Recently I've been trying to start a Blog and Podcast as a means of reducing the language barrier when it comes to learning and playing around with Free and Open Source Software, aka FOSS. So a couple of months back I started the Sinhalen FOSS Blog at Wordpress.com. The idea of the blog is really to introduce various aspects of FOSS such as howto's, command line tips/tricks etc. and provide a forum for other Bloggers to contribute related articles. In this regard, I am grateful to Lakmal and Kanchana for their contributions and hope more of you will take the challenge in installing Sinhala Unicode and getting in to the habbit of remembering to write in Sinhala :). Yes it can be a pain, especially with the current state of input methods. Yes there are always complexities in writing proper Sinhala. But as far as I'm concerned writing something is better than not trying at all. In this regards, I'd have to thank my mom who is my personal Sinhala specialist (she's got a degree in it), and Dhahajaya who is an upcoming singer/song writer (not to mention our accountant).
So the next natural evolution from text is to get into audio. Actually thats not really the case, but for now about an year I've wanted to start podcasting. I've, myself am (me me me) a huge fan of podcasts and listens to over 10 podcasts while on the road on my ipod. Besides I've always had a thing for talking so finally with the help of 2 more geeks, chanux and seejay, I've managed get over the inertia of getting into podcasting.
With the launch of the podcast, I've decided to get its own domain so from now on both the Sinhalen FOSS Blog and Sinhalen FOSS podcast will live at http://sinhalenfoss.org. We'd like to call it a BlogCast because its a fusion of both those elements. Talking about the show, its going to be bi-weekly (hopefully) at first and depending on the feedback and our time availability we might go in to a weekly format. The show will roughly be an hour long, where we will talk informally about news events in the foss world, reviews, gossip and what not in sinhala.
So go check out the pilot episode and give us feedback on how to improve, what you'd like to hear more of less of.