Welcome to mintCast

The Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 492

Recorded on Sunday, August 30, 2026.

Boiling in Texas im Joe; Joining the show again and missing Dolly Parton, I’m Charles ; Swimming in storage space, I’m Jim

(Insert Intro)

• First up in the news

  Mint has a birthday

• In security and privacy
  Give a hint of this news coming up (if there is any)

• In Check this Out
  Mecha Comet, Linux Phone

  Wanderings
  Give a hint of the wanderings

• In Vibrations from the Ether
  Give a hint of what is coming up.

Show Segments

Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description.

• The News (15 min.)

• Mint has a birthday (from londoner)
  Mint had its 20th birthday on Thursday August 27. The original version of Mint was released on August 27, 2006 and was code named “Ada”. It was only available as a beta version, using a KDE desktop, and was based on the third release of Kubuntu (6.06), the first LTS.

• One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With A.I., Says Pew Research (Jim)

• https://www.pcworld.com/article/3204830/linux-didnt-actually-hit-10-percent-market-share-blame-bots.html (JOE)

  • PCWorld reports that recent claims of Linux desktop market share exceeding 10% in North America are likely inflated by AI bots masquerading as legitimate traffic.
  • Statcounter’s methodology of tracking page views rather than unique users makes these statistics vulnerable to bot manipulation, questioning the accuracy of the reported 11.87% figure.
  • Cloudflare Radar data filtered for human traffic shows much smaller Linux growth, suggesting the dramatic market share surge is artificial rather than genuine user adoption.

• RAISE US – https://www.raiseus.ai/ A nonpartisan national initiative launched in June 2026 by Gina Raimondo and Eric Holcomb to help American workers transition into an AI-driven economy through partnerships with governors, employers, and educators. It focuses on scaling workforce retraining programs and policy solutions like earn-and-learn apprenticeships and short-term credentials

• Security and Privacy (5 min.)

• Wanderings (25 min.)

