Headphones – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Sun, 24 May 2026 21:24:20 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Headphones – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast Headphones – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 486 – HTPC Like It’s 2003! https://mintcast.org/486-htpc-like-its-2003/ Sun, 24 May 2026 21:24:19 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7963 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – May

Then in our Wanderings: Bill pays the bills, Joe solders the irons and Jim fins the jelly

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – May

Then in our Wanderings: Bill pays the bills, Joe solders the irons and Jim fins the jelly

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:

Mint Monthly News

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • 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
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • 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!>

]]> full 1:26:00 7963 448.5 – All About Headphones https://mintcast.org/448-5-all-about-headphones/ Wed, 23 Oct 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7228 In our Innards section: We talk headphones

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> In our Innards section: We talk headphones

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 448 448 All About Headphones full 1:23:39 7228 mintCast 359 – COSMIC Proportions (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-359-cosmic-proportions-mp3/ Wed, 21 Apr 2021 06:36:29 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5029 Then, in the News, we get hypnotized, we look at Apple M1 support again, celebrate a birthday, and look to the stars.
In Security, Skynet.
Download
]]> Download

1:59 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
39:55 The News
1:18:36 Security Update
1:26:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I get a fresh stream, Joe sends his keystrokes over the air, Josh has a server dilemma, and Mike heads to space.

Then, in the News, we get hypnotized, we look at Apple M1 support again, celebrate a birthday, and look to the stars.

In Security, Skynet.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 5029 mintCast 359 – COSMIC Proportions https://mintcast.org/mintcast-359-cosmic-proportions/ Wed, 21 Apr 2021 06:25:28 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5024 Then, in the News, we get hypnotized, we look at Apple M1 support again, celebrate a birthday, and look to the stars.
In Security, Skynet.
Download
]]> Download

1:59 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
39:55 The News
1:18:36 Security Update
1:26:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I get a fresh stream, Joe sends his keystrokes over the air, Josh has a server dilemma, and Mike heads to space.

Then, in the News, we get hypnotized, we look at Apple M1 support again, celebrate a birthday, and look to the stars.

In Security, Skynet.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 5024 mintCast 358 – The Ethical Ethos (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-358-the-ethical-ethos-mp3/ Wed, 07 Apr 2021 05:02:24 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5004 Then, in the News, Mint sends relief, Ventoy has a birthday, JingPad gets closer, new docs Man up, and AlmaLinux soothes the soul.
In Security, your smartphone is spying on you, Facebook springs another leak, and we disclose our vulnerability.
Download
]]> Download

2:24 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
39:21 The News
1:02:28 Security Update
1:20:20 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I make a handoff, Joe repairs more stuff, Moss is in the news, Tony Hughes continues the challenge, and Mike the Builder makes a bike.

Then, in the News, Mint sends relief, Ventoy has a birthday, JingPad gets closer, new docs Man up, and AlmaLinux soothes the soul.

In Security, your smartphone is spying on you, Facebook springs another leak, and we disclose our vulnerability.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Dropping FCWN, but it’s not going far.
    • Linux User Space Season 1 is wrapped up.
    • Revising some of my audio editing workflow
      1. The “Compress Dynamics” plugin replaces Audacity’s own AND the Amplify plugin.
      2. The Noise Gate by Audacity, but that isn’t installed by default, is absolutely fantastic
    • Went with a pop filter over a wind screen for this episode. We’ll see if there’s a big difference in sibilants.
  • Joe
    • Well I need to redo one of the two Razers and reverse the connections on one of the 1mores, the Razer I guess I went a bit harsh at first with the soldering iron and I need to get a new 3.5mm connector
    • I also disassembled a couple of mice with my new Pinecil soldering iron.  I like it.  The price is 25 dollars for a good working soldering iron that heats up very fast and is easily portable.  I am still looking for a stand for it that I like.
      1. I took apart the mice for the switches so that I can use them to fix a couple of other M570 mice so that I don’t have to buy more of them.  The M570 seems to have a bit of a short half life.
    • I ordered and received the Dell Latitude 5290, which cost a bit more than I wanted to pay for a tablet but I have to say that it works well.  I also discovered that there may be a good reason to switch to the i7 instead of the i5 version even with the minimal performance gains.  The i7 version has actual Thunderbolt ports instead of just USB 3.1 but I am very happy with the tablet as is.
      1. I first installed Endeavour and then added Gnome because I wanted to give it more of a try
      2. That did not last long and I had the same issues with Steam and my ongoing dislike for Gnome out of the box
      3. Switched to Mint and things started working, other than rotation which had the issue where it would rotate the screen but not the touch.  This was easily fixed by installing screenrotate in the exact same way as with arch.
      4. Steam just plain worked and looked pretty good with Torchlight and Borderlands 2, I would have tried Borderlands 3 but the game takes 112 Gb and that would have fit on the 256 Gb SSD but would not have much left room for anything else.  BL2 was installed using proton so I could use all of the DLC
      5. I will say that BL2 sent the thing from 75 percent battery to shutdown very fast but I am also not done putting the battery through its testing to make sure that it is good
      6. The only thing that I have not been able to get working is the cameras.  Neither of them work.  Didn’t work on Arch or Mint and from what I have found online no one else has been able to get them to work either
    • Ordered a 128 Gb SSD that was supposed to work and it didn’t fit into the WAN port, so I did my research the second time and found out I need a b+m SSD in order to make it work. And it needed to be a 2242 instead of the 2230 that was marked on the board.  But the b+m 128 that I ordered came and did not match the picture or the writing on the front which also said b+m the thing was only an m.  So IDK 
    • I did put a 64Gb micro SD into it but really want the faster m.2 drive either for game storage or for a second operating system.  Maybe I should get a much larger 2280 drive instead.
    • Tried to install Garuda Linux to an external drive to test it out on my tablet but after multiple tries with issues caused by the drives and not the OS I gave up the idea of running Garuda from external media and wiped out Mint on the device and installed Garuda bare bones
    • I have to say that, for Arch, it is extremely robust and takes most of the work out of everything
    • I also found out that the game that I was using as a test case that was not working in steam in endeavour was also not working in Garuda but the reason is because it was a 32-bit game.  So there is an issue with 32-bit libraries needing to be pointed to. 
    • I also should mention that I installed the Gnome version of Garuda but I will get into that in the innards section
    • Also yesterday i picked up a large volume of broken electronics for a decent price.  Lots of bluetooth and wired headphones that need some work.  Already got a couple of them working.  My current favorite is the Razer Nari Ultimate.  I will talk more about them later but some highlights are 2 DT770s, several Shure SE215 and SE315’s and several AT M30, M40, M50
  • Moss
    • In a surprise development, I got a message in Telegram from Ronnie Tucker, congratulating me as the new voice of Full Circle Weekly News podcast. I have only one person to thank for this. Thank you, Leo. Big shoes to fill, but I hope to fill them *weekly*.
    • I had some problems for a week or so with Linux Mint 20.1, the system was locking up or sometimes just the mouse buttons stopped working. A number of other people reported similar issues on the Linux Mint group on MeWe, but nothing made it to the Mint Forum. After a couple more updates, including a kernel update and two systemd updates, my machines are working fine… the Zia800 was locking up when things get plugged into the top USB port on the front of the machine but I think this has been resolved by magic. The Fellowes keyboard I bought on eBay proved to not work so we went to Voldemart and bought her a Logitech keyboard.
    • I plugged Suzanne’s Fellowes keyboard into my computer to test it, and proved it really was not working… but in doing so, I broke off the headphone jack on my nice old Koss headphones. I thought that was all, but when I plugged my other headset into the jack to do Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 on Wednesday, I found I could not hear anyone. Tony Hughes reminded me I had a USB soundcard on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I used it, and continue to do so. Should get a second identical card in the mail in the next couple days.
    • Tony Hughes, Dale Miracle and I recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 last Wednesday and it is out now, following our record-breaking Episode 020 which exceeded 800 downloads. We had a great time as usual, and covered Mageia, Debian Unstable, Endeavour, and others. I’m already working on Episode 022. Episode 020 is at 818 downloads as of this recording.
    • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Elite Eight; voting will close this Friday before moving on to the Semifinals. Surprise! Most of my readers come from mintCast listeners, so all four versions of Mint are favored to make the Final Four… but can Solus sneak in?
  • Tony Hughes
    • Lots and lots of walking. Last Monday I did a 12.5 mile walk with my wife along the coast from South Blackpool to Fleetwood to the North of us. I’m regularly doing 5+ miles a day. It is getting quite addictive to complete the virtual walk challenge I’m on.    
    • As Moss has said we recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and I managed to get it all edited and Posted by Friday so all is good with the world. 
    • During the pre show chat last night I did manage to get Audacity 3.0.0 installed on Endeavor although I have not had a chance to play with it as yet. On my main box I have tried the Snap install and it opens the previous .aup files without a hitch but as it is in a snap it can only see the drive the OS is on so I had to copy a folder from another drive to the PC to try this out. One day I will work out these permission issues with Snap and Flatpak apps.   
  • Mike
    • Proton suite – VPN works very well if you’re comfortable with light CLI usage. Minor adjustments need to be made to work properly (add startup script). Drive is pretty bare bones in its current form but works perfectly, I signed up to beta test iOS app. Mail is mail.
    • Whonix – An operating system designed to help protect your privacy and anonymity. It runs on a VM and forces all programs to connect through Tor network, all clearnet connections are blocked, DNS leaks are blocked.
    • I’ve been wanting to buy a bicycle lately but the prices are so high due to increased demand and the pandemic ($1200 – $1500) that I decided to build a bicycle instead. I found a company that sells a bike partially built for a cheap price, you must complete half of it. City cruiser bicycle. I’m somewhat worried because I’m not mechanically inclined and I’ve never built a bicycle before. [Get the bike tires from Mars next year – Moss]

