Interesting questions raised over at the journal of IT and International Development in a special issue published today: Open Development. I’m still reading it, will share thoughts when I’m done.
Yeah, it's a Windows screenshot, but it works just as well in Linux, honestly.
If you do a lot of interviews, either you have to get very good at shorthand or you’ll spend a lot of time with a pair of headphones clamped to your ears trying to figure out if the last sentence on the tape was was “ending cheap loans” or “send in the clowns”. Transcription is a necessary, and the part of the job I hate the most. It’s also very important – I find that even when my notetaking is at its finest, there’s almost always something I catch on a tape which adds something important to a story or angle which I’d missed before.
ExpressScribe isn’t open source, but it is free and the best transcription software I’ve ever used by a long way. There’s versions for Windows, OSX and Linux which are all identical and simple to install – in fact it’s one of the only Linux programs I know of that has a straightforward Windows style installer rather than a .deb or .rpm package or required repository. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it does mean that anyone coming to Linux from Windows should be able to set it up without too many problems.
The two issues you may have are that NCH, the developer, has stopped linking to the Linux version from it’s front page – but can download it directly from this link - and that you may need to remind it where your sound card is occassionally. I find that every now and then hitting a global hotkey for ‘Back 5 seconds’, for example, will jump the audio forward by a random amount. If this happens, go to Options>Playback and change the sound device from ‘Default’ to the name of your soundcard (it’ll be listed in the drop down menu). A third, minor point is that it’s worth manually clearing the cache of old recording now and then if you’ve archived them somewhere else.
Otherwise, Express Scribe really is great. You can load just about any kind of audio file (WAV, MP3, AAC, etc, and even some proprietary formats) and setting up hotkeys just works. It even supports a footpedal, and I’ve been toying with the idea of making one from an old mouse.
For reference, I bind around the ALT key and the number pad or cursors because they’re easy to reach with your little fingers when typing – ALT+0 is pause and rewind five seconds, ALT+left is rewind 5 seconds and ALT+right is forward 5 seconds.
Other posts in The open source journalist’s toolkit: Build a multimedia journalism studio for free.
Look. Information properly layered and easy to digest.
Perhaps it’s because it was the first Twitter client I ever properly used, or perhaps it’s because it was coded by a friend, but I find Journotwit an indispensable (and free) tool for researching stories or staying on top of Twitter.
It has two key advantages over anything else I know of, including the better known Tweetdeck, Seesmic et al. Firstly, it’s entirely browser based. Whatever machine you log in from, just open Firefox, Safari, Opera or Explorer and your Journotwit desktop will be exactly the same as you left it, with the same columns displayed, the same searches or pand you don’t have to download anything.
The main reason I use it, though, is because it’s the only Twitter client I know that supports a grid-based layout for columns, arranging them both horizontally and vertically. To see the same number of feeds in a Tweetdeck screen as I can see on Journotwit would involve stretching it out across the bottom of two monitors. It’s such a simple but effective design tweak, I’m amazed so few other clients do it (Tweetgrid, obviously given its name, is the only other one I’m aware of). It’s a far more effective way of breaking Twitter down into manageable chunks.
Tweetgrid does something similar, but opens names and searches in a new window, rather than a new column.
Journotwit is also really fast these days. New columns and searches are added with a single mouse click on a name or hashtag, and it intelligently splits status updates into two different branches – one for comments and one for anything that contains a link (ie. potential news). You can’t use Journotwit to monitor Facebook or LinkedIn, but I don’t really use either of those to monitor trends and quickly run realtime searches anyway.
As much as I rely on Journotwit, there are two other Twitter tools I find essential. First off, there’s no build in desktop notification in Journotwit (although there is a sound when a new @ mention or message is displayed), so Ubuntu’s built in Gwibber client is handy for quick views of direct messages. Secondly, the mobile version doesn’t really work at all for me: the scrolling between columns or content are both done vertically, so it’s a bit visually confusing. Out and about I prefer Tweetdeck’s iPhone app – if only there was a way of synching columns between that and desktop Journotwit, I would be in Twitter heaven.
You can follow me at @adamoxford, by the way.
Don't stick with the default view. Make Kdenlive work harder for you.
Good technology is about reducing costs and – at least as far as journalism is concerned – making distribution easier. There are lots of people starting to make a living from running independent news sites by choosing to focus on a hyperlocal or niche subject and producing excellent quality work using low cost tools. The huge cost of production associated with print press has been effectively removed by netbooks, video capable DSLRs or just sticking a phone with Audioboo installed up an interviewee’s nose for that quick pithy and instantly bloggable soundbite, and anyone involved in any way with the news industry is trying to figure out what that means.
What surprises me, though, is that so few people look at how they can reduce the costs of production still further by using free or open source software. Even the strongest advocates of ‘citizen journalism’ and the potential of cheap tools for newsgathering and storytelling – like Michael Rosenblum – seem to say that you need a Mac and Final Cut Pro to produce stuff. For all the company’s virtues, there aren’t many people who’d claim Apple’s strength is in value for money (although I still maintain the 23inch iMac is a good deal). A thousand pound piece of video editing software really seems to defeat the object of bootstrap reporting to me.
So I’m going to put together a series of posts inspired by the NGO in a Box idea of the Tactical Technology Collective, which in one download bundles together all the free software – including a Linux operating system – an NGO in the field would need to run its operations from a barebones PC or laptop. It’s slightly odd that I’m starting with video, because that’s not – at the moment – my primary medium by any means. In fact, while I do a lot of scripting work for various people at the moment, I don’t actually shoot much video myself. Partly, that’s because I’ve not really had the time and the writing pays the bills very nicely, thank you very much; and partly it’s because, as a Linux user, professional quality video editing software is few and far between.