  Joe

  • I was previously having some trouble with the network cables on the second mini rack so i decided to make a couple of changes in that regards i went to microcenter and used the gift card that i had gotten for my birthday from the in laws to get a bunch of one foot and 6 inch patch cables and a decent pair of wire strippers. The cables i used in conjunctions with some keystone passthroughs and a half u plate for the rack. Ran all five of the 6 inch cables from the router to the keystones and then from the front keystones to the ones on the back of the rack. This makes everything neater and saves some space. Definitely makes it easier to work on in the future since i will not need to take things apart to remove cables to move the rack.
  • But i was still having an issue in the house with the wifi bouncing up and down and decided against building my own router for various reasons. So i ended up buying one while it was on sale. The gl-inet flint3e which has all 2.5g Ethernet ports which is good for future proofing and it also has wifi 7. I know that it also has skinned openwrt which is not the easiest to work with but i do have some experience so i should be able to get by. It also means that i will no longer be using the asus ddns that i have been using but i have had the backup duckdns for a while and that should be good enough. The device on paper is awesome and seems to be doing the job very well. some reviews are saying that thing starts dropping after a few months but we will see. 
  • It was actually a lot of work getting everything set up on it First changing the ip address of the device and then going into the modem from from ATT to update the passthrough settings to look for the mac address of the new router. Then spending multiple hours messing around with the gateway mode on the inet and not getting any dang internet out from it. Gateway mode from my reading is a special mode that is designed for what i am doing so that you can ignore you upstream provider and just have your router do all of the IP addressing etc. Anyway once i turned that off everything started working as it should. Then connecting it to my network switch to get it hooked to everything else. After that i went and changed the bssids to the same as the old routers so that all my IOT would just connect but i did get to add a separate new bssid that was a mix of the two bands that i named something new and put a different password on so that i am the only one using it. The wifi is fast and no problems so far. But the fun was just starting. I needed to sort out all of the old ip address and the port forwarding. Alot of the old setups relied on statics ips to talk to each and do alot of my various automations. No dont ask for an example, the easiest to mention would be samba shares. I new a couple of the old IPs from memory and a bunch were recorded in proxmox notes and some i was fine with them changing. I was able to force specific IP address’s by finding the right device and then making it static and then changing the static to the needed IP and restarting the device. THe proxmox servers because of how they are set up always demand the correct UP for the base operating system. This only caused a collision for one of the systems after another device had claimed the ip adress first and it was a pain to diagnose at firest. I would watch it drop off the cluster randomly without any rhyme or reason and then come back. i would go in and check the speeds and it would be fine and then it would be gone. I replaced all of the cables and it was just the same. I looked at all of the network setup on the device and restarted it several times but eventually thought to check and see if it shared an ip with another device and sure enough it did. Gave the proxmox device the static IP and then because i had no idea what the other device even was i restarted the router. That fixed my issues. 
  • After that i had to do all of the port forwarding which was a bit of work but now i have many less than i did before. A lot of it is just covered by my wireguard at least for me. I have a couple of services that are used by friends and family that i did need to set up and then i had to redo most of them at least once because i did not have the correct static internal IPs setup.
  • I also picked up a bunch of interesting things at resale again. It was very hit or miss. Seems almost more miss this time than it was hit but thats how it goes. I picked up a pair of JLAB go airs. Which are an older set of in ear wireless buds for about 4 dollars. I knew when i got them that the odds of them working were pretty slim but they looked to be in ok condition from the outside. They were bagged so i could not see the condition of the buds themselves. But 4 dollars. I plugged them in when i got home and they would not charge which meant that taking the buds out of the case would not turn them on. Speaking of taking them out of the case the bud tips were next level disgusting. Whoever had them had a lot of ear wax. Thats ok i rubbing alcohol and new tips. stuff dissolves easy. So time to take the case apart and test the battery. It is very flat. I use the external power supply to force some power into it and it is fixed and after several attempts i am able to get it reattached and put back into the casing. every time i put it back into the casing one of the joins which was on the edge of the pcb would come off as i slid the casing back together. my fault it was hot in my garage and i was getting impatient. But i did eventually get it. It charged and so did the buds. I was so disappointed when i pulled the bud out of the case and connected it my phone and volume was so dim as to be unhearable. This means that either the battery internal to the bud is so weak that even though it was fully charged that it could not output enough to push the drivers or that the drivers were blown. I could have potentially replaced the batteries but i dont think that level of work is really worth it for these in that i have three more modern sets that are currently working and i tend to get replacement sets on sale for around 15 bucks. I do think that with the more modern sets that since i can be more sure that the batteries and drivers match that i will be doing some parts swapping in the future to keep them running but i cant say the same for the older go airs. 
  • Next i was able to get a 15.6 inch portable screen from ONN for 20 dollars that looks very good. I will be using it in conjunction with my mini laptop and i pulled out some of the old equipment that i had to mount large tablets to tables and using that i have it mounted and am able to pivot it in front of me. The monitor is very crisp but i will always have an issue with the mini hdmi and if i want two monitors hooked up to the mini laptop then one of them has to be hooked up using the micro hdmi port on the mini laptop unless i pull out a proper docking station. Still it will be great to have while working from home and while traveling. I would like it for something like dex at the office but it is missing the touch screen. I will keep my eyes out for something like that in the future.
  • I also found a trackball mouse. Seenda is the brand. It was missing the USB dongle but it was only 3 dollars and has 2 bluetooth modes. Also looking into it it looks like you can pair it to a similar model usb dongle if can come across one. So i will keep my eyes open for one. I dont like that the button to switch devices is on the bottom so you have to pick it up to switch but it does feel very solid and the action on it is very smooth. when i bought it i figured if nothing else its got bearings and a mouse ball ass well as a plethora of switches to act as replacements. 
  • Next up on the things i did not expect to find at the resale, A blu articulating mic arm. it was very cheap i dont think any one knew what it was and it looked to be in perfect condition when i got it. Sadly i was not in perfect condition. One of the the tensioners was cracked internally and was not noticeable until you tried to get it into position and tighten it down. Any way i removed the old bolt and tension system and looked for a new bolt that was the same size. I was not able to find one but i will. The in t mean time i was able to find a bolt and a couple of washers that will slide through the old nut and tighten into position doing the same job. i may need to remove and add a couple of more washers as the one that is there is bowing but the idea is solid. now the microphone is in the correct position.  
    Then i found 4 laptops on facebook marketplace for 30 dollars. Well two laptops and two chromebooks. The ASUS laptop is an old 17 inch beast with a i7 3rd gen. Bad battery and bad keyboard. The person did not have the password for the windows install but who needs that any way. Thankfully the power brick for my MSI laptop worked fine on it and i was able to use my ventoy stick to install mint. For some reason iventoy was detected but would not load. I will need to test further to see the issues. The two chromebooks however were a disappointment. They were both enterprise locked. They could not have the write protection removed and i am not assuming that they were stolen. A lot of schools were getting rid of them this last year. They were also from schools that are pretty far away and it looks like the process for unlocking them includes using a shim provided to the schools. They are rather low cost devices so i am not seeing the point in driving that far out to get anything done with them.  i have a lot of other devices that i can use for screens and there is not much else usable on them.  I will probably get rid of them.  The HP i had to order a power supply for and has a line in the screen and is so slow i don’t think that there is any thing that i can do with it. it has 2gb of ram and an older celeron processor which makes it ewaste.  I had wanted to strip it and make it into a low cost low power server but i think i could do more with the 17 inch.  So 1 in 4.  Still probably worth the the 30 dollars that i paid and since the power supply that i got is universal i can just switch the tip and i have a working system with that i7 3rd gen.  

