Episode 484 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

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

This is Episode 484!

Recorded on Sunday, April 26, 2026

Trying to get my computers to work im Joe; … Moss; … Bill; Got my Tails up Majid; … Eric; There’s always the Sun, I’m Charles; Wrangler of binaries, I’m Jim; Feeling Brave, I’m Charlie

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: Updated Mint ISOs
  • In security and privacy:
  • Then in our Wanderings: Majid explore Tailscale, Joe does it all again

— Play News Transition Bumper —

The News

20 minutes

  • Updated Mint ISOs
    • From londoner
      Updated ISOs for Mint 22.3 are currently being tested by the team. Similar to the “Edge” ISOs that we used to have, these ISOs have the latest 6.17 HWE kernel.

From Charles – Enshitification Event

Microsoft locks out VeraCrypt and WireGuard devs, blames verification process

  • Shape4

— Play Security Transition Bumper —

Security and Privacy

10 minutes

— Play Wanderings Transition Bumper —

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Jim
    • Keybind Utilities:As a Linux user, or a user of any Unix-like operating system, no matter what desktop environment or window manager you use, there should never be a situation where you cannot customize your keybindings to whatever you want. Full stop. Yet, the reality is that not every DE or WM seemingly allows this. There are certain keybindings that I am accustomed to that I want to carry over from my decades of Windows experience and muscle memory. And newer ones that I’ve settled on since I switched to Linux full time a couple of years ago that I want to continue on with. One keybinding that is of utmost importance to me is a common one- the press & release of the left Windows or Super Key (Super_L) open the main menu and launch applications without touching the mouse while still allowing Super + other key combos. Just like what is possible in Cinnamon, and Windows, and other DEs. Last month, you heard my discussion about how I outsmarted the limitations in the GUI settings manager in Puppy Linux TrixiePup64 Wayland by going into the config file of the default labwc window manager and customizing the keybindings in ways that did not appear to be possible in that lightweight distro if you took the misleading GUI interface at face value. Now you’ll hear how I did similar in another distro with a different lightweight desktop environment.
      • Q4OS 6.1 Andromeda with Trinity Desktop Environment: Q4OS is a lightweight distro based on Debian 13 Trixie. It uses very little RAM, possibly even lower than Bodhi Linux with Moksha does. Q4OS was technically my very first Linux install on an ancient Core2Duo desktop with 2GB of RAM with an annoyingly loud fan that I have since sent to recycling. The Trinity Desktop Environment,a fork of KDE 3 (before Plasma), is particularly suited for old computers with its very low RAM usage and lightweight desktop environment. But one thing that irked me about it when I tried it out before and now again with the latest version was the inability for this aged desktop environment, surprisingly last updated in late 2025, to handle having the Windows or left Super key as a menu/app launcher and simultaneously allow the Windows key to be used as a mask in combination with other keys to create other keybindings like Win + e to open a file manager for example and not have those capabilities conflict with one another. When I recently downloaded the new Q4OS Andromeda based on Debian Trixie to a USB stick I wanted to solve this issue, so I am sharing how I did it below adapted from a tutorial on the Q4OS forum https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5550. First one has to go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Keyboard Shortcuts and scroll down near the bottom to uncheck “Use Win key as a modifier (uncheck to bind Win key to menu)” This may seem counter-intuitive, but as far as I can tell the instructions are indeed backwards. Contrary with what it says, if one checks the little box that is what will bind the Win key to the menu and prevent any Win+ other key combinations from working. As it is that means TDE forces you to choose between these capabilities. By unchecking it, you are choosing for TDE to allow its desktop environment to accept Win + other key combos. Of course that means that the press and release of the Win key now does not open the menu as we would wish! How to get around this? Well, now I will tell you are two utilities that one can use on any distro in an X11 environment to get around keybinding limitations that one may encounter.
        • xcape is a command line app to customize keybinds in X11 environments which you can install from the Synaptic package manager or the terminal. There’s a man page you can read which clues you in to the fact that it can assign physical keyboard presses to certain outputs.

