mintCast 318 – Melted Plastic

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This week, in our Wanderings, Leo writes about Nextcloud, Bo spreads the Linux love, Tony Hughes can’t stop Linuxing, even on holiday, Josh considers the new iPhone 11 (wait really??) after yet another broken Pixel 3 , Joe spelunks into splunk, and Tony Watts is building a server.

WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Finally got some writing done on my blog! Only took me three months to get back in the saddle.
  • I’m using two 1TB external USB drives for Nextcloud. One for the main storage and one for a nightly backup.
  • I’m loving the nextcloud auto-backup for photos on my phone.
  • I only allow Nextcloud to be accessed on the local network, so, through the power of OpenVPN, I’m able to access Nextcloud everywhere!
  • Considered doing this in the cloud, but price-wise, it’s hard to compete with established solutions like Google Drive or OneDrive.
  • But since we don’t use a lot of storage on the show, Nextcloud might still be a good solution at a place like DigitalOcean. $5/mo for 20GB storage that’s fully under our control.
  • I’ve dropped plank!
• Bo
  • I blew up my wife’s PC
  • Guy at FNM saw my Linux hat and asked about Linux Mint
  • I’ve paid for, but not scheduled my LPIC exam
• Tony H
  • I have spent the last week in Brussels and had a great if tiring Holiday on the day we went on a trip to Bruges I walked for hours around this very picturesque medieval town, tripling my normal average of about 5-6000 steps. 
  • I joined the BDLL europe live stream on the Saturday evening we arrived in Brussels, just because your on holiday doesn’t stop the geeking 🙂   
  • Researching some refurbished laptops and desktop PC’s to help a couple of friends upgrade their hardware. I’ll be helping them buy and setup the new PC’s now that I’m back home. 
  • Installing Manjaro on my Acer One 2008 8Gb SSD Netbook, installed fine problems with updating will need to play some more. Also installed the MX19.2.1Beta on my Lenovo X201 today and found a bug and decided to do my first bug report, so I created a Bugzilla account and the whole process took less than 10 minutes. Another Linux first for me.
• Josh
  • I learnt that Google can’t make good glass to put on their phones.
  • Android 10 has broke my banking app.
  • Considering selling the replacement they’re sending me as it’s new phone season.
  • Maybe an iPhone 11:
  • Reasons:
    • New audio stream after people wanted change.
    • The refund for my GPU actually came through! The RTX 2060, what I replaced it with, is really nice. It’s actually gone up £50 in price now so I got it at the right time.
    • We sold 66 magazines!
• Joe
  • Spent the week without my tablet so was not able to write down ideas as they came to me
  • Attempted to fix the issues that i am having with anlinux on my phone and no such luck so far
    • Created another user and gave sudo permissions but still getting an error when i use it
    • several low level applications will not launch and no errors thrown.
    • i may nuke and start from start.
    • tried looking for some write ups on how to do it properly but i have not found a good one yet
  • Setup tuxtyping for my son
    • He has enjoyed it but he went through most of it very quickly
    • On the lookout for alternatives
    • Also need to get a new battery for the hp mini that he is using for this
    • Picked up a mouse and setup a keyboard with colored stickers for where fingers go
  • 5150 memorial show
    • Went well, Thanks for everyone that came on and talked about 50 and his shenanigans 
  • Studying splunk
    • Seems like an interesting tool and a good thing to know but i am wondering if we need another centralized tool when we can access all of the logs from one location anyway.
  • Started automating everything at work
    • Driving to increase automation through scripting
    • Creating scripts to automate some of the DB cleanup that we do
      • Also deletions 
      • Moving backups
      • Going to make the execution step as copy and paste as possible
      • Going to have a couple of scripts setup for the basic things that we do all the time
        • Hit execute and done
      • Python Python Python
    • Can’t completely automate as we still need to enter db names and paths but it is a start
  • Oscar cpap analysis
    • Choose linux
    • Got it installed hopefully i will get to test it out this afternoon
  • Havent finished the wheel of time series yet.  Had to replace book 8 with a new copy because the copy I had was missing a chapter
  • Stepped up my gym time.  I now do lunches at the gym along with my couple of times a week in the evenings.
  • Had a good time at the local lug, good conversations about dex and linux in general ..
• Tony W
  • Upgraded a laptop from Win7 to Win10
    • Free upgrade path still works – license fully active
  • Working on a server build
    • Core Duo server tower with 5 drive bays.  8GB RAM, 3 X 2TB hard drives
      • Got hard drives on ebay reasonably – WD caviar green (not the best or most reliable but cheap and I plan to have some fault tolerance)
    • Currently reinstalling heat sink & fan
    • Planning to use either FreeNAS or Ubuntu Server (probably with minimal DE)
  • Finally broke down and had the Oneplus repaired properly
    • • • Oneplus repair process pretty impressive
        • Whole process shipping and all took about 3 business dayStill a great phone at almost 3 years old
          • 6GB RAM, 128GB storage
        • Running Lineage OS as Oxygen OS will stop getting updates sometime soon
  • Consolidated work and personal mobile phone
    • • Both lines/SIM cards in the OnePlus 3T
      • The corporate solution on android is really nice
        • Sandboxed file system for work apps
        • App drawer separated into work and personal
        • Work versions of GMail apps, file manager, Play Store,etc
  • Going to start troubleshooting a Dell all-in-one with suspected bad hard disk
    • The camera is better than the Pixel.
    • Pixel has failed on me twice.
    • Pixel 4 is rumoured to be £900
    • Third party android companies have bad update support.
    • Third party android companies atm are a bit risky, especially with the Huawei stuff. They’re new phone doesn’t have Chrome, Play store or Gmail, and you can’t sideload them either

