Author: Kevie Macphail

The duo of Kevie and Andrew return to TuxJam for the first time in 2017 and they aim to please with a show crammed with a mix reviews, music and Scottish whit.

Kevie and Andrew take a look at Gecko Linux (with the Budgie desktop) followed by an in depth look at the Android browser JumpGo. The focus then shifts to Notepads applications for Android with a comprehensive list including: uNote, TAG Notepad, NoNonsense Notes, CrocodileNotes,Notepad.

All this with the usual mix of creative commons music, the tracks included in this episode are:

• Little Liar by Roller Genoa
• My World by We Are FM
• Feeling Full of Joy (Piano solo) by Cem Music Project
• People Watching by Nicolas Falcon
• Root Cause by Rob Kosh

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In the first TuxJam of 2017, Kevie takes charge of the ship for a solo voyage. But not wishing to disappoint the loyal listeners, he tries to maintain the regular duties.  For the new year there seems to have been a tidal wave of new releases including Bodhi, Scientific Linux, Parsix, Tails, BitKey, Vinux, AntiX, Quirky and AryaLinux.

Kevie then goes onto giving a Linux distro Debex a test to see how it fares on the wild sees.
Entertainment is important to a lonely sailor, so the Zgemma H.2S satellite receiver is put to the test to see if it is fit to pass away the hours on board while a sailor can only dream of his fair maiden on some far distant shores.
Messages in a bottle are sent from Chalkahlom and Jim (aka Whistlewright), which turns out to be a hidden gem of buried treasure known as Droid Break.

R2 D2 cafetiere on ThinkGeek. is one that we failed to map and sailed by her on the previous gifts for geeks episode in December.
Along with the (creative commons) sea fairing shanties:

• No Law For the Human Heart by Entrance
• Moonshine Blues by Paolo Orecchia
• Car On A Train by Michael Ellis
• This Old Guitar and Me by Ken Roberts

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Kevie and mcnalu arrive at their half century — show 50! We begin with our usual roundup of recent and lesser known linuxes on distrowatch. We then review the small but fleet-footed Tiny Core Linux distro. Kevie then discusses his experience with Amazon’s Fire phone. Next, Andrew discusses how the nifty entr command can be used to get various GUI applications to work together. We’re delighted to have substantial feedback to review from the Jolla phone review in TuxJam 49 and news of this year’s Glasgow podcrawl.

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In a return to the original TuxJam format, Kevie takes a look at Ikey Doherty’s work on EvolveOS and the Budgie desktop. The Radio Tray applet goes down well with the radio loving host. Being involved with Linux and podcasting means that you become a frequent visitor to IRC, Kevie looks at two Android IRC: AiCiA and YAAIC. Along with the usual mix of Creative Commons music. The tracks included in this episode are:

• Out On The Road by Persson
• Detroit by Great White Buffalo
• Madly Deeply by Melanie Ungar
• Reclaim the Streets by Skankshot
• Don’t Spend Your Money In The Game by Lele Rambelli
• Before We Said Goodbye by Steve Raphael

Kevie’s HPR episodes:

• CD Rippers
• Success with Students

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Kevie and Andrew (aka McNalu) begin by reviewing a bumper crop of interesting distro releases listed on distrowatch.com. Kevie then gives us a revised opinion of some software he reviewed in previous episodes based on longer-term use, and blames Andrew for making him try the vector graphics application Karbon. The rest of the show is taken over with a review of the Debian-based Tanglu GNU/Linux distro, which has been around now for about a year. Kevie tries out both its Gnome and KDE variants, and Andrew, being a day-to-day KDE user, moves out of his comfort-zone to try Tanglu with Gnome 3. Andrew mentions a game he’s been playing – the splendidly titled Sir, You Are Being Hunted – and then explains why he has decided to take out a life membership of the magnatune.com music service, which he often uses as a source of creative commons-licensed music for TuxJam. We end with an appeal for more feedback as unusually we didn’t receive any for TuxJam 37 🙁 Your comments and suggestions for reviews and of music to play are very welcome!

Creative commons tracks played:

• Eye of the storm by Modern pitch
• Tumble mat by Sinkhole
• Alone (it’s not so bad) by I’m not left handed
• Just leave him by Jim Gaven
• The difference (calming down) by Mystic crock

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Andrew (aka mcnalu) and Kevie continue the TuxJam tradition of a special festive episode that brings you suggestions of gifts for geeks, or indeed gifts that might help bring out the inner-geek in a friend or family-member. Before we get to those, Kevie talks on his positive experience of self-proclaimed “lovely” linux distribution LXLE.

Gifts for Geeks

Stocking fillers (£0 to £20)

• Linux PC case badges
• 4 in 1 pen
• Titanium Spork
• Pacman bottle opener
• Adafruit GEMMA – wearable tech £5
• Learn to Solder book £4
• Raspberry Pi camera board

Mid-range (£20 to £150)

• Chromecast
• Matchstick (official site)
• R2D2 USB hub
• Turntable or Tape deck – Beware of cheapo USB ones – try your local charity/goodwill store instead!
• Flux Capacitor USB car charger
• Flux Capacitor Watch
• Linux Voice subscription
• Ogg compatible media player – Listen to Dave Morriss talk about his Audio player collection on HPR
• magnatune.com subscription 3 months = $45 STOP PRESS: free Christmas Magnatune album download just released.
• Raspberry Pi B+ starter kit

Top-end (£150 or more)

• Fuze – retro 8 bit computer kit powered by a Rasperberry Pi
• Chromebook or better yet, buy a laptop, remove its proprietary OS and install Linux and add a Linux Inside sticker
• Vega Smartwatch, a completely independent android smartwatch.
• Kindle Voyage
• Bose headphones/mobile speakers

Festive Creative Commons tracks played

• Silent night by Sleeping Sky
• Brrr, It’s frickin’s freezing outside by Mr & Mrs Smith
• A very Star Wars Christmas by Nerds with Guitars
• Winter Time by Chiefmonks
• Jingle Bells by Anup*

*If you liked this track, you can download it along with the Magnatune Christmas album for free.

