Information Takes Over

I have spent quite some time recently playing with audio on my ubuntu desktop.

Last time I tried Audio on linux I found it to be a sorely disappointing affair. That was some 6 to 12 months ago.

On my old Windows box I had an E-mu 1820, but when I bought it I didn’t know that Creative didn’t like to help out by open sourcing their drivers. (How many people have bought M-Audio cards now, knowing that they can get Open Source drivers for it!) On my old Windows box I thought that card was going to stay, until week before last…

I had had some recent successes with getting jack and pulseaudio playing nicely. I had had a play with Ardour and loved it. So I bit the bullet and gave it a go.

I now have glorious multi channel playback and recording via my E-mu audiodock, so I have taken the opportunity to throw together a few recordings of my poetry. The first couple were straight recordings with a bit of reverberation added for ambience.

Virility

The Tree I Wish I’d Been

The most recent is a full on four and a half minutes of sequenced sound and samples

A Rude Awakening

If you are viewing this on the site you’ll see the above links as little embedded mp3 players, courtesy of the very smart wpaudio plugin.

timhodson.com has been revamped with a new look and more stuff.  I am working on putting more content on there, so things will grow over time, but for now there is a taster in all but one of the areas.

Highlights might be…

• The Langdale Heights page
• The scripts section
• Some poetry
• A few photographs

And, of course, I eat my own dog food… Several sections of the site are powered by my increasingly popular wordpress plugin blog-in-blog (over 2000 downloads and counting)  that allows you to show posts on pages as part of the content. I use it for the ‘Writing’ subsections, and for the updates on the home page.

Enjoy

A few folks have pointed out the Lookybook beta. Some though have slightly missed the point. This is an interesting example of an online store that allows you to have a look at exactly what you get if you buy. It has links to del.icio.us, and other social sharing sites that allow you to spread the word-of-mouth that will sell their books.

I am sure it is not, as some people seem to think, a source of free books to view online.

However, it is rather a nice example of what you can do if you take a bit of a risk and open up your content.

Now imagine the lookybook interface as the interface to your junior library catalogue!