          In TDE, you want to look on the Shortcut Schemes tab for Global Shortcuts and scroll down where it says Panel: Popup Launch Menu and make sure you only have Ctrl + Escape, the alternate way to open the menu as the only active key combo there. Remove Super_Left as the default option. You can assign other unused key combos instead, but that’s the one that makes sense.

          After doing this press Apply and OK below and then you will need to log out of TDE and back in to TDE. Now in the terminal with xcape already installed, you want to type xcape -e “Super_L=Control_L|Escape” in the terminal. That will assign the press and release of the Win or left Super key to be as if you pressed a combination of Control + Escape and therefore open the menu. Your other Win + other key combos will also work without conflicting with this capability. You can also assign some other keybindings for apps or other functionalities under Keyboard Shortcuts -> Command Shortcut tab. In my case I don’t much like Konqueror as a browser nor as a file manager so I installed lightweight file manager SpaceFM via the Synaptic package manager and assigned that to Win + e, just like how opens the default file manager on Windows, or opens Nemo in the Cinnamon desktop environment and similarly on many others. Note, you must re-type that xcape command in the terminal every time you log in to enable this same behavior. The Trinity Autostart Manager is a tool to automate this, following the same tutorial in the Q4OS forum link referenced above.
    • xdotool is anothercommand line app to customize keybinds in X11 environments which you can install from the Synaptic package manager or the terminal. I have also used this in the past in a similar fashion to xcape. The man pages are very helpful here too, plus search engine results for practical examples. It works similarly to xcape and is another way to potentially get around limitations on keybindings in some DEs or window managers. I once made the Super key open the app launcher in XFCE in NomadBSD by using xdotool’s command line syntax to assign the press and release of the left Super key to some unused key combo, say CTRL + Shift + Y and then assigning CTRL + Shift + Y as the keybinding that would launch the default app launcher in the desktop environment settings. So in other words the press and release of a physical key triggers a phantom press of a certain key combo and that phantom press is what is assigned to open the app launcher in the GUI desktop environment keybinding settings, which otherwise would not be possible. Once again one would need to add the particular xdotool command to auto-start when you log into the desktop automatically.
    • A Problematic Binary Application (And a deep rabbit hole) I recently overcame a number of issues using a binary that I downloaded for a specialized application with a GUI but which had to be launched in the terminal which would not work at all on Linux Mint at first. And then it sent me down a rabbit hole of web searching, forum posting, learning, and experimenting to bend it to my will so that it would behave the way I wanted without any annoyances or complications. To be clear, I’m not talking about the actual functionality of the application. I won’t even address that. I’m talking about the way to manage the binary in Cinnamon and how to launch it cleanly without negative side effects in the most efficient way. It took four steps to do so:
      • Symbolic Link: The error message that resulted when I tried to launch it in the terminal is shown below in the show notes in double quotes. According to the developer, the error libmpv.so.1: cannot open shared object file occurs when the Flet application requires the libmpv.so.1 library, but the system only provides a newer version (typically libmpv.so.2 or libmpv.so.2.1.0). The most effective solution is to install the required packages and create a symbolic link to map the existing library to the version Flet expects. I followed directions from the developer to type the two below lines with elevated privileges in the terminal (from home directory).

        “home/mint/.flet/bin/flet-0.28.2/flet/flet: error while loading shared libraries. libmpv.so.1 cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.”

        sudo apt update
        sudo apt install lib-mpv-dev libmpv2

        Then finally from inside the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu directory I made this symbolic link and it miraculously worked! This was my first time using a symbolic link and I was very pleased to get an app that was recently ported to Linux working pretty quickly by doing so.

        sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmpv.so.2 /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libmpv.so.1
      • Command Chain: Despite the app now launching successfully, I got tired of navigating to the directory containing the binary to launch it with ./. And I was loathe to launch it from the terminal in the home directory because it annoyingly dumped an additional config file and logs each time it started instead of containing them in the directory it resided in in /opt. That’s the way the guy designed it I guess. It’s also annoying to me to have the terminal window hanging around in the background when the GUI app is in use. However, I figured out that by chaining cd, &&, ./, disown, and exit I solved a couple of my annoyances with launching a particular Linux binary by using a single command in the terminal. This way it navigates to the directory first before launching it and thereby keeps the logs and config files contained in the app directory rather than making new ones in the home directory which is what happened otherwise when opening the terminal window in home by default. The double ampersands chain the next commands to launch the app and then disown the terminal window from the running GUI app it launched and then finally exits the terminal window so that it isn’t hanging around unnecessarily. It’s also easy to turn this into a short bash alias for expedited keyboard launching. And lastly it’s easy to add this as one of your system startup applications with a custom command in your desktop environment or window manager. I’m sure experienced Linux users might already know these bits, but some of this was new to me. Maybe you have some GUI apps that are launched with the terminal and this information might be useful to you. (Obviously change the path to where the app is saved on your system if not in a directory in /opt like mine is). But even after this, I wasn’t satisfied because I had no custom icon, just a generic gear icon, for the app on the panel or task switcher when it was open.  
        • cd “/opt/App Directory/” && ./AppName & disown && exit
      • Bash Script: Instead of launching this GUI app using the terminal I now decided I wanted to try to add this app to the menu so I could launch it with a few key strokes including the Super key and app name and have a proper desktop file for it. And also ideally associate an icon with the .desktop file so it would have an icon represented on the panel at the bottom of Cinnamon and the task switcher when the app is running. So I made my very first bash script from the above single line of commands that I otherwise used in the terminal. I did have to take away the double ampersands and revert to single ampersands as part of the bash script. So I’m happy that I learned some very basic fundamentals of bash scripting. However, I *still* wasn’t satisfied because the icon for the GUI app that launched is still a generic gear icon and I couldn’t figure out why.
      • Fix Generic Gear Icon: I finally went for help on the the Linux Mint forum and a kind user explained to me within about 24 hours how to fix my issue: Add or change the line StartupWMClass=xxx after the line Exec=abc123 in your self-made .desktop file. Get the proper value for StartupWMClass by running in a terminal xprop WM_CLASS, the pointer changes, you click on an open window of your misbehaving application:

        $ xprop WM_CLASS
        WM_CLASS(STRING) = “flet”, “Flet”
        mint@Desktop:~$

        Use the second value in the appropriate part of the.desktop file:

