What I've been doing.

Seems there's a resurgence in posting right about now and it's making me feel guilty that I haven't posted anything for a quarter of a year. No, I'm not dead, but I have been stupidly busy. One of the things I have been busy doing is this - www.betheatslocal.org. I meant for it to be a videoblog, but it turns out text blogging is much quicker to fit in around the demands of making pastry and poaching eggs. I have some videos for it in the pipeline though. Maybe I'll even make an effort to post videos here... You never know.

Jon Snow and the digital revolution

Big Media knows it too! Jon Snow talking about the digital revolution.

Reclaim the web

My housemate Chris and I are organising an un-conference called Reclaim the Web. It's a place for techies and activists to get together to work out how to use web technologies to 'make the world a better place' (hey, you gotta have lofty ideals or else you'll never get anywhere). We're gonna run it along three strands this year; practical workshops, short sharp presentations followed by organic open spaces discussions.

It's the third Reclaim the Web that's been held and the first one that I have been involved in organising. I'm so psyched about it. We're going to have presentations on mobile tech, vlogging workshops and who knows what open spaces discussions.

Semanal08 - Climates - Browse a huge range here

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I was watching this video from the Common People when I noticed a curious ad at the bottom. Ebay, for all your climate needs...

Semanal #? - The proper way to remove a bottom bracket

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You know its serious when you need a scaffolding bar to fix your bike. This is at Cranks, the DIY bike mechanics where I volunteer. Cranks people, if you find this and you don't want your face on the internet, please let me know and I'll take it down.

Bottling it

Ok. I bottled it. It was becoming obvious from Ubuntu forums that most of the video editors for it are a bit crap, so I just bought Sony Vegas Platinum Edition. I'll clean up my computer and put this on and see how I go. Maybe my editing problems will be solved. When I get brave, I might try partitioning the drive and install Ubuntu that way. At the moment I really need to solve my editing problems - it's becoming pressing. Once I am in a happy editing place, then I'll try to educate myself on the finer points of hard-drives and have a go.

(Beth weeps as she is sucked back into the machine).

Semanal #4 - Wood Slick

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LOTS OF SWEARING, DON'T READ IF YOU HAVE A SENSITIVE CONSTITUTION.

Recently, you may have seen me go a little bit crazy on Twitter about the wood slick that washed up along the Sussex (and further) coastline. In Worthing, they had piles of the stuff, much higher than your head, but here in Brighton we had less of it. I went down to the beach the day after it made the news (but about a week after the ship, the Ice Prince, went down off Portland Bill - treacherous waters!). I was all fired up from being made to go out onto the street to do 'market research' in my Women in Social Enterprise course - I wanted to talk to people. So I did. I talked to lots of people and got some lovely footage, but unfortunately, because my computer's such a dumb-fuck piece of machinery, I couldn't post it... it was too big and I can't compress. So, this is what you get for now.

My problems are these. I can't use Moviemaker to compress because it won't accept the MP4s that my Xacti produces. If I use a codec to change them to AVIs then it used to partially load them and then crash. Now it tells me I am missing a codec needed to put them in at all. I also have Adobe Premier. It doesn't recognise my camera (possibly because I am not using a firewire), so I have been trying to import footage rather than capture it. I can import it, but I lose the sound. I have no idea why.

This has been an insurmountable headfuck for me for months. So much so that I would try to sort it out and it would defeat me, and I would retreat with my tail between my legs, vowing never to videoblog again. I haven't edited anything properly (i.e. not in camera) since about October. There's loads that I want to do, but I just can't do it at the moment. The computer has been winning up until tonight when I finally decided that the bastard thing would not beat me.

Thus, I have decided to do the unthinkable and install Ubuntu. This is, for me, a rash decision. I am not techy. I am what you might call the Man in the Street. I don't know what a command line is, though I understand that I am going to have to understand what this is. I might melt my computer and my mind by doing this, but both are essentially fried anyway, so it can't get that much worse. I like that there are forums where people want to help you and where they have a specific bit for absolute beginners. I like that it's free and open. Windows, frankly, can go screw itself... well it can in a week or so maybe, when I've saved all my data (have to organise time to do this around jiving, running and pond building). Fuck, I hope this works.