THE NEWS:

  • Mint News: New Linux Mint notification system. “We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.” The notification system will be a desktop popup notification which can be easily dismissed and won’t reappear for 2 days. Default settings have casual users in mind and will show a notification if an update has been available for 7 “logged-in” days or older than 15 calendar days. By default the Update Manager only considers security and kernel updates. The notification system has a grace period, where if you’ve installed ANY updates in any way (update manager, terminal, synaptic) in the last 30 days then it won’t notify you. The notification system is completely configurable for more intermediate to advanced users.
    • Clem on the release for the update changes: This is planned for Mint 20.2 but it could also be backported. We’ve a journalistic slack, we can send you an invite if you contact us by email.
    • Clem noted in the comments that Flatpak will also be controllable through the Update Manager. Clem also notes that a Flatpak update from 1.6.5 to a more current one is on the roadmap.
    • Clem said of Wayland and GTK4: There are no plans to move to GTK4 right now but like anything new this is something we have an interest in and so we’re keeping an eye on it. Regarding Wayland I have no news. We’re investigating the idea of making the latest Cinnamon work with Mutter, there are many pros and cons associated with that, it’s not directly related to Wayland but it could help getting closer.
    • Clem on more Desktop Environments: Not at the moment. We’re very happy with the Cinnamon – MATE – Xfce trio.
    • Clem on usrmerge for LMDE: Although we’re likely to move to a merged system in LMDE 5, in LMDE 4 you don’t need to merge your system. First, our build environment for LMDE is not merged. Second, Debian has been aware of this issue and actively fixed it in their repositories. The Ubuntu version of plymouth produces unreproducible builds, the Debian version does not. Debian detected this issue and already patched it.
  • Londoner reminds us that ventoy-1.0.00 was released on April 5th in 2020.
  • JingOS released v. 0.8 to the public, with a lot of new features, and further announced they were starting a crowdfunding campaign for the JingPad A1 – the world’s first consumer-level Linux tablet. JingOS is intended to be a full-Linux experience for tablet computers, but with an interface that could be mistaken easily for iPad OS. They are designing a product with a 2k+ screen, Gorilla Glass, 4:3 screen ratio, and premium components, with a pen and a keyboard both available. They have Discord, Telegram, Facebook, and other forums to get involved in. It should be pointed out that they got this announcement in under the wire on March 31, there were murmurings about it being a joke.
  • Man-Pages 5.11 released featuring 50,000 line changes and 480 commits by 40 contributors. 950 pages have been changed (more than 90%). The release features various patches and bug fixes. One of the largest man-pages updates in 20 years.
  • AlmaLinux is Official

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Your smartphone is spying on you more than you realize. Researchers from the University of Dublin have found that smartphones transmit telemetry data “back home” on average every 4½ minutes, however Android transmits 20x more data back to Google than iOS sends to Apple. This transfer happens even when the device is idle. Currently there are very few, if any, options to prevent telemetry collection. – Mike
  • 533,000,000 Facebook users have their data leaked online – Moss
  • Vulnerability Disclosure Norms
    • What are your feelings on hackers/security researchers dropping their research to the public directly without letting developers know first.
    • Do you think the typical 90-day requirement is enough?
    • Do you think companies should have an indefinite amount of time to fix issues?

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:26:13 5004 mintCast 358 – The Ethical Ethos https://mintcast.org/mintcast-358-the-ethical-ethos/ Wed, 07 Apr 2021 04:48:21 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5000 Then, in the News, Mint sends relief, Ventoy has a birthday, JingPad gets closer, new docs Man up, and AlmaLinux soothes the soul.
In Security, your smartphone is spying on you, Facebook springs another leak, and we disclose our vulnerability.
Download
]]> Download

2:24 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
39:21 The News
1:02:28 Security Update
1:20:20 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I make a handoff, Joe repairs more stuff, Moss is in the news, Tony Hughes continues the challenge, and Mike the Builder makes a bike.

Then, in the News, Mint sends relief, Ventoy has a birthday, JingPad gets closer, new docs Man up, and AlmaLinux soothes the soul.

