Temporarily a solo act

Last Friday I recorded a quick solo edition of Dogear Nation. We are usually a three-man team (myself, Michael Rowe and Michael Martine) but we had some problems aligning schedules, and since I’d been away from the show the previous two weeks it made sense for me to pick up the slack.

Check out Episode 96 of Dogear Nation and let me know what you think – it was slightly odd not having anyone to bounce a conversation off, but it was a lot of fun editing it into something coherent at the end of the process

Not a peep

Oh yeah. I know you come to The Lost Outpost for your highbrow technical information and photography stuff. Here’s something totally different!

On Friday’s Dogear Nation, Michael Martine announced that we are going to be sponsoring something called “Peepfest”, an event apparently dedicated to marshmallow things called Peeps.

The rest of the podcast crew was amazed that I had no idea what these Peeps things are. Well, you know what – they aren’t sold in the UK so, no, I ha[ve|d] no idea what they are. Never a peep has passed my lips, you might say, in one sense. It turns out that there’s an entire subculture dedicated to them, though – most impressive is this gallery of dioramas featured on the Washington Post site (my favourite being “May the Peeps Be with You”, closely followed by “The Peepsons”).

Crazy, crazy people. And a fun interlude for a blogger.

Update: somewhat alarmingly, I’m now receiving peeps-related submissions, like this study of the research behaviour of peeps. Enough already!

Update: OK, I’m getting reports that these things are not as yummy as they are made out to be. So I’m instituting my first ever poll. Let me know where you stand on the peeps controversy with just a couple of clicks!

Final update: initial poll results indicate that either folks are as clueless about Peeps as I am, or that they are not the nicest sweets in the world. Also, somewhat inevitably, I’ve discovered that the Peeps themselves are actually on Twitter…

Veronica Belmont on Dogear Nation

Image courtesy of Veronica Belmont under a CC license

Rounding off a very cool week which started with Blue Fusion and would otherwise have ended with TVSMC, on Friday’s edition of Dogear Nation we were very lucky to have Veronica Belmont as our special guest.

For those not familiar with Veronica, I first became aware of her when she was hosting the Maholo Daily podcast. She has since gone on to present Tekzilla on Revision 3 and Qore on the PlayStation Network. Bottom line? She knows her tech (just check out some of the stuff she’s done!) and was a great guest. She was also patient enough to bear with us and get over a, um, technical hitch, which meant that the show runs a little shorter than usual – ask Michael what I’m talking about!

So it was a great show, well worth checking out. If you’re not doing it already, why not tag some of the sites you come across this week with ‘dogear-nation’ on del.icio.us? I’m having a couple of weeks off, so the Michaels will need something to talk about!

The blogging / online network diaspora

As my online presence thins out, I often wonder how best to tie it all together. Here’s a meta-post showing where my content has been lately.

eightbar
It has been a while, but I’ve been re-establishing a presence on the eightbar blog lately, talking about haptics, and also about social reality gaming.

Home Camp
The next Home Camp is coming up, planned for April, so the blog is coming back to life after a short hibernation. One of the big news items was yesterday’s unveiling of Google PowerMeter.

Dogear Nation
I’m not going to list every post and podcast episode over on the Dogear Nation blog, but I’ve noted before that I’m a regular host this year and have been posting entries and videos to the blog too.

Video Content
I should probably blog more of the video stuff I create, but tend to highlight the more interesting videos from time to time rather than posting everything here on the blog. My YouTube channel may be of interest. Eventually, I’ve got a grander plan for my video content, but that will have to wait.

(update) Convergence
I just thought of one other thing which I’ve not mentioned around here, but seems to fit into this post. In spite of producing content in a number of places, I’ve also been working on online identity. For a while I’ve been interested in getting the andypiper.com domain but it never seems to be available, and thus I have the .co.uk alternative, which redirects here. I also noted that I picked up pipr.me.uk as a bit of a joke recently, which currently points here as well. I have andypiper.tv too (an independent site currently hosting TwtrCtr). Finally, I have theandypiper.com and theandypiper.co.uk redirecting here too – inspired by the very awesome Geoff Smith, and also by one of the first customer engagements I went on after joining IBM, where I was asked “you’re not THE Andy Piper, are you?”.

So, in the style of Dogear Nation… my final thought for this post is, what is the collective noun for Internet domains? I’m wondering about ‘dominion’, ‘kingdom’ or ‘bailiwick’…

Co-hosting Dogear Nation in 2009

In the past, I’ve posted a blog entry here whenever I’ve been a guest on the Dogear Nation podcast.

