In security and privacy: Critical bootkit vulnerability affects most Linux distros, BitLocker smashed in minutes with pico SBC, and Mozilla helps you wipe your data

Then in our Wanderings: Joe plays games, Moss survives, and Majid finally “gets” Arch

In our Innards section: we discuss the current mintCast infrastructure

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

New Feature: Now the links below open show notes to the specific section covered on the show! Try It!

1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
2. [skipto time=”00:01:29″] – News
3. [skipto time=”00:29:27″] – Security And Privacy
4. [skipto time=”00:43:53″] – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
5. [skipto time=”01:06:54″] – Innards
6. [skipto time=”01:32:40″] – Vibrations From The Ether
7. [skipto time=”01:38:17″] – Check This Out
8. [skipto time=”01:38:37″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
9. [skipto time=”01:39:30″] – Wrap Up
10. [skipto time=”01:41:58″] – Outro

The News

Linux Mint Monthly News

Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

“There is no such thing as a real picture”: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24

Nginx core developer quits project in security dispute, starts “freenginx” fork

Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

Security And Privacy

Critical vulnerability affecting most Linux distros allows for bootkits

BitLocker encryption broken in 43 seconds with sub-$10 Raspberry Pi Pico — key can be sniffed when using an external TPM

Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web

Check This Out

There is a really long, detailed, highly informative, and extremely well-written article explaining The Fediverse on The Verge. If you’re interested, you should check it out.

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, Distrohoppers’ Digest, bardmoss@pm.me, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, and my other contact information can be found at It’s Moss dot com
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also – checkout my other podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypicaldr870on twitter, AtypicalDr on instagram and The Atypical Doctor Podcast on Spotify
• Eric – You can hear and see me on this and the Linux OTC podcasts as well as the Linux Saloon and LinuxLUGCast streams. If you’d like to get in touch with me I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org, Discord (eric_adams), Telegram (https://t.me/ericadams), Matrix (@esa1975:matrix.org), and Mastodon (https://fosstodon.org/@ericadams). Links in the show notes.

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!>

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.

In “Check This Out”

ukraine-drone-training

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, Distrohoppers’ Digest, bardmoss@pm.me, I’m on Mastodon as @zaivala@hostux.social, and other contact information can be found at It’s Moss dot com
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, @wchouser3 on Twitter, and wchouser3 on Facebook also – checkout my other podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org, @atypicaldoctor on twitter, AtypicalAnaesthetist on instagram and The Atypical Anaesthetist Podcast on Spotify
• Eric – Most social media services as Eric Adams. Please note that I am NOT the mayor of New York City just in case there was any confusion. Also, I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org . In addition to MintCast, I am also a part of Distrohoppers’ Digest as well as Linux Saloon and LinuxLUGCast.

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 contribution
• 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!>

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

Linux Innards

• Joe
  • First smartphone was the samsung behold 2 which i hated
  • I also had the htc dash which was a blackberry knockoff but pretty awesome
  • Then the htc hd2 which is the most modded phone ever
    • Windows mobile
    • Android
    • Linux
  • After that i went back to samsung and had the s3 which is a great phone and if you can find one that is working still has its uses.  My son is using one now
    • I used this phone until it died, smaller device but ran well and did everything i needed
    • Still good today as an MP3 player which is what my son uses it for
  • Then the Note 3
    • I used this for a long time
  • S7
    • I still use this for some things but the ports are getting old.  The 3.5mm jack no longer works and the usb connection is a bit wobbly
  • Note 10 plus
• Tony
  • History – The First Smartphone I bought was the Nexus 4 which I got in February 2013. This was a great introduction to the smartphone experience but quickly started to feel restricted and in October 2014 I made the giant leap to a OnePlus1 which I paid £299 but was a premium phone for a mid range price at the time.
  • When that started to feel its age in 2017 I bought a Nokia 6, this was a great Phone and the following year I purchased the 6.1 upgrade for my wife who had been using my old Nexus 4 as her first Smartphone. Unfortunately I dropped the Nokia in 2018 smashing the screen badly and was sold the Huawei P20 lite which I used as my daily driver until last week when I went and bought the Nokia X20 6.6” behemoth which I am still getting used to.
  • This phone has the advantage of receiving guaranteed Android updates for 3 years from release and I should get to Android 14 before the time runs out from the current Android 11 that is installed.
  • Before retiring the OnePlus1 as my daily driver I did delve into the world of alternative Roms and successfully installed Lineage to it, but had an issue with upgrading it at one point and that led me to purchasing the Nokia 6. A while back I decided to have a play with the OnePlus1 and I have installed Ubuntu Touch to it and last night was playing with it and have got it running the latest update of the 16.04 install. I know that they are working on getting 20.04 and I have enabled this to be downloaded as an OTA update when available for the OnePlus1.

• Norbert
  • 2010 – Neonode N2
  • 2010 – (Apple iPod Touch 4G)
  • 2014 – Sony Xperia SP
  • 2015 – Sony Xperia Z Ultra
  • 2016 – (Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7”)
  • 2017 – Sony Xperia X Compact
  • 2019 – Samsung Galax
  • y A8 (2018)
  • 2021 – LG G7 ThinQ
• Josh
  • My initial foray into the world of smartphones were all lower tier devices which were “free” with the signing of a contract. They were all quite terrible and that’s probably why I can’t remember any of them specifically.
  • My first noteworthy smartphone was a Nexus 5 which I purchased early in 2014. It was quite an impressive device for its price point and I still have it today as a backup phone, although it now runs Ubuntu Touch in place of Android. I have had to replace the battery on it once and it does suffer from the all too common power button issue on occasion that causes it to constantly reboot which is why I eventually moved on from it.
  • From there I decided I wanted to focus more on privacy so I went through a number of different flip and feature phones only to find most of them ran stripped down versions of Android and the lackluster performance was maddening. Just attempting to text while the system lagged caused multiple input errors but there was a bit of nostalgia returning to T9 predictive text.
  • I decided to return to the world of smartphones and purchased an LG V30+ off of Ebay. I got it at a very reduced price due to some screen burn in but the phone was pristine outside of that. This is still my daily driver today even though the OS hasn’t received a security update since August of 2019. The DAC is still considered by many to be the best ever put in a phone which is why I’m reluctant to replace it. I use it mainly for listening to music and podcasts and store as little personal data as possible on it.
  • I also purchased a Pinephone UB Ports edition and a Sony Xperia X which I installed Ubuntu Touch on with hopes that one of them could serve as a privacy focused daily driver. The Xperia is usable if you’re willing to compromise convenience quite considerably but the Pinephone remains little more than a developer’s toy that cannot be daily driven under any realistic circumstances. Unfortunately it seems the reality of a capable Linux phone is still quite a ways off into the distance, the hardware is there but the software is definitely not.

Vibrations from the Ether

• Brad A
• Larry M
• William W

Check This Out

• Ferdi – All your apps in one place
• Gesture Improvements (GNOME Extension)

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, November 28th
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on Saturday, December 4th
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• The Other Other Josh – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam

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!>

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.

