openSUSE – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Sat, 17 May 2025 23:46:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png openSUSE – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast openSUSE – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 461 – Virtualization https://mintcast.org/461-virtualization/ Sat, 17 May 2025 23:45:31 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7511 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, BackBlaze backups may be in trouble, you can run Arch inside Windows, Linux kernel drops 486 and early 586 support, and a new RaspberryPiOS release, and the end of Windows 10 support brings new opportunities

In security and privacy: openSUSE removes Deepin Desktop over security issues, Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes mobile, Moss plays with a Pangolin, Eric finally fixes his WiFi.

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, BackBlaze backups may be in trouble, you can run Arch inside Windows, Linux kernel drops 486 and early 586 support, and a new RaspberryPiOS release, and the end of Windows 10 support brings new opportunities

In security and privacy: openSUSE removes Deepin Desktop over security issues, Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes mobile, Moss plays with a Pangolin, Eric finally fixes his WiFi.

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News


Your Backblaze Backups Might Be in Trouble


Linux Kernel to Drop Support for Legacy i486 and Early 586 CPUs


A new Raspberry Pi OS release


The End of 10 group aims to save Windows 10 PCs from landfills using Linux

Security and Privacy:


openSUSE Removes Deepin Desktop Over Security Policy Violations


Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

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, initrd for the animated Discord 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 2:30:10 7511 442 – AMD Support is Cachy(ing) On https://mintcast.org/442-amd-support-is-cachying-on/ Sat, 27 Jul 2024 22:09:09 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7066 First up in the news: Mint 22 update, Red Hat may replace GRUB, Fedora drops X11, CachyOS adds AMD support, Apple approves PC emulator, SUSE Requests openSUSE to Rebrand, EXT4 Has A Very Nice Performance Optimization For Linux 6.11

In security and privacy: CrowdStrike broke Linux and nobody noticed, Firefox's New Controversial Feature

Then in our Wanderings: Bill puts his foot down, Joe is working on magnetism, Moss has new toys,

In our Innards section: We talk about Pine64 products

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]>
First up in the news: Mint 22 update, Red Hat may replace GRUB, Fedora drops X11, CachyOS adds AMD support, Apple approves PC emulator, SUSE Requests openSUSE to Rebrand, EXT4 Has A Very Nice Performance Optimization For Linux 6.11


In security and privacy: CrowdStrike broke Linux and nobody noticed, Firefox’s New Controversial Feature


Then in our Wanderings: Bill puts his foot down, Joe is working on magnetism, Moss has new toys,


In our Innards section: We talk about Pine64 products


And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint 22 Update


Red Hat may replace GRUB


X11 Is No Longer Part of Fedora Workstation 41


CachyOS Introduces New Repository Optimized for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 CPUs


Apple Approves First PC Emulator App for iOS – Can it Run Linux?


SUSE Requests openSUSE to Rebrand


EXT4 Has A Very Nice Performance Optimization For Linux 6.11

Security and Privacy


CrowdStrike broke Debian and Rocky Linux months ago, but no one noticed


Firefox’s New Controversial Feature: Is it a problem?

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser 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!>
]]> 442 442 AMD Support is Cachy(ing) On full 1:51:18 7066 378.5 – Oh, the Distros You’ll Go! https://mintcast.org/378-5-oh-the-distros-youll-go/ Sun, 06 Mar 2022 15:45:12 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5343 In security, Ubuntu Kernel Security Patches, FGKASLR gets closer to mainline, Data stealing malware hides on Linux servers, Go Daddy data breach
In our Wanderings, Joe does some 3d printing, Josh got a new monitor, Norbert switches OS’s, and Clayton looks back
Download
]]> 1:00 The Linux Innards
38:06 Vibrations from the Ether
43:20 Check This Out
45:00 Announcements & Outro

In this episode we discuss our current daily driver distros of choice and pick alternatives that we would move to if our current distros of choice stopped being developed.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

The Innards

  • We discuss our current daily driver distros of choice and pick alternatives that we would move to if our current distros of choice stopped being developed.

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • 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!>
]]> 378.5 - Oh, the Distros You'll Go! full 49:24 5343 377 – Zero Days of Christmas https://mintcast.org/377-zero-days-of-christmas/ Thu, 06 Jan 2022 05:08:48 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5316 In security, a grub update causes problems with Ubuntu and a Log4shell update
Then in our wanderings, Joe's on vacation, Norbert's full of gingerbread, Nishant is surviving the winter, Josh is on Windows, and Bill's just glad to be here
Download
]]> 1:56 The News
21:20 Security Update
32:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:20:55 Announcements & Outro

In the news, Pop OS 21.10 is released, GNOME 42 – Top New Feature and Release Detail, ReactOS 0.4.14 has been released, Krita 5.0 has been released, and there’s yet another desktop environment on the horizon

