Welcome to mintCast

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

This is Episode 496

Recorded on Sunday, October 25, 2026.

… Joe; … Bill; … Majid; …. The rain will come, I’m Charles ; … Retro video games in my future, I’m Jim

(Insert Intro)

• First up in the news
  Google links your phone numbers to other Android accounts
• In security and privacy
  Websites go dark as AI exposes critical security flaws
• In Check this Out
  Give a hint of the product
• Wanderings
  Jim gets a steal on a retro video game PC
• In Vibrations from the Ether
  More feedback about GhostBSD and NomadBSD

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.)

  • Google is quietly linking your phone number to other Android accounts

    • Android phones have been attaching their SIM’s phone number to every signed-in Google account on that device for more than a year. Google’s support documentation says that it verifies the number automatically during setup and adds it to every account on the phone, including work and secondary accounts. According to Google, verification enables features like account recovery and RCS messaging, but the company doesn’t explain why the number needs to be added to every account.

  • Security and Privacy (5 min.)

    Charles
    Web Sites Go Dark AI Finds Flaw

    The flaw is called PHP2Shell. PHP is a programming language used to make websites work behind the scenes. It runs on a web server—not in your browser—to process forms, work with databases, and generate web pages. Its name stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.”
    For example, when you submit a form on a website, PHP can process what you entered and create the page you see next.

    The flaw discovered?
    The issue involves two memory-management vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution—meaning an attacker could potentially run code on a vulnerable server without first supplying a username or password.

• Wanderings (25 min.)

