In Security and Privacy, “The death of privacy online”, and Automatic firmware updates becomes mandatory.

We then get into our “Wanderings”, there’s some feedback, and more!

The News:

Mint Monthly News – June 2026

Arch Linux’s AUR under attack for the second time in less than two months

Starling is a new Linux desktop built using AI in six months

Security and Privacy:

The death of privacy online

“Automatic firmware/software updates for network infrastructure have gone from “nice to have” to “mandatory” because the threat landscape has changed.”

Then in our Wanderings: Joe does a lot, Bill plays magical video cards, Majid is trying to resist Black Friday, Charles goes to a Linux conference, and Jim eschews the mouse.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

The News:

FCC Seeks Comment on ATSC 3.0 DRM – Protect OTA TV!

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric & Majid).
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_doctor@mastodon.social, AtypicalDr on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.
• Charles – charles@mintcast.org, Mr PDX on Discord
• Jim– jim@mintcast.org, GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

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!>

In security and privacy: Arch is Ddossed and malware abounds

Then in our Wanderings: Joe does a lot, Majid achieves very little, Charles, Bill falls off the ARC and Jim is a photographic genius

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

• 00:00:00 – Intro
• 00:01:33 – News
• 00:04:58 – Security And Privacy
• 00:17:07 – Wanderings
• 02:01:52 – Vibrations From The Ether
• 02:09:18 – Check This Out
• 02:10:12 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• 02:11:08 – Wrap Up
• 02:12:57 – Special Thanks
• 02:13:25 – Outro

The News:

Another birthday for Mint!

Mint 22.2 ‘Zara’ final ISOs being tested

Security and Privacy:

Ringreaper Linux Malware

Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other two podcasts I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric & Majid) and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_dr@mastodon.social, AtypicalDr on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.
• Charles – charles@mintcast.org, Mr PDX on Discord
• Jim– jim@mintcast.org, GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

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!>

• In our Innards section we discuss the Android Apps We can’t live without
• And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, Distrohoppers’ Digest, bardmoss@pm.me, other information found at It’s Moss dot com

• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fostodon.org on Mastodon, @wchouser3 on Twitter, and wchouser3 on Facebook also – checkout my other podcasts 3 Fat Truckers and Linux OTC

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

Archive.org for hosting our audio files

Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo

Londoner for our time syncs

Bill Houser for hosting the Pi400 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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • I got some new headphones. ATH-M50Xbt
  • An ssd I thought died didn’t. It’s in an external USB enclosure now, and I used it to do the backup testing for the Innards.

• Joe
  • Had to go back and re-fix my MMCX connections on the 1mores again.  Which means that I did not do as good of a job as I thought last time.  Kinda wish it had some kind of built in tension reliever which would help a little bit.
  • Had a lot of trouble getting the last Anker Soundcore put together and then once again like the other one it would not charge.  I could go into the whole sordid tale of broken ribbon cables and screws popping out of mountings but it just makes me angry.  So in the end, of the 4 I was only able to get one working properly so the whole product line is going to be a no-go for me.  I took the custom made cables from it and put them onto one of the HBS 770s that I still have in reserve.  I may do a few more 770s just for the fun of it but I am looking for alternatives since I don’t think they are being made anymore
  • Ordered a broken pair of Samsung Level U headphones with ANC.  Requires a solvent to break down the glue in order to take it apart.  Also got a really cheap iHome Medallion headset that my wife was able to get for 5 dollars (got 2 of them).  They are in new condition, fresh out of the box, but I am going to mod them anyway. I don’t think that I will get much battery life out of them and I want to modify the Medallion so that it will sit on the collar without moving and so that it can also use the 1mores which should improve sound quality.  
    1. Also going to look into possibly printing a new case for it and giving it a larger battery.  Or at least a new back case but I will need to check and see where the hole for the mic is.  If it is on the back I will need to be creative with how I situate said battery.
    2. I did get the Level U’s. I was able to get it taken apart with minimal damage to the casing.  I probably would not have taken it apart at all except that instead of a bad side on the headset it had a bad battery.  I was able to use one of the batteries from the Ankers which is a little smaller but the replacement batteries that would fit all cost more than I wanted to pay.  Have not done the mmcx mod to the headset and I won’t because they suck.  I am not impressed with the top end volume on them and call quality is terrible.  Don’t know if I somehow tugged the mic and put it into the wrong location but I won’t be working more on this if that is the call quality
  • Thinking about resituating my tablets and seeing if I can get some more use out of them.  Going to sell the 7140 and use the 7130 as a bedroom computer. 
    1. I did spin both of those back up to make sure that the batteries are still good and both updated easily with no issues.
    2. Even I now think that the 7130 is getting a bit long in the tooth but I have yet to find a proper affordable tablet replacement that can run Linux, has a decent screen and fast processing speed.
    3. The Dell Latitude 7200 shows some promise but the price is still a bit high for about $400 same with the 5290
    4. I was able to order a Dell Latitude 5285 for $120 that should have been an easy fix with a bad display cable.  Turned out it had a lot more wrong with it.  Including the USB ports to the point where one of the times that I hooked it up the magic smoke got out.  So $120 wasted. But I should be able to get some good parts out of it for the next one if I can get another at a good price, when I have money again. I did message the seller and he said that I purchased “as is” but then they refunded me anyway
    5. I do have to say though for the few minutes that it was running it it seemed to run Linux well.  The only issue that I saw was the touch screen rotation was inverted to the screen rotation.  But that would probably not be a difficult fix.
  • BTSync has been acting up again.  Had to delete my shares and recreate them a couple of times to get things working again so I may need to find a different syncing solution.  The application did not crash or anything just silently stopped syncing changes.  Seems like it is starting to have problems with syncing time stamps.
    1. https://leochavez.org/index.php/2019/09/21/installing-nextcloud-in-ubuntu/
  • Have still not done much 3-D printing lately, but with the warmer temperatures I did print another adapter for the olympic weights to standard bar.  Which allows me to increase the weights for deadlifts and curls.

• Moss
  • I have installed Mageia 8. I installed Plasma on the Kudu. The installer was more involved than most but was understandable even to me, although it needed to be more graphical and use a larger font. I installed Mageia 8 XFCE on the Inspiron, the same steps but with better graphics and fonts. It doesn’t feel Mandrake-level user-friendly, but it appears to be what I’m reviewing for Episode 021 of Distrohoppers’ Digest. I have also grabbed Emmabunt̎ũs and Robolinux for further evaluation.
  • Speaking of distros, Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 was at 718 downloads today, and Episode 019 leaped ahead of it with 721. We had a lot of fun doing Episode 020, which is already at 424 downloads, and I’m already at work on the script for 021. 
  • Listener and old friend firecat sent me a Series 5 Yubikey, he says it does not have NFC and he apparently got it with a subscription to Wired Magazine. I have had a lot of adventures with this, as it did not work after setting it up as 2FA on Bitwarden. Eventually I somehow tricked Bitwarden into letting me delete that 2FA feature and set up another one. I’m a little concerned that it did not work the first time I tried to use it for 2FA, and a little concerned I managed to defeat the security to fix it. I got all the recovery information saved — I printed it out, and deleted the text file, and hopefully will find a memorable safe place for the printout. I’m still having trouble deciding what to do with it, as most of the uses suggested don’t really tell me what they do, or what they are for, in words I understand. Yet, even if I don’t figure it out, I’m extremely grateful for the gift.
  • We’ve done more work on It’s MOSS, adding articles, graphics, and people, with Dale Miracle being added to the team and one or two others talking to me about future articles. We also have come to an agreement to share articles with Full Circle Magazine, and to publish our articles under the same CC/BY-SA license. Dylan is going back over our site to attach the license info to our articles.
  • Speaking of It’s MOSS, It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 2; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 3. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
  • My wife’s new HP Zia800 came in, and it is a monstrous thing of beauty. The keyboard seller sent the wrong keyboard, but the right one got here Friday. The seller did not ask for the other keyboard to be returned, so if anyone wants a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, without the mouse and 10-key pad which usually are boxed with it, and is willing to pay the postage, I have one. We have received the wifi card. As soon as I’m feeling up to it, I will install the wifi card and plug things in. It came with Windoze 10 on it, she’ll be dual-booting it to Mint…or rather, dual-booting to Windows with Mint primary.
  • I’ve been having a bit of a rough time, with my mother’s interment, work as a substitute teacher being intermittent at best, and other things. But I’ll be OK. And Dresden is still plugging along in Book 10, Chapter 20.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale and Moss. This one was 1 hour long, as having 3 hosts and a new section we have expanded the time taken. It’s a good thing I am not doing a regular review anymore, as due to my health issues I am concentrating on the post production side of the show. I will still be there each episode to keep everyone on track lol. 
  • Aldi here in the UK did a sale of tools last week and I picked up a couple of 10w LED battery portable workshop lights which can also be used as power banks. I also got a digital caliper for £8/$11.20 which is good value as in the local hardware store they were £20 the last time I looked. I also had to buy a new LED bulb for my workshop/office as the old one just stopped working. The replacement seems a lot brighter so maybe the other one had been on the way out for a while.
  • Went on a long walk with my better half last Monday, we walked all the way along the Prom here in Blackpool to the next Town along, Cleveleys, which is about 8 miles away; a few years ago I was not able to walk from the lounge to the kitchen which is about 10 steps, due to arthritis, my final tally for the day was just under 21K. Getting fit is helping keep the arthritis controlled so I have more good days than bad at the moment.
  • I was looking at a Dell 9th gen i7 XPS15 but I missed the boat as they have all gone, so I’m now looking at an Entroware 17” Hybris which for the price with 32Gb of RAM is less than a £1000, I would add my own PCie NVME m.2 card later as I can pick one up for half the quoted upgrade prices on the site and the same with the SSD. There is a link in the show notes to the site if you are interested, and NO we are not sponsored by them. 