In security, a grub update causes problems with Ubuntu and a Log4shell update

Then in our wanderings, Joe’s on vacation, Norbert’s full of gingerbread, Nishant is surviving the winter, Josh is on Windows, and Bill’s just glad to be here

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Joe
    • Vacationing, Troubleshooting, Testing Docker, and VPNing
  • Norbert
    • XFCE WM Hybrid, zentile, OpenSUSE
  • Nishant
  • Josh
  • Bill

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • 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 1:25:24 5316 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 353 – Brave New WWW (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-353-brave-new-www-mp3/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:46:48 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4892 Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more
In security, the InterPlanetary File System
Download
]]> Download

1:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:23 The News
1:29:47 Security Update
1:38:43 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I have second thoughts about Kubuntu, Moss has a new toy, Joe has been playing with watches, Tony has been editing audio, Josh hasn’t broken Arch, Bo survived the pandemic!

Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more

In security, the InterPlanetary File System

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
    • Doubling down on Brave browser.
      • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
      • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
    • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.
  • Joe
    • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
      • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
      • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
    • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
      • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
      • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
    • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
      • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
      • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
    • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
      • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
    • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
    • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
    • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
      • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
      • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
      • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.
  • Moss
    • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
    • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
    • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
    • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
    • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
    • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
    • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
    • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
    • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.
  • Tony H
    • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
    • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
    • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
    • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 
  • Josh
    • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
    • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
    • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
    • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • IPFS (Interplanetary File System)
    • Originally created back in 2015
    • The purpose is, like Bittorrent, to make file storage distributed to increase the resilience of the web by allowing people that opt into IPFS to store little bits of data they’ve seen to then share it to someone else geographically close to them to make it so that even if the main website goes down, the content can still be accessed.
    • To become one of the IPFS content sharers, enable the Local Node option
    • To simply make use of IPFS, just enable IPFS and ensure you’re using a third-party gateway.
    • The way I see it, Google’s AMP is the main competitor.
  • Brave is the first browser to support it
    • It’s as simple as turning a toggle on in Settings.
    • You can easily choose to be a node the first time you access IPFS content. It’s a simple yes or no.
      • Brave asks if you want to enable the IPFS local daemon.

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 4892 mintCast 353 – Brave New WWW https://mintcast.org/mintcast-353-brave-new-www/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:36:39 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4885 Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more
In security, the InterPlanetary File System
Download
]]> Download

1:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:23 The News
1:29:47 Security Update
1:38:43 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I have second thoughts about Kubuntu, Moss has a new toy, Joe has been playing with watches, Tony has been editing audio, Josh hasn’t broken Arch, Bo survived the pandemic!

Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more

In security, the InterPlanetary File System

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
    • Doubling down on Brave browser.
      • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
      • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
    • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.
  • Joe
    • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
      • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
      • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
    • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
      • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
      • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
    • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
      • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
      • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
    • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
      • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
    • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
    • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
    • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
      • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
      • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
      • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.
  • Moss
    • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
    • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
    • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
    • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
    • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
    • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
    • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
    • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
    • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.
  • Tony H
    • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
    • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
    • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
    • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 
  • Josh
    • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
    • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
    • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
    • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • IPFS (Interplanetary File System)
    • Originally created back in 2015
    • The purpose is, like Bittorrent, to make file storage distributed to increase the resilience of the web by allowing people that opt into IPFS to store little bits of data they’ve seen to then share it to someone else geographically close to them to make it so that even if the main website goes down, the content can still be accessed.
    • To become one of the IPFS content sharers, enable the Local Node option
    • To simply make use of IPFS, just enable IPFS and ensure you’re using a third-party gateway.
    • The way I see it, Google’s AMP is the main competitor.
  • Brave is the first browser to support it
    • It’s as simple as turning a toggle on in Settings.
    • You can easily choose to be a node the first time you access IPFS content. It’s a simple yes or no.
      • Brave asks if you want to enable the IPFS local daemon.

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 4885 mintCast 347 – For the Halibut (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-for-the-halibut-mp3/ Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:46:45 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4743 Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and Wordpress fixes some bad ones
Download
]]>

Download

2:53 Wanderings
1:13:18 The News
1:43:29 Security
1:47:39 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I pop a kernel, Bo gets refreshed, Josh keeps his chameleon alive, Tony Hughes becomes a hermit, Moss bites into another distro, Joe gets it HANDled, and Tony Watts does the upgrade dance

Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market

In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and WordPress fixes some bad ones

