So, I’m now running on Wordpress 1.5.
Not to much to report. I’m personally a big fan of the new theme – nice and clean, and looks uniformly good across the different browsers I use. The upgrade process was also a snap – copy in the new files, point my browser to upgrade.php and that was that!
Yet to see much in the way of new functionality – I’m particularly keen to see how good this version is at fending off comment spam. Stay tuned….
Never one to be on the bleeding edge (not through lack of trying – its just the edges I keep picking turn out not to be the bleeding ones 
), I dabbled into the wonderful world of podcasting today.
Neat – very neat.
The catalyst was JJJ (the OZ national, indie-yet-government-run radio station) advertising that they were getting into podcasting, including a “best of the week” 30 minute podcast. Now, I’m thinking these things are a “killer app” for the commuter set. Some of my Sydney friends tell me of a 70 minute commute each way – loading up on a few 30 minute podcasts would while that otherwise useless time away.
Now I a) live in a much smaller town where commutes of more than 30 minutes are almost unheard of, and b) live pretty close to all my current clients. But, what it does let me do is have some more relevant background noise going when I’m doing some telecommuting. Its targeted, so less irritating than, say, the radio. But it doesn’t demand my attention either (well, at least the podcasts I’ve downloaded to date) so it doesn’t interfere with my concentration when I’m working on a problem.
Thus the title – its Radio Next Generation. I’ve picked exactly the sort of programming I want to hear – and I’ll pick when I hear it.
So, my setup is iPodder as the podcasting software, and iTunes as the player. I plan to get some of these on my iPod and see how it fits into life in general – I’m not a fan of people plugging in and tuning out in the office environment, but there are other periods in my day when I have some potential iPod time. I’ll see how I go…..
Notice anything different?
I hope not! But theres always the chance…. I’ve just spent a merry hour or so transferring this blog over to a new web server. The process was straightforward – just a bit lengthy what with installing the whole LAMP family, backing up and restoring databases, copying configs and the like.
But it all appears to be up and running, blog history intact.
The new web server for the blogs is one of these Book PCs – a completely fanless system using the Eden low power CPUs. Big difference over the standard tower that I was using for this – obviously a lot quieter, and being the size of a medium-sized dictionary, a lot smaller too!
And on the hippy front, I’m expecting quite a power saving – modern Intel CPUs can consume around 150 watts – so, around 3.6Kwh per day. And thats not counting all the other power sources in the case. From memory, these Eden things draw around 7 watts (so 0.17Kwh per day). Of course, there’s a cost – this model runs at 533 Mhz. I’ll be interested to see how it handles the load….