In Security, your smartphone is spying on you, Facebook springs another leak, and we disclose our vulnerability.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Dropping FCWN, but it’s not going far.
    • Linux User Space Season 1 is wrapped up.
    • Revising some of my audio editing workflow
      1. The “Compress Dynamics” plugin replaces Audacity’s own AND the Amplify plugin.
      2. The Noise Gate by Audacity, but that isn’t installed by default, is absolutely fantastic
    • Went with a pop filter over a wind screen for this episode. We’ll see if there’s a big difference in sibilants.
  • Joe
    • Well I need to redo one of the two Razers and reverse the connections on one of the 1mores, the Razer I guess I went a bit harsh at first with the soldering iron and I need to get a new 3.5mm connector
    • I also disassembled a couple of mice with my new Pinecil soldering iron.  I like it.  The price is 25 dollars for a good working soldering iron that heats up very fast and is easily portable.  I am still looking for a stand for it that I like.
      1. I took apart the mice for the switches so that I can use them to fix a couple of other M570 mice so that I don’t have to buy more of them.  The M570 seems to have a bit of a short half life.
    • I ordered and received the Dell Latitude 5290, which cost a bit more than I wanted to pay for a tablet but I have to say that it works well.  I also discovered that there may be a good reason to switch to the i7 instead of the i5 version even with the minimal performance gains.  The i7 version has actual Thunderbolt ports instead of just USB 3.1 but I am very happy with the tablet as is.
      1. I first installed Endeavour and then added Gnome because I wanted to give it more of a try
      2. That did not last long and I had the same issues with Steam and my ongoing dislike for Gnome out of the box
      3. Switched to Mint and things started working, other than rotation which had the issue where it would rotate the screen but not the touch.  This was easily fixed by installing screenrotate in the exact same way as with arch.
      4. Steam just plain worked and looked pretty good with Torchlight and Borderlands 2, I would have tried Borderlands 3 but the game takes 112 Gb and that would have fit on the 256 Gb SSD but would not have much left room for anything else.  BL2 was installed using proton so I could use all of the DLC
      5. I will say that BL2 sent the thing from 75 percent battery to shutdown very fast but I am also not done putting the battery through its testing to make sure that it is good
      6. The only thing that I have not been able to get working is the cameras.  Neither of them work.  Didn’t work on Arch or Mint and from what I have found online no one else has been able to get them to work either
    • Ordered a 128 Gb SSD that was supposed to work and it didn’t fit into the WAN port, so I did my research the second time and found out I need a b+m SSD in order to make it work. And it needed to be a 2242 instead of the 2230 that was marked on the board.  But the b+m 128 that I ordered came and did not match the picture or the writing on the front which also said b+m the thing was only an m.  So IDK 
    • I did put a 64Gb micro SD into it but really want the faster m.2 drive either for game storage or for a second operating system.  Maybe I should get a much larger 2280 drive instead.
    • Tried to install Garuda Linux to an external drive to test it out on my tablet but after multiple tries with issues caused by the drives and not the OS I gave up the idea of running Garuda from external media and wiped out Mint on the device and installed Garuda bare bones
    • I have to say that, for Arch, it is extremely robust and takes most of the work out of everything
    • I also found out that the game that I was using as a test case that was not working in steam in endeavour was also not working in Garuda but the reason is because it was a 32-bit game.  So there is an issue with 32-bit libraries needing to be pointed to. 
    • I also should mention that I installed the Gnome version of Garuda but I will get into that in the innards section
    • Also yesterday i picked up a large volume of broken electronics for a decent price.  Lots of bluetooth and wired headphones that need some work.  Already got a couple of them working.  My current favorite is the Razer Nari Ultimate.  I will talk more about them later but some highlights are 2 DT770s, several Shure SE215 and SE315’s and several AT M30, M40, M50
  • Moss
    • In a surprise development, I got a message in Telegram from Ronnie Tucker, congratulating me as the new voice of Full Circle Weekly News podcast. I have only one person to thank for this. Thank you, Leo. Big shoes to fill, but I hope to fill them *weekly*.
    • I had some problems for a week or so with Linux Mint 20.1, the system was locking up or sometimes just the mouse buttons stopped working. A number of other people reported similar issues on the Linux Mint group on MeWe, but nothing made it to the Mint Forum. After a couple more updates, including a kernel update and two systemd updates, my machines are working fine… the Zia800 was locking up when things get plugged into the top USB port on the front of the machine but I think this has been resolved by magic. The Fellowes keyboard I bought on eBay proved to not work so we went to Voldemart and bought her a Logitech keyboard.
    • I plugged Suzanne’s Fellowes keyboard into my computer to test it, and proved it really was not working… but in doing so, I broke off the headphone jack on my nice old Koss headphones. I thought that was all, but when I plugged my other headset into the jack to do Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 on Wednesday, I found I could not hear anyone. Tony Hughes reminded me I had a USB soundcard on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I used it, and continue to do so. Should get a second identical card in the mail in the next couple days.
    • Tony Hughes, Dale Miracle and I recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 last Wednesday and it is out now, following our record-breaking Episode 020 which exceeded 800 downloads. We had a great time as usual, and covered Mageia, Debian Unstable, Endeavour, and others. I’m already working on Episode 022. Episode 020 is at 818 downloads as of this recording.
    • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Elite Eight; voting will close this Friday before moving on to the Semifinals. Surprise! Most of my readers come from mintCast listeners, so all four versions of Mint are favored to make the Final Four… but can Solus sneak in?
  • Tony Hughes
    • Lots and lots of walking. Last Monday I did a 12.5 mile walk with my wife along the coast from South Blackpool to Fleetwood to the North of us. I’m regularly doing 5+ miles a day. It is getting quite addictive to complete the virtual walk challenge I’m on.    
    • As Moss has said we recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and I managed to get it all edited and Posted by Friday so all is good with the world. 
    • During the pre show chat last night I did manage to get Audacity 3.0.0 installed on Endeavor although I have not had a chance to play with it as yet. On my main box I have tried the Snap install and it opens the previous .aup files without a hitch but as it is in a snap it can only see the drive the OS is on so I had to copy a folder from another drive to the PC to try this out. One day I will work out these permission issues with Snap and Flatpak apps.   
  • Mike
    • Proton suite – VPN works very well if you’re comfortable with light CLI usage. Minor adjustments need to be made to work properly (add startup script). Drive is pretty bare bones in its current form but works perfectly, I signed up to beta test iOS app. Mail is mail.
    • Whonix – An operating system designed to help protect your privacy and anonymity. It runs on a VM and forces all programs to connect through Tor network, all clearnet connections are blocked, DNS leaks are blocked.
    • I’ve been wanting to buy a bicycle lately but the prices are so high due to increased demand and the pandemic ($1200 – $1500) that I decided to build a bicycle instead. I found a company that sells a bike partially built for a cheap price, you must complete half of it. City cruiser bicycle. I’m somewhat worried because I’m not mechanically inclined and I’ve never built a bicycle before. [Get the bike tires from Mars next year – Moss]

THE NEWS:

  • Mint News: New Linux Mint notification system. “We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.” The notification system will be a desktop popup notification which can be easily dismissed and won’t reappear for 2 days. Default settings have casual users in mind and will show a notification if an update has been available for 7 “logged-in” days or older than 15 calendar days. By default the Update Manager only considers security and kernel updates. The notification system has a grace period, where if you’ve installed ANY updates in any way (update manager, terminal, synaptic) in the last 30 days then it won’t notify you. The notification system is completely configurable for more intermediate to advanced users.
    • Clem on the release for the update changes: This is planned for Mint 20.2 but it could also be backported. We’ve a journalistic slack, we can send you an invite if you contact us by email.
    • Clem noted in the comments that Flatpak will also be controllable through the Update Manager. Clem also notes that a Flatpak update from 1.6.5 to a more current one is on the roadmap.
    • Clem said of Wayland and GTK4: There are no plans to move to GTK4 right now but like anything new this is something we have an interest in and so we’re keeping an eye on it. Regarding Wayland I have no news. We’re investigating the idea of making the latest Cinnamon work with Mutter, there are many pros and cons associated with that, it’s not directly related to Wayland but it could help getting closer.
    • Clem on more Desktop Environments: Not at the moment. We’re very happy with the Cinnamon – MATE – Xfce trio.
    • Clem on usrmerge for LMDE: Although we’re likely to move to a merged system in LMDE 5, in LMDE 4 you don’t need to merge your system. First, our build environment for LMDE is not merged. Second, Debian has been aware of this issue and actively fixed it in their repositories. The Ubuntu version of plymouth produces unreproducible builds, the Debian version does not. Debian detected this issue and already patched it.
  • Londoner reminds us that ventoy-1.0.00 was released on April 5th in 2020.
  • JingOS released v. 0.8 to the public, with a lot of new features, and further announced they were starting a crowdfunding campaign for the JingPad A1 – the world’s first consumer-level Linux tablet. JingOS is intended to be a full-Linux experience for tablet computers, but with an interface that could be mistaken easily for iPad OS. They are designing a product with a 2k+ screen, Gorilla Glass, 4:3 screen ratio, and premium components, with a pen and a keyboard both available. They have Discord, Telegram, Facebook, and other forums to get involved in. It should be pointed out that they got this announcement in under the wire on March 31, there were murmurings about it being a joke.
  • Man-Pages 5.11 released featuring 50,000 line changes and 480 commits by 40 contributors. 950 pages have been changed (more than 90%). The release features various patches and bug fixes. One of the largest man-pages updates in 20 years.
  • AlmaLinux is Official

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Your smartphone is spying on you more than you realize. Researchers from the University of Dublin have found that smartphones transmit telemetry data “back home” on average every 4½ minutes, however Android transmits 20x more data back to Google than iOS sends to Apple. This transfer happens even when the device is idle. Currently there are very few, if any, options to prevent telemetry collection. – Mike
  • 533,000,000 Facebook users have their data leaked online – Moss
  • Vulnerability Disclosure Norms
    • What are your feelings on hackers/security researchers dropping their research to the public directly without letting developers know first.
    • Do you think the typical 90-day requirement is enough?
    • Do you think companies should have an indefinite amount of time to fix issues?

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:29:17 5000 mintCast 356 – Forced-o-Matic Updates (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-356-forced-o-matic-updates-mp3/ Wed, 10 Mar 2021 06:32:34 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4959 Then, in the News, SteamLink is on Linux, Mageia 8 is out, and Brave Searches for itself.
In Security, LastPass tracks you.
Download
]]> Download

2:05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
45:33 The News
1:18:37 Check This Out
1:26:12 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve upgraded my ears, Joe fixes everything, Moss gets ready to attack a monster, Tony Hughes takes a walk with tools, Josh is getting NAS-ty, and Mike weeps over wifi woes.

Then, in the News, SteamLink is on Linux, Mageia 8 is out, and Brave Searches for itself.