• Bo
  • Whelp, I got COVID.
  • Raspberry Pi Webcam – https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY
    • https://thepihut.com/products/mounting-plate-for-high-quality-camera
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-lens
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-adapter
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
    • https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
  • A Steam Link Raspberry Pi 4 – https://youtu.be/6WRLlAkTbBY

THE NEWS:

• Tony – The new Raspberry Pi Pico has been launched, this is a $4 microcontroller from the Pi Foundation  
• Someone just ported Android 10 to RISC-V architecture 
• Ubuntu Booting on M1 Mac
  • Asahi Linux will benefit. Their target now is GPU reverse engineering. Specifically this is the work of Alyssa Rosenzweig whose done a lot of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali and Bifrost GPUs
  • The progress is… drawing a triangle on the screen. While it seems small, the impact of this is huge. It was done with all original, open source, code and signifies a big step forward for the platform.
• Flatpak 1.10.0 is released 
  • Downloading the app lists will become much faster
  • The change is helped in big part by not downloading everything, but simply downloading what’s available only for your architecture. In the test Alexander shows in his blog, this resulted in a reduction by almost 2/3
• Ubuntu Making Home Folders Private in 21.04
• Project Lenix from CloudLinux Gets a Name
  • AlmaLinux
• Free RHEL up to 16 licenses per account…
• Valve Will Continue Their Linux Investment
  • Linux – We’re continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We’re also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
• Chrome Cutting off API Access to Everyone but Themselves. Sync No Longer Available.
  • Fedora mulling over dropping Chromium altogether.

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: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 7, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – Peaceful Hippo, It’s Moss, MeWe, @bardictriad on Twitter, blogs on Peaceful Hippo, LinuxQuestions.org, and Dreamwidth, music on Bandcamp and my YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus!!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@protonmail.com, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News 

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!>

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.

• Bo
  • Whelp, I got COVID.
  • Raspberry Pi Webcam – https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY
    • https://thepihut.com/products/mounting-plate-for-high-quality-camera
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-lens
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-adapter
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
    • https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
  • A Steam Link Raspberry Pi 4 – https://youtu.be/6WRLlAkTbBY

THE NEWS:

• Tony – The new Raspberry Pi Pico has been launched, this is a $4 microcontroller from the Pi Foundation  
• Someone just ported Android 10 to RISC-V architecture 
• Ubuntu Booting on M1 Mac
  • Asahi Linux will benefit. Their target now is GPU reverse engineering. Specifically this is the work of Alyssa Rosenzweig whose done a lot of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali and Bifrost GPUs
  • The progress is… drawing a triangle on the screen. While it seems small, the impact of this is huge. It was done with all original, open source, code and signifies a big step forward for the platform.
• Flatpak 1.10.0 is released 
  • Downloading the app lists will become much faster
  • The change is helped in big part by not downloading everything, but simply downloading what’s available only for your architecture. In the test Alexander shows in his blog, this resulted in a reduction by almost 2/3
• Ubuntu Making Home Folders Private in 21.04
• Project Lenix from CloudLinux Gets a Name
  • AlmaLinux
• Free RHEL up to 16 licenses per account…
• Valve Will Continue Their Linux Investment
  • Linux – We’re continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We’re also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
• Chrome Cutting off API Access to Everyone but Themselves. Sync No Longer Available.
  • Fedora mulling over dropping Chromium altogether.

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: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 7, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – Peaceful Hippo, It’s Moss, MeWe, @bardictriad on Twitter, blogs on Peaceful Hippo, LinuxQuestions.org, and Dreamwidth, music on Bandcamp and my YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus!!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@protonmail.com, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News 