Well, not any more. That’s because this year, I’m one of the regular co-hosts of the podcast, and we’d only end up with a weekly entry over here as well as on the Dogear Nation blog and the show itself in iTunes.

Dogear Nation is a listener-driven podcast, so we’d love to have you on board with us. Throughout the week, listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. We record the show each Friday, picking out your best news stories from around the web. The content is varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics. Our regular segments are “the obligatory 3D Internet section” and “Mac-a-rooni” but we also talk about coffee, gaming, the environment, social software, books, gadgets, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what our listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you do tag something which we choose for the show, we’ll be sure to give you a shout-out.

Each episode is usually about 30-45 minutes (perfect for a commute!) and we have a lot of fun recording it If you haven’t tried us before, it would be great if you dipped in to check it out, and let us know what you think.

In the office

Taken by Aaron Kim in Hursley today, shared on Twitpic. Click through for the non-thumbnail version, since I apparently can’t display the full image from Twitpic here on my site.

Features of note – Martin Packer wearing his zSeries Wordle t-shirt… Age of Conversation 2 on the desk… me wearing my Dogear Nation t-shirt

W2E Berlin sound and vision

Photography

I’ve posted photos from the Web 2.0 Expo in two sets on Flickr.

Images from the Expo itself:

Images from team events, and round and about the city:

I’ve made all of the images Creative Commons Attribution-ND.

A note on conference photography. I decided to travel light as I was only going for a few days, so I only packed my compact digital camera instead of the DSLR. I also decided to take my Eye-Fi card, reasoning that I’d be able to hook up to the conference wifi and just get the images straight up onto Flickr.

When I first arrived at the Expo, I found I couldn’t configure the card to connect to the network. On day two, it finally did connect, so it was obviously just an issue with the wifi. Unfortunately this continued… so the card would sporadically connect, but not always finish uploading an image. As a result the images are out-of-order in my main Flickr stream (partially fixed by having the sets sorted into chronological order). As a note to myself, I might well reduce the image size in future, since I was shooting at full size and the images were ~2-3Mb which didn’t upload fast.

I was also then faced with the issue of editing and tagging. Flickr offers Picnick integration which is OK… but the range of enhancement options is far more limited than I’m used to in Lightroom, so what with the low light and often wanting to avoid distracting presenters with flash, the photos are hardly my best efforts. Tagging also seemed to take a long time, although I have opened the images for tagging by any Flickr member, so other people can help out there… I already started to trawl for other images from the conference, and note that many of them have restricted permissions preventing me from adding tags or notes

Podcasting

When I got back to the UK on Friday I joined the Dogear Nation regulars for a chat about the event and all the latest web news. Episode 73 has just been posted, so check it out.

A full write-up?

It’s coming. Somewhen soon…

Dogear Nation #71 – partially Pipr…

By the time you read this you should be able to get hold of Dogear Nation episode 71 (in theory… I won’t be online to check when this post appears on the blog).

In case you are wondering what Dogear Nation is… it’s a podcast, run by my good friends Michael Martine and Michael Rowe. Listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. At the end of the week, the Michaels take a run through the interesting news from around the web. The show is fairly varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics: the 3D Internet and virtual worlds, coffee, gaming, social software, books, libraries and Kindle e-readers, Macs and PCs, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what the listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you haven’t tried it before, take a listen – the show is usually about 30-45 minutes and we have a lot of run recording it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy listening!

If you’re wondering about the name of the show – inside IBM we have a social bookmarking service called Dogear, and the guys started out running the show inside the firewall. They’ve migrated to the outside, but the name has stuck

I’ve been an occasional guest so far, and I’ve also been getting increasingly involved in the running of the website recently, rediscovering forgotten web management skills and learning a whole set of new ones around the wonderful world of podcasting!

On Friday night I joined the Michaels about halfway through the recording, and we had a little audio issue where I couldn’t hear everything so in a couple of places I lost track of the conversation… but it was awesome to be able to call in and chat about the latest tags. I always have a blast when I get to join in.

I’m looking forward to being back on the show in a week or so to talk about the news from next week’s Web 2.0 Expo.

By the way, you can also follow the team on Twitter, if you’re so inclined.

Dogear Nation housekeeping

My friend Michael Rowe dropped me a line last week to ask if I’d be able to help with a spot of website maintenance around the Dogear Nation website. It has been a while since I’ve had to do much in the way of fiddling with website backends – WordPress.com does all of that for me, really – so I flexed my fingers and thought I’d give it a shot. Here are some notes on what I had to go through.

