Frankly speaking ...

Do you listen to podcasts? Do you want to manage these outside of normal web-surfing time? Do you want easy configuration? Then podracer is the software you need. Podracer was written by Lorenzo Taylor. It is a simple command line tool that has only two plain text configuration files: $HOME/.podracer/podracer.conf – configure podracer behaviour $HOME/.podracer/subscriptions – the list of subscriptions configuration This file is used to customise podracers download behaviour. With sane defaults, the only settings that I changed were, poddir – the default root location to save podcasts into And two other entries indicating where the log files are to be recorded. subscriptions Like the name suggests this a plain text file listing the podcasts you subscribe to. The format is simple: RSS feed <tab> target directory relative to poddir As this is a plain text file, where comments can be added by appending “#” to a line, it becomes a useful historical record of podcasts I ...

Family and friends depend on me to provide support for their Linux PC's. What is great is that does not require that  much support. But it does mean keeping at least one step ahead. A variety of issues are at stake: Do all applications still work?  Are the devices still supported?  Will the user interface changes be problematic?  Are there new must have features? So, while most stayed back on stable UNR 10.04 systems, I charged ahead to see if the upgrade path was safe ... Upgrading from UNR 10.04 to 10.10 introduced the Unity desktop. For the netbook form factor, this desktop is excellent. It uses limited screen space well. It can be run with minimal use of the trackpad. It looks good. It is very responsive. All the applications that are required to work, do. Devices are recognised and work. So all looks good!  But, as 10.10 was not a LTS release I recommended holding back until 11.04 came out. So I was very eager to see wh...