In Security, LastPass tracks you.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • I got some new headphones. ATH-M50Xbt
    • An ssd I thought died didn’t. It’s in an external USB enclosure now, and I used it to do the backup testing for the Innards.
  • Joe
    • Had to go back and re-fix my MMCX connections on the 1mores again.  Which means that I did not do as good of a job as I thought last time.  Kinda wish it had some kind of built in tension reliever which would help a little bit.
    • Had a lot of trouble getting the last Anker Soundcore put together and then once again like the other one it would not charge.  I could go into the whole sordid tale of broken ribbon cables and screws popping out of mountings but it just makes me angry.  So in the end, of the 4 I was only able to get one working properly so the whole product line is going to be a no-go for me.  I took the custom made cables from it and put them onto one of the HBS 770s that I still have in reserve.  I may do a few more 770s just for the fun of it but I am looking for alternatives since I don’t think they are being made anymore
    • Ordered a broken pair of Samsung Level U headphones with ANC.  Requires a solvent to break down the glue in order to take it apart.  Also got a really cheap iHome Medallion headset that my wife was able to get for 5 dollars (got 2 of them).  They are in new condition, fresh out of the box, but I am going to mod them anyway. I don’t think that I will get much battery life out of them and I want to modify the Medallion so that it will sit on the collar without moving and so that it can also use the 1mores which should improve sound quality.  
      1. Also going to look into possibly printing a new case for it and giving it a larger battery.  Or at least a new back case but I will need to check and see where the hole for the mic is.  If it is on the back I will need to be creative with how I situate said battery.
      2. I did get the Level U’s. I was able to get it taken apart with minimal damage to the casing.  I probably would not have taken it apart at all except that instead of a bad side on the headset it had a bad battery.  I was able to use one of the batteries from the Ankers which is a little smaller but the replacement batteries that would fit all cost more than I wanted to pay.  Have not done the mmcx mod to the headset and I won’t because they suck.  I am not impressed with the top end volume on them and call quality is terrible.  Don’t know if I somehow tugged the mic and put it into the wrong location but I won’t be working more on this if that is the call quality
    • Thinking about resituating my tablets and seeing if I can get some more use out of them.  Going to sell the 7140 and use the 7130 as a bedroom computer. 
      1. I did spin both of those back up to make sure that the batteries are still good and both updated easily with no issues.
      2. Even I now think that the 7130 is getting a bit long in the tooth but I have yet to find a proper affordable tablet replacement that can run Linux, has a decent screen and fast processing speed.
      3. The Dell Latitude 7200 shows some promise but the price is still a bit high for about $400 same with the 5290
      4. I was able to order a Dell Latitude 5285 for $120 that should have been an easy fix with a bad display cable.  Turned out it had a lot more wrong with it.  Including the USB ports to the point where one of the times that I hooked it up the magic smoke got out.  So $120 wasted. But I should be able to get some good parts out of it for the next one if I can get another at a good price, when I have money again. I did message the seller and he said that I purchased “as is” but then they refunded me anyway
      5. I do have to say though for the few minutes that it was running it it seemed to run Linux well.  The only issue that I saw was the touch screen rotation was inverted to the screen rotation.  But that would probably not be a difficult fix.
    • BTSync has been acting up again.  Had to delete my shares and recreate them a couple of times to get things working again so I may need to find a different syncing solution.  The application did not crash or anything just silently stopped syncing changes.  Seems like it is starting to have problems with syncing time stamps.
      1. https://leochavez.org/index.php/2019/09/21/installing-nextcloud-in-ubuntu/
    • Have still not done much 3-D printing lately, but with the warmer temperatures I did print another adapter for the olympic weights to standard bar.  Which allows me to increase the weights for deadlifts and curls.
  • Moss
    • I have installed Mageia 8. I installed Plasma on the Kudu. The installer was more involved than most but was understandable even to me, although it needed to be more graphical and use a larger font. I installed Mageia 8 XFCE on the Inspiron, the same steps but with better graphics and fonts. It doesn’t feel Mandrake-level user-friendly, but it appears to be what I’m reviewing for Episode 021 of Distrohoppers’ Digest. I have also grabbed Emmabunt̎ũs and Robolinux for further evaluation.
    • Speaking of distros, Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 was at 718 downloads today, and Episode 019 leaped ahead of it with 721. We had a lot of fun doing Episode 020, which is already at 424 downloads, and I’m already at work on the script for 021. 
    • Listener and old friend firecat sent me a Series 5 Yubikey, he says it does not have NFC and he apparently got it with a subscription to Wired Magazine. I have had a lot of adventures with this, as it did not work after setting it up as 2FA on Bitwarden. Eventually I somehow tricked Bitwarden into letting me delete that 2FA feature and set up another one. I’m a little concerned that it did not work the first time I tried to use it for 2FA, and a little concerned I managed to defeat the security to fix it. I got all the recovery information saved — I printed it out, and deleted the text file, and hopefully will find a memorable safe place for the printout. I’m still having trouble deciding what to do with it, as most of the uses suggested don’t really tell me what they do, or what they are for, in words I understand. Yet, even if I don’t figure it out, I’m extremely grateful for the gift.
    • We’ve done more work on It’s MOSS, adding articles, graphics, and people, with Dale Miracle being added to the team and one or two others talking to me about future articles. We also have come to an agreement to share articles with Full Circle Magazine, and to publish our articles under the same CC/BY-SA license. Dylan is going back over our site to attach the license info to our articles.
    • Speaking of It’s MOSS, It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 2; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 3. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
    • My wife’s new HP Zia800 came in, and it is a monstrous thing of beauty. The keyboard seller sent the wrong keyboard, but the right one got here Friday. The seller did not ask for the other keyboard to be returned, so if anyone wants a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, without the mouse and 10-key pad which usually are boxed with it, and is willing to pay the postage, I have one. We have received the wifi card. As soon as I’m feeling up to it, I will install the wifi card and plug things in. It came with Windoze 10 on it, she’ll be dual-booting it to Mint…or rather, dual-booting to Windows with Mint primary.
    • I’ve been having a bit of a rough time, with my mother’s interment, work as a substitute teacher being intermittent at best, and other things. But I’ll be OK. And Dresden is still plugging along in Book 10, Chapter 20.
  • Tony Hughes
    • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale and Moss. This one was 1 hour long, as having 3 hosts and a new section we have expanded the time taken. It’s a good thing I am not doing a regular review anymore, as due to my health issues I am concentrating on the post production side of the show. I will still be there each episode to keep everyone on track lol. 
    • Aldi here in the UK did a sale of tools last week and I picked up a couple of 10w LED battery portable workshop lights which can also be used as power banks. I also got a digital caliper for £8/$11.20 which is good value as in the local hardware store they were £20 the last time I looked. I also had to buy a new LED bulb for my workshop/office as the old one just stopped working. The replacement seems a lot brighter so maybe the other one had been on the way out for a while.
    • Went on a long walk with my better half last Monday, we walked all the way along the Prom here in Blackpool to the next Town along, Cleveleys, which is about 8 miles away; a few years ago I was not able to walk from the lounge to the kitchen which is about 10 steps, due to arthritis, my final tally for the day was just under 21K. Getting fit is helping keep the arthritis controlled so I have more good days than bad at the moment.
    • I was looking at a Dell 9th gen i7 XPS15 but I missed the boat as they have all gone, so I’m now looking at an Entroware 17” Hybris which for the price with 32Gb of RAM is less than a £1000, I would add my own PCie NVME m.2 card later as I can pick one up for half the quoted upgrade prices on the site and the same with the SSD. There is a link in the show notes to the site if you are interested, and NO we are not sponsored by them. 
  • Josh
    • Crowbar Kernel Panic has a website! https://crowbarkernelpanic.fireside.fm
    • Crowbar Kernel Panic is officially on Spotify as well! Just search Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify and you will find it.
  • Ryzen 7 5800x totally changed my Linux gaming experience. 
  • TrueNAS is really cool but I have not had success sharing files over the network. I have created a user and a dataset and enabled SMB on the dataset and the sharing settings but I still cannot log into my SMB from another computer.
  • TrueNAS is working now I didn’t do anything and now I can log in to my share with no issues.
  • Mike
    • WiFi woes – 5/30, modem, router, sig strength, packets, net man, kernel, live USB, timeshift…
    • New Dell XPS DE…

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on March 21, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4959 mintCast 356 – Forced-o-Matic Updates https://mintcast.org/mintcast-356-forced-o-matic-updates/ Wed, 10 Mar 2021 06:21:31 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4955 Then, in the News, SteamLink is on Linux, Mageia 8 is out, and Brave Searches for itself.
In Security, LastPass tracks you.
Download
]]> Download

2:05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
45:33 The News
1:18:37 Check This Out
1:26:12 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve upgraded my ears, Joe fixes everything, Moss gets ready to attack a monster, Tony Hughes takes a walk with tools, Josh is getting NAS-ty, and Mike weeps over wifi woes.

Then, in the News, SteamLink is on Linux, Mageia 8 is out, and Brave Searches for itself.

