Run Free My Little Monkey

One of the original ideas behind doing the Digital Prism Screencast was an episode on Conky, how to find a .conkyrc file, edit it, have it start at login etc. This was one of the episodes I had in mind before I had a place on the site design for the screencasts, a name for the screencasts or a wallpaper plan for the screencasts. I had the wallpaper for it ready for ages, but it seemed jinxed.

Every time I tried to record it, something would crop up, either something technical with gtk-recordmydesktop, the phone going off, or my brain going blank part way through or on one occasion the GTK theme flipped on me just as I got to the "adding it to the autostart" part, which is almost at the end. It had become like a monkey on my back.

I must have done at least 15 takes of this episode until finally yesterday I had an episode I was happy with. It is an unusually long 38 minutes, 290mb (MP4) or 323mb (OGV) files. It's also taken me all night to upload these videos for you to now watch. This little monkey is now free to run.

This is not the start of a series of longer shows, my target is between 15 to 25 minutes, depending on the subject and what I want to cover, the Conky episode has been my most complex to date, and remember I do these screencasts in a single take from start to finish. The wallpaper for this episode is a one off too, since the regular wallpaper for the Digital Prism Screencast doesn't work well with Conky to demonstrate. I eventually found after some failed takes that switching wallpapers during the recording knocked the sound off too, so I decided to just use a different wallpaper from the start.

I did take the opportunity to watch Tron for the first time as an adult and found it to be deeper than I had remembered. I last watched it as a kid and didn't understand a lot of the themes at the time. When the process involves uploading the MP4 twice, and the OGV once, and each upload taking around 2hrs 30mins it does give time to do things like watch a movie.