• Josh
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic has a website! https://crowbarkernelpanic.fireside.fm
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic is officially on Spotify as well! Just search Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify and you will find it.
• Ryzen 7 5800x totally changed my Linux gaming experience. 
• TrueNAS is really cool but I have not had success sharing files over the network. I have created a user and a dataset and enabled SMB on the dataset and the sharing settings but I still cannot log into my SMB from another computer.
• TrueNAS is working now I didn’t do anything and now I can log in to my share with no issues.

• Mike
  • WiFi woes – 5/30, modem, router, sig strength, packets, net man, kernel, live USB, timeshift…
  • New Dell XPS DE…

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News, February
• Steam Link now available for Linux.  Collabora
• Mageia 8 is now out
• Brave Browser to challenge Google. Tailcat, a web search engine
• StarLabs Embraces Coreboot

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• LastPass for Android found to contain 7 trackers. 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, several blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch, 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@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites. Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify.
• Mike – GrouchyM@pm.me and GrouchyM on Discord
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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
  • I got some new headphones. ATH-M50Xbt
  • An ssd I thought died didn’t. It’s in an external USB enclosure now, and I used it to do the backup testing for the Innards.

• Joe
  • Had to go back and re-fix my MMCX connections on the 1mores again.  Which means that I did not do as good of a job as I thought last time.  Kinda wish it had some kind of built in tension reliever which would help a little bit.
  • Had a lot of trouble getting the last Anker Soundcore put together and then once again like the other one it would not charge.  I could go into the whole sordid tale of broken ribbon cables and screws popping out of mountings but it just makes me angry.  So in the end, of the 4 I was only able to get one working properly so the whole product line is going to be a no-go for me.  I took the custom made cables from it and put them onto one of the HBS 770s that I still have in reserve.  I may do a few more 770s just for the fun of it but I am looking for alternatives since I don’t think they are being made anymore
  • Ordered a broken pair of Samsung Level U headphones with ANC.  Requires a solvent to break down the glue in order to take it apart.  Also got a really cheap iHome Medallion headset that my wife was able to get for 5 dollars (got 2 of them).  They are in new condition, fresh out of the box, but I am going to mod them anyway. I don’t think that I will get much battery life out of them and I want to modify the Medallion so that it will sit on the collar without moving and so that it can also use the 1mores which should improve sound quality.  
    1. Also going to look into possibly printing a new case for it and giving it a larger battery.  Or at least a new back case but I will need to check and see where the hole for the mic is.  If it is on the back I will need to be creative with how I situate said battery.
    2. I did get the Level U’s. I was able to get it taken apart with minimal damage to the casing.  I probably would not have taken it apart at all except that instead of a bad side on the headset it had a bad battery.  I was able to use one of the batteries from the Ankers which is a little smaller but the replacement batteries that would fit all cost more than I wanted to pay.  Have not done the mmcx mod to the headset and I won’t because they suck.  I am not impressed with the top end volume on them and call quality is terrible.  Don’t know if I somehow tugged the mic and put it into the wrong location but I won’t be working more on this if that is the call quality
  • Thinking about resituating my tablets and seeing if I can get some more use out of them.  Going to sell the 7140 and use the 7130 as a bedroom computer. 
    1. I did spin both of those back up to make sure that the batteries are still good and both updated easily with no issues.
    2. Even I now think that the 7130 is getting a bit long in the tooth but I have yet to find a proper affordable tablet replacement that can run Linux, has a decent screen and fast processing speed.
    3. The Dell Latitude 7200 shows some promise but the price is still a bit high for about $400 same with the 5290
    4. I was able to order a Dell Latitude 5285 for $120 that should have been an easy fix with a bad display cable.  Turned out it had a lot more wrong with it.  Including the USB ports to the point where one of the times that I hooked it up the magic smoke got out.  So $120 wasted. But I should be able to get some good parts out of it for the next one if I can get another at a good price, when I have money again. I did message the seller and he said that I purchased “as is” but then they refunded me anyway
    5. I do have to say though for the few minutes that it was running it it seemed to run Linux well.  The only issue that I saw was the touch screen rotation was inverted to the screen rotation.  But that would probably not be a difficult fix.
  • BTSync has been acting up again.  Had to delete my shares and recreate them a couple of times to get things working again so I may need to find a different syncing solution.  The application did not crash or anything just silently stopped syncing changes.  Seems like it is starting to have problems with syncing time stamps.
    1. https://leochavez.org/index.php/2019/09/21/installing-nextcloud-in-ubuntu/
  • Have still not done much 3-D printing lately, but with the warmer temperatures I did print another adapter for the olympic weights to standard bar.  Which allows me to increase the weights for deadlifts and curls.

• Moss
  • I have installed Mageia 8. I installed Plasma on the Kudu. The installer was more involved than most but was understandable even to me, although it needed to be more graphical and use a larger font. I installed Mageia 8 XFCE on the Inspiron, the same steps but with better graphics and fonts. It doesn’t feel Mandrake-level user-friendly, but it appears to be what I’m reviewing for Episode 021 of Distrohoppers’ Digest. I have also grabbed Emmabunt̎ũs and Robolinux for further evaluation.
  • Speaking of distros, Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 was at 718 downloads today, and Episode 019 leaped ahead of it with 721. We had a lot of fun doing Episode 020, which is already at 424 downloads, and I’m already at work on the script for 021. 
  • Listener and old friend firecat sent me a Series 5 Yubikey, he says it does not have NFC and he apparently got it with a subscription to Wired Magazine. I have had a lot of adventures with this, as it did not work after setting it up as 2FA on Bitwarden. Eventually I somehow tricked Bitwarden into letting me delete that 2FA feature and set up another one. I’m a little concerned that it did not work the first time I tried to use it for 2FA, and a little concerned I managed to defeat the security to fix it. I got all the recovery information saved — I printed it out, and deleted the text file, and hopefully will find a memorable safe place for the printout. I’m still having trouble deciding what to do with it, as most of the uses suggested don’t really tell me what they do, or what they are for, in words I understand. Yet, even if I don’t figure it out, I’m extremely grateful for the gift.
  • We’ve done more work on It’s MOSS, adding articles, graphics, and people, with Dale Miracle being added to the team and one or two others talking to me about future articles. We also have come to an agreement to share articles with Full Circle Magazine, and to publish our articles under the same CC/BY-SA license. Dylan is going back over our site to attach the license info to our articles.
  • Speaking of It’s MOSS, It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 2; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 3. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
  • My wife’s new HP Zia800 came in, and it is a monstrous thing of beauty. The keyboard seller sent the wrong keyboard, but the right one got here Friday. The seller did not ask for the other keyboard to be returned, so if anyone wants a Microsoft Sculpt keyboard, without the mouse and 10-key pad which usually are boxed with it, and is willing to pay the postage, I have one. We have received the wifi card. As soon as I’m feeling up to it, I will install the wifi card and plug things in. It came with Windoze 10 on it, she’ll be dual-booting it to Mint…or rather, dual-booting to Windows with Mint primary.
  • I’ve been having a bit of a rough time, with my mother’s interment, work as a substitute teacher being intermittent at best, and other things. But I’ll be OK. And Dresden is still plugging along in Book 10, Chapter 20.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale and Moss. This one was 1 hour long, as having 3 hosts and a new section we have expanded the time taken. It’s a good thing I am not doing a regular review anymore, as due to my health issues I am concentrating on the post production side of the show. I will still be there each episode to keep everyone on track lol. 
  • Aldi here in the UK did a sale of tools last week and I picked up a couple of 10w LED battery portable workshop lights which can also be used as power banks. I also got a digital caliper for £8/$11.20 which is good value as in the local hardware store they were £20 the last time I looked. I also had to buy a new LED bulb for my workshop/office as the old one just stopped working. The replacement seems a lot brighter so maybe the other one had been on the way out for a while.
  • Went on a long walk with my better half last Monday, we walked all the way along the Prom here in Blackpool to the next Town along, Cleveleys, which is about 8 miles away; a few years ago I was not able to walk from the lounge to the kitchen which is about 10 steps, due to arthritis, my final tally for the day was just under 21K. Getting fit is helping keep the arthritis controlled so I have more good days than bad at the moment.
  • I was looking at a Dell 9th gen i7 XPS15 but I missed the boat as they have all gone, so I’m now looking at an Entroware 17” Hybris which for the price with 32Gb of RAM is less than a £1000, I would add my own PCie NVME m.2 card later as I can pick one up for half the quoted upgrade prices on the site and the same with the SSD. There is a link in the show notes to the site if you are interested, and NO we are not sponsored by them. 