        Exec=/opt/App/app.sh
        StartupWMClass=Flet

        Close the open application window and save your .desktop file. It worked! Now finally this binary file that I launch via a bash script as a GUI app through the Cinnamon menu with the keyboard is behaving as I want and has an icon in the panel and task switcher. I also used this same new knowledge to fix the similar problem with the lack of icon on another application I use called VASSAL, where the secondary or tertiary windows it spawns after the first one did not used to have icons that show. So now I am doubly happy.
    • File Managers:
      • Nemo: Has anyone else noticed that Nemo file manager can be really slow to show directories and files when it is opened? Mind you, the opening of the app isn’t slow, but there is a delay once it is opened to display the directories or files in any view even with 16 or 24 GB or RAM and a modest amount of directories or files. Sometimes I can count to One or Two or even Three Mississippis before it draws the icons on my screen after it opens, almost leading me to think my directories got deleted somehow. It became absolutely intolerable when opening directories of dozens or worse yet hundreds of files, especially large video files I was managing, and it was so bad that it hung up the app and compelled me to force close it more than once when working with directories with many files. One thing that Nemo does right in my opinion is that when viewing collections of videos, using nice large 256 x 256 pixel thumbnails, it will show not just the thumbnail but also the file name, the date created or modified, and most importantly the file size, so that you can easily identify at a glance and skip over the inevitable tiny size short clips that you don’t want to waste your time with.
      • Double Commander: In contrast I downloaded the Double Commander AppImage on my media desktop to rename and organize a large collection of video files and it performed effortlessly without issue for viewing, copying, and moving files. For managing video files, it allows you to set a custom thumbnail size so they are nice and big at 256 x 256 pixels or whatever you want. However it gives you no date or file size info under those big thumbnails. Even in the many settings I could not figure out how to get it to show that info for all files in thumbnail view at a glance like Nemo does which is frustrating.
      • PCManFM: Lightweight application, quick to start up. It has a great thumbnail view, and you can customize the thumbnail size. But it only shows the file names under the thumbnails, and doesn’t show the date or more importantly the size.
      • SpaceFM: Only tiny thumbnails despite being a fork of PCManFM.
      • Krusder: No thumbnail view at all.
      • XFE: No thumbnail view at all.
      • Thunar: Slow and heavy like Nemo. Maybe even slower. Allows you to increase thumbnail size, but shows no date or file size info under those big thumbnails.
      • Dolphin: Allows you to increase thumbnail size, can also show date and more importantly file size info under those big thumbnails. Seems like it is more responsive than Nemo. It also has a setting to remember your last used directory and re-opens there if you want. Will have to test it longer.
    • Video Players & Management:
      • MPV-Android & Nova Video Player: On a previous show, I talked about how the Nova Video Player (F-Droid) is much better than VLC for navigating network shares via Samba on an Android smartphone or tablet. Nova shows thumbnails for videos which do not work, or at least do not usually show up, on VLC Android. That was a source of frustration for me. So I use Nova often to watch videos on my phone over my local network for that reason. But I discovered that Nova has another cool feature. It can open the videos itself, or hand them off to other Android apps to open them instead, including the default Samsung Video Player (which has no accessible icon), or MPV-Android (F-Droid) or VLC. Depending on your preference, these apps each offer slightly different functionality in how one can interact with the app, especially how one can seek through the videos, or fast forward or rewind, or jump forward by discrete amounts with taps or virtual button presses depending on which app you are using. MPV-Android in particular I like because it has a nice ability to scrub forward or backward by dragging one’s finger horizontally across the screen right or left while showing the video which Nova itself, Samsung’s player, and VLC do not have. The amount of scrubbing you can do and how fast you can do it is seemingly limited by how much time you allow for a buffer to build up as it plays in normal speed streaming over your network. But it’s a good way to find specific segments, scenes, songs or whatever key moments you want to scrub to in the short to medium distance measured in seconds or a few minutes. Bigger jumps in long videos, like hours long videos, of course require placing your finger down elsewhere on the timeline at the bottom of the screen and starting over again to build up a new scrubbable video buffer for finer movements.
      • Plex: For the last few years I’ve mostly happily used the free version of Plex since the server software works reliably on one of my desktop PCs, which is not a dedicated server PC, and there are free clients for Fire TV 4K Max and for Android. However, I used to have all my videos in one Video directory and not specifically named and organized for Plex to sequence them and add posters and metadata. That has become unwieldy, so I finally organized my media into separate directories including Movies, TV Shows, Combat Sports, and Music Videos and renamed them with the help of Cinnamon’s File Renamer tool according to Plex’s recommended naming schemes and imported the separate directories as discrete Libraries so Plex could fetch metadata, posters, and organize them neatly as intended. Took about ninety minutes for the initial organization. It was well worth it and I especially like the sanity it brings and the artwork and how the Extras or bonus content for both movies TV series are available below the main feature if you name and arrange them properly. Very useful if you rip movies and bonus content from Blu-ray disks and DVDs with MakeMKV for example or download it from torrents or elsewhere. I was pleased to discover that Plex has a certain amount of tolerance if the movies or episodes are not named exactly as recommended or stuffed into subfolders- within reason. Extras and bonus content need to be named and organized more exactingly however.