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!>

Download

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

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

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

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Alan P
  • Found a bunch of old audio cassettes in the loft. Bought a cassette player off ebay to sample them into a PC (thinkpad, of course) and then feed them into an emulator if they’re computer stuff.
  • Some of them were programs that I’d written with a friend over 30 years ago.
  • Also played some old 8-bit games with my friend Martin Wimpress on our new twitch channel “8bitversus”. We decided to start playing games online when a friend in the Ubuntu Podcast telegram channel suggested it might be fun to watch. I was a massive sinclair spectrum fan, and he was a commodore 64 fan. In these streams we take turns choosing games and get the other person to play games on the other persons platform. It’s fun!
• Leo
  • Got handed a desktop sans case from a friend that wasn’t using it anymore and was moving out of state. I’ve been wanting to build a new server for quite a while to get more into Docker and other enterprisey-type things and I saw it as a sign to forge ahead!
  • i5-6600k, 16GB 2400MHz RAM, ASUS Fancy Pants motherboard, and a 700W PSU.
  • Planning on moving the services I have at home, like Nextcloud, from snap and VMs to MicroK8s, but am having some issues with getting the Dashboard to listen outside on a local LAN subnet.
  • Making slow but steady progress on the manual Raspberry Pi Zero W motion camera setup.
• Tony H
  • Having issues with Ubuntu Studio that I had installed on my Dell 7440 i7 it was reporting errors every time I started it. So I swapped out the M2 SSD with a 2.5” SSD and did a clean install to this drive. More problems, the new iso would not boot, so I ended up finding and using the original iso off my portable HDD to make a new bootable USB install drive this worked and I have a clean install of Ubuntu Studio on the Test laptop for January’s test distro. One issue I have found so far is not an Ubuntu issue but a Firefox issue, I can no longer copy my Firefox folder over to the new machine and have all my bookmarks as they were previously installed. Yes I have a FireFox account but it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to and syncing bookmarks which is a pain when you have several Hundred of these that you would like to access. Previously it was a doddle to copy my FireFox over to a new install and it was one of the reasons I still use it. And yes my desktop PC is linked to the laptop as far as sync is concerned, just not doing it.
  • Recording the latest Distrohoppers Digest episode with Moss, it went out on Friday.
  • Continuing to play with Matchbox models, pick up a couple of bargains over the holiday but now it’s time to start actually restoring a few. Started on a Ford GT superfast restoration and have a couple of others on the go as well. I’ve ordered some replacement parts from one of the model suppliers here in the UK to enable me to restore some of the models with parts missing, but where possible I try to use parts from other models bought for this purpose. Yesterday I went to a collectors Fair / swap meet and bought a few things and did a couple of swaps, thinking next time I may get a table to sell a few things that I have surplus, in the collection.    
  • Going back to PC stuff, I made a donation of some Pi stuff and a couple of Laptops to a friend of my friend Les Pounder. Drew works in Egypt and is hoping to teach local children Computing, but has absolutely no equipment, or didn’t have until Les sent him some Pi’s and an old Lenovo x61s with Raspbian x86 installed so the children will be using the same software on all the machines. One of the PC’s I am sending is an x61s and also a Dell E6220 with some random Pi stuff and a couple of Pi’s to the cause. It’s easy to forget that having access to fairly cheap older hardware via various sources such as ebay is beyond the financial ability of many in much of the world, and for some even in the rich countries. A shout out to Zeb from Destination Linux who did a 24Hr marathon YouTube stream of Euro Truck simulator over the holiday to raise funds for Free Geek, in the US you can find them HERE. There are similar projects in the UK one is the WEEECharity based in the North West so if you want to help people in your own community bridge the digital divide consider a donation of unused and unloved hardware or bung them a small donation to help out. 
  • Finally joined the BDLL Euro show, realised at the last minute that it was the second Saturday of the month, so after a quick check in with the crew dropped out of the pre show mumble chat and jumped into the BDLL Zoom after installing the Zoom client as I was on the Ubuntu Studio laptop, after a bit of a glitch at the beginning with the hardware it went OK for the rest of the 2 hours. 
• Joe
  • Someone gave me an equallogic ps6500  Toyam gave it to me.
  • I have no idea what to do with it
  • Honkeymagoo sent me a pair of pebble watches to work on
    • They both needed battery replacements
    • I failed miserably
    • Ruined one of the ribbon cables that go around the side on one
    • Did get the new batteries connected but was not able to get them to turn on
    • Other then the ribbon break i am not sure what I did wrong
    • One of the boards did get hot at one point but I reflowed the connection for the battery and it settled down
    • Interesting highlights.  I did have to solder a cable onto one of the battery boards.  Just used some wire from some ethernet cable that i had sitting around.  The cable is a little stiff for this application but when i checked the voltages it came out fine.
  • Jim Butchers Codex Alera
    • Good series.
    • Had to replace my copy because the old one was corrupt.  
    • Not sure if it is my hard drive with bad sectors or one of the ones that I used for a backup
  • The book of 5 rings
    • Interesting but because of the type of book and the fact that i am going over it with audio i think i am going to have to go through it several more times before i get the most out of it
  • Shattered Bonds, book 13 in the Jane Yellowrock series
    • Good book, not the easiest to follow.
    • Jumps around a bit and references some obscure aspects of the long series before it
  • Alex Verus novels again
    • Really good series.
    • Better after a couple of read throughs and getting in all the details
  • Also was able to get a python class in this morning.  We should start meeting weekly again. I think the next class that we are going to take may be centos
  • Working on old headphones again
    • Replaced the cable on my daughter’s cheap little headphones
    • Not even sure what brand they are just grabbed an old aux cable and replaced the broken cable
    • I have found that full cable replacements are sturdier and more reliable than patching the cable or replacing the jack
  • Fixed one set of 770’s by shortening the cable on one side
  • Fixed one set of 510’s by shortening the cable on one side and replacing the other
    • I had a problem with the replaced side
    • I tried shortening the original cable first but the sound was dim so i just did a replacement.  
    • Sound was still dim on that side so what I ended up doing was putting some flux down on the board and running my iron over a bunch of the connections while the device was on and playing music(do not try that) this reseated whatever was loose and fixed the sound issues
  • Fixed 2 sets of 810’s and a set of insignia’s by opening the speaker up and shortening the cable from that side
    • 1 more 810 to do that on
    • This is a very difficult fix because of the small size and the fact that it doesnt like to go back together if you get too harsh taking it apart
      • One of the 810s have another problem that i am not going to be able to fix but the insignias work well
        • The 810s i was able to get the earpiece working but it is much dimmer than the other side.  Next time i am setup i may try to reflow some of it 
        • But I think the problem is the connections on the spindle are wearing out so i may take it all the way apart and try to clean that up
        • The insignias work well for audio books but have terrible call quality in and out
      • The other 810 is working good
  • Full cable replacement on some earforce recon 50x’s that i found at goodwill for 4 dollars
    • Will probably also do the same for my other pair of 60p’s
    • This model has a separate line going to each ear one with the cables for the mic
    • The only issue that i have found is when the mic is in the correct position the left and right channels are reversed
  • Did a full band replacement on the z2’s.  Glad the replacement model worked.
    • Was not an exact match on the hinges but was close enough to the same size that i was able to get it together
    • Had to switch back to the standard sized ear cups because this band is narrower than the original
    • Much more clamping force but still comfortable
    • Used the earcups on the razer kraken z2’s
  • Attempted to replace the full cable from the board to the earpiece on a pair of 780’s but was plagued with problems and had to set it aside before i got frustrated while wielding a soldering iron. But as i mentioned before that is a difficult fix.
  • Picked up a pair of Meze 99 neos for 20 dollars
    • These headphones are 200 new on Amazon
    • Work perfectly and sound great
    • I am using a portable amp to push the headphones when i want a good sound
  •  Also picked up a pair of razer krakens for 15 dollars.
    • Had some problems where the left speaker was acting as the mic instead of the mic but was also pushing through sound
    • This had the side effect where everything that played on the headphones was transmitted in complete clarity back through the mic connection.
    • Attempted a cable fix directly at the 3.5mm jack but this did not work and left me somewhat confused as to the actual pinout of the device. Essentially when i had it hooked up right it was doing the same thing as before.
    • Cut the cable again above the included remote as that is the next likely place for an issue to arise. Hooked up a second cable from there and still got the same issue
    • Did a full cable replacement and while testing i found out that the mic is completely shot.
    • Works as a pair of headphones until i find another solution but i think i may mod an old mic from another system. 
    • Basically bypassed the surface mount board that is built in and hooked everything up direct except for the offside speaker
    • Sound good and are comfortable
    • I have a couple mono connectors that i might be able to use, i will need to look more closely 
    • Did not realize that it took proprietary ear cups but the ones i bought for the z2’s to add extra padding worked fine with the extra built in edge material.
    • Even covers up the hole from where i removed the mic 
  • Gave serious consideration to recording the whole thing and while i could have done it from my phone i had 2 problems
    • My phone is my bluetooth testing device
    • If I were planning on posting anywhere i would have had to refrain from cursing. And I was not about to do that.
  • For those of you that are wondering I go through a lot of bt headphones and my kids go through a lot of cans.  Dont think they are going to be using the meze’s though
  • Ordered some new tips for my soldering iron as the ones from microcenter dont quite fit
    • These do fit and work very well.  
  • My server is down after the most recent round of updates.  Not sure what is wrong yet. Need to put the video card back into the server. Which is annoying.  
    • Nope just a hard restart
    • Wait it dropped again.
    • I need to figure out what is going wrong with my server 
    • https://cockpit-project.org/
• Tony W
  • Miracle Morning 
    • First heard about it from User Error
    • S.A.V.E.R.S. explained – “The Miracle Morning”
    • More about habit and discipline than time spent or results 
    • Will stick with some variation of this morning routine
  • Music keeping me very busy (4 “gigs” in the last 4 days)
  • Converting old 8mm video using VLC
    • Tested with this adapter, about $10: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XJKSJZ8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • First test with Super Nintendo quasi-successful
    • VLC able to capture video but not audio for some reason (Your input Can’t Be Opened, VLC Can’t Open MRL File…)
    • Audacity captures the audio no problem – can join VLC video capture with Audacity audio capture
  • Thinkpad dual display conundrum
    • Was initially hesitant to request a $200 thinkpad dock from work, so bought a USB C hub for about $30.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Miracle MorningM8QR83T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • This hub did not work for multiple display, but adding another USB C to HDMI cable did
      • What I have learned is that anything 
    • Total cost of this solution around $40
    • CONS – 
      • No power button
      • 2 cables instead of one 
  •  Recording setup revisions
    • New boom stand (cheap Neewer)
    • Presonus Audiobox
    • Still using budget Behringer XLR mic
  • Have really been enjoying convenience of true wireless earbuds
    • Using Anker Liberty Soundcore buds that were a Christmas gift
    • Plex on the go is great for breaks

News:

• New Developer Dell XPS 13
• CES 2020: Samsung introduces enterprise-ready Galaxy Chromebook – Samsung Galaxy Chrombook
• EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott
• Firefox 72 Released (with Caveats: See Security Update)
  • Picture in Picture mode for Linux (and MacOS).
  • Now supports silencing Notification messages from various websites.
• Linus Torvalds Apprehensive About ZFS Licensing
  • All of the headlines are over the top!
• Kali Drops Default Root User
• Pixelorama v0.6 is Out!