• Josh
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic has a website! https://crowbarkernelpanic.fireside.fm
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic is officially on Spotify as well! Just search Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify and you will find it.
• Ryzen 7 5800x totally changed my Linux gaming experience. 
• TrueNAS is really cool but I have not had success sharing files over the network. I have created a user and a dataset and enabled SMB on the dataset and the sharing settings but I still cannot log into my SMB from another computer.
• TrueNAS is working now I didn’t do anything and now I can log in to my share with no issues.

• Mike
  • WiFi woes – 5/30, modem, router, sig strength, packets, net man, kernel, live USB, timeshift…
  • New Dell XPS DE…

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News, February
• Steam Link now available for Linux.  Collabora
• Mageia 8 is now out
• Brave Browser to challenge Google. Tailcat, a web search engine
• StarLabs Embraces Coreboot

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• LastPass for Android found to contain 7 trackers. 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, several blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch, 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@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites. Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify.
• Mike – GrouchyM@pm.me and GrouchyM on Discord
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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: 

• Mike
  • Finished reading 2 Mitnick books recently (Ghost in the Wires and The Art of Invisibility)
  • Bought a new guitar (Fender Newporter Special)

• Leo
  • Path of Exile runs 95% as good as Windows via Proton Experimental
  • Played with Trinity Desktop Environment for a month

• Joe
  • It has been cold in Texas which tends to slow me down because it hurts.
  • I did get a new 8 Tb hard drive for my server.  Transferred all the data from my 2 Tb onto it but I still need to swap it into the PC instead of the external enclosure.  Then I will be changing the name to match the 2 Tb drive and after I restart it should work fine with my Plex auto detecting.
  • Picked up 5 Raspberry Pi Picos for future projects but I have not found the right project for me yet
    1. Plus as of yet you can use Thonny which gives you an environment for micropython but I am waiting for arduino to get their UI up and running for it which they say they are doing so that I can more easily use c/c++ and more easily convert some of the pro micro code over.
    2. This will make things easier to build a usb controller although I think I will try  a few other projects first
  • I have spent a lot of time cooking and looking up recipes.  Mostly cause if I’m cooking in the kitchen that means that it is warm in the kitchen
    1. Got an air fryer / toaster oven combo that I have been using quite a bit to make healthier fish and chips.  
    2. Also made another batch of protein bars.  This time it was the caramel chocolate version instead of the Skor bar.  It does not firm up as much as I would like in the freezer but is still very tasty and the silicone dish that I used was very helpful as was adding a bit of nonstick to the wax paper.
    3. The burrito skillet was a big hit and I am looking for other recipes to add to my favorites list
  • Work was a little rough here in Texas with the record cold and snowfall
    1. For most places the cold and the snow that we got would not be a problem.  But because this area never gets that we are not prepared for such a thing.  We don’t have snow plows and salt on standby so things got a little crazy here
    2. Millions of people without power for extended periods of time.  Schools closed even though the majority of students are SFH right now anyway.  Road and business closures
    3. I was lucky in that my power was very stable at my house.  Because of this I also ended up working a lot more because most of my team was unavailable.  Lots of 14 hour days and lots of getting called back into work after hours because everyone else had lost connection
    4. While this was going on I also had a water pipe burst due to freezing.  It was fun.  The pipe actually burst in 2 places so the first fix didn’t work.  Thankfully I was able to get a plumber out pretty quick to get the work done.  Which is surprising considering how many people had the same problem including the local post office.
    5. The drain for the washing machine is also frozen so I will not be able to run clothes for a few days and I will need to remember how to do drywall soon after I am satisfied that the wall is dry
  • Been playing a lot of Borderlands 3 to pass the cold Texas days.  I am still liking it.  Also playing some Victor Vran on occasion.  
    1. Someone on Telegram mentioned that a redone version of Diablo 2 is supposed to be coming out.  I have to wonder if it will be playable on linux.  I know that you can easily get the old one to play on linux but Blizzard and Steam don’t have any kind of deal and probably never will.

• Moss
  • There are updates taking OpenMandriva Lx to version 4.2. If you run them as upgrades and don’t read the blog posts first, you will have issues. I’ll talk more about that in Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 020, which we should be recording this week. I have a clean install on the FuzZ400 but have issues with the upgrade on my Kudu, all reported to the OMA Forum.  Distrohoppers’ Digest will also feature a brand new segment, Beautiful Failures. We will talk about the distros we *almost* got to review and what happened. Our most-downloaded episode, 018, has stalled out just below 700 downloads.
  • Listener Dylan Burger has been added to the growing team at It’s MOSS, and added a new feature: Distro Madness 2021. This features head-to-head choices between distros, with a winner emerging. We haven’t had many visitors to the site on a daily basis, so Dylan came up with this idea. The first round of voting is nearly over, so get your votes in now. We intend to have the voting for each round end on the Friday following each whole-numbered episode of mintCast.
  • I have a new sponsor on Sponsus. Every little bit helps, and I am grateful for the support.
  • My other project, All Women Housed, is taking some big steps forward. We are currently in the “almost” phase: almost on the shelves in two southern California grocery chains and in negotiations with a monster chain in Florida most of you have heard of. We have almost completed negotiations for online sales of produce and other products as well. I should have something to actually announce by next episode, don’t wanna jinx it. 
  • My mother’s estate should be settled in 60 days or less, and that will help a lot. She will finally be laid to rest on Friday, February 26th.
  • My wife wants a new computer and wants to learn computer art. I had my eye on a 12-core HP Z800 Workstation for her, but Leo convinced me the 8-core would be a better deal and it’s cheaper. I’ll get that when I get my income taxes back if it’s still there. 
  • We are now reading Book 10 of Dresden Files, Small Favor.

• Tony Hughes
  • Same old same old here in the UK, still in Lock Down so not able to go anywhere so our Valentines meal was a delivery chinese. On a good note I had my first Covid Jab yesterday (Saturday 20th Feb) so I’m halfway to being a little safer.  
  • I have been doing lots of walking during lock down to keep fit and for the last week or so I’m starting to get some distance in with 5 miles a day the last 4 days.
  • Nothing much Linux wise although I did install EndeavourOS to one of my laptops, my remaining Toshiba Z30, I’ve just sold the other one with Windows 10 installed, I had been asked to do a dual boot with Mint, but Windows took over the boot process and I could not get it to boot into the boot selector or bios so that was a no go. Although since then, the guys gave me a way to get to the boot menu by crashing windows several times to confuse it, for future reference if it ever happens again.

• Josh
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic the new official unofficial Linux Mint gaming podcast with hosts Bo and Me (Josh). This mintCast spinoff will dive into the nitty gritty of gaming on Linux. We will test games and launchers to see just how good gaming on Linux has become. 
  • SNOW! No seriously too much snow please stop…
  • Other than snow in my life I have actually switched fully over to Debian as my main server distro of choice. There are a few reasons for this. 

1. It’s not controlled by one entity.
2. It’s extremely static.
3. It’s super flexible with iso’s that even include proprietary firmware.
4. The installer is BETTER than Ubuntu.

• I have also set up a Matrix-synapse with Debian on the backend all running on Linode. I cannot say enough good things about Linode, they are great. [Moss: And if you sign up with Linode and use the code “mintcast”, you will get exactly zero added benefits!]
• My dad finally upgraded his TV woot! He got a 65” LG NANO90 4K TV and it’s so beautiful with some tweaking possibly by the user and possibly by AI. There are some caveats to having a 4K TV that I didn’t even know about till now.

1. On default settings right out of the box the picture quality on 1080p or lower is really really bad.
2. Netflix price gouging.
3. webOS kinda sucks compared to Roku’s UI.
4. Not all 4k or 1080p content is the same even on HD broadcast TV.

• Last but not least, I am turning LMDE4 into a rolling release.