In Security, LastPass tracks you.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • I got some new headphones. ATH-M50Xbt
    • An ssd I thought died didn’t. It’s in an external USB enclosure now, and I used it to do the backup testing for the Innards.
  • Joe
    • Had to go back and re-fix my MMCX connections on the 1mores again.  Which means that I did not do as good of a job as I thought last time.  Kinda wish it had some kind of built in tension reliever which would help a little bit.
    • Had a lot of trouble getting the last Anker Soundcore put together and then once again like the other one it would not charge.  I could go into the whole sordid tale of broken ribbon cables and screws popping out of mountings but it just makes me angry.  So in the end, of the 4 I was only able to get one working properly so the whole product line is going to be a no-go for me.  I took the custom made cables from it and put them onto one of the HBS 770s that I still have in reserve.  I may do a few more 770s just for the fun of it but I am looking for alternatives since I don’t think they are being made anymore
    • Ordered a broken pair of Samsung Level U headphones with ANC.  Requires a solvent to break down the glue in order to take it apart.  Also got a really cheap iHome Medallion headset that my wife was able to get for 5 dollars (got 2 of them).  They are in new condition, fresh out of the box, but I am going to mod them anyway. I don’t think that I will get much battery life out of them and I want to modify the Medallion so that it will sit on the collar without moving and so that it can also use the 1mores which should improve sound quality.  
      1. Also going to look into possibly printing a new case for it and giving it a larger battery.  Or at least a new back case but I will need to check and see where the hole for the mic is.  If it is on the back I will need to be creative with how I situate said battery.
      2. I did get the Level U’s. I was able to get it taken apart with minimal damage to the casing.  I probably would not have taken it apart at all except that instead of a bad side on the headset it had a bad battery.  I was able to use one of the batteries from the Ankers which is a little smaller but the replacement batteries that would fit all cost more than I wanted to pay.  Have not done the mmcx mod to the headset and I won’t because they suck.  I am not impressed with the top end volume on them and call quality is terrible.  Don’t know if I somehow tugged the mic and put it into the wrong location but I won’t be working more on this if that is the call quality
    • Thinking about resituating my tablets and seeing if I can get some more use out of them.  Going to sell the 7140 and use the 7130 as a bedroom computer. 
      1. I did spin both of those back up to make sure that the batteries are still good and both updated easily with no issues.
      2. Even I now think that the 7130 is getting a bit long in the tooth but I have yet to find a proper affordable tablet replacement that can run Linux, has a decent screen and fast processing speed.
      3. The Dell Latitude 7200 shows some promise but the price is still a bit high for about $400 same with the 5290
      4. I was able to order a Dell Latitude 5285 for $120 that should have been an easy fix with a bad display cable.  Turned out it had a lot more wrong with it.  Including the USB ports to the point where one of the times that I hooked it up the magic smoke got out.  So $120 wasted. But I should be able to get some good parts out of it for the next one if I can get another at a good price, when I have money again. I did message the seller and he said that I purchased “as is” but then they refunded me anyway
      5. I do have to say though for the few minutes that it was running it it seemed to run Linux well.  The only issue that I saw was the touch screen rotation was inverted to the screen rotation.  But that would probably not be a difficult fix.
    • BTSync has been acting up again.  Had to delete my shares and recreate them a couple of times to get things working again so I may need to find a different syncing solution.  The application did not crash or anything just silently stopped syncing changes.  Seems like it is starting to have problems with syncing time stamps.
      1. https://leochavez.org/index.php/2019/09/21/installing-nextcloud-in-ubuntu/
    • Have still not done much 3-D printing lately, but with the warmer temperatures I did print another adapter for the olympic weights to standard bar.  Which allows me to increase the weights for deadlifts and curls.
  • Moss
    • I have installed Mageia 8. I installed Plasma on the Kudu. The installer was more involved than most but was understandable even to me, although it needed to be more graphical and use a larger font. I installed Mageia 8 XFCE on the Inspiron, the same steps but with better graphics and fonts. It doesn’t feel Mandrake-level user-friendly, but it appears to be what I’m reviewing for Episode 021 of Distrohoppers’ Digest. I have also grabbed Emmabunt̎ũs and Robolinux for further evaluation.
    • Speaking of distros, Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 was at 718 downloads today, and Episode 019 leaped ahead of it with 721. We had a lot of fun doing Episode 020, which is already at 424 downloads, and I’m already at work on the script for 021. 
    • Listener and old friend firecat sent me a Series 5 Yubikey, he says it does not have NFC and he apparently got it with a subscription to Wired Magazine. I have had a lot of adventures with this, as it did not work after setting it up as 2FA on Bitwarden. Eventually I somehow tricked Bitwarden into letting me delete that 2FA feature and set up another one. I’m a little concerned that it did not work the first time I tried to use it for 2FA, and a little concerned I managed to defeat the security to fix it. I got all the recovery information saved — I printed it out, and deleted the text file, and hopefully will find a memorable safe place for the printout. I’m still having trouble deciding what to do with it, as most of the uses suggested don’t really tell me what they do, or what they are for, in words I understand. Yet, even if I don’t figure it out, I’m extremely grateful for the gift.
    • We’ve done more work on It’s MOSS, adding articles, graphics, and people, with Dale Miracle being added to the team and one or two others talking to me about future articles. We also have come to an agreement to share articles with Full Circle Magazine, and to publish our articles under the same CC/BY-SA license. Dylan is going back over our site to attach the license info to our articles.
    • Speaking of It’s MOSS, It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 2; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 3. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
    • My wife’s new HP Zia800 came in, and it is a monstrous thing of beauty. The keyboard seller sent the wrong keyboard, but the right one got here Friday. The seller did not ask for the other keyboard to be returned, so if anyone wants a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, without the mouse and 10-key pad which usually are boxed with it, and is willing to pay the postage, I have one. We have received the wifi card. As soon as I’m feeling up to it, I will install the wifi card and plug things in. It came with Windoze 10 on it, she’ll be dual-booting it to Mint…or rather, dual-booting to Windows with Mint primary.
    • I’ve been having a bit of a rough time, with my mother’s interment, work as a substitute teacher being intermittent at best, and other things. But I’ll be OK. And Dresden is still plugging along in Book 10, Chapter 20.
  • Tony Hughes
    • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale and Moss. This one was 1 hour long, as having 3 hosts and a new section we have expanded the time taken. It’s a good thing I am not doing a regular review anymore, as due to my health issues I am concentrating on the post production side of the show. I will still be there each episode to keep everyone on track lol. 
    • Aldi here in the UK did a sale of tools last week and I picked up a couple of 10w LED battery portable workshop lights which can also be used as power banks. I also got a digital caliper for £8/$11.20 which is good value as in the local hardware store they were £20 the last time I looked. I also had to buy a new LED bulb for my workshop/office as the old one just stopped working. The replacement seems a lot brighter so maybe the other one had been on the way out for a while.
    • Went on a long walk with my better half last Monday, we walked all the way along the Prom here in Blackpool to the next Town along, Cleveleys, which is about 8 miles away; a few years ago I was not able to walk from the lounge to the kitchen which is about 10 steps, due to arthritis, my final tally for the day was just under 21K. Getting fit is helping keep the arthritis controlled so I have more good days than bad at the moment.
    • I was looking at a Dell 9th gen i7 XPS15 but I missed the boat as they have all gone, so I’m now looking at an Entroware 17” Hybris which for the price with 32Gb of RAM is less than a £1000, I would add my own PCie NVME m.2 card later as I can pick one up for half the quoted upgrade prices on the site and the same with the SSD. There is a link in the show notes to the site if you are interested, and NO we are not sponsored by them. 
  • Josh
    • Crowbar Kernel Panic has a website! https://crowbarkernelpanic.fireside.fm
    • Crowbar Kernel Panic is officially on Spotify as well! Just search Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify and you will find it.
  • Ryzen 7 5800x totally changed my Linux gaming experience. 
  • TrueNAS is really cool but I have not had success sharing files over the network. I have created a user and a dataset and enabled SMB on the dataset and the sharing settings but I still cannot log into my SMB from another computer.
  • TrueNAS is working now I didn’t do anything and now I can log in to my share with no issues.
  • Mike
    • WiFi woes – 5/30, modem, router, sig strength, packets, net man, kernel, live USB, timeshift…
    • New Dell XPS DE…

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on March 21, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4955 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update-mp3/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:57:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4913 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
      • This will be my “studio” machine.
      • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
      • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again
  • Joe
    • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
      • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
      • The other is still working well
    • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
    • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
    • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
    • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
    • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
    • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
      • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
      • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
      • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this
  • Moss
    • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
    • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
    • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
    • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
    • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
    • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
    • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
    • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

    • Sudo Vulnerability
      • The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
      • A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
    •  Chrome[ium] Zero Day
      • Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
      • Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
      • The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
      • Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
      • Electron apps…
  • Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021. 