Security Update:

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

Announcements:

• Ubuntu 19.04 and variants are End of Life on January 23. Please update as soon as possible!
• The next show will be January 26th, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM UTC.

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com 

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

Download

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

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

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

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Alan P
  • Found a bunch of old audio cassettes in the loft. Bought a cassette player off ebay to sample them into a PC (thinkpad, of course) and then feed them into an emulator if they’re computer stuff.
  • Some of them were programs that I’d written with a friend over 30 years ago.
  • Also played some old 8-bit games with my friend Martin Wimpress on our new twitch channel “8bitversus”. We decided to start playing games online when a friend in the Ubuntu Podcast telegram channel suggested it might be fun to watch. I was a massive sinclair spectrum fan, and he was a commodore 64 fan. In these streams we take turns choosing games and get the other person to play games on the other persons platform. It’s fun!
• Leo
  • Got handed a desktop sans case from a friend that wasn’t using it anymore and was moving out of state. I’ve been wanting to build a new server for quite a while to get more into Docker and other enterprisey-type things and I saw it as a sign to forge ahead!
  • i5-6600k, 16GB 2400MHz RAM, ASUS Fancy Pants motherboard, and a 700W PSU.
  • Planning on moving the services I have at home, like Nextcloud, from snap and VMs to MicroK8s, but am having some issues with getting the Dashboard to listen outside on a local LAN subnet.
  • Making slow but steady progress on the manual Raspberry Pi Zero W motion camera setup.
• Tony H
  • Having issues with Ubuntu Studio that I had installed on my Dell 7440 i7 it was reporting errors every time I started it. So I swapped out the M2 SSD with a 2.5” SSD and did a clean install to this drive. More problems, the new iso would not boot, so I ended up finding and using the original iso off my portable HDD to make a new bootable USB install drive this worked and I have a clean install of Ubuntu Studio on the Test laptop for January’s test distro. One issue I have found so far is not an Ubuntu issue but a Firefox issue, I can no longer copy my Firefox folder over to the new machine and have all my bookmarks as they were previously installed. Yes I have a FireFox account but it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to and syncing bookmarks which is a pain when you have several Hundred of these that you would like to access. Previously it was a doddle to copy my FireFox over to a new install and it was one of the reasons I still use it. And yes my desktop PC is linked to the laptop as far as sync is concerned, just not doing it.
  • Recording the latest Distrohoppers Digest episode with Moss, it went out on Friday.
  • Continuing to play with Matchbox models, pick up a couple of bargains over the holiday but now it’s time to start actually restoring a few. Started on a Ford GT superfast restoration and have a couple of others on the go as well. I’ve ordered some replacement parts from one of the model suppliers here in the UK to enable me to restore some of the models with parts missing, but where possible I try to use parts from other models bought for this purpose. Yesterday I went to a collectors Fair / swap meet and bought a few things and did a couple of swaps, thinking next time I may get a table to sell a few things that I have surplus, in the collection.    
  • Going back to PC stuff, I made a donation of some Pi stuff and a couple of Laptops to a friend of my friend Les Pounder. Drew works in Egypt and is hoping to teach local children Computing, but has absolutely no equipment, or didn’t have until Les sent him some Pi’s and an old Lenovo x61s with Raspbian x86 installed so the children will be using the same software on all the machines. One of the PC’s I am sending is an x61s and also a Dell E6220 with some random Pi stuff and a couple of Pi’s to the cause. It’s easy to forget that having access to fairly cheap older hardware via various sources such as ebay is beyond the financial ability of many in much of the world, and for some even in the rich countries. A shout out to Zeb from Destination Linux who did a 24Hr marathon YouTube stream of Euro Truck simulator over the holiday to raise funds for Free Geek, in the US you can find them HERE. There are similar projects in the UK one is the WEEECharity based in the North West so if you want to help people in your own community bridge the digital divide consider a donation of unused and unloved hardware or bung them a small donation to help out. 
  • Finally joined the BDLL Euro show, realised at the last minute that it was the second Saturday of the month, so after a quick check in with the crew dropped out of the pre show mumble chat and jumped into the BDLL Zoom after installing the Zoom client as I was on the Ubuntu Studio laptop, after a bit of a glitch at the beginning with the hardware it went OK for the rest of the 2 hours. 
• Joe
  • Someone gave me an equallogic ps6500  Toyam gave it to me.
  • I have no idea what to do with it
  • Honkeymagoo sent me a pair of pebble watches to work on
    • They both needed battery replacements
    • I failed miserably
    • Ruined one of the ribbon cables that go around the side on one
    • Did get the new batteries connected but was not able to get them to turn on
    • Other then the ribbon break i am not sure what I did wrong
    • One of the boards did get hot at one point but I reflowed the connection for the battery and it settled down
    • Interesting highlights.  I did have to solder a cable onto one of the battery boards.  Just used some wire from some ethernet cable that i had sitting around.  The cable is a little stiff for this application but when i checked the voltages it came out fine.
  • Jim Butchers Codex Alera
    • Good series.
    • Had to replace my copy because the old one was corrupt.  
    • Not sure if it is my hard drive with bad sectors or one of the ones that I used for a backup
  • The book of 5 rings
    • Interesting but because of the type of book and the fact that i am going over it with audio i think i am going to have to go through it several more times before i get the most out of it
  • Shattered Bonds, book 13 in the Jane Yellowrock series
    • Good book, not the easiest to follow.
    • Jumps around a bit and references some obscure aspects of the long series before it
  • Alex Verus novels again
    • Really good series.
    • Better after a couple of read throughs and getting in all the details
  • Also was able to get a python class in this morning.  We should start meeting weekly again. I think the next class that we are going to take may be centos
  • Working on old headphones again
    • Replaced the cable on my daughter’s cheap little headphones
    • Not even sure what brand they are just grabbed an old aux cable and replaced the broken cable
    • I have found that full cable replacements are sturdier and more reliable than patching the cable or replacing the jack
  • Fixed one set of 770’s by shortening the cable on one side
  • Fixed one set of 510’s by shortening the cable on one side and replacing the other
    • I had a problem with the replaced side
    • I tried shortening the original cable first but the sound was dim so i just did a replacement.  
    • Sound was still dim on that side so what I ended up doing was putting some flux down on the board and running my iron over a bunch of the connections while the device was on and playing music(do not try that) this reseated whatever was loose and fixed the sound issues
  • Fixed 2 sets of 810’s and a set of insignia’s by opening the speaker up and shortening the cable from that side
    • 1 more 810 to do that on
    • This is a very difficult fix because of the small size and the fact that it doesnt like to go back together if you get too harsh taking it apart
      • One of the 810s have another problem that i am not going to be able to fix but the insignias work well
        • The 810s i was able to get the earpiece working but it is much dimmer than the other side.  Next time i am setup i may try to reflow some of it 
        • But I think the problem is the connections on the spindle are wearing out so i may take it all the way apart and try to clean that up
        • The insignias work well for audio books but have terrible call quality in and out
      • The other 810 is working good
  • Full cable replacement on some earforce recon 50x’s that i found at goodwill for 4 dollars
    • Will probably also do the same for my other pair of 60p’s
    • This model has a separate line going to each ear one with the cables for the mic
    • The only issue that i have found is when the mic is in the correct position the left and right channels are reversed
  • Did a full band replacement on the z2’s.  Glad the replacement model worked.
    • Was not an exact match on the hinges but was close enough to the same size that i was able to get it together
    • Had to switch back to the standard sized ear cups because this band is narrower than the original
    • Much more clamping force but still comfortable
    • Used the earcups on the razer kraken z2’s
  • Attempted to replace the full cable from the board to the earpiece on a pair of 780’s but was plagued with problems and had to set it aside before i got frustrated while wielding a soldering iron. But as i mentioned before that is a difficult fix.
  • Picked up a pair of Meze 99 neos for 20 dollars
    • These headphones are 200 new on Amazon
    • Work perfectly and sound great
    • I am using a portable amp to push the headphones when i want a good sound
  •  Also picked up a pair of razer krakens for 15 dollars.
    • Had some problems where the left speaker was acting as the mic instead of the mic but was also pushing through sound
    • This had the side effect where everything that played on the headphones was transmitted in complete clarity back through the mic connection.
    • Attempted a cable fix directly at the 3.5mm jack but this did not work and left me somewhat confused as to the actual pinout of the device. Essentially when i had it hooked up right it was doing the same thing as before.
    • Cut the cable again above the included remote as that is the next likely place for an issue to arise. Hooked up a second cable from there and still got the same issue
    • Did a full cable replacement and while testing i found out that the mic is completely shot.
    • Works as a pair of headphones until i find another solution but i think i may mod an old mic from another system. 
    • Basically bypassed the surface mount board that is built in and hooked everything up direct except for the offside speaker
    • Sound good and are comfortable
    • I have a couple mono connectors that i might be able to use, i will need to look more closely 
    • Did not realize that it took proprietary ear cups but the ones i bought for the z2’s to add extra padding worked fine with the extra built in edge material.
    • Even covers up the hole from where i removed the mic 
  • Gave serious consideration to recording the whole thing and while i could have done it from my phone i had 2 problems
    • My phone is my bluetooth testing device
    • If I were planning on posting anywhere i would have had to refrain from cursing. And I was not about to do that.
  • For those of you that are wondering I go through a lot of bt headphones and my kids go through a lot of cans.  Dont think they are going to be using the meze’s though
  • Ordered some new tips for my soldering iron as the ones from microcenter dont quite fit
    • These do fit and work very well.  
  • My server is down after the most recent round of updates.  Not sure what is wrong yet. Need to put the video card back into the server. Which is annoying.  
    • Nope just a hard restart
    • Wait it dropped again.
    • I need to figure out what is going wrong with my server 
    • https://cockpit-project.org/
• Tony W
  • Miracle Morning 
    • First heard about it from User Error
    • S.A.V.E.R.S. explained – “The Miracle Morning”
    • More about habit and discipline than time spent or results 
    • Will stick with some variation of this morning routine
  • Music keeping me very busy (4 “gigs” in the last 4 days)
  • Converting old 8mm video using VLC
    • Tested with this adapter, about $10: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XJKSJZ8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • First test with Super Nintendo quasi-successful
    • VLC able to capture video but not audio for some reason (Your input Can’t Be Opened, VLC Can’t Open MRL File…)
    • Audacity captures the audio no problem – can join VLC video capture with Audacity audio capture
  • Thinkpad dual display conundrum
    • Was initially hesitant to request a $200 thinkpad dock from work, so bought a USB C hub for about $30.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Miracle MorningM8QR83T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • This hub did not work for multiple display, but adding another USB C to HDMI cable did
      • What I have learned is that anything 
    • Total cost of this solution around $40
    • CONS – 
      • No power button
      • 2 cables instead of one 
  •  Recording setup revisions
    • New boom stand (cheap Neewer)
    • Presonus Audiobox
    • Still using budget Behringer XLR mic
  • Have really been enjoying convenience of true wireless earbuds
    • Using Anker Liberty Soundcore buds that were a Christmas gift
    • Plex on the go is great for breaks