THE NEWS:

• Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi  – Big flap in the Raspberry Pi Linux community over the fact there is a Microsoft PPA in the new Raspberry Pi OS. Jeff Geerling gives a balanced view in this YouTube video – Is Microsoft Spying on your Raspberry Pi?
• The Microsoft, Azure, Ubuntu Privacy Issue
• The Mars lander helicopter, named Ingenuity, is powered by Linux!
• VLC is going to the Moon! As part of it’s 20th anniversary VLC will send a time capsule shaped like a traffic cone to the moon. The time capsule will be filled with 1TB MicroSD cards containing user videos and classic films – [Moss: They’re just trying to reserve a parking space.]
• The 2020 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards voting is over. We did great! There was a 3-way tie for Best Linux/OpenSource Podcast. The winners – Bad Voltage, GNU World Order, and Command Line Heroes – had 14 votes each, 4th place had FLOSS Weekly tied with Late Nite Linux with 10 votes each, and mintCast was alone in 6th place with 9 votes. Linux Action News had 8, and then Ubuntu Podcast with 6. There were 21 podcasts nominated. mintCast has done better each of the past 3 years, starting in the middle of the pack.
• Pine64 has chosen Manjaro ARM + KDE Plasma UI for future PinePhones. Of course, you are welcome to install whatever you would like, but this is the new default.
• Linus releases Linux kernel 5.11. Non LTS kernel, first release of 2021. Support for Wifi 6 added, new HWE for Intel and AMD, and Syscall User Dispatch for running modern Windows games with Proton or Wine.
• System76 Making an Open Source Keyboard

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Patch your stuff!
• Brave Leaks DNS!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on March 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 – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, 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@mintcast.org, @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. Buy me a coffee!

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: 

• Mike
  • Finished reading 2 Mitnick books recently (Ghost in the Wires and The Art of Invisibility)
  • Bought a new guitar (Fender Newporter Special)

• Leo
  • Path of Exile runs 95% as good as Windows via Proton Experimental
  • Played with Trinity Desktop Environment for a month

• Joe
  • It has been cold in Texas which tends to slow me down because it hurts.
  • I did get a new 8 Tb hard drive for my server.  Transferred all the data from my 2 Tb onto it but I still need to swap it into the PC instead of the external enclosure.  Then I will be changing the name to match the 2 Tb drive and after I restart it should work fine with my Plex auto detecting.
  • Picked up 5 Raspberry Pi Picos for future projects but I have not found the right project for me yet
    1. Plus as of yet you can use Thonny which gives you an environment for micropython but I am waiting for arduino to get their UI up and running for it which they say they are doing so that I can more easily use c/c++ and more easily convert some of the pro micro code over.
    2. This will make things easier to build a usb controller although I think I will try  a few other projects first
  • I have spent a lot of time cooking and looking up recipes.  Mostly cause if I’m cooking in the kitchen that means that it is warm in the kitchen
    1. Got an air fryer / toaster oven combo that I have been using quite a bit to make healthier fish and chips.  
    2. Also made another batch of protein bars.  This time it was the caramel chocolate version instead of the Skor bar.  It does not firm up as much as I would like in the freezer but is still very tasty and the silicone dish that I used was very helpful as was adding a bit of nonstick to the wax paper.
    3. The burrito skillet was a big hit and I am looking for other recipes to add to my favorites list
  • Work was a little rough here in Texas with the record cold and snowfall
    1. For most places the cold and the snow that we got would not be a problem.  But because this area never gets that we are not prepared for such a thing.  We don’t have snow plows and salt on standby so things got a little crazy here
    2. Millions of people without power for extended periods of time.  Schools closed even though the majority of students are SFH right now anyway.  Road and business closures
    3. I was lucky in that my power was very stable at my house.  Because of this I also ended up working a lot more because most of my team was unavailable.  Lots of 14 hour days and lots of getting called back into work after hours because everyone else had lost connection
    4. While this was going on I also had a water pipe burst due to freezing.  It was fun.  The pipe actually burst in 2 places so the first fix didn’t work.  Thankfully I was able to get a plumber out pretty quick to get the work done.  Which is surprising considering how many people had the same problem including the local post office.
    5. The drain for the washing machine is also frozen so I will not be able to run clothes for a few days and I will need to remember how to do drywall soon after I am satisfied that the wall is dry
  • Been playing a lot of Borderlands 3 to pass the cold Texas days.  I am still liking it.  Also playing some Victor Vran on occasion.  
    1. Someone on Telegram mentioned that a redone version of Diablo 2 is supposed to be coming out.  I have to wonder if it will be playable on linux.  I know that you can easily get the old one to play on linux but Blizzard and Steam don’t have any kind of deal and probably never will.

• Moss
  • There are updates taking OpenMandriva Lx to version 4.2. If you run them as upgrades and don’t read the blog posts first, you will have issues. I’ll talk more about that in Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 020, which we should be recording this week. I have a clean install on the FuzZ400 but have issues with the upgrade on my Kudu, all reported to the OMA Forum.  Distrohoppers’ Digest will also feature a brand new segment, Beautiful Failures. We will talk about the distros we *almost* got to review and what happened. Our most-downloaded episode, 018, has stalled out just below 700 downloads.
  • Listener Dylan Burger has been added to the growing team at It’s MOSS, and added a new feature: Distro Madness 2021. This features head-to-head choices between distros, with a winner emerging. We haven’t had many visitors to the site on a daily basis, so Dylan came up with this idea. The first round of voting is nearly over, so get your votes in now. We intend to have the voting for each round end on the Friday following each whole-numbered episode of mintCast.
  • I have a new sponsor on Sponsus. Every little bit helps, and I am grateful for the support.
  • My other project, All Women Housed, is taking some big steps forward. We are currently in the “almost” phase: almost on the shelves in two southern California grocery chains and in negotiations with a monster chain in Florida most of you have heard of. We have almost completed negotiations for online sales of produce and other products as well. I should have something to actually announce by next episode, don’t wanna jinx it. 
  • My mother’s estate should be settled in 60 days or less, and that will help a lot. She will finally be laid to rest on Friday, February 26th.
  • My wife wants a new computer and wants to learn computer art. I had my eye on a 12-core HP Z800 Workstation for her, but Leo convinced me the 8-core would be a better deal and it’s cheaper. I’ll get that when I get my income taxes back if it’s still there. 
  • We are now reading Book 10 of Dresden Files, Small Favor.

• Tony Hughes
  • Same old same old here in the UK, still in Lock Down so not able to go anywhere so our Valentines meal was a delivery chinese. On a good note I had my first Covid Jab yesterday (Saturday 20th Feb) so I’m halfway to being a little safer.  
  • I have been doing lots of walking during lock down to keep fit and for the last week or so I’m starting to get some distance in with 5 miles a day the last 4 days.
  • Nothing much Linux wise although I did install EndeavourOS to one of my laptops, my remaining Toshiba Z30, I’ve just sold the other one with Windows 10 installed, I had been asked to do a dual boot with Mint, but Windows took over the boot process and I could not get it to boot into the boot selector or bios so that was a no go. Although since then, the guys gave me a way to get to the boot menu by crashing windows several times to confuse it, for future reference if it ever happens again.

• Josh
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic the new official unofficial Linux Mint gaming podcast with hosts Bo and Me (Josh). This mintCast spinoff will dive into the nitty gritty of gaming on Linux. We will test games and launchers to see just how good gaming on Linux has become. 
  • SNOW! No seriously too much snow please stop…
  • Other than snow in my life I have actually switched fully over to Debian as my main server distro of choice. There are a few reasons for this. 

1. It’s not controlled by one entity.
2. It’s extremely static.
3. It’s super flexible with iso’s that even include proprietary firmware.
4. The installer is BETTER than Ubuntu.

• I have also set up a Matrix-synapse with Debian on the backend all running on Linode. I cannot say enough good things about Linode, they are great. [Moss: And if you sign up with Linode and use the code “mintcast”, you will get exactly zero added benefits!]
• My dad finally upgraded his TV woot! He got a 65” LG NANO90 4K TV and it’s so beautiful with some tweaking possibly by the user and possibly by AI. There are some caveats to having a 4K TV that I didn’t even know about till now.

1. On default settings right out of the box the picture quality on 1080p or lower is really really bad.
2. Netflix price gouging.
3. webOS kinda sucks compared to Roku’s UI.
4. Not all 4k or 1080p content is the same even on HD broadcast TV.

• Last but not least, I am turning LMDE4 into a rolling release.