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10’s 5.8 kernel in Linux Mint. My 5700XT’s performance has increased! Yay!
    • Playing with Kubuntu 20.10 which also has kernel 5.8.
    • Recording this on an AMD A10-7870K with 16GB RAM and all my other audio gear. If something goes wrong today, I’m gonna blame that…
    • Last episode I mentioned that World of Warcraft was crashing in Wine from Lutris. Fixed this by moving from the Wine 5.7 TkG version that Lutris provides to Wine Staging 5.19. That upgraded to 5.20 recently as well.
    • Chromium got upgrades! It’s now part of the Linux Mint repo.
cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

ln -s ../bin/bg3.exe LariLauncher.exe

cp ./*.dll ../bin/
  • Josh
    • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
    • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
    • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
    • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.
  • Tony H
    • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
    • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
    • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.
  • Moss
    • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
    • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
    • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
    • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
    • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
    • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.
  • Joe
    • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
      • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
      • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
      • One DS Lite
    • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
      • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
      • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
      • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
      • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
      • Only one way to find out.
      • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
      • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
      • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
    • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
      • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
      • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
      • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
      • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
      • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
      • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
      • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
    • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
      • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
      • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
      • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
      • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
      • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
      • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
      • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
        • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
      • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
      • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
      • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
      • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
    • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
      • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
      • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
      • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
      • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
      • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
      • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
      • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server
  • Tony W
    • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
    • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
    • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
    • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
    • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
    • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
    • LineageOS updating
    • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
    • Sometimes Linux is just better…
      • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

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 …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4743 mintCast 347 – For the Halibut https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-for-the-halibut/ Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:10:14 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4737 Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and Wordpress fixes some bad ones
Download
]]>

Download

2:53 Wanderings
1:13:18 The News
1:43:29 Security
1:47:39 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I pop a kernel, Bo gets refreshed, Josh keeps his chameleon alive, Tony Hughes becomes a hermit, Moss bites into another distro, Joe gets it HANDled, and Tony Watts does the upgrade dance

Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market

In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and WordPress fixes some bad ones

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10’s 5.8 kernel in Linux Mint. My 5700XT’s performance has increased! Yay!
    • Playing with Kubuntu 20.10 which also has kernel 5.8.
    • Recording this on an AMD A10-7870K with 16GB RAM and all my other audio gear. If something goes wrong today, I’m gonna blame that…
    • Last episode I mentioned that World of Warcraft was crashing in Wine from Lutris. Fixed this by moving from the Wine 5.7 TkG version that Lutris provides to Wine Staging 5.19. That upgraded to 5.20 recently as well.
    • Chromium got upgrades! It’s now part of the Linux Mint repo.
cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

ln -s ../bin/bg3.exe LariLauncher.exe

cp ./*.dll ../bin/
  • Josh
    • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
    • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
    • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
    • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.
  • Tony H
    • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
    • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
    • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.
  • Moss
    • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
    • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
    • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
    • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
    • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
    • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.
  • Joe
    • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
      • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
      • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
      • One DS Lite
    • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
      • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
      • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
      • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
      • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
      • Only one way to find out.
      • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
      • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
      • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
    • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
      • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
      • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
      • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
      • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
      • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
      • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
      • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
    • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
      • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
      • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
      • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
      • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
      • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
      • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
      • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
        • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
      • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
      • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
      • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
      • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
    • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
      • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
      • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
      • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
      • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
      • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
      • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
      • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server
  • Tony W
    • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
    • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
    • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
    • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
    • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
    • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
    • LineageOS updating
    • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
    • Sometimes Linux is just better…
      • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

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 …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

]]> full 4737 mintCast 339 – OLTs? More Like OLGeez (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-339-olts-more-like-olgeez-mp3/ Wed, 15 Jul 2020 04:17:50 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4525 Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more
In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.

Download
]]>

Download

1:46 Wanderings
40:36 News
54:43 Security
1:04:28 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Joshua Hawk is fighting with his mic, I upgrade all the things, Tony Hughes inkscapes and breaks lockdown, Moss gets Full Circle love, and Joe does TV repair

Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more

In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Joshua Hawk
    •  I have been searching for the perfect linux desktop distro for the past 2 plus years and have been everywhere from Linux Mint to Manjaro. I was on solus for about a year and then found out that it did not have the software I needed. The beginning of this year I settled back on linux mint for my main desktop and have also enjoyed openSUSE especially for servers. 
    • Before the show I had a major issue with my mic on my desktop. The audio sounded like I put the mic out of the window of a moving car. I figured it out and It happened to be the overclock on my desktop, it was really bad.
  • Leo
    • Finally got the desktop upgraded to LM20, but haven’t done anything fancy with it yet. The kernel is 5.4, and I don’t want to wait til November to get a newer one. I’ll probably move to Ukuu soon. Same with Mesa. 20.2 has given me lots of performance improvement
    • Had a couple bugs show up in LM20 on the laptop.
      • Bluetooth stutters a lot
      • cinnamon-screensaver freezes the screen in an unlocked state after waking up from suspend. However, this has been resolved.
    • Warpinator. Fantastic. It may not be better than whatever you have now, but it’s really, really good.
      • It is quite literally AirDrop for Linux.
    • I’ve installed Chromium using the Apt pinning solution provided by Clem. Chromium… is annoying. It will crash every now and then.
    • Excited to see the new episode of Linux User Space hit the internet. Tomorrow if you’re listening live, yesterday if you’re listening on mintCast release day, and a while back if you listen later. Any which way. July 12th.
  • Tony H
    • This last 2 weeks have been a little more relaxed as the lock down here in England has relaxed quite a lot so a friend came up from London and stayed a few days which was great as we had not seen each other for over 4 years. It is one of those friendships that we may not talk for months but when we do it is like it was just a few days ago. I sent him home with a loaf of homemade sourdough bread and one of my Matchbox models from the early 1960’s that he remembered having as a child.
    • The new printer is working well and I have started to use Inkscape more to design decals for the model restorations, as this gives a much better result when printing them out despite the small scale you can tell if they are just scaled photo reproductions of the original decal, although for some of the decals a upscaled picture of an original can work. There was a problem with Inkscape 0.92 not allowing me to flow text to a path, so I installed the Flatpak of 1.0 and this is working well in the new version. I’ve now got some laser decal paper and will try that out soon!!!! 
    • I’ve been using bunsenlabs Linux on the Distrohoppers laptop and it is very lightweight in respect of resources, I’m also getting more use to using keyboard shortcuts to access the web browser and various things, although I’m still using the mouse to access menus although you can use a shortcut to bring up a run menu to start software so it is possible not to use the mouse unless the software needs mouse input. As it is based on Debian 10 (Buster) then the software is a little dated but it is not a major issue as it all works.
    • Joe joined my Zoom LUG meeting last week at 4AM in the morning! ‘His’ time, that is what I call dedication or serious insomnia!!!!  
    • I joined BDLL Europe edition last night and had a good time geeking out with the crew again, I no longer feel able to stay up till 3-4am Sunday Mornings due to the disruption to my sleep pattern so the Monthly Euro edition is my BDLL fix at the moment.
  • Moss
    • I wrote up a bio of my computing life for the Linux Mint telegram group and the members insisted I submit it to Full Circle Magazine. I did so, and it was accepted for a future issue. So then I submitted my little writeup on Ventoy to FCM, and it was accepted for a NEAR future issue: Ronnie not only accepted it for an App Pick but said he was going to rush off and try it himself. Feeling good about this. If you want to read the bio, I posted it as a blog on LinuxQuestions.org. I also posted the Ventoy article as a blog, and you should also see Leo’s video.
    • I had a problem with Manjaro booting when Linux Mint 19.3 controlled Grub. I used my Ventoy stick to boot to Manjaro’s GRUB and ran grub-install there, which worked fine. I tried the OpenMandriva GRUB, and that didn’t want to work quite right (but it worked later when I went back to it). So I let Manjaro control GRUB. The guys in the Telegram group told me to try this and that, but none of it fit into my head at the time.
    • On Saturday night, the 3rd of July, I downloaded three versions of openSUSE Leap 15.2 and copied them to my Ventoy stick. I then got Joshua Hawk talking with me in the Distrohoppers’ Digest Telegram room, and figured out that Leap refuses to load from Ventoy (although Tumbleweed does work in Ventoy). So I burned a stick by itself for the netinstaller… and it could not find the website online. Did I log into my modem correctly? I don’t know. So at 23.30, I started an installation using the DVD installer on a USB stick. There were a couple times when I didn’t know what to do and Joshua helped me out. For some reason, the installer did not see my 2 Gb EFI sector, and reported I didn’t have one which was at least 550 Mb. I went ahead with the installation… and it completed. But  when I attempted to boot, it again said it could not find any boot for itself. I booted to Manjaro and attempted to fix the boot using Grub Customizer, but no. I now have a complete installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2, but no way to boot to it. I have asked for help in the openSUSE forum on LinuxQuestions.org but so far the answers are lacking understanding on one side or the other. 
    • Due to this issue, I still have no distro for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I tried going with BionicPup64, but it obviously is not meant to be run as a daily driver and has problems updating to current versions of apps. Still trying to work around this issue.
    • I received a Canakit with a Raspberry Pi 4, 4 Gb model, from my old friend and mintCast listener, Firecat. It’s assembled, and I only plugged it in, without OS, to make sure that it runs and to determine that it did not have a blue LED on the fan like Firecat’s fan did.
    • I received the Hyundai Technology Koral 10×3 tablet I talked about last show. But in the end, it was not even close to the hype: The advertising said it was as powerful as a desktop PC; the reality was that it was not half as powerful as my Moto X4 phone. I could not load GIF images; the camera was poor; motion in videos was blurry. I returned it to Target for full credit, and the return process was sweet as could be.
    • I did buy another tablet, helped by listener cryptodan. This one is unbranded on Amazon but met all the specs and was even cheaper, and came with an included cover, screen protector, and earphones. It is considerably better than the Hyundai was, and you can even avoid going full Android as most Google apps need to be installed. The brand turned out to be DUODUOGO, the price was $84 (although they’re sold out of the black one, and the gold one they have now – also not labeled by the brand, but called “Novel TTT” is $90). Very generic, MediaTek SoC with Mali 400 GPU. I really, really like this tablet, and have been talking about it a lot on our Telegram groups. I’ve posted a review on the new site, and am trying to elicit help in getting it to layout right. I still wish I could have gotten a PineTab, so I could have actual Linux on a tablet.