News:

• New Developer Dell XPS 13
• CES 2020: Samsung introduces enterprise-ready Galaxy Chromebook – Samsung Galaxy Chrombook
• EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott
• Firefox 72 Released (with Caveats: See Security Update)
  • Picture in Picture mode for Linux (and MacOS).
  • Now supports silencing Notification messages from various websites.
• Linus Torvalds Apprehensive About ZFS Licensing
  • All of the headlines are over the top!
• Kali Drops Default Root User
• Pixelorama v0.6 is Out!

Security Update:

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

Announcements:

• Ubuntu 19.04 and variants are End of Life on January 23. Please update as soon as possible!
• The next show will be January 26th, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM UTC.

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com 

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

Download

This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D).

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.

Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.

Finally, in security, we talk sudo.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Spilled water on my laptop right before the show…
  • Playing with my audio setup again.
    • Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage.
    • Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the  mic as well.
      • This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing!
    • Linux fixes another flash drive.
      • Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently.
      • During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died.
      • Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed.
• Moss
  • On Tuesday  on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. 
  • As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean.
  • I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port.
  • I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
  • I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that.
  • My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old…
• Josh
  • Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel
    • Lots of things to see
    • Podcast panel with Joe Ressington
    • It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh.
  • Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi.
  • I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week.
  • I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section.
  • All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks!
• Joe
  • Ordered 5 HBS 820’s
    • When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool.  
    • 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird
      • Not that I am complaining
      • The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise
      • The last one has one side that doesn’t work
      • I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working
      • Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides 
      • That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total.
      • One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on.  Seems to be holding together well 
      • The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section.  You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly
  • Read  book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality
  • Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet.  Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas?
  • Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia.  Very good author and well done audios.
  • Also Daniel Faust books 1-8
  • Kevin Mitnick   The art of invisibility
    • “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect”
    • Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work.
  • Started up my python classes with a few friends again.
    • We are starting by refreshing with: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter0/ 
    • We are also going to go over some of the red hat courses
  • I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures.
    • MMCX connectors.  I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables.  Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece.  You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets.
  • Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube
    • It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos
    • I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless
    • I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case.
    • I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically.
  • Wrote an article about travel networking.  It is a broad overview at this point
    • covers networking while visiting family
    • Or while at a hotel
    • Or while traveling down the road
• Tony W
  • Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show
    • Good month for grunge concerts in ATL
  • Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop
    • 5400 HDD to SSD
    • 4G RAM to 8GB
    • Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows
    • Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes 
  • I hate buying printer ink
    • $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify.  At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.]
  • Played with Bunsenlabs
    • Continuation of the old Crunchbang
    • Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’.  It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines
    • System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB
    • Still have 32 bit iso

THE NEWS:

• Ubuntu 19.10 Released
  • Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released.
  • Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip)
  • ZFS on root (experimental)
  • Gnome 3.34
  • Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released
  • Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04.
• Ubuntu 20.04 Named
  • Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo)
  • As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020
• Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu
  • Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006.
• Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released
  • Josh is highly disappointed
  • The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone
  • The soli radar thing is, weird
  • It’s nice to have a 90Hz display
  • However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad)
• The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report
  • Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro
  • Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement”
  • Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics
  • Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center
  • In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be
• Freespire 5.0 Released
  • I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options.
• Tails 4.0 Released
• Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux
• Samsung Kills Linux on Dex

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation!
• Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28.
• This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL)
• Basically, just run updates.

WRAP-UP:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338
  • Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/
  • Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News

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 and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

Download

This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D).

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.

Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.

Finally, in security, we talk sudo.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Spilled water on my laptop right before the show…
  • Playing with my audio setup again.
    • Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage.
    • Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the  mic as well.
      • This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing!
    • Linux fixes another flash drive.
      • Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently.
      • During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died.
      • Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed.
• Moss
  • On Tuesday  on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. 
  • As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean.
  • I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port.
  • I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
  • I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that.
  • My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old…
• Josh
  • Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel
    • Lots of things to see
    • Podcast panel with Joe Ressington
    • It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh.
  • Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi.
  • I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week.
  • I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section.
  • All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks!
• Joe
  • Ordered 5 HBS 820’s
    • When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool.  
    • 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird
      • Not that I am complaining
      • The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise
      • The last one has one side that doesn’t work
      • I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working
      • Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides 
      • That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total.
      • One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on.  Seems to be holding together well 
      • The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section.  You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly
  • Read  book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality
  • Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet.  Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas?
  • Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia.  Very good author and well done audios.
  • Also Daniel Faust books 1-8
  • Kevin Mitnick   The art of invisibility
    • “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect”
    • Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work.
  • Started up my python classes with a few friends again.
    • We are starting by refreshing with: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter0/ 
    • We are also going to go over some of the red hat courses
  • I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures.
    • MMCX connectors.  I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables.  Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece.  You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets.
  • Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube
    • It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos
    • I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless
    • I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case.
    • I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically.
  • Wrote an article about travel networking.  It is a broad overview at this point
    • covers networking while visiting family
    • Or while at a hotel
    • Or while traveling down the road
• Tony W
  • Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show
    • Good month for grunge concerts in ATL
  • Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop
    • 5400 HDD to SSD
    • 4G RAM to 8GB
    • Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows
    • Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes 
  • I hate buying printer ink
    • $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify.  At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.]
  • Played with Bunsenlabs
    • Continuation of the old Crunchbang
    • Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’.  It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines
    • System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB
    • Still have 32 bit iso

THE NEWS:

• Ubuntu 19.10 Released
  • Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released.
  • Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip)
  • ZFS on root (experimental)
  • Gnome 3.34
  • Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released
  • Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04.
• Ubuntu 20.04 Named
  • Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo)
  • As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020
• Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu
  • Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006.
• Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released
  • Josh is highly disappointed
  • The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone
  • The soli radar thing is, weird
  • It’s nice to have a 90Hz display
  • However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad)
• The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report
  • Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro
  • Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement”
  • Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics
  • Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center
  • In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be
• Freespire 5.0 Released
  • I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options.
• Tails 4.0 Released
• Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux
• Samsung Kills Linux on Dex

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation!
• Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28.
• This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL)
• Basically, just run updates.

WRAP-UP:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338
  • Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/
  • Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News

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 and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

Download

This week, in our Wanderings, Toyam (Void Linux maintainer) shaves a yak and gets to soldering, I blew up and recovered my Mint install, Tony’s been editing audio and LUGing, Josh has been playing with Windows Subsystem for Linux , and Joe finally gets the Note 10

Then, in our news we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News, exFAT in the kernel, iPhone and Android exploits and the new Pinebook Pro

In security, we talk Firefox and why you should give it another try

WANDERINGS:

• Toyam
  • Yak shaving: Need a calendar for my household, to share appointments and other plans, and can’t be Google, must work from the CLI…. Oh also should be offline compatible.
    • During a class last year I wrote the frontend for this calendar, but didn’t have a satisfactory backend.
    • So started investigating Wails, which lets you, like Electron, use javascript for your frontend, but Wails lets you build a golang backend.
      • Got Wails to support Void Linux.
      • But still working on linking my frontend with their backend.
  • Soldered parts onto a PCB I previously designed. I now regret choosing small parts (0402).
• Leo
  • Broke my desktop Mint install by using ppa-purge for the padoka PPA so I can test the oibaf PPA for performance differences on my graphics card. Didn’t pay attention to what it was going to uninstall. It even makes you type in “Yes, do as I say!” Turns out, it uninstalled EVERYTHING. I watched icons disappear from Plank one-by-one. Checked the terminal and my jaw dropped. CTRL+C couldn’t save me here. SSDs are brutal for mistakes like this.
    • Luckily I don’t tinker with Mint on my laptop that way, or it could have been a bigger issue!
    • Timeshift saves the day.
    • Ended up reinstalling anyway since I still wanted to tinker with oibaf and didn’t want to go through recovery again. Backed up home, and started fresh.
  • Got a new mechanical keyboard for $15 after using some amazon credit that I didn’t know what to do with. Ended up buying a Velocifire 78-key keyboard with Outemu brown switches. They’re a little loud for my tastes, but it’s growing on me.
• Tony H 
  • Editing the Audio for the last show, and was happy to say that it was the best effort I’ve made with the editing since I joined the show. For anyone out there trying to get to grips with audio recording and editing, stick with it as the only way you learn how it works is by doing it, you will find what works for you and your set up. We have a production guide that was written by Rob and Issac, and has been modified by us since, but you sometimes have to go with what works with the audio you have to work on and the setup that you have.
  • So for the next Distrohoppers digest review I’ve installed and been playing with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, I seem to be developing a liking for rolling distributions. I’m also developing a liking for XFCE and installed this as the DE again as I had been using it in EndeavourOS.
  • We had the last meeting at the current makerspace venue which involved mainly taking away the equipment we wanted to transfer to the new venue (my Garage) over the next few weeks we will be reconnecting with our Linux roots and advertising the Saturday meetings in the local library as our LUG as it was in the old days. There maybe an opportunity to install the 3D printer at the library at a later date but for now we need to work on making my Garage fit to use the printer and Laser cutter at my place.
  • Getting more donations of PC’s, Les gave me a Tower from his uncle who passed away recently, this will be passed on to a charity after having Linux Mint 19.2 XFCE installed as its light on memory at only 2Gb of RAM.
  • Setting up a Dell Optiplex 7010 i5 with 8Gb Ram 240Gb SSD (Mint 19.2 Mate) and a 250Gb HDD (windows 10) For my better Half. Her old Pentium Dual core was well past its sell by date having Mint 17.3 and Windows 7 on a 160Gb HDD in dual boot mode. I set up Libreoffice Writer to ribbon mode as she uses MS Office at work so is more used to that interface. Her first comment once she went on line was that she can play some of the games that stopped working on the old PC due to an outdated Flash codec. One happy Wife, Life is Good   
  • Broke my phone today
• Josh
  • Been playing around with WSL. I did use it back in the BETA stages but it’s much improved now.
  • I’ve found a VSCode plugin that allows you to edit files in folders that are within WSL. This allows me to do EduBlocks development in Windows. 
  • It’s quite obvious that this could now replace Linux for me and I do wonder what we will see in 10 years. Will linux distros be as popular or will Windows WSL get even better and be more popular?
  • Found a new OS called “CloudReady” from Neverware that lets you turn any PC into a Chromebook. It’s super cool!
  • I returned to school this week
  • The printed magazines are live! We’ve had so many orders, considering we thought we’d get none, we’re really happy. 
  • I got a new GPU. I opted for an Asus OC Nvidia RTX 2060. It’s amazing, the drivers actually work properly *cough AMD* and so far my experience of Nvidia is great. Real Time Ray Tracing is super cool, even though it’s not really implemented in anything. 
• Joe
  • Have been taking a break from social media 
    • I am even behind on my podcast listening.
  • Have been listening to the wheel of time again
  • Got the Galaxy Note 10 plus
    • Still think it cost way too much but the wife convinced me to get it
    • Will come up with a full review
    • Android Dex is nice, works very well and easy
    • Linux on dex is not yet available for the Note 10+
    • The screen is brilliant. 
    • Transferred a 60 gig of data over wifi to the device very easily
    • Didnt even heat up using resilio sync with 60+ gb of data
    • Usb c dock worked without a hitch as did displaylink
      • Although Dex does not work over display link
    • Also want to test steam link with android on dex
  • Fixed an m.2 adapter with a faulty usb 3.0 b connection
  • Testing anlinux on the note 10+
    • It works very smooth, no hitches or delays that i have seen
    • Using ubuntu but it feels a lot more like trying to setup arch
      • Very minimal install 
      • Installed mate
      • Installed nautilus
      • Created a new user and attempted to install vlc
      • VLC installed but still will not launch
      • Further testing required
  • One of the few issues that i have found with my migration to the new phone is that a lot of my settings in podkicker did not migrate, although all of my subscriptions did so i have ended up with a backlog of pocasts

NEWS:

• 5150 has passed
  • You may know him from the linux lug cast or as an hpr host 
  • I dont even know what to say
  • My condolences to his family
  • I loved doing the linux lug cast with him
  • I am happy that i got to meet him at Texas Linux fest 
  • Next Episode of the linux lugcast will be a tribute episode, we will be trying to get people on from other casts that knew 50 to talk about how they knew him
  • On the 20th 
• Linux Mint Monthly News – August 2019
  • More HiDPI support incoming! Fixing some of the rough edges that cropped up in 19.2 (blurry images, system tray icons)
    • The system tray icon issues stem from the buggy nature of Gtk.StatusIcon and its related obsolete objects that let the app itself draw the icon.
    • To fix this, Mint will be using XApp.StatusIcon.
    • A couple of videos are on the monthly news page to illustrate
  • I think Clem inadvertently made a “How to program Linux Mint with Python3” video.
  • They’re fixing weird Update Manager shield icon issues. On first login, it can be invisible or cropped.
  • Mintbox 3 still in the works with new diamond cut aluminum logo.
• Microsoft wants to bring exFat to the Linux kernel 
• Pinebook Pro pre-orders open
  • CPU: 64-Bit Dual-Core ARM 1.8GHz Cortex A72 and Quad-Core ARM 1.4GHz Cortex A53
  • GPU: Quad-Core MALI T-860
  • RAM: 4 GB LPDDR4 Dual Channel System DRAM Memory
  • Flash: 64 GB eMMC 5.0
  • Wireless: WiFi 802.11AC + Bluetooth 5.0
• Apple gives third-party repair shops access to authorized parts
• Apple Music comes to the Web, which means Linux, too! 
• Google Says Malicious Websites Have Been Quietly Hacking iPhones for Years
• SMS Attacks on Android phones
  • Joker Spyware Found in 24 Google Play Apps
  • Funkybot Malware Intercepts Android Texts and 2FA Codes

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Firefox 69 blocks trackers by default!
  • By using the standard tracking profile built into the browser, Firefox 69 will block mainly 3rd party cookies: this means ads and their trackers.
  • Cryptominers are blocked by default!
  • Autoplay videos will be blocked by default, as well, and you can control how. Nothing at all, no audio only, or allow.
  • Firefox is also blocking Flash from automatically running without your explicit permission. The “Always activate” option has been removed.
  • This is for all platforms you can run Firefox on, not just Linux! That includes Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS.
  • New logo coming in 70!

WRAP-UP:

• Toyam Cox — voidlinux.org, github.com/void-linux, #voidlinux on freenode
• Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338
  • Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/
  • Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News

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 and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

Download

This week, in our Wanderings, Toyam (Void Linux maintainer) shaves a yak and gets to soldering, I blew up and recovered my Mint install, Tony’s been editing audio and LUGing, Josh has been playing with Windows Subsystem for Linux , and Joe finally gets the Note 10

Then, in our news we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News, exFAT in the kernel, iPhone and Android exploits and the new Pinebook Pro

In security, we talk Firefox and why you should give it another try

WANDERINGS:

• Toyam
  • Yak shaving: Need a calendar for my household, to share appointments and other plans, and can’t be Google, must work from the CLI…. Oh also should be offline compatible.
    • During a class last year I wrote the frontend for this calendar, but didn’t have a satisfactory backend.
    • So started investigating Wails, which lets you, like Electron, use javascript for your frontend, but Wails lets you build a golang backend.
      • Got Wails to support Void Linux.
      • But still working on linking my frontend with their backend.
  • Soldered parts onto a PCB I previously designed. I now regret choosing small parts (0402).
• Leo
  • Broke my desktop Mint install by using ppa-purge for the padoka PPA so I can test the oibaf PPA for performance differences on my graphics card. Didn’t pay attention to what it was going to uninstall. It even makes you type in “Yes, do as I say!” Turns out, it uninstalled EVERYTHING. I watched icons disappear from Plank one-by-one. Checked the terminal and my jaw dropped. CTRL+C couldn’t save me here. SSDs are brutal for mistakes like this.
    • Luckily I don’t tinker with Mint on my laptop that way, or it could have been a bigger issue!
    • Timeshift saves the day.
    • Ended up reinstalling anyway since I still wanted to tinker with oibaf and didn’t want to go through recovery again. Backed up home, and started fresh.
  • Got a new mechanical keyboard for $15 after using some amazon credit that I didn’t know what to do with. Ended up buying a Velocifire 78-key keyboard with Outemu brown switches. They’re a little loud for my tastes, but it’s growing on me.
• Tony H 
  • Editing the Audio for the last show, and was happy to say that it was the best effort I’ve made with the editing since I joined the show. For anyone out there trying to get to grips with audio recording and editing, stick with it as the only way you learn how it works is by doing it, you will find what works for you and your set up. We have a production guide that was written by Rob and Issac, and has been modified by us since, but you sometimes have to go with what works with the audio you have to work on and the setup that you have.
  • So for the next Distrohoppers digest review I’ve installed and been playing with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, I seem to be developing a liking for rolling distributions. I’m also developing a liking for XFCE and installed this as the DE again as I had been using it in EndeavourOS.
  • We had the last meeting at the current makerspace venue which involved mainly taking away the equipment we wanted to transfer to the new venue (my Garage) over the next few weeks we will be reconnecting with our Linux roots and advertising the Saturday meetings in the local library as our LUG as it was in the old days. There maybe an opportunity to install the 3D printer at the library at a later date but for now we need to work on making my Garage fit to use the printer and Laser cutter at my place.
  • Getting more donations of PC’s, Les gave me a Tower from his uncle who passed away recently, this will be passed on to a charity after having Linux Mint 19.2 XFCE installed as its light on memory at only 2Gb of RAM.
  • Setting up a Dell Optiplex 7010 i5 with 8Gb Ram 240Gb SSD (Mint 19.2 Mate) and a 250Gb HDD (windows 10) For my better Half. Her old Pentium Dual core was well past its sell by date having Mint 17.3 and Windows 7 on a 160Gb HDD in dual boot mode. I set up Libreoffice Writer to ribbon mode as she uses MS Office at work so is more used to that interface. Her first comment once she went on line was that she can play some of the games that stopped working on the old PC due to an outdated Flash codec. One happy Wife, Life is Good   
  • Broke my phone today
• Josh
  • Been playing around with WSL. I did use it back in the BETA stages but it’s much improved now.
  • I’ve found a VSCode plugin that allows you to edit files in folders that are within WSL. This allows me to do EduBlocks development in Windows. 
  • It’s quite obvious that this could now replace Linux for me and I do wonder what we will see in 10 years. Will linux distros be as popular or will Windows WSL get even better and be more popular?
  • Found a new OS called “CloudReady” from Neverware that lets you turn any PC into a Chromebook. It’s super cool!
  • I returned to school this week
  • The printed magazines are live! We’ve had so many orders, considering we thought we’d get none, we’re really happy. 
  • I got a new GPU. I opted for an Asus OC Nvidia RTX 2060. It’s amazing, the drivers actually work properly *cough AMD* and so far my experience of Nvidia is great. Real Time Ray Tracing is super cool, even though it’s not really implemented in anything. 
• Joe
  • Have been taking a break from social media 
    • I am even behind on my podcast listening.
  • Have been listening to the wheel of time again
  • Got the Galaxy Note 10 plus
    • Still think it cost way too much but the wife convinced me to get it
    • Will come up with a full review
    • Android Dex is nice, works very well and easy
    • Linux on dex is not yet available for the Note 10+
    • The screen is brilliant. 
    • Transferred a 60 gig of data over wifi to the device very easily
    • Didnt even heat up using resilio sync with 60+ gb of data
    • Usb c dock worked without a hitch as did displaylink
      • Although Dex does not work over display link
    • Also want to test steam link with android on dex
  • Fixed an m.2 adapter with a faulty usb 3.0 b connection
  • Testing anlinux on the note 10+
    • It works very smooth, no hitches or delays that i have seen
    • Using ubuntu but it feels a lot more like trying to setup arch
      • Very minimal install 
      • Installed mate
      • Installed nautilus
      • Created a new user and attempted to install vlc
      • VLC installed but still will not launch
      • Further testing required
  • One of the few issues that i have found with my migration to the new phone is that a lot of my settings in podkicker did not migrate, although all of my subscriptions did so i have ended up with a backlog of pocasts

NEWS:

• 5150 has passed
  • You may know him from the linux lug cast or as an hpr host 
  • I dont even know what to say
  • My condolences to his family
  • I loved doing the linux lug cast with him
  • I am happy that i got to meet him at Texas Linux fest 
  • Next Episode of the linux lugcast will be a tribute episode, we will be trying to get people on from other casts that knew 50 to talk about how they knew him
  • On the 20th 
• Linux Mint Monthly News – August 2019
  • More HiDPI support incoming! Fixing some of the rough edges that cropped up in 19.2 (blurry images, system tray icons)
    • The system tray icon issues stem from the buggy nature of Gtk.StatusIcon and its related obsolete objects that let the app itself draw the icon.
    • To fix this, Mint will be using XApp.StatusIcon.
    • A couple of videos are on the monthly news page to illustrate
  • I think Clem inadvertently made a “How to program Linux Mint with Python3” video.
  • They’re fixing weird Update Manager shield icon issues. On first login, it can be invisible or cropped.
  • Mintbox 3 still in the works with new diamond cut aluminum logo.
• Microsoft wants to bring exFat to the Linux kernel 
• Pinebook Pro pre-orders open
  • CPU: 64-Bit Dual-Core ARM 1.8GHz Cortex A72 and Quad-Core ARM 1.4GHz Cortex A53
  • GPU: Quad-Core MALI T-860
  • RAM: 4 GB LPDDR4 Dual Channel System DRAM Memory
  • Flash: 64 GB eMMC 5.0
  • Wireless: WiFi 802.11AC + Bluetooth 5.0
• Apple gives third-party repair shops access to authorized parts
• Apple Music comes to the Web, which means Linux, too! 
• Google Says Malicious Websites Have Been Quietly Hacking iPhones for Years
• SMS Attacks on Android phones
  • Joker Spyware Found in 24 Google Play Apps
  • Funkybot Malware Intercepts Android Texts and 2FA Codes

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Firefox 69 blocks trackers by default!
  • By using the standard tracking profile built into the browser, Firefox 69 will block mainly 3rd party cookies: this means ads and their trackers.
  • Cryptominers are blocked by default!
  • Autoplay videos will be blocked by default, as well, and you can control how. Nothing at all, no audio only, or allow.
  • Firefox is also blocking Flash from automatically running without your explicit permission. The “Always activate” option has been removed.
  • This is for all platforms you can run Firefox on, not just Linux! That includes Windows, Android, MacOS and iOS.
  • New logo coming in 70!

WRAP-UP:

• Toyam Cox — voidlinux.org, github.com/void-linux, #voidlinux on freenode
• Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338
  • Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/
  • Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News

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 and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>