THE NEWS:

• Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi  – Big flap in the Raspberry Pi Linux community over the fact there is a Microsoft PPA in the new Raspberry Pi OS. Jeff Geerling gives a balanced view in this YouTube video – Is Microsoft Spying on your Raspberry Pi?
• The Microsoft, Azure, Ubuntu Privacy Issue
• The Mars lander helicopter, named Ingenuity, is powered by Linux!
• VLC is going to the Moon! As part of it’s 20th anniversary VLC will send a time capsule shaped like a traffic cone to the moon. The time capsule will be filled with 1TB MicroSD cards containing user videos and classic films – [Moss: They’re just trying to reserve a parking space.]
• The 2020 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards voting is over. We did great! There was a 3-way tie for Best Linux/OpenSource Podcast. The winners – Bad Voltage, GNU World Order, and Command Line Heroes – had 14 votes each, 4th place had FLOSS Weekly tied with Late Nite Linux with 10 votes each, and mintCast was alone in 6th place with 9 votes. Linux Action News had 8, and then Ubuntu Podcast with 6. There were 21 podcasts nominated. mintCast has done better each of the past 3 years, starting in the middle of the pack.
• Pine64 has chosen Manjaro ARM + KDE Plasma UI for future PinePhones. Of course, you are welcome to install whatever you would like, but this is the new default.
• Linus releases Linux kernel 5.11. Non LTS kernel, first release of 2021. Support for Wifi 6 added, new HWE for Intel and AMD, and Syscall User Dispatch for running modern Windows games with Proton or Wine.
• System76 Making an Open Source Keyboard

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Patch your stuff!
• Brave Leaks DNS!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on March 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 – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, 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@mintcast.org, @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. Buy me a coffee!

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
  • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
    • This will be my “studio” machine.
    • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
    • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again

• Joe
  • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
    • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
    • The other is still working well
  • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
  • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
  • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
  • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
  • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
  • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
    • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
    • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
    • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this

• Moss
  • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
  • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
  • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
  • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
  • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
  • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
  • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
  • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

• Bo
  • Steam Game Festival
    • Frozen Flame
    • Graven
    • Trail of Ayash
    • Little Nightmares 2
  • Glorious Eggroll Proton build
  • Josh and I made a NextCloud and email server.
    • Nextcloud is installed via Snap
    • Mailcow is installed via docker
  • My son had absolutely 0 interest in my retropie.
  • Ordered the parts for my pi camera and plan to build it on stream.

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News – January
• Bo – martin-wimpress-ubuntu-desktop-lead-leaving-canonical
• Ubuntu 21.04 Will Have Wayland by Default
• Bo – New EndeavourOS release brings the latest XFCE desktop
• Google removes The Great Suspender Chrome Plugin as malware
• Debian releases 10.8 “Buster” with 45 security updates
• Nvidia Driver 460.39 Supports Kernel 5.10
• Bo – Pop_OS! Publishes Guide to Gaming
• Follow Up: AlmaLinux Beta Out

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

• Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, 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@mintcast.org, @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. Buy me a coffee!

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
  • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
    • This will be my “studio” machine.
    • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
    • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again

• Joe
  • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
    • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
    • The other is still working well
  • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
  • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
  • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
  • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
  • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
  • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
    • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
    • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
    • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this

• Moss
  • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
  • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
  • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
  • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
  • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
  • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
  • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
  • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

• Bo
  • Steam Game Festival
    • Frozen Flame
    • Graven
    • Trail of Ayash
    • Little Nightmares 2
  • Glorious Eggroll Proton build
  • Josh and I made a NextCloud and email server.
    • Nextcloud is installed via Snap
    • Mailcow is installed via docker
  • My son had absolutely 0 interest in my retropie.
  • Ordered the parts for my pi camera and plan to build it on stream.

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News – January
• Bo – martin-wimpress-ubuntu-desktop-lead-leaving-canonical
• Ubuntu 21.04 Will Have Wayland by Default
• Bo – New EndeavourOS release brings the latest XFCE desktop
• Google removes The Great Suspender Chrome Plugin as malware
• Debian releases 10.8 “Buster” with 45 security updates
• Nvidia Driver 460.39 Supports Kernel 5.10
• Bo – Pop_OS! Publishes Guide to Gaming
• Follow Up: AlmaLinux Beta Out

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

• Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, 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@mintcast.org, @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. Buy me a coffee!

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!>

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
  • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
  • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
  • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
• Joe
  •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
    • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
  • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
  • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
  • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
    • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
    • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
    • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
    • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
    • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
    • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
    • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
    • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
  • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
    • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
    • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
  • Have started biking in the evenings
    • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
    • But I did get pulled over.  
• Josh
  • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
  • Writing some python.
  • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
  • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
  • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  

• Moss
  • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
  • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
  • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
  • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
  • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
• Bo
  •  Learning JS by developing a custom Foundry VTT system
    • Gitlab – https://gitlab.com/boisapunk/sta-foundry-vtt
    • Boilerplate – https://html5boilerplate.com/
    • Handlebars – https://handlebarsjs.com/
    • Tutorial I mentioned – https://youtu.be/gcSN4AQcUzM

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint November News
• Cinnamon 4.8 Hit Github
• Clem Begins Uploading Testing ISOs for 20.1 * thanks to Londoner
• Raspberry Pi OS Gets Updated
  • A switch to the Pulse Audio sound applet makes configuring individual audio stream volumes easier
  • The CUPS service and GUI come preinstalled making it easier to get printers working as well
  • And updates to Orca help those with visual impairments
• Elementary OS Has a Raspberry Pi Pre-Release
• CentOS Is Dead * thanks to Dale
• You can’t stop the signal: CentOS lives again as Rocky Linux
• QT6 is out! All you KDE neon users can start cringing now.
• Guix 1.2 is out with an 8-year anniversary.
• Souk – For Flatpaks in Gnome

SECURITY UPDATE:

• ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
  • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:

• The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
• The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
• Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.

• Open Source Devs not concerned about security
• Trickbot
  • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
  • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
  • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, December 27, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime 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
  • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
  • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
  • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
• Joe
  •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
    • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
  • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
  • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
  • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
    • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
    • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
    • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
    • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
    • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
    • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
    • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
    • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
  • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
    • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
    • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
  • Have started biking in the evenings
    • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
    • But I did get pulled over.  
• Josh
  • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
  • Writing some python.
  • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
  • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
  • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  

• Moss
  • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
  • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
  • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
  • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
  • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
• Bo
  •  Learning JS by developing a custom Foundry VTT system
    • Gitlab – https://gitlab.com/boisapunk/sta-foundry-vtt
    • Boilerplate – https://html5boilerplate.com/
    • Handlebars – https://handlebarsjs.com/
    • Tutorial I mentioned – https://youtu.be/gcSN4AQcUzM

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint November News
• Cinnamon 4.8 Hit Github
• Clem Begins Uploading Testing ISOs for 20.1 * thanks to Londoner
• Raspberry Pi OS Gets Updated
  • A switch to the Pulse Audio sound applet makes configuring individual audio stream volumes easier
  • The CUPS service and GUI come preinstalled making it easier to get printers working as well
  • And updates to Orca help those with visual impairments
• Elementary OS Has a Raspberry Pi Pre-Release
• CentOS Is Dead * thanks to Dale
• You can’t stop the signal: CentOS lives again as Rocky Linux
• QT6 is out! All you KDE neon users can start cringing now.
• Guix 1.2 is out with an 8-year anniversary.
• Souk – For Flatpaks in Gnome

SECURITY UPDATE:

• ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
  • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:

• The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
• The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
• Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.

• Open Source Devs not concerned about security
• Trickbot
  • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
  • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
  • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, December 27, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime 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
  • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • Let’s Enable Snaps on Linux Mint 20
  • 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.
    • Good to know my Nextcloud writeup is still accurate!
  • 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:

• Raspberry Pi 400
• New GIMP Unstable Build Lets You Test Features Coming in GIMP 3.0
• Elementary OS Dark Mode in Odin

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:

• 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 …

• 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • Let’s Enable Snaps on Linux Mint 20
  • 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.
    • Good to know my Nextcloud writeup is still accurate!
  • 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:

• Raspberry Pi 400
• New GIMP Unstable Build Lets You Test Features Coming in GIMP 3.0
• Elementary OS Dark Mode in Odin

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:

• 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

• Bo
  • At work I’ve been hardening servers. I’ve actually locked myself out of one.
  • New monitors
    • AOC C24G1
    • 144hz
    • FreeSync
  • Bo, don’t read this
    • https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Variable_refresh_rate
  • Baldur’s gate 3 on linux
    • Protondb gives it a gold rating.
    • GloriousEggroll’s custom proton
    • Symlinking the launcher

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

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

cp ./*.dll ../bin/

• Josh
  • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
  • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
  • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
  • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.

• Tony H
  • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
  • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
  • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.

• Moss
  • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
  • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
  • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
  • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
  • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
  • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.