      • ffmpeg:
        • Splitting Video Clips: Plex and Jellyfin can recognize videos that are comprised of more than one segment and play them seamlessly if you name them correctly, but I decided to make the delineation clear by splitting a couple of longer videos that I had downloaded from YouTube thatwere compilations of episodes, for example, a roughly two hour video comprised of four 22-ish minute episodes back to back so that they would be more easily recognized by Plex by the proper episode designations once split. So I went back to one of the most efficient ways to do that using FFmpeg in the terminal without re-re-encoding the video or audio. In the show notes you can see the syntax I used to do that, extracting a shorter video from the long video, in this case from the beginning to the 22 minute and thirty second mark:
    • ffmpeg -i Input.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -to 00:22:30 -c:v copy -c:a copy Output.mp4
    • Joining Video Clips: Plex and presumably Jellyfin can also recognize videos that are separated into up to eight parts if sequentially numbered correctly and play them as if they are one. But they strongly recommend using software to join them in advance. Once again FFmpeg in the command line works great to do this without re-encoding using the Concat protocol like so, at least for mpeg files:
      • ffmpeg -i “concat:input1.ts|input2.ts|input3.ts” -c copy output.mpeg
    • Jellyfin: Now that I have my media renamed and well organized, I installed the Jellyfin server software via the command line script they provide on the same decade old Dell desktop running Linux Mint where I also run Plex server where my media resides on an old 300 GB external Samsung hard drive. This is not a dedicated server but a desktop I use for multiple purposes, mostly media related. I added the official client from the Amazon store on my Fire TV 4K Max device. It easily connected to the Jellyfin server on the desktop using an on-screen code with the Quick Connect feature. I also installed the official app on my Android phone through F-Droid. There are a number of 3rd party applications for every platform as well, this being a FOSS project. Jellyfin has a less cluttered interface than Plex without all the streaming content links. Luckily, they follow suit with the naming and organizing requirements for the Movies & TV Shows, so all the posters, thumbnails, and metadata showed up as expected. I like the way it groups my non-TV and non-movie videos based on the directories I have on the hard drive by default, which Plex does not do. You have to use a separate feature called Collections in Plex to group like content like this. Judging by the posts on the Jellyfin subreddit it holds the potential for a lot of customization. So another deep rabbithole awaits.
    • Recast DVR: I finally gave up on my Recast DVR that I have used since I cut the cord in 2019 because it has had so many problems over the last few years maintaining a connection to my network, especially since I moved and have an AT&T Fiber gateway. Not to mention the multiple outages the service has had in terms of series recordings which were messed up on Amazon’s back end. This on the heels of the official news that all future Fire TV devices are moving away Android to their locked down Vega OS. So in the medium term future I’m sure to be moving away from the Fire ecosystem. So I painstakingly went through the Western Digital Elements 2 TB external drive and the internal 500 GB drive that I had to pry apart from the Recast so I could identify the subset of recordings out of hundreds of hours of OTA TV recordings on the drives, some several years old, that I wanted to salvage and watch at some point. The recordings were separated into multiple .mpg files numbered consecutively from 0000 to up to 0006 or 0012 or maybe even up to 00025 for HD two hour programs, as individual 500 MB parts that make a whole 30 minute, 60 minute, or longer program. That took a few hours to organize, and rename them using either the terminal or Double Commander once Nemo became too slow and unresponsive to use. The idea now is that that I can start to use the now available WD 2 TB drive that used to be plugged into my Recast as expanded storage as my new Media drive connected to my Media Desktop instead of the old 300 MB Samsung external drive that was plugged into my Media Desktop. I can take the properly named files and add these to my Media Drive to watch in Plex or Jellyfin and just use Tablo to record over-the-air TV going forward.
    • Hard Drive Fail: TheWestern Digital2 TB hard drive that was the Recast’s expanded storage and from which I copied a subset of content that I wanted to keep suddenly failed and started clicking after I re-formatted it and tried to copy data to it to use it as my new larger Media drive to hold the content that I could access via Plex or Jellyfin. Frustrating because these drives are way more expensive now than they used to be even recently. Even though I actually own seven older 6 TB Hitachi G-Technology Drives that I could re-purpose for my media storage, but they’re big, need separate power, generate heat, vibrate my desk a bit, and have a bright light on the front. Leaving them on 24/7/365 is a lot more of a commitment than a small modern multi-TB hard drive the size of a deck of cards which is silent and needs no power other than the USB connection. I ended up purchasing a small 4 TB Seagate Hard Drive for $171 after tax and started transferring my Movies, TV Shows, and other media there. Then I needed to purchase a longer cord to connect it to the SS USB 2.0 port on my Media desktop since the cord it came with was so short.