  Jim

  • NAS in Cooler Master Tower: Fourteen Hitachi 3 TB hard disk drives liberated from their enclosures are now installed in my gigantic Cooler Master Tower for 42 TB total storage for my NAS. That doesn’t count the 16 TB from four 4 TB hard disk drives that I installed in my media desktop and Celeron desktop. By the way, this tower has an Intel i7 950 (8) at 3.06 Ghz x 4 with 16 GB of RAM. The GPU is an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580. The tower has six fans- a CPU fan, big front fan, bottom fan, back fan, big side panel fan, and a top fan, which I had to purchase a fan cable to connect and get working. The GPU additionally has three fans of its own on the bottom of it. I made an investment of $270 in parts to kit out this Tower PC and the other two desktops with all 18 Hitachi hard drives from the nine external hard drives, not counting twenty bucks I spent on a USB rechargeable dust blower. I spent quite a bit of time with the blower and cotton swabs to try to remove as much dust as possible from this fifteen year old tower desktop case and fan blades. I assume if you had to purchase a huge tower case like this today it would cost hundreds of dollars. I needed a sixteen SATA data port PCI adapter for the tower, some extra SATA data cables, and multiple SATA power splitters. Also needed a couple of PCI brackets, one in the tower and one in my media desktop to hold dual 2.5" SSDs for my operating system drives, and a larger PCI bracket for my media desktop to hold a 3.5" 2 TB hard disk drive, along with a two port SATA card. Of the fourteen drives in the tower, five drives fitted into the dedicated slots with plastic trays on the bottom while I fit a whopping nine more drives in three Evercool Dual-5.25" bay to triple 3.5" drive enclosures in the six 5.25 bays on the top, which were one of the bigger expenses of my purchases. The three black Evercool boxes that match the tower color perfectly had one screw to secure them to the back side of case and added three more fans total, for which I also needed to add MOLE power splitters, making a lot of cords strewn around in the open space of the tower, even considering that the 16 port SATA card for data had to trunks with eight octopus arms data cables coming out of them. I had to remove the special HDD tray and backstop on the bottom two of the six top bays to fit the third Evercool box. Of the fourteen HDDs only one drive has a warning that it may fail soon in Disks. At least that is what shows before formatting it. I have yet to format them as I am trying to decide between going ZFS or some kind of RAID setup for redundancy and that requires some more research.
  • Media Desktop & Celeron Desktop: Two Hitachi 4 TB hard disk drives in Dell Inspiron Media Desktop as discussed on a previous show being put to good use for storing downloaded media and two Hitachi 4 TB hard disk drives in my Celeron desktop awaiting a specific purpose.
  • NomadBSD: This FreeBSD variant is designed to be used as a persistent OS on a USB stick, and can also be installed on bare metal. It’s similar to GhostBSD in the sense that it is a “distro” that comes with a desktop environment, XFCE in this case, and a whole suite of useful software like Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, and many utilities, making it easy to install FrreeBSD for newbs just like Linux Mint is for Linux. However, the maintainers have dropped the ball for whatever reason and have not updated it in a couple of years. As the last version from more than two years ago is still based on FreeBSD 14.x, while FreeBSD 15.0 is the latest nowadays, it is dangerously insecure and out of date. Into this void, steps a single user who took it upon himself to update it to use FreeBSD 15.0. This special version of the .iso, which he says is not a fork, is x86 only, and UWS file system only rather than ZFS, and does not support secure boot, none of which are an issue for me. Notably NomadBSD can run on less than 8 GB of RAM unlike GhostBSD. I used to have the old version of NomadBSD running on my ancient Core2Duo desktop from 2006 with 2 GB of RAM, which I have since sent to recycling. In any case, I downloaded the .iso and installed it on a USB and then to my twenty dollar Craigslist 2013 era Celeron desktop with 4 GB of RAM that can no longer run GhostBSD but which runs NomadBSD just fine. It is easy to install software through their OctoPkg GUI package manager or through the command line, just like FreeBSD or GhostBSD. The blog with link to .iso and information about this variant: https://pfriedma.org/blog/bsdthing.html
  • Nitter & XCancel: Further enshittification of the internet as X (Twitter) sends cease & desist to the people behind the Nitter project, an open front end for Twitter that allowed people to read Tweets, replies, and follow people on Twitter using RSS feeds, which has not been possible for a while since Elon’s changes if one doesn’t have a Twitter account. Xcancel is a notable casualty of this as they were the leading service backed by Nitter that I used to auto-forward Twitter posts to via an extension in my browser.
  • TV Trackers: Since the demise of TV Time app a few weeks ago, many apps and web sites have stepped into the void to help people track TV shows including some brand new ones. Many of these offered to import data from the TV Time app, which worked better or worse depending on how one exported and imported the data. Some of the apps and sites provided online tools to facilitate those imports. I have been trying several apps, with varying results. Differences in the user interfaces, sorting options, and various other settings are significant factors of course, as well as the community for those that like to read or post reviews of episodes. But I am finding one huge obstacle is that many of the apps and sites use one popular TV database called TMDB for their data due to their free and easy to use API and only a smaller subset of apps use the same database as TV Time did, called the TVDB, which is the better one in my opinion, or better yet use both. It means in practical terms that certain types of shows, especially syndicated TV shows, foreign TV shows, and shows on PBS public broadcasting, or relatively obscure TV channels may be missing season and episode data completely or partially. In my case most of the apps, including some which I otherwise like, do not track at least one of the shows I watch which has more than a hundred episodes per season, which makes it sort of my canary in the coal mine which eliminates most apps from consideration.
    • Bingebox: Great interface, with the shows one is currently watching right at the top of the app making it easy to update as one watches. Also allows one to track movies. It is one of my favorite apps and might otherwise be my new home. But the database is incomplete for one of the shows I watch so I have to eliminate it from consideration.
    • Media Tracker: Tracks more than just TV shows, including movies and video games. Decent interface, but database incomplete for one of my shows.
    • Mirate: Very nice interface with shows you are watching right up top of the app. Database incomplete for one of my shows.
    • Movie Paradise: Tracks TV shows very well despite the name of the app. I don’t love the Been A While tab on the show tracker. Database incomplete for one of my shows.
    • Refract: Very active development. Huge influx of new users after TV Time’s demise. Busy interface with a lot of features. Overkill in some sense. However, the database is incomplete for one of my shows.
    • SeriesGuide: Effectively a front end connected with your Trakt account, a web site TV show tracker. Awkward to update shows imho. Database incomplete for more than one of my shows.
    • Showly: Syncs with Trakt.tv. Alphabetical list of shows, but no focused portal for shows I am currently watching. Database complete for my shows.
    • Simkl: Syncs with Trakt.tv. Alphabetical list of shows, but no focused portal for shows I am currently watching. Database complete for my shows.
    • Trakt.tv: Syncs with web site. Continue Watching and Start Watching to update shows. Database complete for my shows.
    • Bingers: From the original developer of TV Time, simple interface without fluff, easy to mark whole shows or seasons watched, easy to update new watched episodes from the opening screen, can change or remove watched date, uses best of both databases for most complete episode and series list, and has community features to read and leave episode reviews.
      • Notifications: Would like the notification to specify not just the show name but also the season & episode number like Mirate does. So for example the notification would say “Jeopardy! Masters S4 – E4 is out now”, not just “Jeopardy! Masters New episode, out now.”, like Bingers does now.
      • Posters: A couple of my more obscure TV shows do not have poster art by default, which stands out quite a lot, and the option to change poster art does not help because it says there is no poster art.