I needed to update the blog from an older version of WordPress to the latest 2.6.x release. The first stumbling block I encountered was a lack of shell access to the hosting service… instead they offer a web console based on cPanel. This system is actually OK, once you get use to how it all works, although everything would have been far faster at the command line. The web interface offers a level of “automated” application installation through something called Fantastico, which showed me that an upgrade to a newer (but not the newest) version of WordPress could be done automatically… but that I’d potentially lose any customisations and plugins.

Being a podcast, Dogear Nation does use some plugins to extend the basic WordPress experience. In particular it uses podPress. I thought I’d research whether this would cause me any issues if I upgraded, and sure enough it turns out that podPress doesn’t currently work with WordPress 2.6.x and that the plugin author hasn’t been able to release a fixed version yet. Luckily there’s a workaround which involves disabling the new feature in WP 2.6 which clashes with it – a simple switch in the wp-config.php file.

I wanted to check that the workaround plus the upgrade wouldn’t hurt the site, and fortunately there was another instance of WordPress available on the box… but I didn’t have an admin ID. I did have access to the WP MySQL database for that instance though, so I was able to hack myself an administrator ID through a couple of SQL INSERTs into the appropriate tables. Once I’d done that, I disabled the plugins, switched off the revisions stuff in wp-config.php, deleted the older 2.x.x files and replaced them with those from WP 2.6.2 – and things seemed to work, once I’d re-enabled plugins. Since that was a success, I then went ahead and applied the change across the site.

The only thing was that Fantastico continued to think that an older version was installed, so I had to modify an additional file in the install (fantversion.php) to reflect the updated WordPress level… which has now resulted in the system informing me that any further upgrades must be manual. WordPress makes upgrades so easy, I’m really not too scared by that.

While I was at it, I thought I’d make a few more cosmetic changes:

Dogear Nation iPhone screenshot

• the site now has a favicon
• the site now has a Web Clip icon, so if you add a link to the home screen of an iPhone or iPod Touch, a nice Dogear Nation logo shows up. This is a simple case of putting a file called apple-touch-icon.png in the top-level directory.
• talking of iPhones… I’ve installed the very excellent iWPhone plugin, which means that the content is now optimised for Mobile Safari, whilst still working as before in desktop browsers.
• the links in the sidebar now point to various other places where tags can be created (as well as the traditional del.icio.us)
• I’ve locked off a few files that shouldn’t have been accessible, tweaked robots.txt, fixed some typos, updated the podcast description in iTunes, set the home page to show the last 10 posts … basically I’ve done a bit of tidying

An interesting exercise, and hopefully the results are good. As an occasional contributor to the show, and a regular listener, do let me know if you have ideas that might be useful – happy to have a look at implementing additional improvements if the audience demands it!

Another Dogear Dance

It was my pleasure to join the two Michaels on Dogear Nation on Friday. If you listen to the episode you’ll pick up on a bunch of the things I’ve been doing lately that I’ve not gotten around to blogging about… such as our recent acquisition of a Wii + Wii Fit + Mario Kart, and my iPhone 3G. Oh, and there’s some mention of that Roo Reynolds guy, too…

Dogear Nation guest spot

I was able to join the two Michaels (Rowe and Martine) on Friday’s recording of Dogear Nation[1]… Matt Simpson was unfortunately absent, but we still had a good talk around a bunch of topics including last week’s Technical Leadership Exchange, Twitter, social networks for conferences, file sharing, Congressional hearings on Second Life, and Guitar Hero. I think this was the third time I’ve been on the show and it’s always a pleasure. I blame my memory dropouts and umming and erring on latent jet-lag, though.

Check out the new Dogear Nation website and grab the episode direct, or do what I do and subscribe in iTunes!

[1] a weekly technology and innovation podcast, bringing you your dose of cutting-edge tagged websites

Another Dogear Nation guest slot

I was happy to be able to join Michael, Michael and Matt as a guest on their regular Dogear Nation podcast on Friday. I’d been a guest before back in July when we talked about the HackDay event in London… this time we covered the UK launch of the iPhone, Leopard, Roo’s recent talk at the IET, Identity 2.0, and various other things… to a soundtrack of Michael Rowe in a NYC cab

NB you can also get the Dogear Nation dashboard widget for OS X, which I hope should work on both Tiger and Leopard.

Technorati tags: Dogear Nation, Leopard, iPhone, Roo Reynolds, podcast, Identity 2.0