It seems like in the last month or so, I had to explain to several people, several times in a couple of venues why Dan and I do not immediately release a version of the show once we are finished recording. I thought I should repeat the explanation here for everyone’s benefit.

Linux Outlaws was never meant to be a news show. When I came up with the concept, I was modeling it very much after MacBreak Weekly and to some extend This Week in Tech itself. That is to say LO is designed to be discussion of and reflection on the Linux and open source / free software news of the week in a friendly, often lighthearted atmosphere. It should not be your primary source of these news. As such, LO was never designed to present a comprehensive, authorative or even reliable selection of what has happened in the last week and because of that I had never thought it to be a big issue that we have a pretty long lead time with the show (usually at least three days from recording to release). You could say that Linux Outlaws isn’t optimised to bring you information quickly, instead we concentrate pretty hard to maximise the quality of the show. This extends to content (both serious and humorous) and also audio quality and general listenability (cutting out the uhms, ahhs and pauses) which is especially important to both Dan and I. This takes time and we know that. The whole concept of the show is build around it. We realised pretty early into it that some people rather prefer the show very raw and quickly delivered. That is why we started experimenting with streaming it live and have kept that arrangement up since then. We now provide you with exactly the recording of it all as it happens live, both in video and pretty high quality audio formats. I even save the video to the Ustream site when I don’t forget to record it. This is our compromise for those of you who want the show immediately and/or in its raw state. We are, however, not willing to sacrifice the quality of the actual podcast because of this. There will be no raw, TLLTS-style, fresh-off-the-tape release of Linux Outlaws. The editing and releasing of the podcast will always take time and I am acutely aware of the fact that it has been taking longer lately. I will take steps against this (more on that in a minute) but I will not compromise the core values of our show for it. As long as this is still a hobby for both Dan and me, there will be no way that I can release the podcast much faster than we have done in the past couple of years. If you want it faster, either pay me to do the editing or watch the live show.

As the show has been getting longer and longer, and with the original mission in mind, I have come up with a plan to re-focus Linux Outlaws a bit to adjust for this. Starting with the next show (#136), we will stop listing all distro and software releases that we pick up on. We will only talk about the ones we find noteworthy for some reason or another. You are of course still free to send us feedback (which we always appreciate a lot) and tell us if you think we missed something important, but please respect our decision if we do not mention stuff you send us. By now, we are getting a lot of email and everybody has something else that he or she finds important. In the same vein, I will take it upon myself to more radically cut down the actual news items we talk about. I always do this in some kind of fashion or another, but I will try to be more ruthless with it now since I think we really need to focus on the important things and make the show a little less complicated again. If I do this correctly, chances are you won’t even notice but if you do, please remember: we are human too and humans make mistakes. With any luck, this will speed up the release of the show again and keep it fresh for many, many more episodes to come. Our purpose always has been and always will be to produce the most relevant while still entertaining Linux podcast in the highest quality possible out there.

Again, by all means send us feedback on all of this, we are always interested in what you think and how we can make the show better for all of you. Just one more thing: Before you send us email, think about what you are doing. Maybe read it over again before you push that “send” button. As I said, we are starting to get a lot of email and we take a chunk out of our personal free time to read it all (and we do read all the mail we get) — so please make it worth our while. If you do that, I am happy to read all of your feedback, a lot of it warms my heart every week and totally makes it worth it to do this show. We are grateful for all the intelligent rants, funny insults, well-worded criticism, witty jokes and random “I really like your show” comments we get. Please keep that up!

Hello once again. I trust everyone has had a nice Christmas? I thought I’d provide a quick update to wrap up the year on this blog as well…

I just released the last episode for the year on Tuesday — we had a lot of fun with this one, recording special sound effects and all. I even drove over a road bump very fast in my Twingo to make it authentic! So that wraps up the podcast itself for 2009, but a few other things have developed that I wanted to talk about on here as well. First off, you might have noticed the Sixgun Productions bumper at the beginning of the show and in the file tags. The site itself explains what we have in mind with this pretty well, so I’ll leave it at that, suffice it to say that we are looking to put Linux Outlaws on a much more solid foundation for the future. Do not despair, we aren’t looking to sell out or have suddenly developed delusions of grandeur like some other podcasters, we are simply trying to make sure that the production of the show can be sustainable for us in the long run so that we can deliver many, many more episodes to you. In the same vein, you will notice the adverts on the main page. This is an experiment to see if we can generate a revenue stream for the show. Both Dan and myself will most likely undergo some changes in our lives in 2010 and this will hopefully help to keep us afloat. I’ve personally never had ads on any of my sites and I’m curious to see how this shapes up. As always, we welcome any comments and feedback in general on this via the usual channels. We have also talked about supporting the show via ads in the content itself a few times, but so far nothing has transpired. No matter what happens, we have quite firmly agreed on never having more than one ad on the show itself. I have seen first hand what more than that will do to a show like TWiT and I don’t want to go down that path. Again, if you have any comments on all of this, please leave them here on the blog or send us an email.

Anyway, the Linux Outlaws wish you all the best for 2010 and the new decade! Here’s to many, many more shows in the new year. I am going to leave you with our Libsyn download stats for the year (as of this morning) and as you can see, the show is really going places. We hope to improve on that even more in the new year!

