Under its new leadership, the mag has enjoyed a reinvention: new columnists have been brought on board to rejuvenate the content and offer something more than month-old news. One of those columnists is me, with a brand-new two-page section called Mobile Tech Watch.

It’s not the first time I’ve written for Custom PC: previously, I worked under James Gorbold to produce the news analysis and opinion column Download, while the news articles I had written for Bit-Tech were culled and reprinted in the front of the magazine. When Custom PC underwent a redesign that saw the page size shrink, however, Download left the building and so did I.

It’s good to be back, and while this initial column was completed to a short deadline I’m looking forward to what the future will bring. A regular monthly column on a set topic gives you a chance to set up interviews, briefings and behind-the-scenes access which simply isn’t possible with one-off features and will hopefully result in a quality read.

It’s early days, but the magazine’s rebirth appears to be going down well with its readers so far. In my opinion, things are only going to get better.

The group test required a methodical approach, addressing the most common needs from an audio CD ripping package: the codecs supported; the ability to deal with scratched discs; downloading of CDDB information and cover art; and handling of discs encumbered with digital restrictions management (DRM) technology.

It also provided me with an excuse to listen to some of my favourite music, of course.

Interestingly, the group test result convinced me to switch from my usual CD ripping tool to an alternative thanks to its surprising performance. It’s not often that I’ll make a move from a tool I’m used to as the result of testing like this, but it’s always welcome when it does happen.

The final part of my three-part series looking at contributing to the LibreOffice project finishes off with an investigation of how a contributor can make the leap from mentoree to mentor – a key part of any open source community. It’s something which is all too often overlooked, but as soon as you start to take your first steps on the path you begin to know more than those who start after you. As a result, you have valuable knowledge to share with the community – even though you might consider yourself a mere neophyte.

Finally, there’s the review of BackBox Linux, a distribution aimed at security and penetration testing. As with BackTrack, it’s an Ubuntu derivative but it includes a surprisingly robust suite of utilities – including documentation tools and general-purpose packages like audio utilities and even a scanner driver – which makes it a serious contender despite the immaturity of the project.

Further details on this issue are available over on the Linux User & Developer website.

As you can probably see from the cover it’s a look at AMD’s disappointing launch of its consumer-grade Bulldozer-core processors, the AMD FX Series. Completed to the tightest possible schedule – I received an email requesting a 3,500-word feature on Thursday, with a deadline of the following Monday – it forms an overview of the history of Bulldozer, its launch in the server market, its consumer launch and the complaints that have been raised over its performance.

It also includes comment from an AMD engineer in the company’s Austin facility on what is being done to address the architecture’s problems – not an easy thing to get on such short notice, and massive thanks to AMD’s André Heidekrueger and Bite PR’s Sami Makinen for organising that so quickly.

It’s a nice piece, if I do say so myself, and hopefully won’t be the last to grace Micro Mart’s cover. Fingers crossed for longer deadlines next time, though…

Despite being merely a small extract of two points raised in the interview, it’s proving popular: the article has shot to the top of the ‘most read’ list and looks to be staying there for the duration. Another teaser is planned in the coming weeks, while the full interview will be found in the pages of Linux User & Developer Magazine Issue 111.

The teaser can be found over on the Linux User & Developer website.

It was a fun, if somewhat challenging, piece, involving getting comment and option from industry luminaries including Xamarin chief technical officer Miguel de Icaza, Black Duck Software’s Peter Vescuso, Logic PD’s Mark Benson, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman and others.

Taking up four pages at the heart of the magazine, the feature looks at what has changed in Android 4.0, the industry’s reaction to those changes, what the re-opening of the source code – closed for Android 3.x ‘Honeycomb’ – means, and how developers can look to capitalise on the software’s release to make some serious dough.

Issue 109 also sees the second part of my three-part series on becoming a bug-fixer for open source projects, focusing on the LibreOffice project (thanks largely to how wonderfully helpful its members have been.) Finally, it includes a group test covering popular email clients, a project that saw me asking friends on Twitter to email sample messages to a test account for flavour – and a chance to see themselves in print, too.

More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.

Will it take off? Where are the mounting holes? Is it possible to overclock the Broadcom system-on-chip at the heart of the system? What software does it run? Can it play games? Does it support 1080p video playback? Will I ever stop asking these stupid questions?

All this and more answered over on Dennis Publishing’s computing enthusiast site, Bit-Tech.

The second feature to come out of the interview, a more Linux-focused Q&A-style transcription, is scheduled to appear in Imagine Publishing’s Linux User & Developer Magazine, Issue 111.

Given five votes each, the judging panel put forward their contenders for the title. As usual, the voting covered a pleasing mix of independent games – with two of my votes going to Frozen Synapse and Bastion, two very fine titles to come out of independent game studios this year – and triple-A titles, with no real surprises as to the overall winner.

The full piece can be found over on the Bit-Tech website.

Echoing a similar feature created for Issue 100, this latest run-down was a pleasure to write: as before, its creation involved the downloading, installation and configuration of ten Linux distributions within a virtual machine environment (VirtualBox, if you’re curious) so that screenshots of each can be taken.

Rather than using stock screenshots, each image is specific to the feature and includes the same applications – a media player, a calculator and the application menu – for easy comparison between different distributions’ visual styles.

Doing that takes a fair amount of effort, of course, but the result is worth it.

The feature also collects comments and opinions from distributions’ developers and community members, along with a rapid-fire ‘quick facts’ boxout for each.

Also in this latest issue is the first of a three-part series looking into becoming a bug fixer for an open source software project, using the real-world example of the LibreOffice productivity suite and including input from community members Michael Meeks, André Schnabel and Markus Mohrhard.

More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.

Working regularly for both print and digital publications – including writing the Mobile Tech Watch column for Dennis Publishing’s Custom PC Magazine, group tests and features for Imagine Publishing’s Linux User & Developer Magazine, news articles for bit-tech.net, ExpertReviews, the sadly defunct thinq.co.uk and others – Gareth is a prolific and experienced writer who has been used as a source by ComputerWorld, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Register, DigitalJournal, Linux Today, and even Wikipedia. (Yes, that last one is a joke. It’s also true.) Also, he doesn’t talk about himself in the third person nearly as much as this particular page might suggest.

Gareth’s articles have also featured on the front page of Slashdot, Y-Combinator’s Hacker News, and the “what’s hot” section of reddit.

If you’re looking for someone to cover an event, an op. ed. piece on a new release, or just some simple copywriting or proofing services, why not get in touch?

First, the “10 Ways to Fix Linux” piece: this was something of a departure from the norm, but proved a fun challenge. For each problem, the issue needed to be reproduced on a test-bed system – specifically, a VirtualBox environment – in order for screenshots to be taken and each fix tested for viability.

While the piece is unlikely to contain anything to surprise the hardcore among the magazine’s readership, relative newcomers should hopefully find it a useful cut-out-and-keep reference for the most likely issues they’ll come across while using Linux as a personal operating system.

The group test, as is usual, took four popular packages – Seahorse,
KeepassX, PasswordMaker and LastPass – and pitted them against each other to see which emerged the victor. As with most software-based group tests, the packages were installed in a clean Ubuntu environment within VirtualBox to ensure no conflicts were present.

Finally, the interview: conducted over the telephone with Canonical’s Gerry Carr, the piece covered the new features of Ubuntu 11.10, upcoming changes for 12.04, the backlash following the switch from GNOME to Unity on the desktop, and more.

Interviews are always a bit of a pain due to the amount of time taken up with transcription afterwards, but it’s rare they don’t make an interesting read; I’d like to think this one is no exception to that rule.

More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.