Wishing you a Merry Christrmas and a Happy New Year from Kevie and Andrew!

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Kevie and Andrew (aka mcnalu) start off with a round up of recent releases of lesser-known distros on distrowatch.com. They review Neptune OS 4.2 which was released just after 4.1 was reviewed in TuxJam 35, and find only slight improvements on what was already a well-crafted linux distro. They’re then joined by Gordon aka ThistleWeb from our sibling podcast Crivins to talk about Trelby, a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) package for writing scripts and screenplays. If you’d like to know a bit more, give Gordon’s Hacker Public Radio (HPR) show on this topic a listen. Andrew (the complete graphics amateur) then reviews the vector graphics software Karbon and is quizzed by Kevie, who makes a living from teaching young folk to use graphics software. How Karbon compares to Inkspace, it’s main FOSS rival, is left for a future episode. Kevie then reviews streamripper, which, as the name suggests, is a tool for recording audio streams. We then review our feedback and pass on the invite to the HPR new year special show.

Creative commons tunes played in this episode were:

Rise by Rob Warren – suggested by Pete Daniels https://loadaverage.org/pete
David & Golliath by Wooden Legs – suggested by Tim Dobson https://twitter.com/tdobson
I’m Down, Down, Down by Yuvalain
Don’t Stop by Tradmark
Answer My Call by The Way I Am
All I Wanna Be Is Happy by A Beautiful Tomorrow

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We start, as always, with a review of recent but less well-known releases on distrowatch.com. We then review Neptune OS 4.1 – a KDE GNU/Linux distribution with Debian underpinnings and a pleasing array of multimedia applications, particularly for audio. (By sheer bad lack, it turns out that Neptune OS 4.2 was released just after we recorded the podcast on 24 Oct 2014.) We then discuss a lighter-weight alternative to Audacity called MHWaveEdit that both Kevie and Andrew (aka McNalu) have used to edit other podcasts they’ve recorded. We finish up by discussing feedback we’ve received since the last show.

We are delighted that all the music used on this show came from listeners’ suggestions, and bemused that one suggestion has come from a bot. We’ve still got more to use, so be patient if your suggestion hasn’t been included yet.

Creative commons tunes played in this episode were:

Sweet Machine by Eyedrop – Question http://oracle.skilledtests.com/question
Lemmings in Love by Pornophonic – Eric Duhamel https://loadaverage.org/ericxdu23
Ophelia’s Song by Musetta – Laurel Russwurm http://s.russwurm.org/laurelrusswurm
Discount Store by Dan Bryk – Alister Christman https://twitter.com/mralc

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After a summer break, TuxJam is back with its mix of creative commons music and reviews of lesser known free and open source (FOSS) projects brought to you by Kevie and Andrew (aka McNalu). We do our round of recent releases documented on distrowatch.com. Then we review Slackware-based live distro Austrumi, which Kevie has used for a while, but which is new to long-time Slackware afficiando Andrew. Next, Kevie reviews a *gasp* non-FOSS game called FarSky in which you have to recover from a submarine disaster whilst stopping to gaze up in wonder at the fauna of the oceans.Then Andrew talks about Voxelands which is a fork of Minetest, the FOSS game inspired by Minecraft. Voxelands drops Minetest’s modding capabilities but aims to deliver a more playable game. We then go through our usual feedback section, noting some positive comments made about our Hacker Public Radio special TuxJam 33 1/3. And, have you ever wondered what two hungover Scotsmen sound like the morning after a podcrawl around the pubs of Glasgow? Wonder no more!

Creative commons tunes played in this episode were:

In the Rain – Joseph Connelly
The White Lady – Dead White Man
I Breathe – SAKTO
Hand Me the Crown – Julia Haltigan
For Life – Trundicho
These Nights – Modern Pitch

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TuxJam 33 starts off with its usual round-up of less well known Linux distro releases on distrowatch. You can hear Andrew eating humble pie because he’s completely forgotten to do a previously agreed review of the distribution SolydXK. Kevie on the other hand has bravely moved outside is comfort zone to try out the KDE version, SolydK, and Andrew slightly redeems himself by offering a commentary on KDE. Andrew reviews a lightweight alternative to the audio application Audacity called mhWaveEdit– which he discovered thanks to Beeza in HPR1514, Kevie recounts his experience with FireFox OS on the Geeksphone Revolution and we move on to discuss prior experiences on the ZTE Open and can’t help but discuss other unsettling news from Mozilla, in particular its recent, reluctant stance on DRM support. The feedback section is larger than normal due to the favourable comments arising from our HPR special TuxJam 31, and the raging controversy over the spelling of whisky arises again.

Creative commons tunes played in this episode were:

• Don’t Forget To Turn the Lights Out by Kelly Allyn
• Perfect Combination by NODREAMS
• Keep Your Smile by The Homeless Bones
• Manhattan Project by Dennis Logan
• Television Song by Bryan Dunn

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