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4913 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:46:23 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4909 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
      • This will be my “studio” machine.
      • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
      • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again
  • Joe
    • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
      • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
      • The other is still working well
    • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
    • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
    • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
    • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
    • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
    • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
      • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
      • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
      • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this
  • Moss
    • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
    • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
    • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
    • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
    • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
    • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
    • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
    • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

    • Sudo Vulnerability
      • The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
      • A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
    •  Chrome[ium] Zero Day
      • Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
      • Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
      • The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
      • Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
      • Electron apps…
  • Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021. 

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4909 mintCast 326 – One Byte Opposition (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-326-one-byte-opposition-mp3/ Wed, 15 Jan 2020 07:10:03 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4126 Then, in our news - Dell shows a new developer XPS 13 laptop at CES, there is a new enterprise Chromebook from Samsung and EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield and more.
In Security - It’s time to update Firefox... again. And Cablehaunt spooks your modem.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Special Guest Alan Pope finds gold in the loft and plays 30+ year old games online, Leo wins at gifts, but fails at MicroK8s, Tony Hughes plays with Ubuntu Studio, more Matchbox cars, and donates some tech, Joe tries to repair a pebble, fixes more headphones and listens to lots of books, Tony Watts converts 8mm film to digital, plays with a dual monitor setup on his Thinkpad and reconfigures his recording setup.

Then, in our news – Dell shows a new developer XPS 13 laptop at CES, there is a new enterprise Chromebook from Samsung and EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield and more.

In Security – It’s time to update Firefox… again. And Cablehaunt spooks your modem.

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Alan P
    • Found a bunch of old audio cassettes in the loft. Bought a cassette player off ebay to sample them into a PC (thinkpad, of course) and then feed them into an emulator if they’re computer stuff.
    • Some of them were programs that I’d written with a friend over 30 years ago.
    • Also played some old 8-bit games with my friend Martin Wimpress on our new twitch channel “8bitversus”. We decided to start playing games online when a friend in the Ubuntu Podcast telegram channel suggested it might be fun to watch. I was a massive sinclair spectrum fan, and he was a commodore 64 fan. In these streams we take turns choosing games and get the other person to play games on the other persons platform. It’s fun!
  • Leo
    • Got handed a desktop sans case from a friend that wasn’t using it anymore and was moving out of state. I’ve been wanting to build a new server for quite a while to get more into Docker and other enterprisey-type things and I saw it as a sign to forge ahead!
    • i5-6600k, 16GB 2400MHz RAM, ASUS Fancy Pants motherboard, and a 700W PSU.
    • Planning on moving the services I have at home, like Nextcloud, from snap and VMs to MicroK8s, but am having some issues with getting the Dashboard to listen outside on a local LAN subnet.
    • Making slow but steady progress on the manual Raspberry Pi Zero W motion camera setup.
  • Tony H
    • Having issues with Ubuntu Studio that I had installed on my Dell 7440 i7 it was reporting errors every time I started it. So I swapped out the M2 SSD with a 2.5” SSD and did a clean install to this drive. More problems, the new iso would not boot, so I ended up finding and using the original iso off my portable HDD to make a new bootable USB install drive this worked and I have a clean install of Ubuntu Studio on the Test laptop for January’s test distro. One issue I have found so far is not an Ubuntu issue but a Firefox issue, I can no longer copy my Firefox folder over to the new machine and have all my bookmarks as they were previously installed. Yes I have a FireFox account but it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to and syncing bookmarks which is a pain when you have several Hundred of these that you would like to access. Previously it was a doddle to copy my FireFox over to a new install and it was one of the reasons I still use it. And yes my desktop PC is linked to the laptop as far as sync is concerned, just not doing it.
    • Recording the latest Distrohoppers Digest episode with Moss, it went out on Friday.
    • Continuing to play with Matchbox models, pick up a couple of bargains over the holiday but now it’s time to start actually restoring a few. Started on a Ford GT superfast restoration and have a couple of others on the go as well. I’ve ordered some replacement parts from one of the model suppliers here in the UK to enable me to restore some of the models with parts missing, but where possible I try to use parts from other models bought for this purpose. Yesterday I went to a collectors Fair / swap meet and bought a few things and did a couple of swaps, thinking next time I may get a table to sell a few things that I have surplus, in the collection.    
    • Going back to PC stuff, I made a donation of some Pi stuff and a couple of Laptops to a friend of my friend Les Pounder. Drew works in Egypt and is hoping to teach local children Computing, but has absolutely no equipment, or didn’t have until Les sent him some Pi’s and an old Lenovo x61s with Raspbian x86 installed so the children will be using the same software on all the machines. One of the PC’s I am sending is an x61s and also a Dell E6220 with some random Pi stuff and a couple of Pi’s to the cause. It’s easy to forget that having access to fairly cheap older hardware via various sources such as ebay is beyond the financial ability of many in much of the world, and for some even in the rich countries. A shout out to Zeb from Destination Linux who did a 24Hr marathon YouTube stream of Euro Truck simulator over the holiday to raise funds for Free Geek, in the US you can find them HERE. There are similar projects in the UK one is the WEEECharity based in the North West so if you want to help people in your own community bridge the digital divide consider a donation of unused and unloved hardware or bung them a small donation to help out. 
    • Finally joined the BDLL Euro show, realised at the last minute that it was the second Saturday of the month, so after a quick check in with the crew dropped out of the pre show mumble chat and jumped into the BDLL Zoom after installing the Zoom client as I was on the Ubuntu Studio laptop, after a bit of a glitch at the beginning with the hardware it went OK for the rest of the 2 hours. 
  • Joe
    • Someone gave me an equallogic ps6500  Toyam gave it to me.
    • I have no idea what to do with it
    • Honkeymagoo sent me a pair of pebble watches to work on
      • They both needed battery replacements
      • I failed miserably
      • Ruined one of the ribbon cables that go around the side on one
      • Did get the new batteries connected but was not able to get them to turn on
      • Other then the ribbon break i am not sure what I did wrong
      • One of the boards did get hot at one point but I reflowed the connection for the battery and it settled down
      • Interesting highlights.  I did have to solder a cable onto one of the battery boards.  Just used some wire from some ethernet cable that i had sitting around.  The cable is a little stiff for this application but when i checked the voltages it came out fine.
    • Jim Butchers Codex Alera
      • Good series.
      • Had to replace my copy because the old one was corrupt.  
      • Not sure if it is my hard drive with bad sectors or one of the ones that I used for a backup
    • The book of 5 rings
      • Interesting but because of the type of book and the fact that i am going over it with audio i think i am going to have to go through it several more times before i get the most out of it
    • Shattered Bonds, book 13 in the Jane Yellowrock series
      • Good book, not the easiest to follow.
      • Jumps around a bit and references some obscure aspects of the long series before it
    • Alex Verus novels again
      • Really good series.
      • Better after a couple of read throughs and getting in all the details
    • Also was able to get a python class in this morning.  We should start meeting weekly again. I think the next class that we are going to take may be centos
    • Working on old headphones again
      • Replaced the cable on my daughter’s cheap little headphones
      • Not even sure what brand they are just grabbed an old aux cable and replaced the broken cable
      • I have found that full cable replacements are sturdier and more reliable than patching the cable or replacing the jack
    • Fixed one set of 770’s by shortening the cable on one side
    • Fixed one set of 510’s by shortening the cable on one side and replacing the other
      • I had a problem with the replaced side
      • I tried shortening the original cable first but the sound was dim so i just did a replacement.  
      • Sound was still dim on that side so what I ended up doing was putting some flux down on the board and running my iron over a bunch of the connections while the device was on and playing music(do not try that) this reseated whatever was loose and fixed the sound issues
    • Fixed 2 sets of 810’s and a set of insignia’s by opening the speaker up and shortening the cable from that side
      • 1 more 810 to do that on
      • This is a very difficult fix because of the small size and the fact that it doesnt like to go back together if you get too harsh taking it apart
        • One of the 810s have another problem that i am not going to be able to fix but the insignias work well
          • The 810s i was able to get the earpiece working but it is much dimmer than the other side.  Next time i am setup i may try to reflow some of it 
          • But I think the problem is the connections on the spindle are wearing out so i may take it all the way apart and try to clean that up
          • The insignias work well for audio books but have terrible call quality in and out
        • The other 810 is working good
    • Full cable replacement on some earforce recon 50x’s that i found at goodwill for 4 dollars
      • Will probably also do the same for my other pair of 60p’s
      • This model has a separate line going to each ear one with the cables for the mic
      • The only issue that i have found is when the mic is in the correct position the left and right channels are reversed
    • Did a full band replacement on the z2’s.  Glad the replacement model worked.
      • Was not an exact match on the hinges but was close enough to the same size that i was able to get it together
      • Had to switch back to the standard sized ear cups because this band is narrower than the original
      • Much more clamping force but still comfortable
      • Used the earcups on the razer kraken z2’s
    • Attempted to replace the full cable from the board to the earpiece on a pair of 780’s but was plagued with problems and had to set it aside before i got frustrated while wielding a soldering iron. But as i mentioned before that is a difficult fix.
    • Picked up a pair of Meze 99 neos for 20 dollars
      • These headphones are 200 new on Amazon
      • Work perfectly and sound great
      • I am using a portable amp to push the headphones when i want a good sound
    •  Also picked up a pair of razer krakens for 15 dollars.
      • Had some problems where the left speaker was acting as the mic instead of the mic but was also pushing through sound
      • This had the side effect where everything that played on the headphones was transmitted in complete clarity back through the mic connection.
      • Attempted a cable fix directly at the 3.5mm jack but this did not work and left me somewhat confused as to the actual pinout of the device. Essentially when i had it hooked up right it was doing the same thing as before.
      • Cut the cable again above the included remote as that is the next likely place for an issue to arise. Hooked up a second cable from there and still got the same issue
      • Did a full cable replacement and while testing i found out that the mic is completely shot.
      • Works as a pair of headphones until i find another solution but i think i may mod an old mic from another system. 
      • Basically bypassed the surface mount board that is built in and hooked everything up direct except for the offside speaker
      • Sound good and are comfortable
      • I have a couple mono connectors that i might be able to use, i will need to look more closely 
      • Did not realize that it took proprietary ear cups but the ones i bought for the z2’s to add extra padding worked fine with the extra built in edge material.
      • Even covers up the hole from where i removed the mic 
    • Gave serious consideration to recording the whole thing and while i could have done it from my phone i had 2 problems
      • My phone is my bluetooth testing device
      • If I were planning on posting anywhere i would have had to refrain from cursing. And I was not about to do that.
    • For those of you that are wondering I go through a lot of bt headphones and my kids go through a lot of cans.  Dont think they are going to be using the meze’s though
    • Ordered some new tips for my soldering iron as the ones from microcenter dont quite fit
      • These do fit and work very well.  
    • My server is down after the most recent round of updates.  Not sure what is wrong yet. Need to put the video card back into the server. Which is annoying.  
  • Tony W
    • Miracle Morning 
      • First heard about it from User Error
      • S.A.V.E.R.S. explained – “The Miracle Morning”
      • More about habit and discipline than time spent or results 
      • Will stick with some variation of this morning routine
    • Music keeping me very busy (4 “gigs” in the last 4 days)
    • Converting old 8mm video using VLC
    • Thinkpad dual display conundrum
    •  Recording setup revisions
      • New boom stand (cheap Neewer)
      • Presonus Audiobox
      • Still using budget Behringer XLR mic
    • Have really been enjoying convenience of true wireless earbuds
      • Using Anker Liberty Soundcore buds that were a Christmas gift
      • Plex on the go is great for breaks

