July 29, 2020News, OGG, Podcast

mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Jason
- Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
- Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
- Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
- Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
- Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
  - Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
  - Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
  - Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
  - Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
  - Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
Leo
- Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
- Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
- Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
- The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

Tony H
- Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.
- I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results.
- Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
- On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.
Moss
- I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
- We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so.
- I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
- Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
- I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
- We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
Joe
- New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out. I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
  - This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
- Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books. I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through. But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
- My freezer out in the garage had an issue. An operator issue. It was still full of ice which then melted.
  - Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.
  - About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
- My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
  - Ryzen 5 3600
    - Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.
  - B450m matx motherboard
  - Cube case
  - Rx 560 graphics card
    - It will eventually get upgraded
  - They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
    - Still need to get this taken back
  - G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
  - I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
  - After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working
  - Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
  - Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
  - Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
    - Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
  - Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
- Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
  - It worked fine right out of the box. I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
    - For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
    - Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
  - So this could very easily serve as a convergence device. I will be working on a setup for it
  - The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
- Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
  - Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
  - I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
  - Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each. Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
- I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
Tony W
- New (to me) guitar amp! Boss Katana 100W
  - Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of
  - Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
  - Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only)
- Reworked hard drives in studio computer
  - One more new 120GB SSD
  - Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
  - Used Ventoy for the Windows install
  - Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
    - PopOS, manjaro, others
- Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school,
- Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay)
  - Linux Beta
    - Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
    - Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB. It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
    - It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
    - VLC was already installed
- Music gigs
  - Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
- Lots of grilling and barbecuing!
  - New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)