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 …

Just taken receipt of a Smart AX MT882 modem from TalkTalk (UK) which will hopefully give us broadband at our studio.

Initial research shows this is an Ethernet (browser based admin at 192.168.1.1) or USB (ditto, 192.168.1.2) model. A manual is available by searching for  SmartAX_MT882_V200R002C01B021_User_Manual.pdf with your favourite search engine or from DriverGuide by having a subscription or viewing ads.

That’s all for now, will add details later if I have any problems installing it. As it has an Ethernet port it should be a breeze compared to previous efforts with USB modems on Linux distros … should be!

I’ve a little note on my desk from last time I had to clean up a dodgy sermon recording. It was a spur of the moment idea to record onto the laptop, little did I know that the laptop had a built in microphone and so recorded not only on the line-in from the mono out (post-mix) of the mixing desk but also the hiss, flutter and buzz of the laptop via it’s own mic.

Here’s what I did in audacity to get a bearable result:

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Well having come from Slackware I’d obviously been enjoying the ease of installation with Synaptic (an apt-get frontend) too much and the gods of computing were watching my karma count(!) … the simple “update-manager” method of upgrading promised much and didn’t really deliver anything other than a rushed lesson in apt-get, dpkg, aptitude and the use of the recovery console option in Ubuntu’s GRUB menu.

Update Manager, problem!

The update manager appeared to hang when it came to restarting the X font server, it may have been something else that triggered it, what was clear to me was I had a frozen X session mid-way through a graphically managed dist-upgrade. Not great. I left it for a few hours to see if it was just taking its time, no joy.

I tried a few things by switching to a CLI with alt-ctrl-F1: apt-get and aptitude reported problems. Neither would run enough for a fix. apt-get reported that I should run “dpkg –configure -a” to reconfigure. dpkg reported “too many errors, stopping”. Now I didn’t like the sound of that

Reboot

On reboot, I chose the recovery console. After much playing around I found I could run “apt-get update” (after getting my net connection up by running “/etc/rc.local”; which just does a pon for my speedtch USB modem connection). Still not much use. I noticed that the first package being complained about was libgnomevfs2-bin, so attempted to install that by itself. No joy. Aptitude was useful here in listing what was broken, but not much use otherwise.

In the end after frantically reading through several man pages I discovered the –force options for dpkg, in a do or die moment I entered “dpkg –configure -a –force-all”. Well that seemed to do the trick, finished installing things, which all seemed to have downloaded already (so something was working right in update-manager at least).

Reboot to glorious KDE goodness.

Rebooting again I had the new menu options in GRUB for the new kernel, a good sign. Booted up fine and I logged in to my KDE session and was back in the now familiar territory of Ubuntu.

Well, I was kinda expecting something to have changed. Nothing seemed that different, this is however Ubuntu with the kubuntu-desktop package installed.

Didn’t take long to find what had changed … firefox 3 beta4 had been upgraded to 3 beta 5 and was broken! Oh yeah and I couldn’t launch GUI apps from a root konsole either.

I’m trying to edit a small clip from a larger program, add titling and post to YouTube. The clip is a section of TV program called Best of Friends and shows a pottery challenge throwing a pot on the potters wheel at Barefoot Ceramics.

Anyway, FOSS linux apps I’m auditioning (at least I think they’re all FOSS, definitely free-gratis):

1. Cinelerra [Update: look out if you get cinelerra from Akirad, it installs an app called akiranews, this seems to be some sort of spam gateway (as yetunexploited. I'm a little concerned about it as a security risk too. So I've uninstalled it as a precaution and removed all akirad repositories.]
2. Kino
3. Kdenlive
4. Open Movie Editor
5. Jahshaka
6. Avidemux
7. Cinepaint

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Well I was browsing digg as usual when I came across a link for “the pink patch“, curious fellow that I am I wondered what it was.

Turns out that the latest way to extract money from teen girls low self-esteem is to sell “diet patches”, think of them like nicotine patches but for people with (perceived or actual) weight problems. As much as I’m curious I was also sceptical, the only way to lose weight is to expend more energy than you put in as food - smaller portions, more exercise (must try this some time!). Can you really just stick a patch on and lose weight? I doubt it.

The claims

• FAST — You’ll start to burn more fat instantly! Proven to be the quickest way to infuse your body with all-natural weight loss ingredients for amazing results!
• FRESH — Revitalise your body with the energy of the Pink Patch! With the weight coming off, you’ll feel recharged not to mention how amazing you’ll look!
• FREE-SPIRITED — Don’t give up your social life and become a slave to the gym to achieve that perfect body. Simply put on the Pink Patch and take off that stubborn stone - it’s that easy.

There’s more wild claims too …

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

I came across a post from GotQuestions.org, a creationist website, that describes what they call “Progressive Creationism“. One of the characteristic beliefs of a Progressive Creationist apparently is that:

Death and bloodshed have existed from the very beginning of creation and were not the result of Adam’s sin. Man was created after the vast majority of earth’s history of life and death had already taken place.

Without geting into the whole thing I would like to respond to this passage:

Another error of Progressive Creationism is that death existed prior to the Fall, which undermines the Bible’s clear teaching that death is a result of sin (see Romans 5:12 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22). Any theory which places man or animal death prior to the Fall of Adam must be rejected.

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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.

Well, I thought it would be nice to do some demo’s for using Inkscape. First up though I need to find a decent way to create video screencaps, preferably with audio and notes - though a video editor could be used later with the resulting video.

I used Google and Sourceforge to expand my search and limited the contenders to those with Linux versions. The top app on SF was VirtualDub but it’s Windows only.

Contenders are:

1. http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
2. http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul
3. http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org/about.php : I got my package from the getdeb site.
4. http://www.debugmode.com/wink/ : Wink version 2 is currently only available for Windows, which might suggest a move away from Linux.
5. http://epresence.tv/ : they call video captures “screencasts”. Their Producer and Player applications aren’t currently available for Linux.
6. http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/

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