So, over the last few weeks I’ve tried everything – Cinelerra, PiTiVi, Kino, Lives, OpenShot, Open Movie, and Kdenlive. I have the added complication that at the moment, I’m using my Panasonic GF1 to produce 720p video, which uses the AVCHD codec and isn’t as widely supported as other DV systems. There’s been a lot of metaphorical hair pulling, but after a lot of playing around with different versions I can confidently say that the latest version of Kdenlive – 0.7.8 – is by far and away the best of the lot, and if it’s correctly configured, as capable as just about anything else on the market.
How do you get it set-up right? The secret is in moving the windows around. Just right click on the border of any pane and you can rearrange tabs, shift windows to slots and customise it to suit your own workflow. Then right click again to lock everything down. It’s fast, and thanks to being built around ffmpeg, supports just about every damn codec on the planet.
Not only is it a really friendly interface thanks to being built on KDE (although I run it on Gnome), it has high end tools for broadcast like per channel histograms and a neat gamut checking feature. More importantly, though, it handles inline clip editing and transcoding really, really well.
Seriously, if you’re editing video on Linux, you need this.
I know this is of niche interest, but the Remember the Milk provider does actually work with version 3.0.3 of Thunderbird. All you do is change the version as described here (the rest of the hack isn’t needed with the latest version of the RTM app). Unless you actually use both apps regularly, you can’t imagine what joy it was to make this discovery this morning.
This probably isn't as exciting for you as it is for me. Also, time to change my desktop background.
Desperate to entertain Tabby on yet another three hour drive to Brighton tomorrow, I decided to load some Charlie and Lola onto my Moblin powered Eee 901. The problem is that as ace as Moblin is, with its sub-20 second boot time, because it’s an Intel sponsored project all the common media codecs for MP3, DivX and so on aren’t in the repositories – unlike Ubuntu or Fedora, there’s no easy way to install them.
This guide helped – and also highlighted how painful it is to alt-tab between running apps in Moblin when cutting and pasting to the terminal. I say it helped, there’s a couple of typos (specifically in the lines “sed -i ‘s/10/11/’ /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora” and “yum install gstreamer-ffmpeg”) but sadly, being a Fedora newb, I’m not entirely sure how. Following the guide threw up an error when trying to install gstreamer-ffmpeg, but I also installed SMPlayer as per the advice in the comments. I don’t know if SMPlayer would work without the bits of the walkthrough that did, if I’m honest, but I’ll try and find time to uninstall everything and find out.
Still, many thanks to the author for making tomorrow’s journey a bit more bearable for the three-year-old.
I’m really enjoying writing the occasional list feature for TechRadar lately, giving me reason to jot down thoughts which I should by rights probably have published here long ago and just got too busy. The latest is a quick introduction to Linux which I hope covers most of the pain points for anyone thinking of switching from Windows – a move I wholeheartedly endorse, natch.
On the busy front, been ludicrously so trying to clear my desk for the Kyrgyzstan trip next week – a feat I’ve almost accomplished and just need to nail down interviews with Orange and Vodafone for a feature due at the end of this week. Otherwise I’m burying my head researching more about the country and the issues I’ll be investigating once there.
No idea what access to WiFi or even a mobile phone is going to be like, but will be doing my best to blog at least once a day and post regular Twitter updates again while I’m out there.
A simple fix for a problem that shouldn't be there
For months now I’ve had an annoying problem with Ubuntu. It boots to Gnome login in less than 30 seconds, but then pauses for a long time before showing the desktop. Through tweaking and fixing I’ve got this down to something reasonable – another 30-40 seconds, but it’s still too long. I’d narrowed the problem down to an error message with PulseAudio, but figured a full reinstall was the only way to fix the machine (and undo all the other bits I’ve fiddled with and lost track of). Not having the time to do that recently, I’d filed it under ‘Things to do’ at some random point in the future.
Except I don’t need to any more. After months of occassional searches, yesterday finally threw up the solution. In order not to trigger a time out error during login, both your user and root apparently need to be members of the groups pulse, pulse-access and pulse-rt. But, for some reason, they’re not by default. At some point in the past I’d added my user to one of these, but not completed the whole set.
Anyway, the upshot is that now everything is working smoothly and perfectly and I’m happy. Anyone else who’s having problems can find a much more detailed troubleshooting guide here.
Finally plucked up the courage to upgrade my main machine to Jaunty and it was an absolutely painless process. Even VMWare is working fine after the kernel upgrade, and that’s the first time that’s ever happened.
I still get a 20-30 pause between the gnome login screen and the desktop appearing though. Something that’s been installed and removed in the past is bugging it out, and the only error I get is a gnome-desktop-panel timeout one. The problem is that this has been related to a Compiz/Nvidia bug – which isn’t the one I’ve got. A clean install is probably the only way to fix it.
Having failed completely to get Tweetdeck working – Adobe AIR not wanting to play happy with Ubuntu – I’m really glad I finally checked out Spode‘s JournoTwit.
JournoTwit, yesterday
Embarrassingly, I had no idea he was such an accomplished coder. This really is a great app, which filters out stories from potential news stories as well as highlighting @ replies, retweets and auto-loading pics. And, there’s a mobile version too.
Even better, it doesn’t require a proprietary format like Adobe AIR to make it work – it’s all done in PHP and Javascript. Of course, it does mean I’m trusting Spode with my login details, but he works for the Telegraph now, so he’s clearly a man of integrity, right?
Photorama
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