    • I was goofing around with Leo and the DHD gang on Telegram about my threatened joke site, It’s MOSS. And Cryptodan put up the money for 2 years’ domain registration, and Firecat gave me webspace, so dammit, I had to write the site. I quickly learned how much WordPress has changed, to the point that I had serious trouble even getting stuff to publish to the site and still don’t have the menus and stuff right.
    • On Thursday night the 9th, I attempted to run the Mint 20 Upgrade. I got lots of error messages, several restarts, repeated it to see if I got the same errors, and I did. So I gave up on it, and reported the same to the Linux Mint Telegram group. I booted my machine normally on Friday afternoon, and watched the usual things I watch. About 22.00, I saw an icon I didn’t recognize, telling me I had updates, and then noticed that several other icons were more Dark Mode than I was used to. I went to my computer and opened the Welcome Screen, to see that it reported I was now running Mint 20. So I opened my Terminal and ran sudo apt autoremove to get rid of the old 19.3 files, which went smoothly. I did have to install the flatpak of Mumble, and had to reinstall Kodi as there is no PPA for Focal as yet.
    • My wife has been in increasing amounts of pain, and her doctor does not seem to be willing to do anything and the chiropractor does not seem able to do anything. We are exploring other options. I just started physical therapy for my shoulder; more pain, but some increase in motion as of today. My mother is still alive and about as well as a 91-year-old woman can be expected. And we haven’t read any Dresden since before the last show. Which leads us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • Restarted the Dresden Files books so I can be all caught up when Peace Talks comes out on the 14th
    • Picked up a 60 inch 1080p TV for free with a bad HDMI chip.  HDMI did not work at all.  So I purchased a 16 dollar adapter for HDMI-to-composite and everything on the TV is working great
      • But it is hooked up to my little mini PC in the garage. which does not seem to have the graphical processing power to handle two large TVs at the same time, so I get a bit of screen tearing but I swapped the outputs of the 2 TVs and that helps the tearing a lot.  Lowering the resolution on both screens got rid of it almost entirely
      • Plus it is a plasma which probably won’t do well out in the heat for very long
      • But hey — free
    • Because it is a plasma I really can’t leave it on all the time either so I ordered an IR Blaster hub that works with Alexa since I wont be able to hook the TV up to the smart outlet, which I doubt would be able to provide enough power throughput.  
      • It works very well with both of the TVs that i have out there which are both LG
      • So I have timers setup on the computers to turn it off and the blaster to be able to quickly turn both back on.
      • This seems like a low cost substitute for a harmony remote.  You don’t need to use Alexa, you can use your phone.  Reminds me a lot of the Note 3 and Galaxy Tab 2
    • Also worked with an NFC tag and IFTTT to get some silent actions on some of my smart devices so I don’t wake the wife when I go to bed after her.  It was not too hard to setup but you have to do it from the individual apps instead of directly from Alexa which can get a little annoying 
    • Redoing my work space out in the garage because of the replacement TV.
      • Pulled out every extension cord and plug and got rid of the TV stand and a desk so far.  Reboxing some of the storage, throwing some things away and giving away some other things trying to make room for new projects
    • Priced getting ethernet run out to the garage.  Didn’t like the prices but hey I kinda expected it.  I miss having friends around that have the tools and the skills to do that type of thing.
      • It is now run and I have much more stable speeds and should be able to do several projects.
      • I moved my server out there but I don’t know how it will handle the heat of the garage.
      • I need to check the cable from the router to the wall but I am not seeing speeds as fast I should in the garage
      • Have not used the tower as a PC in a while although I have kept up with updates I may completely reformat and start over 
    • Attended Tony H LUG because I could.  
      • It was fun talking TV shows and books.
      • 4 am is a terrible time for a LUG but I had a lot of fun
      • Thanks for inviting me and I may join again.
    • Sold all of the working f*** Insignia Headphones.
      • Did not make much of a profit doing it and they were not fun to work on.  
      • Will not buy Insignia headphones again.  I have yet to find any that were worth the cost which is saying a lot considering I got this set for a bout a dollar a piece 
    • I only have one of the Skullcandy Crushers left which means I have sold 3 of them not including the ones with the 3D printed hinges.  
      • Have made a decent profit selling these so far
      • Paid less than 90 for the headphones 
      • Sold 3 so far at 60 dollars each so I have doubled my money
      • Seems like this might be a good time of year to sell cans
      • Have given or traded 2 of the ones with 3D printed hinges.
        • One to my daughter which she loves
        • One to a listener in exchange for a broken laptop
        • I am also using one of the ones with 3D printed hinges which leaves one left.  Wonder what I should do with it
    • Put a graphics card into my server and set it up to use as a desktop in my garage
      • I let it sit for a day powered in my garage to make sure that it was stable and had no problems
      • In the wee hours of the morning i could not sleep so i finished hooking it up to my monitors and after some finagling it worked although I had intermittent cut outs on one of the monitors which I was still troubleshooting and thinking that it was an issue with power
      • I did the upgrade path for Linux Mint 20 although I did have to go through 19.3 to get there.  The power cut part-way through the update
      • It was not hard to fix, just restarted and configure all and it was done
      • The upgrade path required removing all the external repos so it removed x2go docker resilio sync and plex
      • Installed a couple of applications since the update required removal of some of the repos
      • It shut down again but I was monitoring temperatures.  While they were higher than I would have liked, they should not have caused the shut off
      • I let the machine sit for about ten minutes and then powered it on again.  It powered back off after the login twice.
      • But the third time it shut off before the login was finished so it was not programmatical 
      • Turns out both of my back up power supplies were also bad.  One provided no power and the other would turn on and then turn off.
      • My assumptions of the possibilities at this point are 
        • The power supply is bad and I need a new one
        • The motherboard is bad and I need a new one
        • There is a problem with the motherboard cpu combo and I need a new motherboard
        • Any way you cut it I need new hardware
        • Haven’t decided if I am going to get the new mobo power supply and reuse the processor and ram or if I am just going to completely upgrade

