February 12, 2020MP3

mintCast 328 – Sigh-DPI (mp3)

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo says Kernel 5.5 is the best and worst thing ever, Moss works on Distrohopper’s Digest, Joe is booking it again, and Bo is getting ready for a test.

Then in our news, Linux Mint goes HiDPI, Proton open-sources its VPN, Kernel 5.4 makes long-term support waves, Wireguard lands in Kernel 5.6, and more.

In security, your data is not safe. But we already knew that!

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo
- Kernel 5.5 fixed everything and improved gaming performance!
- A development snapshot of mesa 20 broke everything!
- Updating to 5.5.2 and the February 8th development snapshot of mesa fixed everything again!
- What a ride
Moss
- Distrohoppers’ Digest has moved into double digit episode numbers, with Episode 10 recorded on February 5th. Download numbers are well above what we expected when we started this project.
- I’m getting my Galago Pro 2 reconfigured after the Mint Crash. The actual cause was a Grub mess-up, but until I really learn how to work with Grub it’s just easier to reinstall. Anyone who wants to know what my current 7 installations are can ask me in Telegram.
- I installed OpenMandriva 4.1 on my Kudu, currently residing along with Feren OS and Ubuntu Budgie. It looks really good. But I still don’t know the package manager, and have no idea whether I can get Mullvad on it.
- On Feb 3, I got word that I have been added to the team at Ubuntu Budgie. While this is exciting, and I’ve been added to the Ubuntu Budgie Discourse and Slack, I still don’t know how to actually do anything when I find something to fix. At any rate, Leo was wrong, my next podcast project will be BudgieCast.
- We’re getting deep into Fool Moon, the second of the Dresden Files series. I read the graphic novel of it, and it hardly scratches the surface of the novel itself. Especially the chapter where he is wiped out to the point of getting to talk to his subconscious self. Good stuff. Firecat has managed to get me copies of the rest of the books, so we won’t have to stop reading just because I’m a pauper.
- Work is being stressful, although I’m still employed; It would be more stressful if I were not. I keep getting ideas of how to move on into other work, and keep running into the papercut issues which are bad enough to prevent me from moving forward with those ideas. If people really did want to move to Linux from Windows 7, I can’t think of anyone better than myself to do those installations.
- I went out this morning to drive for Postmates, just another food delivery service but one which averages more income than GrubHub or Uber Eats, and found to my chagrin that I did not have one essential tool with me. So I had to drive home and I’ll try again tomorrow.
Joe
- Good reading
  - Found a copy of Demon Squad
    - Simple read and not for everyone but I enjoyed it
  - Catching up on podcasts
  - Wanted a quick read so I also listened to one of my favorites: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
    - If you did not like the movie give the book a try
    - If you did like the movie definitely give the book a try
  - Wax and Wayne series from Brandon Sanderson
    - I really like the first 2 books
    - Third book isn’t as good and the fourth book should be coming this year
- Picked up a Pi 4 and a couple more pi Zeros
  - Still debating projects for the Zeros.
  - Testing out the 4
  - Will give my impressions on it at a later date
- Having been researching Pi projects, I think I like the project for multiroom audio.
  - Don’t know if I have a use for it but it does seem fun
  - And I have 3 Pi Zeros ready to go
- Also thinking about soldering a USB hub onto one of the Zeros.
  - Kinda negates the point of the zero but still a cool project and it is still cheaper than a 3B
  - Using a slim hub would not add much space.
- Working on a new set of scripts to automatically convert and transfer newly purchased Amazon ebooks
  - Will work a lot like my automation of torrents
  - Purchase and download book on any of my devices
  - Move to a location on said device that uses resilio sync
  - Automatically gets transfered to my server which then moves it to another location
  - Book gets converted to epub or mobi, then the original and the copy get moved to my calibre library and a copy of the converted file gets moved to a resilio location that transfers to my phone.
  - This then can be played using voice aloud.
- Broke my second pair of Earforce z2’s Not sure how they ended up breaking while sitting on my desk at work but they did, and I can’t find anyone selling the replacement bands unless I want to buy them from aliexpress and I don’t. So I am looking for alternatives
- I had purchased a lot of ‘as is’ wireless tv headphones with base stations from Sony (wh-rf400r if curious) so that I could give 2 of them to my dad and step mom for christmas and a have a few extra. I was hoping that the hooks on them were the correct size but no such luck
- They were however correct enough in size for a pair of Skullcandy Hesh 3’s that I had picked up from a previous job lot of broken headphones and the hesh’s only issue was a broken band. I had to drill the hook holes a bit larger and cut back some of the internal bracing on the Hesh’s but now they work great
  - The Hesh are a great sounding pair of headphones with nice soft earpads and the new band provides a nice amount of clamping force. I do need to make sure I put my ears in the earcups just the right way because the cups are pretty small. Otherwise the amount of time I can wear them is fairly small. Also the batteries are pretty good considering how much time these set on a shelf waiting for me to find parts for them
  - Also very easy to work on with well placed easily accessible solder joins
  - Also the sonys have extra cables that run through the band, i was thinking about seeing what the output voltage is and seeing if i could use the base to charge the battery in the hesh
- In testing the Pi 4 i had some networking issues because the wifi adapter in the pi is not very good
  - I don’t want to get into too many details on the Pi
  - But here is what I tried
  - External USB wifi.
  - Wifi router as bridge
    - This is the fault of the router though as it was an older one that had issues. This fix should have worked and provided better speeds and stability
  - Brought back my powerline adapters and this greatly helped although it has not fixed all the networking issues
Bo
- Missing you guys
- Using terminal for as much as possible to prepare for LPIC, even for simple tasks.
  - Cat, join, sort
  - Ls | Xargs chmod 755
- AWX
  - Credential manager
  - Inventory management
  - Roles
- non -linux life
  - Tabletop RPGs
  - Star Trek Adventures podcast

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

Our Next Episode will be live Feb 23, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

Joe – www.Tllts.org linuxlugcast.com MeWe [email protected]
Bo – ecnradio.com

Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, [email protected], [email protected], Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

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 you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
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!)