Hmm. I thought that the bar was pretty low for using the internet nowadays. Clearly people no longer need to find the button to switch on the computer …

An AOL Living website (they have a blog called ParentDish which I frequent) gives advice on such tricky tasks as cooking marshmallows (”Smores”?) and unpacking a Chinese takeaway and putting it on a plate. Advanced readers wanting to learn a trade can make furniture.

The overly smiley pair on the video entreat us that “we discovered this by chance” … pile up some books and put a piece of flat wood on top, voila, a coffee table. Not exactly penicillin is it.

Google Calendar - Newport school term dates

I’ve been getting acquainted with Google calendar and it’s features and to be honest I’m pretty impressed.

For Barefoot Ceramics pottery painting studio I’ve created a Google calendar with Newport City Council school term dates (as taken from their website) up until 2010. Hopefully, having made this a public view calendar, it’ll be useful to someone - parents with pda’s? other business folk wanting to track school holidays. I shall probably add the standard diary dates too, Easter / Hannukah / Christmas / &c..

iCal format export and import

Having created several calendars now I feel I’ve got the jist of it’s limitations and benefits. It’ll be great, I think, for use as a collaborative calendar tool - not least because it does (slightly hidden away but otherwise effortless) import and export of .ics files (iCal format).

So if you’d like the Newport, South Wales, school term dates until 2010 in iCal format (.ics) then hit up the link OR use the above link to see the public view. To add teh calendar to your own Google Calendar, click that little “+Google Calendar” icon at the bottom-right …

“One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody’s listening.” — Franklin P. Jones

I keep reading bits-and-bobs about trackbacks. When I came across one on the Wordpress pages I thought, at last chance to try them out. I read the Glossary at WordPress Codex, I read the Wikipedia pages, I read a few intros on Google. I couldn’t work out how it worked.

The key bit that was missing was how the link gets created in the first place, little did I know that there’s a “Trackbacks” section in the Wordpress administractors “Write” pane. Suddenly everything is a whole lot clearer. The best reference I found was probably this Sixapart docs page although their main trackback intro page was down. I would need to fish into the Wordpress code a bit to see what WP does with this trackback URL, but I’ll save that for some other day I think.

So this post is supposed to be about Wordpress hoodies, but hey, can’t win them all.

Was recently invited to attend the SWLUG lightning talks - someone posted a mock up poster on the site created as an ODT file in OpenOffice.org.

As is my want I decided that it could look a little more sparky. But not too “designed” as it’s just a simple poster to advertise a Linux event, we wouldn’t want to suggest that us Linux geeks need any more GUI than Emacs provides after all.

Here’s my effort. Click thumb to open a PNG version … if anyone wants the source files and the like you can comment or email me.

OpenSong on Kubuntu

Installing a free lyric projection software on Linux from scratch

This is just a quick review of how I installed OpenSong on Kubuntu (the KDE version of Ubuntu) from scratch on a Windows XP (SP1) laptop.

1. Install Kubuntu
2. Install REALbasic using adept, alien and dpkg
3. Compile / Install OpenSong
4. Use …

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Link Summary

• http://alicious.com/2...from-scratch/#more-24

mp3 production - church sermon recording

This page is actually quite old now. More recently I’ve been using Ubuntu on an older Toshiba laptop for arranging things at the Christian fellowship that I attend. We’re looking at using OpenSong for lyrics and Bible quotations on the projector. I’ve also had a first shot at live recording straight on to the laptop using the “mono mix” from the mixing desk and a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) sound editing application called Audacity; Audacity can encode files to MP3 itself (I think it use the LAME encoder), which is handy.

The original page follows:

A Christian brother contacted me to ask about sermon recording. One of the problems he was having was with slow MP3 encoding from WAV files in windows. So, I did some googling around and whipped up this page. I hadn’t realised that you could record MP3 on-the-fly - that is create MP3’s live. Similar things can be done with WMA and OGG files. So Leeor, this one is for you.

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Link Summary

• http://www.ubuntu.com/
• http://www.opensong.org/
• http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
• http://alicious.com/2...on-recording/#more-22

Mentalist book suggestions

Ian Rowland

Whilst perusing Ian Rowlands website I came across a list of book recommendations. I’ve been well in to Derren Brown and his tricks and illusions, and showmanship, fascinate me. Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and all such tricks of the mind intrigue me as a philospher: We trust our minds (usually) to be truthful, if we can not trust our minds then we are lead towards greater skepticism (ie away from a realist view of the world).

Anyway here’s the list with links to buy the books.

Let me take this from the top. The branch of magic and conjuring which deals with “mind-reading”, and tricks with a “psychic” flavour, is called “mentalism”. If you want to learn about mentalism, 95% of everything worth knowing can be found in 15 books.

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Link Summary

• http://en.wikipedia.o...inguistic_Programming
• http://alicious.com/2...-suggestions/#more-18

Well have now updated alicious.com to use Wordpress. Hopefully this is going to mean that I can blog posts of info that I want to keep around.

Will update with past pages as I see fit!

Slackware Linux installation on an IBM Thinkpad 755CX is considered to be out-dated and will not be updated as of 2007-03-19

If you need to get Linux discs (CD, DVD) in teh UK then Cheep Linux (”the cheepest way to buy free software, lol!) and the Linux Emporium still appear to be operating, UseLinux was down for maintenance at the time of writing.

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