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 26th of July at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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

  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • 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.
]]> full 4525 mintCast 339 – OLTs? More Like OLGeez https://mintcast.org/mintcast-339-olts-more-like-olgeez/ Wed, 15 Jul 2020 03:52:53 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4520 Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more
In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.
Download
]]>

Download

1:46 Wanderings
40:36 News
54:43 Security
1:04:28 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Joshua Hawk is fighting with his mic, I upgrade all the things, Tony Hughes inkscapes and breaks lockdown, Moss gets Full Circle love, and Joe does TV repair

Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more

In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Joshua Hawk
    •  I have been searching for the perfect linux desktop distro for the past 2 plus years and have been everywhere from Linux Mint to Manjaro. I was on solus for about a year and then found out that it did not have the software I needed. The beginning of this year I settled back on linux mint for my main desktop and have also enjoyed openSUSE especially for servers. 
    • Before the show I had a major issue with my mic on my desktop. The audio sounded like I put the mic out of the window of a moving car. I figured it out and It happened to be the overclock on my desktop, it was really bad.
  • Leo
    • Finally got the desktop upgraded to LM20, but haven’t done anything fancy with it yet. The kernel is 5.4, and I don’t want to wait til November to get a newer one. I’ll probably move to Ukuu soon. Same with Mesa. 20.2 has given me lots of performance improvement
    • Had a couple bugs show up in LM20 on the laptop.
      • Bluetooth stutters a lot
      • cinnamon-screensaver freezes the screen in an unlocked state after waking up from suspend. However, this has been resolved.
    • Warpinator. Fantastic. It may not be better than whatever you have now, but it’s really, really good.
      • It is quite literally AirDrop for Linux.
    • I’ve installed Chromium using the Apt pinning solution provided by Clem. Chromium… is annoying. It will crash every now and then.
    • Excited to see the new episode of Linux User Space hit the internet. Tomorrow if you’re listening live, yesterday if you’re listening on mintCast release day, and a while back if you listen later. Any which way. July 12th.
  • Tony H
    • This last 2 weeks have been a little more relaxed as the lock down here in England has relaxed quite a lot so a friend came up from London and stayed a few days which was great as we had not seen each other for over 4 years. It is one of those friendships that we may not talk for months but when we do it is like it was just a few days ago. I sent him home with a loaf of homemade sourdough bread and one of my Matchbox models from the early 1960’s that he remembered having as a child.
    • The new printer is working well and I have started to use Inkscape more to design decals for the model restorations, as this gives a much better result when printing them out despite the small scale you can tell if they are just scaled photo reproductions of the original decal, although for some of the decals a upscaled picture of an original can work. There was a problem with Inkscape 0.92 not allowing me to flow text to a path, so I installed the Flatpak of 1.0 and this is working well in the new version. I’ve now got some laser decal paper and will try that out soon!!!! 
    • I’ve been using bunsenlabs Linux on the Distrohoppers laptop and it is very lightweight in respect of resources, I’m also getting more use to using keyboard shortcuts to access the web browser and various things, although I’m still using the mouse to access menus although you can use a shortcut to bring up a run menu to start software so it is possible not to use the mouse unless the software needs mouse input. As it is based on Debian 10 (Buster) then the software is a little dated but it is not a major issue as it all works.
    • Joe joined my Zoom LUG meeting last week at 4AM in the morning! ‘His’ time, that is what I call dedication or serious insomnia!!!!  
    • I joined BDLL Europe edition last night and had a good time geeking out with the crew again, I no longer feel able to stay up till 3-4am Sunday Mornings due to the disruption to my sleep pattern so the Monthly Euro edition is my BDLL fix at the moment.
  • Moss
    • I wrote up a bio of my computing life for the Linux Mint telegram group and the members insisted I submit it to Full Circle Magazine. I did so, and it was accepted for a future issue. So then I submitted my little writeup on Ventoy to FCM, and it was accepted for a NEAR future issue: Ronnie not only accepted it for an App Pick but said he was going to rush off and try it himself. Feeling good about this. If you want to read the bio, I posted it as a blog on LinuxQuestions.org. I also posted the Ventoy article as a blog, and you should also see Leo’s video.
    • I had a problem with Manjaro booting when Linux Mint 19.3 controlled Grub. I used my Ventoy stick to boot to Manjaro’s GRUB and ran grub-install there, which worked fine. I tried the OpenMandriva GRUB, and that didn’t want to work quite right (but it worked later when I went back to it). So I let Manjaro control GRUB. The guys in the Telegram group told me to try this and that, but none of it fit into my head at the time.
