My opening theme for the show lasts about a minute and a half. For the video I felt I needed to make it shorter just to get the point across that it was for my show. So I edited the audio under Audacity and kept it down to about 30 secs.

The artists I played in the video I needed to get the videos off YouTube.  There are many ways to do this, but one utility that is just awesome is DamnVid. This multiplatform application allows you to download and encode videos into many different formats. So I used the YouTube URL for the videos of the artists I highlighted in the video.

For the actual video I played around with PiTiVi and Openshot. PiTiVi lacks transitions and effects at the moment, which the community has been screaming for them to put in. Openshot is great, but there was some things I feel it’s still missing.

I checked out KDEnlive under Nixie Pixel’s review and recommendation and I have to say, this is a VERY powerful little video editor. A lot of effects, transistions, and easy to boot! I started making titles within the software, but I wound up tweaking them more using Inkscape. Nothing spectacular, just quick and dirty creation because I need to learn to use InkScape more to be honest.  But aside from that I think the final product is pretty damn good for a beginner.

So let me know what you all think! Here’s The Video: 

Now I know I can rip to OGG or FLAC and convert them to MP3 using Audacity, LAME, and a shit load of other convertors, but that is 1 extra step! I’ve tried Sound-Juicer and K3B and looked at tutorials for each of them and still no go!

So I went back to Gnome. Long Live the Foot!

One thing I noticed is when I installed UbuntuTweak the Add/Remove Programs app on the Gnome Menu generates no programs in it at all. So I have to go through UbuntuTweak or Synaptic to install programs now. No big issue, but hopefully when Karmic comes out this will not happen.

I’m going to add a Page that lists all the programs I use as a reference to myself and to anyone else who wants a similar system. Also I will post tips to install stuff. WHEE!

I didn’t mess anything up this time under Gnome. Everything was working fine. But I decided to back up and do a clean install of Kubuntu. Everything is back up and running and nothing was really lost (except time to get everything).

So last night I loaded up some games. I love the RTS genre so I got Spring Loaded and the Evolution mod. I would really like to play the Star Wars mod but it’s closed for beta testing.

I found my iTalk finally so hopefully I will be doing a new podcast. I really need to find a new power cord for the mixer but I cannot afford it. So please if you wanna help out with VooDooRadio donate!

I have audacity installed and now I have to figure how to work with it better. It’s been WAY too long since I used it. And hopefully I can make a show as good as I used to under Audition when I was under Windows.

I know I could take the OLD microphone I have (either the USB Logitech or the Radio Shack Omnidirectional) and plug it into the mic jack on the laptop. But the quality is really crumby. I paid good money for a condenser mic and now I can’t use it because the mixer has no power. This is very frustrating to me.

But anyway, nothing much to report on. Everything is running the way I like it more or less.

I got this setup from the Ubuntu Blog website which it was very helpful, but seeing how I am wireless more I needed more variables to add to my setup. And this information was easily obtainable from Conky’s Sourceforge site more specifically the variable section.

The one thing I have been finding out about conky is that is is very tedious to really set it up. There is no “user friendly” GUI to configure it like the Screenlets so you have to do a lot of text editing to get it to work right. And you have to really ignore word wrap.

Another little thing about conky is when you make changes you can kill the process (I use top in the terminal to kill it) and restart it, reboot the machine, or log out of your Gnome session. I have used all three and logging out seems to be a little quicker than the other two. Go fig.

Also I learned that gPodder has an option to skip podcasts when syncing them to your iPod. So the Ubuntu Podcast has been set to that because of the file format issue with the iPod.  You can also set up an autodelte ever 30 days or whatever you want. I prefer to manually do it, but that’s just me. Also you can save the files somewhere else if you please. This is  a nice option because some shows I like to archive or edit to get bits for my show (ala “This is Why we’re Fat” from Nobody Likes Onions being inserted into my show).

I have been shutting down the machine lately so I don’t log in from work too much. But I still think I got some things done in the short time I did them.

I am now trying to think of what I should remove or tweak next. I find it funny that with all the programs and files I have on the system now it’s only 20GB used and a large portion of that is the documents and files I have in my home folder Can we say Bloatware?

I am looking back on the things I have been doing through this experiment and it pleases me to see I am able to do a lot of things I was able to do under Windows just fine.

Netflix REALLY needs to get on the ball with the instant streaming stuff because this is a pain in the nuts having it be Silverlight 2.0 only. That is primarily one of the only things I miss so far.

Speaking of streaming I need to think about finding info about how to get my DirecTV DVR and this machine to talk so I can stream movies or pictures. I got it going under windows before. I also will have to hard-wire the laptop so I can get a decent connection for that as well.

It would be awesome to be able to stream videos off of the lappy because I have a ton of AVI’s I backed up onto DVD-R’s that I could easily copy onto the hard drive to play better. Maybe I will do this later today.. Or start that.

Finally I finished sorting out all my music files and got them back on the external HD! So I started to get things together to record my podcast. Hooked up my mixer, turned it on and plugged it into the USB port. The system found it OK. I checked it with Skype.

Beautiful.  Launched Audacity and chose the input for the mixer and started recording.  The waveform was flat..

Hmmmm..

Read on to find out what happened.Well, I’m looking all around on the machine for settings issues and everything seemed right then I looked down and realized that all of a sudden I had no power on my mixer. The powersupply died. FUCK!

And of course I find out there is an Internal Mic bug in Ubuntu. Great.