• Joe
  • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
    • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
    • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
    • One DS Lite
  • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
    • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
    • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
    • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
    • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
    • Only one way to find out.
    • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
    • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
    • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
  • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
    • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
    • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
    • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
    • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
    • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
    • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
    • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
  • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
    • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
    • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
    • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
    • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
    • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
    • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
    • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
      • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
    • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
    • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
    • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
    • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
  • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
    • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
    • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
    • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
    • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
    • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
    • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
    • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server

• Tony W
  • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
  • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
  • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
  • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
  • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
  • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
  • LineageOS updating
  • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
  • Sometimes Linux is just better…
    • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News for October
  • http://linuxmint.com/tmp/blog/3978/hypnotix_1.0.0_all.deb
• Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla and Flavors Released
• Ubuntu 21.04 codename released: Hirsute (Heer-suit) Hippo
• Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date: the 22nd of April 2021
• Fedora 33, Flavors and Spins Available – What’s New
• XDA Pro 1x runs either UBPorts (Ubuntu Touch), LineageOS or ‘Android’ – Tony W
  • Indiegogo
• Microsoft Edge, Developer Edition, Released
• Youtube-dl DMCA’d
  • Replacements already out there
  • Community rallies behind Youtube-dl, GitHub CEO says the takedown is in violation of their principles and the whole concept of Archive.org.

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Chromium Will Block Malicious and Fake Notifications in 86
• Chromium Also Fixes a Font Rendering Flaw
• Quick Addition. Update WordPress to 5.5.2 Or Later
  • 10 security fixes, 2 of which could lead to privilege escalation or RCE

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 15, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! https://everytimezone.com/s/b3937eae

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, 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

• Bo
  • At work I’ve been hardening servers. I’ve actually locked myself out of one.
  • New monitors
    • AOC C24G1
    • 144hz
    • FreeSync
  • Bo, don’t read this
    • https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Variable_refresh_rate
  • Baldur’s gate 3 on linux
    • Protondb gives it a gold rating.
    • GloriousEggroll’s custom proton
    • Symlinking the launcher

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

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

cp ./*.dll ../bin/

• Josh
  • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
  • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
  • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
  • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.

• Tony H
  • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
  • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
  • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.

• Moss
  • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
  • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
  • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
  • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
  • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
  • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.

• Joe
  • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
    • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
    • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
    • One DS Lite
  • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
    • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
    • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
    • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
    • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
    • Only one way to find out.
    • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
    • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
    • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
  • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
    • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
    • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
    • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
    • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
    • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
    • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
    • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
  • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
    • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
    • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
    • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
    • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
    • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
    • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
    • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
      • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
    • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
    • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
    • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
    • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
  • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
    • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
    • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
    • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
    • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
    • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
    • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
    • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server

• Tony W
  • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
  • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
  • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
  • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
  • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
  • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
  • LineageOS updating
  • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
  • Sometimes Linux is just better…
    • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News for October
  • http://linuxmint.com/tmp/blog/3978/hypnotix_1.0.0_all.deb
• Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla and Flavors Released
• Ubuntu 21.04 codename released: Hirsute (Heer-suit) Hippo
• Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date: the 22nd of April 2021
• Fedora 33, Flavors and Spins Available – What’s New
• XDA Pro 1x runs either UBPorts (Ubuntu Touch), LineageOS or ‘Android’ – Tony W
  • Indiegogo
• Microsoft Edge, Developer Edition, Released
• Youtube-dl DMCA’d
  • Replacements already out there
  • Community rallies behind Youtube-dl, GitHub CEO says the takedown is in violation of their principles and the whole concept of Archive.org.

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Chromium Will Block Malicious and Fake Notifications in 86
• Chromium Also Fixes a Font Rendering Flaw
• Quick Addition. Update WordPress to 5.5.2 Or Later
  • 10 security fixes, 2 of which could lead to privilege escalation or RCE

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 15, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! https://everytimezone.com/s/b3937eae

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, 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • The Chromium based browsers have fixed the AMD/Graphical issue that was plaguing me. Waiting for a new beta update from the Linux Mint Chromium package to test that. But so far, Linux Mint’s Chromium is stable, but still has the issue. Can’t remember if it was Dan or Joe from Linux User Space that said resizing the windows fixes it. It does!
  • Web Apps is my new favorite thing. I use it with Plex and Nextcloud mostly with the Linux Mint Chromium.
  • World of Warcraft crashes on launch from Lutris. Sad times.
• Moss
  • I have the FuzZ400 about as good as it’s going to be, still need to hit F1 during all boots. This makes it hard to reboot from my recliner, as the F1 key on the wireless mini keyboard does not function. (Note: buy new wireless keyboard with real F-keys when possible.) 
  • I installed the power supply on my mini desktop. It works again. I put my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive in it. All the partitions were there, I thought I had 4 installations on it… but only the Mint partition had a distro in it, and the swap partition had been added to the partition which followed where it was. I reestablished the swap partition, and installed an OEM of Mint 20 Cinnamon on it. I’m looking for a local student to give it to. I have a monitor for it, but I haven’t looked to see if I have a working spare keyboard or mouse.
  • On Tuesday the 13th, I went looking for a Telegram group about Bodhi Linux, and didn’t find any in English so I set up one — with help, as I’ve never done this before. I posted it to all my Linux groups and also to both Bodhi Forums and my LQ blog. We have 20 members now, including lead dev Robert Wiley (aka YLee).
  • I had a great conversation with YLee in the group yesterday, lots of new stuff, including that there is a pre-alpha release now of Bodhi 6.0, available both with Moksha and E24. There is no 6.0 repo yet, but YLee stated that some programs from the 5.1 repo MAY work, such as the bodhi-printing app, no guarantees. I’m a Bodhi-loving fool, I currently have 3 installations on my laptop – 5.1, 6.0 with Moksha and 6.0 with Enlightenment E24.
  • Moksha development has far surpassed E17 levels, and has included most of the improvements through E24; however, unlike the main Enlightenment line, YLee accomplished this without changing the stable E17 codebase. 
  • The Bodhi team is mostly just 2 devs now, so please volunteer if you can help. Donations are up and down as well. [$50 this month, $300 last month]
  • In employment news, I still have not gotten paid by Census 2020, but discovered that was my fault. I fixed it, but I could be waiting another 3-4 weeks to receive my paycheck. I have been hired as a substitute teacher by the local school district, but the past two weeks were Fall Break so no work. I interviewed for an actual computer repair position, but was not called back for the second round. 
  • We’re getting near the end of Dead Beat, the 7th book in the Dresden Files series.
• Joe
  • The GK61S Bluetooth keyboard.  I still think that changing out the battery might be my best bet for maintaining bluetooth connection but overall I am disappointed.  I do like the buttons and the size is useful but having to use it wired is a bit annoying and I don’t know if replacing the battery will actually fix all the issues since it sometimes has a problem staying connected over bluetooth even with external power.  It can work with just the USB-C cable but wire can get in the way.  
    • I had previously thought that most of the Bluetooth connection issues with Linux had been solved but now I am going to need to look into it a bit more
    • Mostly bluetooth seems to suck on the desktop
  • Having fun with the Repetier snap and my 3D printer.  Had to do a lot of fixing and refixing to get it printing again but it is good to go for now.  Still having some problems with ABS even with the enclosure but I am switching back to pla and petg for now.  I did have to build a couple of dry boxes for the filament rolls and hopefully that will help.  Petg is printing pretty good right now.
  • Still figuring out what i want to do with that Lenovo Flex 4.  It is currently running Repetier and hooked up to my printer.  I think I am going to do a bit more conversion of the space that it is in and see if I can make a mini studio.
    • Used it to do the linux lugcast since we are using Jitsi amongst ourselves
      • Used Droidcam for this.  I think i got better resolution over wifi than i did over USB
    • Waiting on a mic stand to come in and will be using it along with the HyperX Quadcast mic it actually came in today but i have not opened it yet
    • Thinking about getting a green screen and seeing how well it works since you can get them for around 20 dollars
  • Finally made the upgrade on my main laptop to Mint 20 following the upgrade path, really nice to not have to jump through all the hoops to get the graphics card working properly.  
    • Reinstalled both Docker and Resilio Sync and all my scripting seems to be working fine
  • I had to install the flatpak for mumble on all my machines.  I guess the most recent update messed with the certificates.  Great to find out as the show is starting
• Josh Hawk
  • Mic Mayhem! I have been dealing with trying to get good audio out of my mic. I have a Blue Snowball USB Condenser mic right now and for some reason the audio is good sometimes and sounds hollow others. I have tried messing with the software sound settings but nothing seems to help. I just have to turn it on and hope my recording sounds good this time haha .
  • In other news this led me to buy a new dynamic mic! After looking at a ton of reviews I finally decided on believe it or not an Amazon Basics Mic . I found it on eBay for 16$ but I didn’t have an audio interface so it came with a XLR to ¼” audio jack. I plugged it into my Creative Sound Blaster Z sound card and presto my voice sounded much better but alas it was not to be. There was a rhythmic buzzing that I later found out was coming from my sound card . All that to say I am back using my Blue Snowball and am waiting for a new XLR to USB cable that will fix the buzzing issue.
  • One more quick thing. I have finally installed openSUSE on my parents old Gateway PC and am in the process of setting it up. I tried to use the transactional server install and realized that zypper does not work on that so I reinstalled the normal server version.
• Bo
  • Gnome experiment
    • Fedora 32 getting stuck on boot (gnome display manager)
      • Attempts to repair grub failed
    • Ubuntu was cool but I feel like it’s not close to “stock” gnome
    • Pop!_OS
      • Great! Love the window tiling feature and how it’s implemented
    • Gnome: it’s not you, it’s me…
  • Still playing card games on tabletop simulator (tts). Yesterday I taught my sister to play Magic.
  • LOTR the card game had an online convention using tts and Discord.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 – Will it Proton?