    • On Saturday night, the 3rd of July, I downloaded three versions of openSUSE Leap 15.2 and copied them to my Ventoy stick. I then got Joshua Hawk talking with me in the Distrohoppers’ Digest Telegram room, and figured out that Leap refuses to load from Ventoy (although Tumbleweed does work in Ventoy). So I burned a stick by itself for the netinstaller… and it could not find the website online. Did I log into my modem correctly? I don’t know. So at 23.30, I started an installation using the DVD installer on a USB stick. There were a couple times when I didn’t know what to do and Joshua helped me out. For some reason, the installer did not see my 2 Gb EFI sector, and reported I didn’t have one which was at least 550 Mb. I went ahead with the installation… and it completed. But  when I attempted to boot, it again said it could not find any boot for itself. I booted to Manjaro and attempted to fix the boot using Grub Customizer, but no. I now have a complete installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2, but no way to boot to it. I have asked for help in the openSUSE forum on LinuxQuestions.org but so far the answers are lacking understanding on one side or the other. 
    • Due to this issue, I still have no distro for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I tried going with BionicPup64, but it obviously is not meant to be run as a daily driver and has problems updating to current versions of apps. Still trying to work around this issue.
    • I received a Canakit with a Raspberry Pi 4, 4 Gb model, from my old friend and mintCast listener, Firecat. It’s assembled, and I only plugged it in, without OS, to make sure that it runs and to determine that it did not have a blue LED on the fan like Firecat’s fan did.
    • I received the Hyundai Technology Koral 10×3 tablet I talked about last show. But in the end, it was not even close to the hype: The advertising said it was as powerful as a desktop PC; the reality was that it was not half as powerful as my Moto X4 phone. I could not load GIF images; the camera was poor; motion in videos was blurry. I returned it to Target for full credit, and the return process was sweet as could be.
    • I did buy another tablet, helped by listener cryptodan. This one is unbranded on Amazon but met all the specs and was even cheaper, and came with an included cover, screen protector, and earphones. It is considerably better than the Hyundai was, and you can even avoid going full Android as most Google apps need to be installed. The brand turned out to be DUODUOGO, the price was $84 (although they’re sold out of the black one, and the gold one they have now – also not labeled by the brand, but called “Novel TTT” is $90). Very generic, MediaTek SoC with Mali 400 GPU. I really, really like this tablet, and have been talking about it a lot on our Telegram groups. I’ve posted a review on the new site, and am trying to elicit help in getting it to layout right. I still wish I could have gotten a PineTab, so I could have actual Linux on a tablet.
    • I was goofing around with Leo and the DHD gang on Telegram about my threatened joke site, It’s MOSS. And Cryptodan put up the money for 2 years’ domain registration, and Firecat gave me webspace, so dammit, I had to write the site. I quickly learned how much WordPress has changed, to the point that I had serious trouble even getting stuff to publish to the site and still don’t have the menus and stuff right.
    • On Thursday night the 9th, I attempted to run the Mint 20 Upgrade. I got lots of error messages, several restarts, repeated it to see if I got the same errors, and I did. So I gave up on it, and reported the same to the Linux Mint Telegram group. I booted my machine normally on Friday afternoon, and watched the usual things I watch. About 22.00, I saw an icon I didn’t recognize, telling me I had updates, and then noticed that several other icons were more Dark Mode than I was used to. I went to my computer and opened the Welcome Screen, to see that it reported I was now running Mint 20. So I opened my Terminal and ran sudo apt autoremove to get rid of the old 19.3 files, which went smoothly. I did have to install the flatpak of Mumble, and had to reinstall Kodi as there is no PPA for Focal as yet.
    • My wife has been in increasing amounts of pain, and her doctor does not seem to be willing to do anything and the chiropractor does not seem able to do anything. We are exploring other options. I just started physical therapy for my shoulder; more pain, but some increase in motion as of today. My mother is still alive and about as well as a 91-year-old woman can be expected. And we haven’t read any Dresden since before the last show. Which leads us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • Restarted the Dresden Files books so I can be all caught up when Peace Talks comes out on the 14th
    • Picked up a 60 inch 1080p TV for free with a bad HDMI chip.  HDMI did not work at all.  So I purchased a 16 dollar adapter for HDMI-to-composite and everything on the TV is working great
      • But it is hooked up to my little mini PC in the garage. which does not seem to have the graphical processing power to handle two large TVs at the same time, so I get a bit of screen tearing but I swapped the outputs of the 2 TVs and that helps the tearing a lot.  Lowering the resolution on both screens got rid of it almost entirely
