month: April 2009

emusic

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.

Changing hostname in Mandriva

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”.

in /etc/sysconfig/network add the following line:

HOSTNAME=hostname

Where hostname is whatever you want the computer to be called.

Then in /etc/hosts just add the hostname after localhost on the first (and probably only) line in the file. It should look something like:

127.0.0.1       hostname localhost

Where again hostname is the name of the computer.

Do this, reboot, and all should be well.

Dropbox for Mandriva 2009 and 2009.1

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.

Social networking workflow

This is how it works…..

I post anything under 140 characters to identi.ca using the Ubiquity extension for Firefox. This then posts them to Twitter and Facebook, and adds them to the right hand menu of this blog using the Twitter Tools plugin. Then, once a day, they all get spliced together by Loudtwitter and posted to my Live Journal.

I also add posts to my LJ using the Deepest Sender plugin for Firefox. I only post there if I need to lock things down to custom groups of people (or if what I write cannot be in the public domain for whatever reason).

Everything else gets posted here. Also via Deepest Sender.

Additionally, everything I listen to all all my computers and my iPod is sent to Last.fm, which then adds the last 10 songs to the right hand menu of this blog.

I think that is pretty much everything.

Review : Stages by Abscondo

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.

It’s availabe for free from Jamendo, and from the artist’s website, and available to buy from iTunes.

Albums of the first quarter?

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

  1. Frank Turner – Love Ire & Song + The First Three Years
  2. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead – The Century of Self
  3. The Hold Steady – Separation Sunday         
  4. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love   
  5. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive     
  6. Modern Skirts – All Of Us In Our Night     
  7. Robyn Hitchcock – Goodnight Oslo   
  8. Morrissey – Years of Refusal     
  9. British Sea Power – Do You Like Rock Music?         
  10. The Dada Weatherman – The Green Waltz

I think that’s probably fairly accurate.

Holidays and other things

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.

Trying new Linux Distributions

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.