  Joe

  • Well, that thin client that i installed mint on is now working as a set top box in the kids area until i free up another machine which will probably happen soon enough.  I do have a tablet that i could swap it out for but i think that i may end up pulling the hard drive from a couple of those that i have extra and see what i can do with those m.2 drives.  
    But upon pulling them i see that they are ngff instead of nvme.
  • More tdarr wanderings in my journey to use less disk space.  I did have a problem with some of the files in tv shows that were encoded in h265.  the problem was that they would work too quickly and they would not compress very much.  But they would then cause my gpu to crash and my computer to restart.  So i told it to ignore the h265 and then it finished the rest of the drive in about a day.  The total freed up was about 1.5tb so it went from 6.5tb used to 5tb.  Not as much freed up as i would like but i still cant complain.  I also went through all of the computers that i am using for this and put the samba shares into the fstab so i dont have to get everything done for every drive every time and then moved on to one of the drives with just movies on it.  It is also less than half full so should go somewhat quicker than the other two drives with tv shows on them.  Plus each movie will have different encoding so i doubt more than one at a time will have the same problems as the tv shows with over loading the gpu. 
  • The movies drive surprisingly finished and saved 1.2tb. I also started migrating all the movies onto that drive after it finished since all of them have been transcoded. I will probably need to organize them later so that kids stuff is separate but for now that is not much of a concern since i no longer have small children in my home or using my plex.
  • So all that is left is the two drives with tv shows but those are going to take a while. Yes i know that i am data hoarding. I will go through after this is done and see if there is anything that i want to get rid of.
  • Now on to readmeabook.  I cant complain too much about the application itself.  the site that i use to check for books keeps blocking the ips from the vpn that i use.  that is their right of course but it means that i have to keep rotating ips.  i kinda want to set up some automation for rotating but i am still looking into how. So instead of that i decided to get a private tracker. getting that tracker was not too bad but they have certain rules about sharing ratios. So in order to try and make that more possible i needed to set up port forwarding through a vpn.  This was a chore and a half and i did have googles AI help a lot.  Some of it i did end up coding myself based on the different things that it had me try but in the end it was working.  But for some reason it is still blocked even though i can verify that the forwarding is working as expected.  after nearly 8 hours of trying different things i just said to heck with it and left it as is.  
  • I am able to occasionally pick up some long ethernet cables at the resales so i decided that it might be worth it to start getting some of those and making them into a bunch of shorter cables for my mini racks. Also i think that it is a good skill to have and will save me money in the future.  To do this i have ordered a crimping tool and testing kit to give a try at making my own.  I used to have a spool of the stuff that was never used but i dont remember whether or not i got rid of it in one of my clean outs.  Oh well like i said i can pick up long runs of it for a couple of dollars and i should be able to make it into something more useful.  Plus with the weather not being as hot as it was i should be able to make some time to get the garage cleaned out again and hopefully more organised.
  • Pulled out the soldering iron.  I was having an issue with my vaporizer where the button was not clicking on the one and on the other one it was simply not firing or firing irregularly when the button was pressed.  So on the one where it was not firing i took it apart and tried to clean it.  it is one of those surface mount ones that has the domed piece of metal that clicks inward.  I tried to clean it up at first but there was just too much corrosion.  I was able to get a these vaporizers at a really good price so i had looked and there was not any more available.  SO i priced a couple of others to see what a replacement would cost and i did not like what i saw.  I ordered a pack of various switches for 13 dollars instead.  I figured that i could try things out on the one that was not firing at all and see how well i did since this is a delicate piece of soldering.  What with the small surface mount, the ribbon cable that it attaches too and plastic/kapton over the thin metal dome.  Basically it is very easy to mess it up.  But i was able to do it. Mostly.  While removing the old one which was glued down the plastic tabs that hold the ribbon cable down melted but i can fix that with some double sided tape.  a couple of touches with iron and everything was in place.  It really made the thing work like new again.  I am not impressed with how it is setup since there is only solder points on one side of the switch but it is solidly in place and put back together.  I am also going to do the other one so that i have a backup.
  • I also got bored and decided that i wanted to try out something fun. I wanted to see if i could get dex working over wifi using scrcpy. The answer is yes i can. But i had to jump through a few hoops to do it. The apt version of scrcpy is too old to do it and the flathub version would not install on the device that i was using for whatever reason. So i ended up having to allow snap and installing the snapd version of scrcpy to get it working. Plus jumping through all of the hoops to get wireless adb working which granted is much simpler than it used to be. Why is this useful in any way you may ask? Well for one thing it means that i can use the same mouse and keyboard from my main computer on my phone which is helpful to not need to pick up my phone to be able to use it. It also means that as long as i have the settings done correctly that i can connect to my phone if i do something crazy like forget it in the other room. I have used a similar setup before and have always liked it. Being able to do it with the desktop from DEX using a command from scrcpy is a lovely bonus though.
  • Got a care package from Bill with a new a mic arm which is much better quality than the old one i was using. Thank you Bill. It is nice having one that actually stays in place when you move it. The old one i am not done with however. I need to print a mount for it and i need to redo the articulation points to make them work as they should but i am going to try and see if it will work for a screen mount for a light weight portable monitor. I was going to design my own using some pvc to control the height and a design that i was going to modify from thingiverse but i think that this solution will probably work better.
  • I also ordered a cheap seenda mouse so that i could try to get a working usb dongle for the mouse that i already have but it sadly the dongle will not pair with the trackball mouse. Which is weird because the company ‘Areson’ that makes the dongles i have been able to reuse in the past. I also tested with another of the dongles that i have and neither was able to pair to the mouse. Bluetooth mode still works fine though. I will just have to keep my eyes open for another in the future