    • ScreenStream: It runs a webserver on your phone with a stream of the display that you can access from the devices in your network, like your Linux PC, by using the address provided in the ScreenStream App, when you start it. It it available on FDroid: https://www.f-droid.org/packages/info.dvkr.screenstream/
  • Joe
    • Well, after the last wanderings show i went and got started on the mini rack to get it working the way that it should. First i tried simply moving the pc with the sata connectors to the top so that the hot air could more easily escape. I also tried to set up the fan for it but it turns out that fan does not work. Or the adapter doesnt. I did not test because i also could not get the m2 sata adapter to read again. At all. So i removed it and put in the adapters for m2 to pcie x4 and then to 5 port sata. I used the 3d printed crossbar that i made and screwed the pcie extension into it. I am not happy with the physical stability of the final product and i am going to design something a little bit more stable. But the 5 drives are all hooked up and the 4tb drive is disconnected.
    • Also while i had it apart i put in the ethernet cables to make it run to the back so that it is easier to connect and disconnect ethernet coming off of the rack. I also ran one spare and setup the connection for the VPN port I may still add another router to the mix but for now it should be good. I did not switch out the power supply for now because i would need different sets of adapters to make everything work and that seemed like a hassle.
    • I also decided to split one of the 8tb drives, the one that i have been using for containers on proxmox and pass half of it to OMV so that i can do what i was planning on doing with the 4tb drive to that. the set up was easy, just create the disk space on the drive with the tools in proxmox under the VM and then treat it like a normal drive. But in trying to use it the speeds were terrible. Very terrible. I thought it might be the adapter setup so i tried out a couple of different speed tests with large volume transfers to see if the problem was anywhere else. The speeds to the other drives are awesome. Within 15-20 percent of the speeds between drives that are directly connected on my garage PC. But the speeds to that faux drive are about 1/4th the speeds of the others. That is bordering on unusable. I can see why all the tutorials for setting up OMV all said to pass through the whole drive. I thought it might be an issue of the other containers taking up IO but i shut them all down and it did not improve the speeds. I did however notice that the speeds of those containers was greatly reduced. Especially the VMs. So the copying of the data was not impacted but the run quality was impacted for everything else. 
    • But now i have a backup of my audiobooks. Well a second one. Although the other one is only mostly complete. This does kind of insentivise getting the 10 port adapter sooner rather than later. But it does also mean that this 5 port one that i am using and all the adapters are doing a good job. Now we just have to see about longevity. The other internal ones that i had the longest lasting one was about 3 months. But if i do set up another internal one i will make sure to have proper cooling for it.
    • I also redid my Home Assistant because of it breaking last time. I had some trouble at first because i tried to reuse the commands in the terminal history. The version that was there was too old and would not install. Went and found the new version and everything worked as expected. It was actually a lot easier to setup than the old version and the push button automations on the phone are so much easier to set up than the ones you make for Alexa which require another 3rd party integration and some creative rest commands. The only thing that took some time was going to the PC and looking up whichever device name so that i could see what it was addressed to internally. But yeah, all set up and working and backed up twice.
    • As i may have mentioned before one of the mini laptop/tablets 2 in 1s that i like to use is the Dell Venue 11 pro with the keyboard base that has the battery.  It has been difficult in recent years to keep it in batteries for the keyboard. So i have two of these machines.  One with an i5 4gen and one with the m5 4thgen both are great but i tend to use the m5 more because of the better battery life.  But i was down to one keyboard with a working battery and two more that the keyboard and touchpad worked but the battery was undetected.  So i took one of them apart and pulled the battery and was testing voltages and then i tried to apply power directly to the connector but there was no draw.  So i peeled back the cover of the 4 cell battery board with 2 in series and parallel with full voltage of 7.4v  so 4 3.7 batteries.  brilliant.  I know what to with those.  After testing the voltages one set of cells was under 2v so with my external power supply set to 2.5v and plenty of current i connected to the positive and negative terminals until the power draw dropped to zero and then i reconnected the connector and plugged in the usb power supply and with my multimeter watched the voltage rise on the battery.  Hooked it back up to the tablet and it is now detected.  Charged right up and held the charge.  Did the same for the other keyboard but it sadly did not work even though the battery does show full charge on the multi-meter but i noticed that one of the pins was bust off on the connector.  I assume that must be the one that makes the power detectable to the tablet cause i cannot get it up and running.  But now when i purchase another keyboard i dont have to single out just the ones with working batteries cause even if i get one where the battery is not fixable i have a spare battery ready to go.  Still glad to keep this device working a little while longer.  It is still really good for note taking and web browsing even if it does have trouble with videos that are sped up.  no trouble at regular speed but small issues sped up.  And the i5 version has a loud fan compared to the m5 version.  And the battery took a long time to charge up after bringing it back.  Guess we will see how long it lasts.  maybe i will get to try swapping that other one sooner than i think.
