This week Reddit released their backend code for download and as open source. Being open source anyone can download and improve upon the Reddit code. This is a win for people who want to be Reddit clones, as well as a win for Reddit who gets the benefits of features, bug fixes, and more from anyone who contributes. 

If you are interested in the project or want to grab the code, head over to the Reddit Trac Open Source Project.

BarCampKC is scheduled for May 9th and 10th in Overland Park, KS.

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Unlike other BarCamps, BarCampKC will have no actual camping out and all the sessions will be planned the night of the 9th during the meet and greet time.

If you are in the KC area, or want to come even if you aren’t, check out the BarCampKC page or the blog and put your name on the Wiki.

I will be running the audio equipment to record as well as live stream the audio for the Alternageek Tech Show either through TalkShoe or BlogTalkRadio. The links and stream will also be available the day of the event at Alternageek.com

I have owned NixNews.com for some time and until the last few days it has existed purely as a Linux news river. Originally built on WordPress with RSS aggregator plugins, NixNews grabbed Linux and open source from all over the internet and compiled the links in one place while linking back to the original posting site for reading. The downside to this form factor was that it was nearly impossible to moderate and duplicates appeared more often than not in the river with large streams of posts from one site or another resulting in an uneven mix of news.

After initial testing and tweaking, NixNews.com has been reborn into a user voted Linux news and article site. I have tagged it beta, and it just that, an early beta service that will still have bugs to be worked out. I have taken the testing as far as I can go on my own and am opening it up and announcing it’s release. Please take the time to visit, register, vote/bury the stories, and submit new posts. I would like to see NixNews grow in it’s niche as a valuable resource for information to the Linux community. I welcome your bug reports as well as any suggestions you might have for it’s function, interface, design, or feed aggregation.

PodCamp MidWest has begun and if you are in the Kansas City area it’s not too late to head over. I am posting photos to Flickr, SnapFoo, and updating Twitter live. Twitter friends lunch meetup today, check out the tweets to find out where.

• Flickr Photos
• SnapFoo Pics
• Twitter

Read the blog post covering all the sessions I attended at Alternageek.com.

Last.fm announced today that users in the US, UK, and Germany can now stream full length tracks as well as entire albums straight from the Last.fm social music service. They state they will be paying artists directly and have the support of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner as well as independent artists.

According to their announcement:

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

If this service does well it could help push the major labels into a new service model that serves the customers and the artists. Last.fm was acquired by CBS last spring.

I posted a few Tweets today in reference to video games, specifically:

It’s funny to say ouch when you get hit in a video game since it doesn’t really *hurt*
~and~
Show of hands, who else yells or such in the *heat* of video game play?

This is when you see how entertaining Twitter can be! Here are the replies those tweets generated:

ldmosquera: the measure to which you say “ouch” in a videogame, is the measure to which it successfully captures you. So it’s all good.
bblboy54: *raises hand*
miyako_houou: I will at times make some sort of weird vocalizations like a dying whale or somesuch if I’m really close to dying, rarely though
jeffisageek: i am raising my hand
linuxchic: Video game that made me yell the most: MicroMachines for NES…no brakes! :)
popefelix: You should hear how loud I get when I’m playing GTA
ldmosquera: I don’t yell, but I enjoy games which silently scare me to death. Also applies to movies. Immersion FTW!
warmaiden: I do. And my siblings. So far back as I can remember. Atari!!
dlpasco: Doom 2, followed by Half-Life
ldmosquera: Scariest games I’ve played: Undying, System Shock 2, Doom 3. The original Alone in the Dark was a living agony to play too.
sbspalding: what about Ecco the Dolphin. Most frustrating game ever programmed.
linuxchic: I have to say E.T for Atari 2600 wins most frustrating game ever programmed since it was *impossible* to win.
bblboy54: as a kid I still had hours of fun with ET for atari but I remember wondering what the point was :)

What about you?

Every so often I get all kinds of sidetracked here at linuxchic.net and wander away from tech and nix and wind up posting stuff like blog tips and such… well, no more (blog tips anyway). I’ve decided to fully utilize my blogagory.com domain and dedicate it to the topic of blogging. This is a pretty big topic so I suppose it will end up encompassing such things as social networking and new media as well, but only as it applies to a blogger. To make a potentially long blog post short, head over to blog(a)gory.com and read about blogging (the URL doesn’t actually have the parentheses in case you are confused) . Stay here or listen to the alternageek.com podcast to read/hear about tech, gadgets, nix, and open source. Want to hear random life rants of mine? That’s what my Twitter and Vox blog is for. Why so many blogs? Because sometimes you just don’t give a crap about my issues with pajamas in public or my opinion of the blogosphere (there it is, I used the word!) and you are visiting linuxchic.net just for the ‘nix stuff.