  Check This Out (5 min.)

• https://mecha.so/
  Mecha Comet-handheld Linux computer 
  that’s truly yours to own, build and mod.

General

Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!

If you see something that you think we should be talking about, tell us!
Chat with us on Matrix at mintcast.org/matrix or send us email at [email protected]

Next Saturday will be a roundtable episode at 2pm US Central Time (convert to your time zone). Everyone is welcome to join us at mintcast.org/roundtable. Just click the link. No software required. Everyone’s welcome to take part, with a camera or not, or come join us in the Live Chat on YouTube.

The week after will be a News/Wanderings episode at 2 pm US Central Time (convert to your time zone). Come join us in the Live Chat on YouTube.

Listen to other Podcasts of the Linux Syndicate Family

Join Bill, Majid, Eric and Charlie on Linux OTC, Linux Off The Cuff, for an unscripted and unpredictable conversation about all things Linux, open source and more.

Join Dale and Majid on Distrohoppers’ Digest to hear about their experiences and challenges with trying out different Linux distros.

Our Hosts

Joe – jeboylan on Matrix, [email protected], & The Linux Link Podcast, The Linux Lug Cast, Buy him coffee on Ko-fi as Joeeb.

Bill – Bill_H on Matrix, [email protected], wchouser3 on fosstodon.org.

Majid – AtypicalDoctor on Matrix, [email protected], & The Atypical Doctor Podcast.

Jim – GNU2Linux on Matrix, [email protected], & The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

Eric – esa1975 on Matrix, [email protected].

Charles – Mr PDX on Matrix, [email protected]

Acknowledgements

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

Bill for our audio editing, hosting & maintaining our Nextcloud & web servers.

Londoner for his contributions, from News to Time Syncs.

The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about. Thanks Clem & Team.

(Insert Outro)