    • Well I changed my mind.  The keyboard that i fixed with the broken pin.  I went back to it.  I really wanted to know if it was properly fixed.  So i got out my soldering iron and i mounded up a bit on the broken pin and tested again.  It was seen by the system which is awesome.  but it was not a stable connection so i got out the flux and i gave it another shot.  Its still not perfect  in that it will sometimes lose connection, but it is charging and discharging while connected with all of the regular keyboard and touchpad functionality.  That was a fun set of fixes over all.  so now i have 3 keyboards with full functionality and two tablets.  I will start using them more in my room in the evenings for journaling and show ideas.  But now i have 3 devices for on the go and that is just about perfect for me.  The two tablets with extra batteries and the one gx mini laptop for some heavy lifting.  It is USB c so any halfway decent battery pack will do the job for that one.  But as my eyes get a little bit older it is not the easiest device to use and the keyboard has always been an issue for my giant fingers.
    • I did get the 10 port adapter and i did have to go into the bios and adjust the power settings to get it work right. That was a bit of an ordeal to figure out why it was not working. But the PCIE has its own power regulation for low power modes and i had to turn that off to get things to work right. The speeds are not as fast as some of the adapters that i have used but not terrible.  So i have transferred all of my audiobooks and all the associated metadata to the 4tb drive and that will be the only thing there.  this is a full copy backup as well.  I then changed the mount from the old location to the new location on the LXC using the new share information, making it look like nothing had changed on the LXC side to see if all the books and settings were remembered and yes that worked perfect. This frees up almost 3 tb of space on one of the 8tb drives.
    • And then, a couple of days later i had a problem where i needed to restart the proxmox box. Well the drives did not come back.  Multiple attempts at restarts to see if they came back but no such luck.  I dont know what the issue was.  The lights were all on and the logs didnt show anything. I also tried disconnecting all but one drive and still nothing.  So i switched back to the 5 port and everything came back.  I have also ordered a 6 port to see if i can get that working.  I will try the 10 port on the garage pc and hook up the 2.5 inch drives there, which will let me know if it is a proxmox issue.  I will probably also use it as a chance to swap the other drives around and maybe get one of those other two 8tb drives hooked to the DAS instead of the 4tb.  I am also thinking about getting an M-itx computer to take of the load of the DAS and possibly have it run as a router as well since the one that i am looking at also has 2 2.5g ports.  But it is 180 bucks and i aint made of money.  The other problem with it being that i would then have to find some ddr4 sodimm.  I have a massive amount of ddr4 dimm but no laptop ram that isnt currently in use.  There is another one that i could use that is cheaper but i would have to get a couple of different adapters for it.
    • Moving on, my nephew got a gaming laptop for free. pretty good one too. don think i need to get into the exact stats on it but it was overheating. Also the original account was still on it. So before i knew what was wrong i needed a way to test what was happening. I went into the bios and i changed things to let it network boot and not see the original OS that was installed. I then used my trusty iventoy and installed linux mint and psensor. The thing was overheating if you looked at it funny. So i took it apart and reapplied thermal paste to the cpu and gpu and that seems to have helped a lot. I ran a couple of games and while temps were not perfect they did not jump from nothing to 96 opening a file browser. But this being for someone else i needed to install windows on it. I actually tried to install windows 11 from iventoy but it would not load. Probably because it could not see any available drive but i did not know that at the time. Then i switched to a copy of ventoy on a usb stick with windows 10 and 11 on it. I ended up having to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to get it to see the hard drive from the bios but i finally got windows 10 installed. I did not put on an account or anything but i do see the setup screen on boot. So now i will be taking it back to him in Florida while he is on leave.  
    • I also am looking into potentially building a pi nas to leave at my dads house for a bit of offsite backup.  Not sure how useful that would be but it would be fun.  Also curious what else i could do with it.  Probably use it as an rsync backup for important files and all of my photos.  Then again i have enough parts to set up an entire pc if i want.  Might be interesting to set it up and have a proxmox instance way out remote and have it pass its network through wireguard or something.
  • Majid
    • Tailscale & Taildrop
      • previous issues
      • now its brilliant!
      • RustDesk
    • Fedora gone, Linux Mint 22.3 remains
    • Ubuntu 26.04
    • kdewallet
    • Lineage OS
    • GrapheneOS
    • Chromecast woes, ?replacement
      • Amazon Fire Stick (Android before they run out!)
      • Google TV Streamer
      • (Apple TV)
  • Charles AI Tools OpenCode and Cursor Use OpenCode/Cursor = a “CLI/context framework” for coding. “If you’ve heard people say, “AI can do everything now,” this is a more grounded take: these tools are useful, but only if you understand what they are actually doing. At a high level, think of OpenCode and Cursor as AI workspaces.  