      • Plus it is a plasma which probably won’t do well out in the heat for very long
      • But hey — free
    • Because it is a plasma I really can’t leave it on all the time either so I ordered an IR Blaster hub that works with Alexa since I wont be able to hook the TV up to the smart outlet, which I doubt would be able to provide enough power throughput.  
      • It works very well with both of the TVs that i have out there which are both LG
      • So I have timers setup on the computers to turn it off and the blaster to be able to quickly turn both back on.
      • This seems like a low cost substitute for a harmony remote.  You don’t need to use Alexa, you can use your phone.  Reminds me a lot of the Note 3 and Galaxy Tab 2
    • Also worked with an NFC tag and IFTTT to get some silent actions on some of my smart devices so I don’t wake the wife when I go to bed after her.  It was not too hard to setup but you have to do it from the individual apps instead of directly from Alexa which can get a little annoying 
    • Redoing my work space out in the garage because of the replacement TV.
      • Pulled out every extension cord and plug and got rid of the TV stand and a desk so far.  Reboxing some of the storage, throwing some things away and giving away some other things trying to make room for new projects
    • Priced getting ethernet run out to the garage.  Didn’t like the prices but hey I kinda expected it.  I miss having friends around that have the tools and the skills to do that type of thing.
      • It is now run and I have much more stable speeds and should be able to do several projects.
      • I moved my server out there but I don’t know how it will handle the heat of the garage.
      • I need to check the cable from the router to the wall but I am not seeing speeds as fast I should in the garage
      • Have not used the tower as a PC in a while although I have kept up with updates I may completely reformat and start over 
    • Attended Tony H LUG because I could.  
      • It was fun talking TV shows and books.
      • 4 am is a terrible time for a LUG but I had a lot of fun
      • Thanks for inviting me and I may join again.
    • Sold all of the working f*** Insignia Headphones.
      • Did not make much of a profit doing it and they were not fun to work on.  
      • Will not buy Insignia headphones again.  I have yet to find any that were worth the cost which is saying a lot considering I got this set for a bout a dollar a piece 
    • I only have one of the Skullcandy Crushers left which means I have sold 3 of them not including the ones with the 3D printed hinges.  
      • Have made a decent profit selling these so far
      • Paid less than 90 for the headphones 
      • Sold 3 so far at 60 dollars each so I have doubled my money
      • Seems like this might be a good time of year to sell cans
      • Have given or traded 2 of the ones with 3D printed hinges.
        • One to my daughter which she loves
        • One to a listener in exchange for a broken laptop
        • I am also using one of the ones with 3D printed hinges which leaves one left.  Wonder what I should do with it
    • Put a graphics card into my server and set it up to use as a desktop in my garage
      • I let it sit for a day powered in my garage to make sure that it was stable and had no problems
      • In the wee hours of the morning i could not sleep so i finished hooking it up to my monitors and after some finagling it worked although I had intermittent cut outs on one of the monitors which I was still troubleshooting and thinking that it was an issue with power
      • I did the upgrade path for Linux Mint 20 although I did have to go through 19.3 to get there.  The power cut part-way through the update
      • It was not hard to fix, just restarted and configure all and it was done
      • The upgrade path required removing all the external repos so it removed x2go docker resilio sync and plex
      • Installed a couple of applications since the update required removal of some of the repos
      • It shut down again but I was monitoring temperatures.  While they were higher than I would have liked, they should not have caused the shut off
      • I let the machine sit for about ten minutes and then powered it on again.  It powered back off after the login twice.
      • But the third time it shut off before the login was finished so it was not programmatical 
      • Turns out both of my back up power supplies were also bad.  One provided no power and the other would turn on and then turn off.
      • My assumptions of the possibilities at this point are 
        • The power supply is bad and I need a new one
        • The motherboard is bad and I need a new one
        • There is a problem with the motherboard cpu combo and I need a new motherboard
        • Any way you cut it I need new hardware
        • Haven’t decided if I am going to get the new mobo power supply and reuse the processor and ram or if I am just going to completely upgrade

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 26th of July at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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

  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • 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.
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