NEWS:

• Ubuntu Details 32-bit Support for 19.10
  • After some research by the Ubuntu devs, it looks like 199 packages and dependencies will be maintained going forward and on into 20.04.
  • Their forum will be used to identify any additional packages that might need to be maintained as well.
• Top 5 Snaps per Distro
  • Ubuntu sees: VLC, Spotify, Skype, Chromium, Canonical-livepatch
  • Fedora sees: Spotify, VLC, VSCode, Postman, Slack
  • Arch sees: Spotify, VSCode, Skype, Discord Slack
  • https://www.getpostman.com/
• First Microsoft/Linux Conference Ever, March 10-11 2020
  • WSLconf: A conference focusing on the Windows Subsystem for Linux
  • No registration fee to attend, but space is limited
  • Attendees will see presentations from the WSL team at Canonical, the WSL team at Microsoft, and the creators of Pengwin, a Linux distro based on Debian GNU/Linux and optimized for WSL.
  • https://www.wslconf.dev/
  • All hail our Winux overlords
• PineTime, the $25 smartwatch for Linux Smartphones
• Firefox Is Switching to a Monthly Release Cycle
  • As opposed to the 6-8 week cycle they’re currently on.
  • Firefox says this will make them more agile and allow them to bring new features faster.
• Linux Kernel 5.3 released 
• Richard Stallman steps down
• Apple Event – 10th September
  • iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro & Max + New iPad are announced
  • Apple TV+ & Apple Arcade prices announced
  • iPhone is the new camera king

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Locks are crap.  Modern rogue..
• Chrome dns over https
• LastPass Vulnerability

Tavis Ormandy: “LastPass could leak the last used credentials due to a cache not being updated. This was because you can bypass the tab credential cache being populated by including the login form in an unexpected way!”

WRAP-UP:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe [email protected]
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), [email protected], [email protected]
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338
  • Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/
  • Twitter @TonyH1212, [email protected] [email protected]

• Tony Watts – [email protected], Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – [email protected], [email protected], edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

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