  Bill

  Majid

  Charles

  Jim

  • Nitter Redirect for X: I finally signed up as a developer and submitted my recently created Firefox extension yesterday. It failed validation as an add-on the first time with one error. So I went back to ChatGPT to get it to fix it. (I like how ChatGPT retains your chat history so you can go back to it.) My message: “I submitted this extension to the Firefox add-on developer hub and it failed validation with one error. Can you please re-make it and correct this so it will pass validation as a Firefox extension? The error message follows: The “data_collection_permissions” property is missing. https://mzl.la/firefox-builtin-data-consent The “/browser_specific_settings/gecko/data_collection_permissions” property is required for all new Firefox extensions, and will be required for new versions of existing extensions in the future. Please add this key to the manifest. More information at: Error: manifest.json”. ChatGPT quickly corrected the error and made me a new version 2.1.1 that I downloaded, tested and re-submitted and it is now under review for approval as a Firefox extension.
  • Open Media Vault NAS: I recently installed this server operating system from the .iso on a USB stick to act as a proper NAS in my gigantic Cooler Master tower PC. I replaced Linux Mint that used to be on the internal 250 GB SSD with Open Media Vault after first formatting the fourteen 3-TB HDDs as ext4 to remove all the existing data and remnants of the RAID setups from when they were in the external Hitachi drives. Using the so-called Workbench, or web interface to the appropriate local URL over my network from my laptop, I had to update the OMV software and reboot. Then I enabled S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on the fourteen Hitachi 3-TB hard drives which confirmed that one drive is supposedly going bad, while two have minor warnings about bad sectors. Then I had to follow the directions on the New User Guide online to install Installing OMV-Extras using an SSH Client, specifically puTTY which I installed from the Mint Software Center on my laptop to allow me to successfully use plugins. Then I had to figure out that I had to specifically mount the file systems for each of fourteen hard drives. I have yet to install and enable RAID via the openmediavault-md 81.6-1 plugin and choose a RAID protocol before setting up my Samba shares and then creating shared folders to copy my data to. I am not sure which RAID to choose, but I think RAID 5 might be appropriate for my circumstance. I still have to work through that before copying my data over. Once set up, the plan going forward is to only turn on this server before bed to limit electricity use and and any annoying fan noise from the nine fans in the daytime and let it do all my automated backups overnight. There is no reason for it to run 24/7 since I am not streaming anything off of it just using it as local storage to archive my valuable but rarely accessed historical files and data with redundancy as well as a place to send backups of my current backups of the data and environments of all the computers that I actively use in my network. I’m sure I’ll have one more update about this when the RAID is set up and all my data is copied over.
  • Celeron Desktop Upgrades: RAM & SSD- I purchased two Kingston KVR16E11/4 1.5v. 4GB DDR3 RAM chips on eBay for $9.99 plus $5.72 shipping plus tax to replace the two 2GB RAM chips already in there so I could have the minimal 8 GB of RAM to run GhostBSD on this desktop. I also moved the 240 GB SSD with GhostBSD from the big tower to my Celeron since I don’t need two SSDs in a server now running Open Media Vault. NomadBSD remains on the 60 GB SSD already in the Celeron so I intend to dual-boot from one user friendly FreeBSD variant to the other if I so choose with GhostBSD as the main OS and NomadBSD as an alternative going forward. Important to note that this Celeron desktop is now sitting below the desk next to my gigantic Tower connected to the same monitor, mouse, keyboard, and speakers that used to be connected to the gigantic Cooler Master tower that is now acting as a NAS and therefore only has a web portal for administration. That means that fourth workstation on my left-most L-shaped desk section is now not wasted on a headless server.
  • GhostBSD Boot Woes: For whatever reason, I can’t get GhostBSD to boot up on the Celeron from the 240 GB SSD. I re-installed it multiple times with the GhostBSD UEFI boot loader or the alternative ReFind boot loader. No matter what settings I set in the BIOS boot options after that it won’t boot even if I put it first in the boot order or if I disconnect the 60 GB SSD with NomadBSD. Somehow I can boot GhostBSD on my Sager laptop as an alternative to Linux Mint if I go to the BIOS and set the appropriate drive to boot first in order of preference. In the meantime I have no problem getting NomadBSD to boot up from the 60 GB SSD in the Celeron so that’s what I have as the main OS there for the time being until I can get some help from the GhostBSD forum about my GhostBSD boot issues.
