TechJam

Well this is a whole week late yikes!

Due to finals coming up last week for my class I was pre-occupied with those to write this but I sit here tonight on January 18th at 11:18pm pulling double duty with episode 173 and 174 reviews, so if it ends up late in the afternoon of the 19th when these post you will know why

This episode was focused a program called Hydrogen which allows you to easily program a drum beat that can be used many different things including just having fun. While talking about the program, Eric trys to lay down a cool guitar track for Robbie to code to.  By the end of the feature segment it was clear that Robbie and Eric were having fun, which really is what this shows about at least in part.  While hydrogen is primarily a linux application, an older version does exists for windows.  Fair warning however this program can become extremely addicting, consuming most of your time.

Hydrogen also includes a variety of features, most of which Robbie did not have time to talk about, the biggest feature on Hydrogen however the ability to download drum kits. While downloading trumpets may not sound like a very big feature, it allows the user to extend the sound of the program by offering different types of drums, and even mixing and matching different drum kits together.  I should also note that Robbie made it look extremely easy to lay down a basic song and hydrogen, however I have found somebody that lacks in music experience such as myself might find a little more challenging.  Also you have the ability to export songs achieve made on hydrogen, allowing you to share them with other people that have the program.

Hillary also made an in studio appearance on the show this week, as usual she did the news segment on the show other than that though surprisingly she was relatively quiet.

Robbie also mentions his favorite audio editing program Goldwave which to unlock the full feature set costs a small amount of money.  I’ve never use the program and personally, so I can’t say how easy it is to use I have to go based on what I can see, which looks pretty easy.

Also mentioned on the show was the fact that the sequel to Wolfienstein, Enemy Territory, was three and available for linux.  After watching this show I tried to run that program on my linux machine, and found that it doesn’t seem to play well with a lot of the newer versions of linux.  To this day a week later I still haven’t been able to get to work, I’m not sure if it’s just my machine or if it’s just that the binaries are old.

Also Cedega was announced to be shutting down their service, they are offering refunds for those currently under a active subscription. If you wish for an alternative to Cedega you can try Crossover by Codeweavers which is also a paid program but offers similar functionality to Cedega also running on WINE.

Once again un-raid was mentioned for an easy way to manage a backup server, or just a general files are.  All in all the show was of great show packed full of useful information, and is always a little bit of humor thrown in, as always the banter between Robbie, Eric, Hillary helped break up the technical parts of the show, this makes it feel like you’re chatting with a friend and not watching somebody telling you how to do stuff.

Watch at the Episode 173 now

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Tags: cat5, category5, eric kidd, hillary rumball, linux, platform, Robbie Ferguson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.