THE NEWS:

• Wine 5.19 Out
• System76 Lets Tiling Windows Stack
• Kernel 5.9 Out
• Plasma 5.20 Is a Huge Release
• Happy Birthday KDE!

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Google, Intel Warn of IoT Kernel Bug

• • • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
    • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
    • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.

• Zoom rolls out E2E Encryption for EVERYONE

• • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
  • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
  • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC. Check when this will be in your local timezone at https://everytimezone.com/s/7d8c1119.
• Note both the US and UK will have time changes (“fall back” 1 hour) between mintCasts 346 & 347, so those times remain the same, but this makes the UTC time 1 hour later than before.

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, 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • The Chromium based browsers have fixed the AMD/Graphical issue that was plaguing me. Waiting for a new beta update from the Linux Mint Chromium package to test that. But so far, Linux Mint’s Chromium is stable, but still has the issue. Can’t remember if it was Dan or Joe from Linux User Space that said resizing the windows fixes it. It does!
  • Web Apps is my new favorite thing. I use it with Plex and Nextcloud mostly with the Linux Mint Chromium.
  • World of Warcraft crashes on launch from Lutris. Sad times.
• Moss
  • I have the FuzZ400 about as good as it’s going to be, still need to hit F1 during all boots. This makes it hard to reboot from my recliner, as the F1 key on the wireless mini keyboard does not function. (Note: buy new wireless keyboard with real F-keys when possible.) 
  • I installed the power supply on my mini desktop. It works again. I put my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive in it. All the partitions were there, I thought I had 4 installations on it… but only the Mint partition had a distro in it, and the swap partition had been added to the partition which followed where it was. I reestablished the swap partition, and installed an OEM of Mint 20 Cinnamon on it. I’m looking for a local student to give it to. I have a monitor for it, but I haven’t looked to see if I have a working spare keyboard or mouse.
  • On Tuesday the 13th, I went looking for a Telegram group about Bodhi Linux, and didn’t find any in English so I set up one — with help, as I’ve never done this before. I posted it to all my Linux groups and also to both Bodhi Forums and my LQ blog. We have 20 members now, including lead dev Robert Wiley (aka YLee).
  • I had a great conversation with YLee in the group yesterday, lots of new stuff, including that there is a pre-alpha release now of Bodhi 6.0, available both with Moksha and E24. There is no 6.0 repo yet, but YLee stated that some programs from the 5.1 repo MAY work, such as the bodhi-printing app, no guarantees. I’m a Bodhi-loving fool, I currently have 3 installations on my laptop – 5.1, 6.0 with Moksha and 6.0 with Enlightenment E24.
  • Moksha development has far surpassed E17 levels, and has included most of the improvements through E24; however, unlike the main Enlightenment line, YLee accomplished this without changing the stable E17 codebase. 
  • The Bodhi team is mostly just 2 devs now, so please volunteer if you can help. Donations are up and down as well. [$50 this month, $300 last month]
  • In employment news, I still have not gotten paid by Census 2020, but discovered that was my fault. I fixed it, but I could be waiting another 3-4 weeks to receive my paycheck. I have been hired as a substitute teacher by the local school district, but the past two weeks were Fall Break so no work. I interviewed for an actual computer repair position, but was not called back for the second round. 
  • We’re getting near the end of Dead Beat, the 7th book in the Dresden Files series.
• Joe
  • The GK61S Bluetooth keyboard.  I still think that changing out the battery might be my best bet for maintaining bluetooth connection but overall I am disappointed.  I do like the buttons and the size is useful but having to use it wired is a bit annoying and I don’t know if replacing the battery will actually fix all the issues since it sometimes has a problem staying connected over bluetooth even with external power.  It can work with just the USB-C cable but wire can get in the way.  
    • I had previously thought that most of the Bluetooth connection issues with Linux had been solved but now I am going to need to look into it a bit more
    • Mostly bluetooth seems to suck on the desktop
  • Having fun with the Repetier snap and my 3D printer.  Had to do a lot of fixing and refixing to get it printing again but it is good to go for now.  Still having some problems with ABS even with the enclosure but I am switching back to pla and petg for now.  I did have to build a couple of dry boxes for the filament rolls and hopefully that will help.  Petg is printing pretty good right now.
  • Still figuring out what i want to do with that Lenovo Flex 4.  It is currently running Repetier and hooked up to my printer.  I think I am going to do a bit more conversion of the space that it is in and see if I can make a mini studio.
    • Used it to do the linux lugcast since we are using Jitsi amongst ourselves
      • Used Droidcam for this.  I think i got better resolution over wifi than i did over USB
    • Waiting on a mic stand to come in and will be using it along with the HyperX Quadcast mic it actually came in today but i have not opened it yet
    • Thinking about getting a green screen and seeing how well it works since you can get them for around 20 dollars
  • Finally made the upgrade on my main laptop to Mint 20 following the upgrade path, really nice to not have to jump through all the hoops to get the graphics card working properly.  
    • Reinstalled both Docker and Resilio Sync and all my scripting seems to be working fine
  • I had to install the flatpak for mumble on all my machines.  I guess the most recent update messed with the certificates.  Great to find out as the show is starting
• Josh Hawk
  • Mic Mayhem! I have been dealing with trying to get good audio out of my mic. I have a Blue Snowball USB Condenser mic right now and for some reason the audio is good sometimes and sounds hollow others. I have tried messing with the software sound settings but nothing seems to help. I just have to turn it on and hope my recording sounds good this time haha .
  • In other news this led me to buy a new dynamic mic! After looking at a ton of reviews I finally decided on believe it or not an Amazon Basics Mic . I found it on eBay for 16$ but I didn’t have an audio interface so it came with a XLR to ¼” audio jack. I plugged it into my Creative Sound Blaster Z sound card and presto my voice sounded much better but alas it was not to be. There was a rhythmic buzzing that I later found out was coming from my sound card . All that to say I am back using my Blue Snowball and am waiting for a new XLR to USB cable that will fix the buzzing issue.
  • One more quick thing. I have finally installed openSUSE on my parents old Gateway PC and am in the process of setting it up. I tried to use the transactional server install and realized that zypper does not work on that so I reinstalled the normal server version.
• Bo
  • Gnome experiment
    • Fedora 32 getting stuck on boot (gnome display manager)
      • Attempts to repair grub failed
    • Ubuntu was cool but I feel like it’s not close to “stock” gnome
    • Pop!_OS
      • Great! Love the window tiling feature and how it’s implemented
    • Gnome: it’s not you, it’s me…
  • Still playing card games on tabletop simulator (tts). Yesterday I taught my sister to play Magic.
  • LOTR the card game had an online convention using tts and Discord.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 – Will it Proton?

THE NEWS:

• Wine 5.19 Out
• System76 Lets Tiling Windows Stack
• Kernel 5.9 Out
• Plasma 5.20 Is a Huge Release
• Happy Birthday KDE!

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Google, Intel Warn of IoT Kernel Bug

• • • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
    • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
    • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.

• Zoom rolls out E2E Encryption for EVERYONE

• • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
  • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
  • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC. Check when this will be in your local timezone at https://everytimezone.com/s/7d8c1119.
• Note both the US and UK will have time changes (“fall back” 1 hour) between mintCasts 346 & 347, so those times remain the same, but this makes the UTC time 1 hour later than before.

