Hey folks, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on the blog and I figured it was time I stopped slacking – not in a Slackware sense, thankfully Also I was pretty surprised earlier this evening when Fab found an interesting article concerning us on Podcast Alley. It seems we were listed in their top 5 tech podcasts for May, and we didn’t even know until now. Have a look at the screen shot below…

Podcast Alley Listing

(click to enlarge)

You might notice a little podcast down there below us at number 8… what’s it called again? Oh yes, that’s it. Security Now! Hang on, that’s pretty amazing news. I don’t listen to it myself but I couldn’t deny that it’s one of the best known technology podcasts around. Part of Leo Laporte’s TWiT stable no less. I know it’s only one website and one month’s review so we shouldn’t get carried away, but it’s nice to see. I’m pretty chuffed by this and so is Fab, I wanted to share the picture. Thanks to everyone who’s helped and supported us in almost 2 years of doing this now. It’s a lot of work but we both have fun making the show, that’s thanks to our great listeners. We recently passed 100 episodes, a landmark I never imagined we could reach. Here’s to another hundred. We’re not done waffling yet.

Take care,

Dan

Last night, Dan and I did a little experiment. We attempted to stream the recording of Episode 78 live on ustream.tv — “attempted” is the right word, because I discovered that both the webcams I tried with my Eee PC would invariably cut out after a few minutes.  We managed  to stream the audio feed of the whole show though, I guess that’s something. Because this was highly experimental, we only announced it in our IRC channel (#linuxoutlaws on irc.freenode.net) and on the Linux Outlaws group on identi.ca. In the end we got about 34 viewers, which isn’t bad considering we didn’t advertise it at all before going on the air.

Streaming the making of the show live is something I wanted to do for quite some time and we had many requests from listeners to do it. I will try to get the webcam issues sorted out for the next recording session (probably on Monday) and we’ll take it from there. If people keep saying they like this sort of thing, I am definitely happy to keep doing it. As long as it doesn’t detract from the audio podcast version of the show at all — and in contrast to Leo Laporte, I really mean this. Anyway, please feel free to tell us what you think of this idea in the comments or the forums. We appreciate your feedback a lot and always take it into account.  Right now, we will only stream video from my end I think, but you can of course hear Dan’s audio over the stream. Maybe you guys & gals can persuade him to stick his mug up on camera one day as well…

Oh, and one last thing: We will be calling this little venture Linux Outlaws Live (or LOL for short). That acronym is way to tempting not to use it.

Update: I have set up a preliminary page at /live where you can watch the stream when it goes on the air. We will announce air times in our identi.ca group since we don’t have a specific schedule for recording yet.

As a first effort in cleaning up the visual design of the podcast, I’ve created  some comic-style portraits of Dan and myself (in part inspired by the ones the TWiT Network uses) and used them in conjunction with the logo I developed some time back to create a new iteration of our cover art — which will be used from the first episode of 2009 onwards. You will notice that the font is much clearer and more readable on small screens (I had some feedback requesting this) and that there’s again some Linux command line goodness in there. It’s also a bit of an homage to Security Now, which was the podcast that got me into podcasting in the first place (the first one I listened to, so in a sense Leo and Steve started all of this). I hope you like the new artwork, please share your thoughts on it in this forum thread. This is the first of a bunch of visual changes coming to Linux Outlaws in 2009…