News:

Security Update:

  • Mozilla Patches Zero-Day Being Actively Exploited in 72
    • The Firefox team updated version 72 one day after initial release because of a Type Confusion flaw that is being exploited in the wild.
    • These flaws essentially do not look at some specific input and run whatever is given to it. This can cause issues when privileged data is requested.
    • Upgrade to Firefox 72.0.1 or Firefox ESR 68.4.1 to fix this issue.
  • Cable Haunt Vulnerability Affects Hundreds of Millions of Cable Modems
    • Users of cable modems with Broadcom chips are affected.
    • The spectrum analyzer on the Broadcom chip, typically used for debugging and testing purposes, can be leveraged to:
      • Change default DNS server
      • Conduct remote man-in-the-middle attacks
      • Hot-swap code or even the entire firmware
      • Upload, flash, and upgrade firmware silently
      • Disable ISP firmware upgrade
      • Change every config file and settings
      • Get and Set SNMP OID values
      • Change all associated MAC Addresses
      • Change serial numbers
      • Be exploited in botnet
    • ISPs or manufacturers can fix the issue with a firmware update. There’s not much you can do about it. However, the complexity of the attack is very high, so unless you’re under the microscope, you’ll likely not be affected.

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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!)
]]> full 1:43:27 4126 mintCast 326 – One Byte Opposition https://mintcast.org/mintcast-326-one-byte-opposition/ Wed, 15 Jan 2020 07:02:29 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4131 Then, in our news - Dell shows a new developer XPS 13 laptop at CES, there is a new enterprise Chromebook from Samsung and EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield and more.
In Security - It’s time to update Firefox... again. And Cablehaunt spooks your modem.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Special Guest Alan Pope finds gold in the loft and plays 30+ year old games online, Leo wins at gifts, but fails at MicroK8s, Tony Hughes plays with Ubuntu Studio, more Matchbox cars, and donates some tech, Joe tries to repair a pebble, fixes more headphones and listens to lots of books, Tony Watts converts 8mm film to digital, plays with a dual monitor setup on his Thinkpad and reconfigures his recording setup.

Then, in our news – Dell shows a new developer XPS 13 laptop at CES, there is a new enterprise Chromebook from Samsung and EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield and more.

In Security – It’s time to update Firefox… again. And Cablehaunt spooks your modem.

