Month: October 2011

FLOSS software things which I wonder about…

“FLOSS” (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), and “FOSS” (or F/OSS, Free and Open Source Software).

I attended the Floss Unconference fest yesterday at Manchester Conference centre (a location I had planned to use for BarCampManchester2 due to their ability to do overnights and excellent warren like structure).
The event was reasonable but not well attended, which was a shame. It needed about another 30 people to feel more busy and active. Not quite sure why people never came out for it…? But to be honest I only spotted it by hearing a tweet from Teknoteacher. Anyhow, at the end of the day there were lightening talks and I jumped at the chance to talk about software which really needs to be developed on Linux. I’ve adopted this post to apply to most Floss type things…

First up…

  • What happened to Say my name desert? The developer moved to announcefy but frankly its a downgrade and I’m just about to uninstall it because they’ve been talking about plugins for yonks and they still don’t exist. Instead I just installed Call Announcer which seems to do what I want, but we’ll see…
  • In the same vein, locale what happened? I’ve switched to the hyper geeky Llama which operates based on radio cell towers so in theory it shouldn’t eat so much power as locale. But to be honest I’ve not really had time to mess with it and tweak it.
Now to the desktop…

I’m sure theres plenty more but these are my thoughts right now…

End of the zune, ipod and the pacemaker?

The Pacemaker in use

I think we can pretty much say its the end of the road for the Mpeg3 players.

Microsoft pretty much ported the zune software to their new Microsoft Phone 7 operating system, Apple have done the same and look to be killing the ipod range finally. The single purpose music player is pretty much out for the count.

So what about the Tonium Pacemaker?

Well Tonium went bust a while ago… and the thread is tonium alive? charts the disastrous mistakes which were made over time…

Now everyones trying to get the source code, so we can try and extend the life of such a great product…

Can’t believe I’ve owned the product for over 3 years now, I was one of the first to get it. A whole year before Engadget even. I really hope the community can get the source code because besides the poor battery life and dodgy recording of mixes on the device. There’s already people hacking in SSDs into the Pacemaker, so there’s plenty of people up for compiling and hacking around.

Interesting segway – we’re finally setting a challenge for the next evolution or even revolution in djing at the Mozilla festival later this year…

Eink demos

Sriram Peruvemba, vice president of marketing at Eink, gives us the latest news from Eink, they announced that they will ship between 25 million and 30 million Eink screens this year, just for the Eink e-readers like the Kindle 4 and Nook Touch. Yup you read right, 30 million of those devices to be sold this year.

Is it only me but does the device he’s playing with look exactly the same as the new touch screen Amazon Kindle? Can’t believe I didn’t spot it before really. Anyway its a interesting little interview, but still odd there not going for the bigger display areas?

 

Build tech city or go one better?

rain rain go away

Not wrote anything about London’s TechCity and Silicon Roundabout for quite sometime but I’ve been thinking about it… The recent talk from Matt Brittin at MediaCityUK reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while.

The Silicon Roundabout thing slightly bugs me and the Techcity thing winds me up but not for the reasons you would imagine. Silicon roundabout is frankly a silly name but I can live with that. The area is full of hopeful startups and internet powered companies. Its great and to be fair east London was always a cool place. I actually spent quite a lot of time in the last startup boom.

My problem is copying the states… Not only copying the concept but somewhat getting it seriously wrong or backwards. I’ll save the reasons for others but this is different times, different circumstances and a totally different country. Part of the solution is diversity of ideas and process, something the UK is very good at in one way or another.

Its no mistake Google’s Eric Schmitt mentions “you’re either a ‘luvvy’ or a ‘boffin’.”

A cultural thing which has got to stop, along with simply copying…

To coin an old phrase, think differently…?

The next few months are very busy

I knew September onwards was going to be busy but this is getting a little out of control…

As you can see a whole bunch of them take place within or close to Manchester, so luckily i won’t have to go too far… However I’m also looking to finally go to Le Web for the very first time and maybe the Media Festival again.

Its cranking up to be a hectic autumn but hopefully a decent one full of lots of great experiences and people…