User:Klaatu

Klaatu

I'm a Unix and Linux enthusiast and, lately, professional. I'm a Slackware and Red Hat / Fedora user. I dabble in code, I write a lot and have technical articles published in magazines, books, and online, plus some fiction books which are available both online and in paperback.

I attended uni for filmmaking, and have been lucky enough to work on several big-budget motion pictures, with post being done in New Zealand, where I currently reside. The company I worked for housed the southern hemisphere's largest super computer, for rendering, so I'm one of the few people who can say that I have run ffmpeg on an 80,000 core machine.

Sometimes I also do podcasts.

Podcasts

• Gnu World Order is my personal Linux oggcast, and as far as I know the first podcast to release shows in ogg vorbis and speex formats only (that is, no proprietary codecs are offered). The show discusses any geeky topic I want to cover.
• Fedora Reloaded was a show that me and a friend had inherited and ran for a while, but sadly our schedules became to disparate to manage. The show died a quiet, untimely death.
• Hacker Public Radio is a daily podcast for which I am a correspondent. I cover lots of different things on this show, including interviews with KDE devs, Fedora people, and even an episode on how to create an RPM using rpmbuild.

Contact

• Email: klaatu at the domain of the third podcast listed above
• IRC: notklaatu in freenode IRC
• Fedora Account: klaatu
• Jabber: notklaatu on planetjabber.de

Activities within Fedora

• I promote Fedora at events.
• I interview Fedora people whenever I get a chance to, primarily at Linux conventions.
• As a freelance author, I wrote 6 of 8 articles for the Linux Identity Fedora 11 issue, available in your local bookstore, a Fedora FAQ that they seem to re-use whenever they feel like they need one, and a lot of other articles later on, including quite a few for Fedora 14 and 15, 18, and so on.

Linuxy Activities, Tutorials, How-to's

• Slackermedia contains evolving tutorials on accomplishing multimedia creation on Linux. I use Slackware as my jumping-off point for multimedia, but much of what I write about on Slackermedia applies to Fedora, especially since I sometimes borrow Fedora and CCRMA packages using rpm2tgz.
• Linux Journal, Linux Pro, Linux Format, Linux Identity, and Linux+ have published articles written by me.
• I wrote an article for the very cool Libre Graphics magazine.
• I wrote and maintain a nice, basic application called trashy that lets the user move things to the system trash via the command line, as well as empty it when they are sure they want to delete the files. It is meant as a sane intermediary for the very dangerous (yet strangely, for all of its potential damage, ubiquitous) rm command. Since trashy is in BASH, it is very portable and free of dependencies. It flirts with but is not married to (since it does not assume a user has a desktop) FreeDesktop specs.
• I wrote and maintain an application called Shaker Loops, which shakes the mouse every few minutes. Seems silly, but believe it or not whilst administering dozens of Linux machines, going into System Settings and deactivating screensavers for every single one becomes tedious. With Shaker Loops, I can just turn that on to defeat screensavers, and do my maintenance as needed.
• I maintain Vance L. Simpson's screenwriter-mode, an emacs extension for writing industry-standard screenplays in GNU Emacs. Well, really I maintain a fork of it, since I can't seem to find Vance anywhere online. My fork contains a few minor patches; one improves usability and the other adds functionality.
• I wrote and maintain StopGo, a stop-motion animation application in use at local schools.