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, 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• • Leo
    • Chromium graphical glitches
    • Playing with Batocera again
  • Tony H
    • Since the last show I have been playing with the waterslide decal paper again, this time to make decals for coffee mugs, I have done a couple of mintCast Mugs and a Distrohoppers Digest Mug. While after they have been cured in the oven for a little while they are hand washable it is suggested if you want to make them dishwasher proof then you use a special lamination sheet during the process, as I don’t have a dishwasher I’ve not done this and they have stood up to hand washing in warm soapy water so I’m happy. 
    • I have again travelled to Woodbrooke so I am in studio Z on the 15” Dell laptop that stands in as my podcast PC when on the road.
    • I’ve written another couple of articles in my Full Circle series on podcast production.
    • So I was wondering what to review on Distrohoppers for the next show and looking on Distrowatch came across KaOS which is a rolling distribution built on Qt and KDE, and uses the Pacman package system, but is totally independent of any other OS. I’ve had a few issues with Dual Booting but it is on one of my Toshiba Z30’s as a solo install.
    • I made a video tutorial of using Drive to store and share files, for a friend using the OBS screen capture facility. So as well as showing her in person she has the tutorial as an aid memoir if not sure what to do.
  • Moss
    • I received a computer from our team’s audio editor, Fuzzy P. This is an HP Z400 workstation, with a quad-core Xeon processor running at 3.20 GHz, 16 Gb RAM, and my first-ever Nvidia graphics card, an FX-1500. I got some help from Dale Miracle and others in our Telegram group on some issues I ran into. I removed the unnecessary RAID card.  It also has only USB 2 ports but lots of them. I will be purchasing a USB 3 card this week, to be installed in the slot vacated by the RAID card. I briefly ran this machine with my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive, then replaced that with my 512 Gb SSD. It still does not boot all the way through, I need to hit F1 when prompted, but it boots fine after that. I’m using the FuzZ400 for this broadcast and will presumably use it for future podcasts.
    • The FuzZ400 would not see the SSD at first, so I threw GPartEd at it and it got recognized. There are 6 distro partitions on this drive, with one of them unused. It wouldn’t boot to Mint, so I installed a fresh Mint 20 MATE on it, which worked fine, and the Nvidia driver was added during updates. I checked the Ubuntu Unity partition and did not have to reinstall, plus it added the Nvidia driver with ease. Bodhi required a reinstall, but it installed the driver during initial installation. On the other hand, Gecko STATIC found the driver and made it available, but did not give me any hints on how to install it, and ditto for OpenMandriva.
    • The other computer I was given is DOA, but might have some good parts. And I haven’t yet installed the new power supply on my old desktop mini.
    • After Episode 16 of Distrohoppers’ Digest, I removed 3 of the 8 distros on my laptop, and have installed Pop!_OS in one of the freed spaces. I’m still looking for what to add to the other two partitions. Does this mean I’ll be reviewing Pop!_OS for October? Wait and see…
    • Episode 15 of Distrohoppers’ Digest has exceeded 600 downloads, a new peak for us. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback on various groups.
    • I got new tires on my car today. Quite a saga here but no need to go into it. 
    • My mother is back in the rehabilitation facility after breaking the pin in her hip.
    • My wife and I are racing through Dead Beat (Book 7) in Dresden Files. He’s on the clock trying to find out how to invoke the Erlking. So I’ll just invoke Joe right now and let him talk about his two weeks.
  • Joe
    • Catching up on podcasts for a little while
    • Also going to listen to a classic from Raymond Feist 
      • Magician Apprentice and Magician Master
    • Battle Grounds from Jim Butcher the most recent Dresden Files book
      • Did enjoy although I am seeing some continuity issues
    • Alastair Stone novels
      • More urban fiction.  Not terrible.
    • Rebuilding a few parts on my 3D printer, lets see how well it works
      • Had to pull apart the hot end because of a clog between the ptfe tubing and the throat, ordered a new block and throat but got the wrong size so I had to clean up the old one and use it again
      • That seemed to work just fine
      • While I had it out and apart I noticed that the teeth on the extruder gear were a little worn but I decided to try it anyway
      • Also while I had it apart I replaced the hot bed with one that wasn’t warped.  This helped but the Y carriage is also warped so it is not perfect.
      • It seemed like the gear was not providing enough force so I decided to change it and the y carriage at the same time
      • This turned out fine and the calibration worked but it turned out the issue was moisture in the filament which was making it difficult to extrude.
      • So after a couple more teardowns and rebuilds I was still having trouble with extrusion even with a fresh roll so I redid the ptfe tubing again but then the thermistor broke and the one I replaced it with was broke but the third one worked fine.
      • Got a good print in
      • Was not able to get CURA to connect to my 3D printer for whatever reason
      • But I was able to get repetier to connect and send commands.  More testing is required
        • It was able to send commands and read the internal sd card
        • I can still use CURA to slice on my other machines and then send the gcode over to the laptop that I have set up and use either X2Go or Octoprint to handle everything
        • Gives me a reason to setup octopi and see what I can do with it
    • Researching building a full keyboard on my own, not because I think it is a good idea but because I think it would be fun
      • Seems like it would be an expensive hobby to get into.
      • Probably couldn’t turn around and sell them to make my money back and I don’t know if I will be able to do a good job at it
      • I prefer my hobbies pay for themselves
      • Currently looking at building a Sick-68 keyboard which seems to be where most people start the process.
      • I did purchase a 60 percent kit and put in the rest of the blues that I have and a set of keycaps.  I already know that the keyboard will not meet spouse approval as it is very loud.
      • Plus the use of the function key for many things is going to take some getting used to
      • But still it is fun and I like it. But I do think that a full keyboard might do better for me
      • Also the battery on the board seems to not hold a charge for very long and take a lot of time to charge.  I am going to look and see what I have that might make a better replacement
      • But the keys are super smooth and I know that Leo will hate it
    • Picked up an ideapad flex 4 for a decent price. 
      • Not the greatest laptop in the world but I am liking the folding screen and after I switched the hard drive to an SSD and installed LM, it is going pretty smooth.  Although I think I should also upgrade the ram to 8Gb from 4 and that would help a lot 
      • The spinning disk that was in it before I am pretty sure had some issues.  It was running windows but after it ran updates it would have problems rebooting and coming back from suspend.  Although the issue with suspend would be solved by a power cycle.
      • I plan on playing around with this device for now but I think I will reinstall Windows on it and pass it on to one of the kids.  Either my middle child or my youngest depending on need.  
  • Josh Hawk
    • Issues and solutions with btrfs! I set up a 3 way raid 1 on three 2tb disks. I decided to use one of those disks to install lmde4 on and I thought since it’s a 3 way raid 1 it would just have the data on the other 2 disks. I did this, and then the other 2 disks would not mount. I spent hours trying to fix this to no avail. Finally I came across a forum post that mentioned needing to remove a disk from the btrfs raid before using it. At that point I felt so stupid cause the solution was so simple. All I have to do is add the drive back to the raid, do a scrub and balance to get the data correctly on the disk, then delete it from the raid and I can use it as I would any other drive.
• New hardware!  I just purchased a 1Tb NVME M.2 SSD. It has 3400mb read and 3000mb write (not that I will ever need that speed but I have it!).

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News, September 2020
  • Regression in Linux Mint 19 Fixed
    • This regression broke the boot sequence
    • Timeshift could not revert it
  • Chromium is back! Test it!
    • Linux Mint 20
    • LMDE 4
  • A new Sticky Notes app! Give your feedback and bug reports!
  • Do you use IPTV?
  • WebApp Manager in Beta! Test it!
  • Linux Mint 20.1 will be named Ulyssa and release just before Christmas
  • Hardware Video Acceleration on by default in Celluloid for 20.1
    • You can enable it now for testing by:

Clicking the burger menu, “Preferences” -> “Miscellaneous”, and add the following line in “Extra MPV Options”:

hwdec=auto-safe

• • Driver Manager having issues with pulling in recommended packages for Nvidia. To fix this:
    • APT recommends will become enabled in Linux Mint 19.x (they already are in Mint 20)
    • The Driver Manager will switch to packagekit.
    • We’ll soon backport new versions of mintsystem and mintdrivers to all 19.x releases and to Linux Mint 20.
  • A bug, noted here and here, affected people with USB printers when they upgraded from Linux Mint 19.3 to 20.
    • Fix it by removing the ippusbxd package.
    • In the future, the package may be replaced with ipp-usb
  • The clickable area on the close, maximize and minimize buttons will be bigger with no change to the looks.
  • Tray icons (fcitx, KDE connect, Redshift, etc.) got a few tweaks.
  • Acknowledgement of the Cinnamon Spices downtime in early September. Migrated to a new server and framework. Report issues!
• Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla Beta Is Out
• Fedora 33 in Beta

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• To Josh: Where do you stand on Security/Privacy vs Convenience > aka tinfoil hat?

Announcements:

Our next show will be on October 18, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC. Check https://everytimezone.com/s/a5d26573  to convert to your local time.

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, 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• • Leo
    • Chromium graphical glitches
    • