It’s Episode Thirty-Four of Season-Nine of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Martin Wimpress and Emma Marshall are connected and speaking to your brain.

The three amigos are back with our new amiga!

In this week’s show:

* We discuss going to a Randall Munroe book signing of What If? and Thing Explainer and getting extra signed copies for you to try and win in a c-o-m-p-e-t-i-t-i-o-n!

*

We share a Command Line Lurve:

* direnv – An environment switcher for the shell

* We also discuss fixing bugs in Ubuntu and visiting Barcelona.

*

And we go over all your amazing feedback – thanks for sending it – please keep sending it!

*

This weeks cover image is taken from Wikimedia.

Thing Explainer Competition!

* Prize: Signed copies of “What If?” and “Thing Explainer” by Randall Munroe (creator of XKCD)

* Question: Listen to the podcast for instructions

* You can use the upgoer5 editor to help.

* Send your entries to competition AT ubuntupodcast DOT org. We’ll pick our favourite and announce the winner on the show.

* Here are some examples to help get you in the groove:

Mark

I write words that are read by a computer. Students who want to learn about something ask their computer for part of a book. Their computer talks to another computer over phone lines, and that computer uses the words I’ve written to send them the book part they want. Sometimes students want new types of book parts that they can use to share their learning with other students. I have to work out the right words for the computer to let them do this, and write them. When I can, I share my words with other people so that their computers can send better book parts to their students.

Alan

I talk to people about computer things to help make the stuff they make and the stuff we make better. Also I sometimes write things that the computer gets but I am not great at that. We give away a lot of the things we make which is not like the way some other people share their work. It makes me happy inside that we do this.

Martin

I help write a group of books that a computer reads and stores. These books make the computer work much better. When a computer has stored the books I help make you can do things with your computer, like write to people and send what you wrote to the other peoples computers. Or you can ask your computer to talk to other computers to learn things, look at moving pictures, listen to music or buy shopping.

The group of books I help write are free for anyone to give to their computer. You are also free to change these books and share those changes with anyone. This way everyone can help make the books even better so your computer can do more for you.