They combine three things:

1. A chat-style interface where you ask for help.

2. Access to your local files and project context.

3. Optional tool use, like terminal commands or connected services.

So instead of a standalone chatbot with no context, these platforms can work with your real files and tasks.

Cursor is often used as an editor-first environment with AI built in.  

OpenCode is often used as an agent/workflow interface where the AI can run structured steps.

Different style, similar goal: help people move faster from idea -> output.

Why people are adopting them

The value is speed and clarity.

– You can ask for summaries of complex material.

– You can turn rough notes into clean structure.

– You can save reusable templates for recurring tasks.

– You can keep a running context file so the AI remembers your preferences.

For me, one practical win is continuity.

I can keep files like personal context notes, session handoffs, and topic prep docs, then reuse those in new sessions without starting from zero.

That shifts AI from novelty to workflow.

OpenCode vs Cursor in plain terms

Here is the easiest way to explain the difference:

– Cursor often feels like “AI inside your main work editor.”

– OpenCode often feels like “AI task runner and session workspace.”

In real life, many people use both:

– one interface for day-to-day editing and interaction,

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

  • Joe Runcer
    • Hi guys, you are making a great show and I’m enjoying it greatly. I’m also a Mint user and haven’t booted my Windows PC in 6 months 🙂
    • Because you are “my people” I wanted to ask if anyone uses Jellyfin and maintains a library? I do and would like to swap notes with another user.
    • Regards,
    • Joe
  • Reply Joe
    • there was a conversation about potentially sharing servers in the future including with Bill
  • Runcer
    • Hi Bill, thanks for reaching out. I should probably follow your lead and try to setup this reverse proxy thing. I am like you, self taught and everything I do beyond the basics is hours of struggle, that said I have struggled through quite a bit and I have things “running” 🙂 Chatgpt has been very helpful!
    • Here is another project of mine SDR, have you heard of it?
    • He included a link to a personal server so I am redacting unless given specific permission to do otherwise
  • Joe
    • I have a couple of friends that do the software defined radio thing for fun. Joel over on the linux link tech show and a friend back in El Paso named Paul that used to hop on some of the shows. I am actually a little surprised that Bill has not gone down that rabbit hole yet. But not really something that i have gotten into
  • Phil S
    • Greetings all,
    • This article by itsfoss.com caught my eye today.
    • I wonder what effect (if any) there will be on LM MATE in the future. Martin Winpress’ full post on the issue can be found here. It looks like a couple of people have put their hand up to assist, but I wonder if there will be anyone with the time and resources to take over from Martin.
    • I only briefly used MATE when I switched to Linux (Mint) in 2019. I was assessing the LM desktops and eventually settled on Cinnamon where I’ve been ever since.
    • It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
    • Phil

— Play Check This Transition Bumper —

Check This Out

10 minutes

  • https://techlore.tech/brave-origin-review-is-the-new-60-paid-browser-worth-it/

Housekeeping & Announcements

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  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
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  • Hobstar for our logo,
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

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