The weekend was mostly spent at Malc's for Beat Camp. Unfortunately not many people could make it on Saturday, so basically it was me and Malc playing dun dun (big drums) all afternoon, with breaks for some chat and playing in his studio. Marjolein came along after dinner for some indoor drumming.

Sunday was better attended with up to a dozen of us out in the sunshine learning some new songs. My brain was totally full. After both days I was exhausted and ready for sleep by 10pm. It was all great fun. I even got to perform on the debut performance of an old song. We're due to perform some of the new material at Malc's garden party this coming weekend. We shall see how much I can remember. I'm not a drum machine.

The kids got some extra music too when we went along to Bedfordshire Music's Saturday Music Centre. They are both showing signs of musical talent so we're happy to encourage them. I quite enjoy making music with my kids.

My fledging music studio (sic) gained a microphone stand from Ebuyer, along with a solar powered charger to charge my phone and PDAs. It has an internal battery so that I can take it along to extend the battery life.

Since my LUG talk about OpenStreetmap I've been playing with BSGPSPDA on my PDA/GPS thingy. It shows great promise as it can show the OSM maps for a given location, but you have to download them first. I wrote a little Python script to do this that works very nicely. I would really like to develop it into a proper GUI application that shows the maps and lets you choose an area to download. That will mean learning some more Python.

I've had a few issues with the PDA software, but I've been in contact with the author and he is working on them. I already have a new version to try. Try that with Microsoft!