  • Retro Gaming Desktop: Since the selection of desktop PCs on my local Craigslist is so anemic I looked on Facebook Marketplace for the first time ever and found a listing by a seller who has several listings selling computers for budget minded retro video gamers. And the one specifically that caught my eye advertised a Linux based Retro Emulation computer that came with more than 1500 games. I wasn’t looking for a turnkey solution but that sounded intriguing so I looked into the details. The desktop he was selling runs Zorin OS 18.1 (based on Ubuntu 24.04) using their customized GNOME 46.0 desktop environment in a Wayland session. It has an Intel Core i7-860 4-core processor with 8 MB of L3 cache at 2.80 Ghz and an AMD ATI Radeon HD 5000/6000/735 Cedar-series GPU from 2011 which supports DirectX 11.2 and OpenGL 4.4. It has 16 GB of RAM, comprised of two Ripjaws Z 8 GB sticks. For connectivity, it has an add-on card Gigabit ethernet port, an HDMI port on the video card, several USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire port, and an included wireless USB stick the seller also threw in. The case is a Compaq branded black mid-size tower with pretty much all its components replaced by better parts, maybe even down to the power supply and fan. For storage, an Intel 240 GB internal SSD hosts the OS and a 2½ inch 1 TB hard disk drive contains more than 1500 retro emulation games and several launchers to play them. The games include what seems like the entire collection of N64, NES, and SNES games. The launchers pre-installed include several aimed at different game systems like NES, N64, and SNES, as well as Playstation Portable, Playstation 2 and some others. This PC is now at one of my four main workstations I have between my two glass desks, and sits just to my left next to my laptop. It’s whisper quiet which is nice as it is within arms reach. Total price, a whopping $60 cash, more than worth it just for the PC or the individual parts, never mind the games. Aside from the large collection of emulation games that came included, I was pointed to a web site which has downloads for all the games for all the other popular game systems of yesteryear like Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Intellivision, Xbox, Gameboy, and many more. I also intend to install DOSBox or one of its forks to run old DOS games and ancient abandonware Windows games, as well as WINE, Bottles, Proton, and potentially Steam for maximum compatibility for old Windows games from the Windows 3.1 era, up through Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows Vista, onward to the Windows XP era. The original Carmageddon, one of my favorite DOS games back in the day that I still have the CD for, is one on my list to make work. The computer starts up super fast so I’m going to stick with Zorin OS for the immediate future and see how I get along with it. I believe I need to invest in some kind of USB connected generic game controller so it’s awkward to have to assign keyboard shortcuts for each individual game that I tried in the various launchers. I’m sure this will be a time sink and I’ll have updates on my progress.
  • Dell SFF PC as a Home Lab: Since my dear old Dad decided to eliminate commercials in his life as much as possible and recently upgraded all the streaming services that he subscribes to and shares with me to the commercial-free tiers, my quality of streaming viewing is much improved. Because of this I’m now looking at re-purposing the Dell small form factor PC that sits on my desktop connected to my main 32" TV. You may recall from a previous episode that I had purchased a Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro Computer, with an Intel Quad Core i5-6500T, with 8GB DDR4 RAM, and a 256 GB SSD set I that up as a HTPC a couple of months ago with KDE Neon and Plasma Big Screen for the so called 10-foot interface. In practice though I found it clunky to have to change the input on the TV itself with the appropriate Fire TV remote and then use the small Rii controller I purchased to control the Plasma Big Screen interface compared to using a purpose built streaming device controlled more easily by a one-handed remote control like Fire TV 4K. And now I don’t need it in any case. So I thought this SFF PC might make a good home lab for learning about self hosting. I want to learn how to use Docker and containers. The homelab will be headless after setup although it’s still connected to the TV for now to help with setup.

• Check This Out (5 min.)a camera

• Vibrations from the Ether (10 min.)

  • Hi Jim!

    Thanks for the reply.

    Yes, that NomadBSD (based on FreeBSD 15.1) is very impressive.

    I’ve been following GhostBSD for a while, but haven’t given a real spin yet.

    I feel conflicted as to whether to continue pursuing the BSD options, or to fall back to the more familiar (and more widely supported) Linux distros.

    I recently started following Void Linux and I’m going to give that a spin on one of my laptops.I like that Void is completely independent and that it doesn’t use SystemD. Oh and that it’s a minimalist distro that is known to work well on older systems.

    Thank you for the invite to the RoundTable. I probably won’t be participating anytime soon. I have a lot going on and my life is somewhat chaotic.

    Keep up the good work with the BSDs and with the podcast!

    Alejandro from N.Y.C.

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)