Terminal Tricks – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Sun, 20 Jul 2025 21:38:18 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Terminal Tricks – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast Terminal Tricks – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 464 – Ticky Tacky People https://mintcast.org/464-ticky-tacky-people/ Sun, 20 Jul 2025 21:38:16 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7566 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – July 2025

In our Innards section: Let’s talk BASH!

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – July 2025,

In our Innards section: Let’s talk BASH!

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes


Mint Monthly News – July 2025

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 464 464 Ticky Tacky People full 1:16:26 7566 371 – Rounded Corners https://mintcast.org/371-rounded-corners/ Wed, 06 Oct 2021 05:37:05 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5230 In security, More bugs and more malware
Then in our Wanderings, Joe does vacation, Norbert Listens to the Doctor, Josh tries ventoy, Tony is making ice cream trucks, Leo plays D2
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
28:03 Security Update
38:05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:19:37 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Linux Mint Monthly updates, Ubuntu news, Windows being Windows and Steam deck news

In security, More bugs and more malware

Then in our Wanderings, Joe does vacation, Norbert Listens to the Doctor, Josh tries ventoy, Tony is making ice cream trucks, Leo plays D2

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio production
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logg
  • 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!>
]]> 371 - Rounded Corners full 1:27:49 5230 mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-400-raspberry-pies-mp3/ Wed, 18 Nov 2020 04:39:51 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4771 Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 
In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug
Download
]]> Download

1:56 Wanderings
33:22 News
50:26 Security
56:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo colorizes his terminal, Josh eyeballs an eggroll, Tony gives the Gorilla another go, and Joe fiddles with firmware

Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Doing some surveillance!
    • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.
  • Josh
    •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 
  • Tony H
    • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
    • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 
  • Joe
    •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
      • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
      • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
      •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
      • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
      • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
    • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
      • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
      • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
      • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
    •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
    •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
    • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
    • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
    • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Bug in Ubuntu’s GDM3 allows root access
    • Link .pam_environment to /dev/zero
    • Open Region & Language. It’ll freeze and peg the accounts-daemon process at 100%
    • Send the stop signal (-SIGSTOP)
    • Run (nohup bash -c “sleep 30s; kill -SIGSEGV 597; kill -SIGCONT 597”) where 597 is the process ID of accounts-daemon
    • Logout and wait for the new user creation window
    • Proof of Concept
  • Ransomware for Linux
    • RansomEXX

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4771 mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-400-raspberry-pies/ Wed, 18 Nov 2020 04:19:50 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4765 Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 
In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug
Download
]]> Download

1:56 Wanderings
33:22 News
50:26 Security
56:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo colorizes his terminal, Josh eyeballs an eggroll, Tony gives the Gorilla another go, and Joe fiddles with firmware

Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Doing some surveillance!
    • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.
  • Josh
    •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 
  • Tony H
    • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
    • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 
  • Joe
    •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
      • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
      • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
      •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
      • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
      • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
    • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
      • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
      • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
      • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
    •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
    •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
    • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
    • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
    • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Bug in Ubuntu’s GDM3 allows root access
    • Link .pam_environment to /dev/zero
    • Open Region & Language. It’ll freeze and peg the accounts-daemon process at 100%
    • Send the stop signal (-SIGSTOP)
    • Run (nohup bash -c “sleep 30s; kill -SIGSEGV 597; kill -SIGCONT 597”) where 597 is the process ID of accounts-daemon
    • Logout and wait for the new user creation window
    • Proof of Concept
  • Ransomware for Linux
    • RansomEXX

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 57:03 4765 mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-340-unit-of-measurement-mp3/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:57:59 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4552 Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more
In security, we talk Twitter
Download
]]>

Download

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Jason
    • Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
    • Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
    • Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
    • Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
    • Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
      • Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
      • Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
      • Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
      • Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
      • Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
  • Leo
    • Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
    • Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
    • Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
    • The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

 

  • Tony H
    • Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.   
    • I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results. 
    • Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
    • On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.  
  • Moss
    • I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
    • We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so. 
    • I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
    • Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
    • I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
    • We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out.  I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
      • This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
    • Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books.  I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through.  But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
    • My freezer out in the garage had an issue.  An operator issue.  It was still full of ice which then melted.  
      • Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.  
      • About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
    • My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
      • Ryzen 5 3600 
        • Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.  
      • B450m matx motherboard
      • Cube case
      • Rx 560 graphics card
        • It will eventually get upgraded
      • They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
        • Still need to get this taken back
      • G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
      • I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
      • After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working 
      • Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
      • Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
      • Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
        • Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
      • Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
    • Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
      • It worked fine right out of the box.  I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
        • For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
        • Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
      • So this could very easily serve as a convergence device.  I will be working on a setup for it
      • The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
    • Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
      • Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
      • I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
      • Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each.  Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
    • I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
  • Tony W
    • New (to me) guitar amp!  Boss Katana 100W
      • Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of 
      • Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
      • Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only) 
    • Reworked hard drives in studio computer
      • One more new 120GB SSD
      • Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
      • Used Ventoy for the Windows install
      • Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
        • PopOS, manjaro, others
    • Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school, 
    • Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay) 
      • Linux Beta
        • Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
        • Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB.  It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
        • It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
        • VLC was already installed
    • Music gigs 
      • Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
    • Lots of grilling and barbecuing!  
      • New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 9th of August at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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

  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 4552 mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement https://mintcast.org/mintcast-340-unit-of-measurement/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:41:02 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4547 Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more
In security, we talk Twitter
Download
]]>

Download

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Jason
    • Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
    • Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
    • Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
    • Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
    • Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
      • Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
      • Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
      • Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
      • Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
      • Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
  • Leo
    • Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
    • Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
    • Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
    • The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

 

  • Tony H
    • Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.   
    • I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results. 
    • Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
    • On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.  
  • Moss
    • I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
    • We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so. 
    • I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
    • Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
    • I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
    • We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out.  I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
      • This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
    • Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books.  I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through.  But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
    • My freezer out in the garage had an issue.  An operator issue.  It was still full of ice which then melted.  
      • Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.  
      • About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
    • My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
      • Ryzen 5 3600 
        • Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.  
      • B450m matx motherboard
      • Cube case
      • Rx 560 graphics card
        • It will eventually get upgraded
      • They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
        • Still need to get this taken back
      • G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
      • I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
      • After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working 
      • Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
      • Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
      • Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
        • Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
      • Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
    • Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
      • It worked fine right out of the box.  I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
        • For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
        • Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
      • So this could very easily serve as a convergence device.  I will be working on a setup for it
      • The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
    • Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
      • Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
      • I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
      • Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each.  Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
    • I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
  • Tony W
    • New (to me) guitar amp!  Boss Katana 100W
      • Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of 
      • Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
      • Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only) 
    • Reworked hard drives in studio computer
      • One more new 120GB SSD
      • Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
      • Used Ventoy for the Windows install
      • Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
        • PopOS, manjaro, others
    • Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school, 
    • Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay) 
      • Linux Beta
        • Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
        • Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB.  It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
        • It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
        • VLC was already installed
    • Music gigs 
      • Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
    • Lots of grilling and barbecuing!  
      • New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 9th of August at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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

  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
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