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Alan P
    • Found a bunch of old audio cassettes in the loft. Bought a cassette player off ebay to sample them into a PC (thinkpad, of course) and then feed them into an emulator if they’re computer stuff.
    • Some of them were programs that I’d written with a friend over 30 years ago.
    • Also played some old 8-bit games with my friend Martin Wimpress on our new twitch channel “8bitversus”. We decided to start playing games online when a friend in the Ubuntu Podcast telegram channel suggested it might be fun to watch. I was a massive sinclair spectrum fan, and he was a commodore 64 fan. In these streams we take turns choosing games and get the other person to play games on the other persons platform. It’s fun!
  • Leo
    • Got handed a desktop sans case from a friend that wasn’t using it anymore and was moving out of state. I’ve been wanting to build a new server for quite a while to get more into Docker and other enterprisey-type things and I saw it as a sign to forge ahead!
    • i5-6600k, 16GB 2400MHz RAM, ASUS Fancy Pants motherboard, and a 700W PSU.
    • Planning on moving the services I have at home, like Nextcloud, from snap and VMs to MicroK8s, but am having some issues with getting the Dashboard to listen outside on a local LAN subnet.
    • Making slow but steady progress on the manual Raspberry Pi Zero W motion camera setup.
  • Tony H
    • Having issues with Ubuntu Studio that I had installed on my Dell 7440 i7 it was reporting errors every time I started it. So I swapped out the M2 SSD with a 2.5” SSD and did a clean install to this drive. More problems, the new iso would not boot, so I ended up finding and using the original iso off my portable HDD to make a new bootable USB install drive this worked and I have a clean install of Ubuntu Studio on the Test laptop for January’s test distro. One issue I have found so far is not an Ubuntu issue but a Firefox issue, I can no longer copy my Firefox folder over to the new machine and have all my bookmarks as they were previously installed. Yes I have a FireFox account but it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to and syncing bookmarks which is a pain when you have several Hundred of these that you would like to access. Previously it was a doddle to copy my FireFox over to a new install and it was one of the reasons I still use it. And yes my desktop PC is linked to the laptop as far as sync is concerned, just not doing it.
    • Recording the latest Distrohoppers Digest episode with Moss, it went out on Friday.
    • Continuing to play with Matchbox models, pick up a couple of bargains over the holiday but now it’s time to start actually restoring a few. Started on a Ford GT superfast restoration and have a couple of others on the go as well. I’ve ordered some replacement parts from one of the model suppliers here in the UK to enable me to restore some of the models with parts missing, but where possible I try to use parts from other models bought for this purpose. Yesterday I went to a collectors Fair / swap meet and bought a few things and did a couple of swaps, thinking next time I may get a table to sell a few things that I have surplus, in the collection.    
    • Going back to PC stuff, I made a donation of some Pi stuff and a couple of Laptops to a friend of my friend Les Pounder. Drew works in Egypt and is hoping to teach local children Computing, but has absolutely no equipment, or didn’t have until Les sent him some Pi’s and an old Lenovo x61s with Raspbian x86 installed so the children will be using the same software on all the machines. One of the PC’s I am sending is an x61s and also a Dell E6220 with some random Pi stuff and a couple of Pi’s to the cause. It’s easy to forget that having access to fairly cheap older hardware via various sources such as ebay is beyond the financial ability of many in much of the world, and for some even in the rich countries. A shout out to Zeb from Destination Linux who did a 24Hr marathon YouTube stream of Euro Truck simulator over the holiday to raise funds for Free Geek, in the US you can find them HERE. There are similar projects in the UK one is the WEEECharity based in the North West so if you want to help people in your own community bridge the digital divide consider a donation of unused and unloved hardware or bung them a small donation to help out. 
    • Finally joined the BDLL Euro show, realised at the last minute that it was the second Saturday of the month, so after a quick check in with the crew dropped out of the pre show mumble chat and jumped into the BDLL Zoom after installing the Zoom client as I was on the Ubuntu Studio laptop, after a bit of a glitch at the beginning with the hardware it went OK for the rest of the 2 hours. 
  • Joe
    • Someone gave me an equallogic ps6500  Toyam gave it to me.
    • I have no idea what to do with it
    • Honkeymagoo sent me a pair of pebble watches to work on
      • They both needed battery replacements
      • I failed miserably
      • Ruined one of the ribbon cables that go around the side on one
      • Did get the new batteries connected but was not able to get them to turn on
      • Other then the ribbon break i am not sure what I did wrong
      • One of the boards did get hot at one point but I reflowed the connection for the battery and it settled down
      • Interesting highlights.  I did have to solder a cable onto one of the battery boards.  Just used some wire from some ethernet cable that i had sitting around.  The cable is a little stiff for this application but when i checked the voltages it came out fine.
    • Jim Butchers Codex Alera
      • Good series.
      • Had to replace my copy because the old one was corrupt.  
      • Not sure if it is my hard drive with bad sectors or one of the ones that I used for a backup
    • The book of 5 rings
      • Interesting but because of the type of book and the fact that i am going over it with audio i think i am going to have to go through it several more times before i get the most out of it
    • Shattered Bonds, book 13 in the Jane Yellowrock series
      • Good book, not the easiest to follow.
      • Jumps around a bit and references some obscure aspects of the long series before it
    • Alex Verus novels again
      • Really good series.
      • Better after a couple of read throughs and getting in all the details
    • Also was able to get a python class in this morning.  We should start meeting weekly again. I think the next class that we are going to take may be centos
    • Working on old headphones again
      • Replaced the cable on my daughter’s cheap little headphones
      • Not even sure what brand they are just grabbed an old aux cable and replaced the broken cable
      • I have found that full cable replacements are sturdier and more reliable than patching the cable or replacing the jack
    • Fixed one set of 770’s by shortening the cable on one side
    • Fixed one set of 510’s by shortening the cable on one side and replacing the other
      • I had a problem with the replaced side
      • I tried shortening the original cable first but the sound was dim so i just did a replacement.  
      • Sound was still dim on that side so what I ended up doing was putting some flux down on the board and running my iron over a bunch of the connections while the device was on and playing music(do not try that) this reseated whatever was loose and fixed the sound issues
    • Fixed 2 sets of 810’s and a set of insignia’s by opening the speaker up and shortening the cable from that side
      • 1 more 810 to do that on
      • This is a very difficult fix because of the small size and the fact that it doesnt like to go back together if you get too harsh taking it apart
        • One of the 810s have another problem that i am not going to be able to fix but the insignias work well
          • The 810s i was able to get the earpiece working but it is much dimmer than the other side.  Next time i am setup i may try to reflow some of it 
          • But I think the problem is the connections on the spindle are wearing out so i may take it all the way apart and try to clean that up
          • The insignias work well for audio books but have terrible call quality in and out
        • The other 810 is working good
    • Full cable replacement on some earforce recon 50x’s that i found at goodwill for 4 dollars
      • Will probably also do the same for my other pair of 60p’s
      • This model has a separate line going to each ear one with the cables for the mic
      • The only issue that i have found is when the mic is in the correct position the left and right channels are reversed
    • Did a full band replacement on the z2’s.  Glad the replacement model worked.
      • Was not an exact match on the hinges but was close enough to the same size that i was able to get it together
      • Had to switch back to the standard sized ear cups because this band is narrower than the original
      • Much more clamping force but still comfortable
      • Used the earcups on the razer kraken z2’s
    • Attempted to replace the full cable from the board to the earpiece on a pair of 780’s but was plagued with problems and had to set it aside before i got frustrated while wielding a soldering iron. But as i mentioned before that is a difficult fix.
    • Picked up a pair of Meze 99 neos for 20 dollars
      • These headphones are 200 new on Amazon
      • Work perfectly and sound great
      • I am using a portable amp to push the headphones when i want a good sound
    •  Also picked up a pair of razer krakens for 15 dollars.
      • Had some problems where the left speaker was acting as the mic instead of the mic but was also pushing through sound
      • This had the side effect where everything that played on the headphones was transmitted in complete clarity back through the mic connection.
      • Attempted a cable fix directly at the 3.5mm jack but this did not work and left me somewhat confused as to the actual pinout of the device. Essentially when i had it hooked up right it was doing the same thing as before.
      • Cut the cable again above the included remote as that is the next likely place for an issue to arise. Hooked up a second cable from there and still got the same issue
      • Did a full cable replacement and while testing i found out that the mic is completely shot.
      • Works as a pair of headphones until i find another solution but i think i may mod an old mic from another system. 
      • Basically bypassed the surface mount board that is built in and hooked everything up direct except for the offside speaker
      • Sound good and are comfortable
      • I have a couple mono connectors that i might be able to use, i will need to look more closely 
      • Did not realize that it took proprietary ear cups but the ones i bought for the z2’s to add extra padding worked fine with the extra built in edge material.
      • Even covers up the hole from where i removed the mic 
    • Gave serious consideration to recording the whole thing and while i could have done it from my phone i had 2 problems
      • My phone is my bluetooth testing device
      • If I were planning on posting anywhere i would have had to refrain from cursing. And I was not about to do that.
    • For those of you that are wondering I go through a lot of bt headphones and my kids go through a lot of cans.  Dont think they are going to be using the meze’s though
    • Ordered some new tips for my soldering iron as the ones from microcenter dont quite fit
      • These do fit and work very well.  
    • My server is down after the most recent round of updates.  Not sure what is wrong yet. Need to put the video card back into the server. Which is annoying.  
  • Tony W
    • Miracle Morning 
      • First heard about it from User Error
      • S.A.V.E.R.S. explained – “The Miracle Morning”
      • More about habit and discipline than time spent or results 
      • Will stick with some variation of this morning routine
    • Music keeping me very busy (4 “gigs” in the last 4 days)
    • Converting old 8mm video using VLC
    • Thinkpad dual display conundrum
    •  Recording setup revisions
      • New boom stand (cheap Neewer)
      • Presonus Audiobox
      • Still using budget Behringer XLR mic
    • Have really been enjoying convenience of true wireless earbuds
      • Using Anker Liberty Soundcore buds that were a Christmas gift
      • Plex on the go is great for breaks

News:

Security Update:

  • Mozilla Patches Zero-Day Being Actively Exploited in 72
    • The Firefox team updated version 72 one day after initial release because of a Type Confusion flaw that is being exploited in the wild.
    • These flaws essentially do not look at some specific input and run whatever is given to it. This can cause issues when privileged data is requested.
    • Upgrade to Firefox 72.0.1 or Firefox ESR 68.4.1 to fix this issue.
  • Cable Haunt Vulnerability Affects Hundreds of Millions of Cable Modems
    • Users of cable modems with Broadcom chips are affected.
    • The spectrum analyzer on the Broadcom chip, typically used for debugging and testing purposes, can be leveraged to:
      • Change default DNS server
      • Conduct remote man-in-the-middle attacks
      • Hot-swap code or even the entire firmware
      • Upload, flash, and upgrade firmware silently
      • Disable ISP firmware upgrade
      • Change every config file and settings
      • Get and Set SNMP OID values
      • Change all associated MAC Addresses
      • Change serial numbers
      • Be exploited in botnet
    • ISPs or manufacturers can fix the issue with a firmware update. There’s not much you can do about it. However, the complexity of the attack is very high, so unless you’re under the microscope, you’ll likely not be affected.

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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!)
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