Libsyn Download Stats for 2009

I want to apologise for taking so long to release Episode 103. This week was a combination of long hours at work, family commitments, some unforeseen events I had to attend, and to make matters worse, Audacity decided to eat my project file for the show. With the help of Ubuntu Studio I was at least able to get Ardour running and to learn enough to edit the rest of the show using that. More on those adventures in a future show, suffice it to say for now that I will be switching to Ardour for producing the podcast from here on out. At least all of this gave me the chance to finally get my arse in gear and start learning how to use it (I had meant to do that for ages now).

I hope you enjoy the show despite the wait. The news might be slightly stale content by now but as usual, Dan and I had great fun recording this episode and if nothing else it should at least be funny. Once again, we are sorry for the inconvenience of the late release. There will also be no rest for the wicked and we plan to record 104 today at 18:00 UTC so be sure to catch the live show on ustream. If you can’t make it, Dan will edit this one so it should be out a lot more quickly then this week’s release…

As I write this, I have just release Episode 81 of the show — this one was a big shakey since we had some unforseen problems during the recording. We streamed the show live again, but discovered afterwards that Dan had lost about two minutes of the recording somewhere in the middle. I got really scared when he told me this via IM, but Dan being the audio wiz that he is, managed to sync the files up flawlessly and fix the problem by re-recording some bits and glueing it all back together with duct tape and some chewing gum. And much like travelling in the Millenium Falcon,a little on-the-fly patch job does not detract at all from the end result. In fact, you would be hard pressed to detect it, even if I told you the exact location of our little slip-up. It turned out to be a quite marvellous show in the end.

I am really glad we could recover this one, there shouldn’t be that much difference between what we streamed live and the final podcast result. I do hope you enjoy the show and rest assured that we always do our best to bring you a show every week. It should be clear that the podcast itself always has priority before anything else we do which includes the live streaming version and I hope you all appreciate that. Anyway, disaster averted, get on with your podcast listening!

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.

Hey folks, just wanted to update you all on what we’ve been doing in the last week or two for the show. As you might have guessed from the title of this post the schedule’s gotten a bit messed up lately. We’ve never really had a strict release schedule and in the early days we just released the show whatever day it happened to be ready, it was different every week. I never worried about it much as I figured it’s a podcast, people will get it when it hits the RSS feed. That was until Lugradio Live last year where people kept coming up and asking me “what day does the show come out?”. Since then we’ve tried to release on a Sunday or Monday more consistently in the hope that it sets people up for the week. We hit this target most of the time but every so often things get backed up and with one thing and another we get off schedule. This is where we find ourselves now, somewhere way off the schedule and nearer to the grass verge Recording and editing about 80mins of audio every week can be quite a strain at times but between us we usually manage it and I’m certainly not complaining, I love doing the show and I love even more that other people seem to enjoy listening to it. If we can bring a smile to one person’s face then that satisfies me greatly. So here’s what’s happened in the last couple of weeks.

We recorded some extra content whilst we were doing episode 72 and that became an extra episode about Mythbuntu (73). The plan was to release 73 in the middle of last week and keep to the weekend releases as normal. Unfortunately we didn’t quite manage that and things got pushed back, we ended up releasing episode 74 just last Thursday night, a couple of days ago. Originally ep 74 was meant to be our extended interview with Miguel De Icaza but unfortunately he had to reschedule and we recorded a normal show instead. Last night (Friday) we recorded a very long and I think interesting interview with Miguel where we discussed his feelings about Microsoft, the whole Novell deal, patent issues surrounding Mono and much much more. It finished up at about 75mins in total and we decided to make this episode 75. I need to edit it a little, add music, sprinkle in some prerecorded bits and do all the usual production work that entails. I expect we’ll release the show on Tuesday probably. Following that I hope we can get back to our normal weekend releases and get back into our rhythm. I notice with a lot of podcasts and I’m not talking specifically about Linux one here but all podcasts in general, the main issue they run into is a lack of shows or lack of content. Gaps between shows get longer, releases are delayed. I’ve even heard some people call this phenomena “podburn”, I’m not sure if that qualifies as a real word but to me it just sounds more like the name of a small Scottish town. Maybe the sight of a battle, the battle of Podburn. In the 16 months or so we’ve been doing this that’s never happened to us and in fact we normally tend to have the opposite problem, too much content and not enough time to release it all. So I guess I should be thankful for that and long may it continue.

Right, that should be everyone up to date now with recent events in Linux Outlaws Land (what a truely disappointing theme park that would make) so move along there’s nothing to see here, go on clear off. I hope you enjoy episode 75 when it hits the net and thanks for listening, reading, contributing and ranting in our general direction. We appreciate it

We started doing interviews with Bradley Kuhn on Episode 40 and have continued on our LugRadio Live 2008 show (which people really liked). Since then we’ve been fortunate enough to have many more really cool guests, namely Evan Prodromou, Becky Hogge, Steve McIntyre, Jono Bacon and most recently Dann Washko. Doing these interviews has proven to be a real success and Dan has been busy compiling a “hit list” of even more interesting people we’d like to talk to. I have to say he’s been amazing at organising these and he’s doing most of the work on that front. We will be aiming at roughly getting one guest a month going forward, but don’t count on it — as with everything LO, that’s subject to change if it needs to.