Before going out and getting a headset, I guess I should see if I can get the Internal Mic going.  I looked on the Ubuntu Forums and found a few others who have the same issue with Acer Laptops and the internal mic’s. Luckily there is a fix!

• Step 1: Download the Alsa Driver from here:

ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/driver/alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.bz2

• Step 2:extract the contents.Open terminal and go to where you downloaded the driver. Extract it using

tar -vxf alsa-driver-1.0.20.tar.gz

• Step 3:  Compile the driverNote:  You need checkinstall if you don’t have it use apt-get to get it

sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Then run the commands below
This takes a little while to do its thing

./configure
make
sudo make install

• Step 4: Configure alsa-base.confAdd the following line to the end of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf file. I did this by using the command:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf

I added these two lines at the end of the conf file then saved it.

alias snd-card-0 snd-hda-intel
options snd-hda-intel model=acer

• Step 5:  Reboot.

This worked, but seriously, internal mic’s are shitty to say the least. But it’s nice to know that it works more or less. By this time I had gotten so fed up with my mixer dying, I decided that maybe it’s best I use a headset or find out if Daddy’s Junky Music will allow me to get a new cable with my extended warranty. GRRRR.

So after fighting with it all I gave up recording for the night and watched my friend’s do their show on XLR and called it a night.

I watched ITRadio on the live stream and it was running decent aside from the slight skipping because of the wireless connection, but I managed to overcome throwing my machine out the window because of it.

I didn’t do too too much because it was my birthday. I actually removed a few programs that didn’t work too well on the machine (mainly some games) but aside from that everything is still running swell.

I hope to work on a podcast soon. It’s been a few weeks since I last put one out. I haven’t even hooked up the mixer to this machine to see if it can work with Audacity properly. Oh well something to set my sights on I guess.

I basically watched TV last night and had my birthday cake and opened presents from Sarah and Emma. I got 2 iPod cases (1 hard the other is one of the soft rubber ones) some pants and some T-shirts which I needed badly. Emma signed the card and brought me the big bag that the presents were in. My sister and her kids stopped by and gave me cards and a little VW Bug car that Emma loves to play with now.

I will have more things that I have done on the machine tomorrow because I barely spent time doing anything on this day.

Well… Perfect in the sense that it showed things and did things, but it was S…L…O…W as molasses because our network is a little on the laggy side.

So to announce I was able to connect from work to the home machine, I sent out a tweet using Gwibber. Of course my friend Graeme (of ITRadio fame) had to make a snarky reply.

Through there I was able to install a few things. I am trying to get my music sorted a little so I looked up a few possibilities to do so. People were saying that Cowbell was a program that aided in the sorting of your digital library so I installed that.

It was not quite what I had hoped it to be. It was basically a tag editor ONLY and did not sort your music files what-so-ever.

Rhythmbox also does not sort out the files into a nice Artist – Album manner so I did some more hunting around. Then it dawned on me. SONGBIRD! I had tried this out under windows before, it was decent, but people were calling it the iTunes killer app. Well, it’s not quite there yet. Yes it is a killer when it comes to functionality, resources,  and the add-ons. But it doesn’t have the podcast functionality iTunes has so a lot of people that listen to podcasts will be still drawn to iTunes, in my opinion.

So I installed Songbird. It imported all my media and it also sorted the files into the directory structure I mentioned earlier. So it works perfectly. Goodbye Banshee and Cowbell. Rhythmbox, you will be used for ripping audio CD’s  (another feature Songbird lacks). gPodder, you are definitely my podcast downloading and syncing solution.

After all this I played a little more in Second Life and called it a day.

I began installing the LAMP server stuff. LAMP is Linux Apache Mysql and PHP as one package. Once I got it all installed I tested out the web server. Worked. Installed PHPMyAdmin. Works. I will play more with that later. I need to read up on configuring Apache some more.

So while updating my podcasts from listening to a bunch of them at work, I installed some Applets for Avant Window Navigator as well as some themes for it and for Gnome. I  also added some more Screenlets and downloaded some desktops from Gnome-Look to make everything stand out. You can see the screenshot by clicking the thumbnail at the top of the page.

So I am still itching to get the mixer hooked up and work on getting the podcast recorded so I can really play with Audacity to re-learn it. It has been too long since I used it.

I ran across another Air application called AirTalkr. It is supposedly an IM client and Social media client combined (like Digsby) but it was REALLY buggy so I uninstalled it.

Uninstalling Air applications is kind of easy. You have to actually download the .air file onto your machine and double click it as if you were installing the application and the installer brings up the Uninstall option. See cake!

Ok That is all for today. I will have more on the 7th day.

So to fix this I subscribed to 1 feed inside of Rhythmbox (the default audio player in Ubuntu 9.04). I plugged in my iPod and after it noticed it was connected, I dragged and dropped the latest episode onto the iPod.

I loaded up gPodder and had it do it’s sync and  all the episodes that were not marked as played went right onto the iPod. However it kept the 1 episode from Rhythm box, which is no big deal.

I unplugged my iPod and head off to work with all my new podcasts ready to play. The ONLY downside to gPodder is that when the podcast uses cover art for their shows it doesn’t show on the iPod.  For example, VooDooRadio’s Last show had a special cover art that I made for the episode. When I was using iTunes under Windows the episodes would have that picture I made, but under gPodder. Nothing. Nada. BAH!

Maybe I missed something. I dunno.

So basically nothing new installed. Just conquered a small little issue that I found as important for my work day. Listening to shows as I work makes me feel more productive.