I’m finally terminating this feed. All future updates will be at mojocrash.net. Audio for this PSA here.

PSA for this morning’s podcast here.

Oooh lordy - don’t I sound miserable today? I’m not - it’s just the way it came out. Shitloads of material from the Thursday night recording session to chop up and try to extract some goodness from so for today you’ll just have to put up with me.

I played two tunes today in a desperate attempt to lift the mood. First was One Dope Ride from De La Vega - who don’t have a website as far as I can see. You can hear them at the Podsafe Music Network though. The second was Richard Cheese’s cover of Radiohead’s creep. Smokin’. Dave Anderson sent me that one so it’s probably hot.

MP3 here, feed here (yes I know it comes out looking like a load of wonky code if you click on it - copy & paste into your podcatcher) or subscribe via iTunes thusly.

Update: I’ve added a PSA to the above ‘cast - it’s here.

This is one of the best bits of software news I’ve heard in a while - and pretty much entirely unexpected. Xara Xtreme is going open source with Linux and Mac versions licensed under the GPL.

If you haven’t heard of Xara it’s one of the finest vector drawing programs ever. Its roots are in a product called Artworks which ran on Acorn RISC OS machines. The first version of Xara I owned ran snappily on a 486, did real time anti-aliasing and basically knocked spots off anything else. My venerable copy of Xara X is the main reason I boot up a Windows machine these days.

Xara (the company) started out as Computer Concepts and they produced the first piece of software I ever bought - the WordWise wordprocessor for the BBC Micro. Legend has it that Charles Moir wrote it at his mum’s kitchen table. About fifteen years ago my company and Computer Concepts briefly collaborated on a hardware product and, frankly, I can’t wait to have the chance to work with these guys again - they’re an excellent company who have been producing top quality software for twenty five years.

I’m rambling now… Just so excited that not only will I be able to run Xara on my Mac and Linux boxes - I’ll probably be able to help get it there.

Today I’m podcasting from my bike. So I’m a bit out of breath - sorry about that. Today’s music is On Dope Ride by De La Vega - from the Podsafe Music Network. There’s a direct link to the MP3 here and you can subscribe here: here.

I’m going to post this on Hexten as well but in future the feed will only be available from mojocrash.net.

Show number one. Sure to be a future collector’s item. Come and get it. Direct link to MP3 here, subscribe here: here. Warning: gets a bit sweary in places…

I think this may be the best yet… I’ve just had to call my cellphone provider, O2, about a fault on the account. After ten calls to different numbers (I’m not kidding - I counted them) I finally got through to a human. It went like this:

Yup, that’s right he asked me for my password and when I couldn’t remember it he immediately told me what it was. I’m obviously getting really l33t at this social engineering thing. So here’s an experiment we can all try at home: next time you have to speak to your bank, your credit card company, the telephone company, whoever, do a little probing to find out just what you can get them to reveal. Forget (temporarily) any passwords or security questions and confine yourself to information about yourself that’s public - name, address, postcode, maybe your phone number. Bear in mind that it’s not hard to find your mother’s maiden name or your date of birth either - these being matters of public record. Let me know how far you get.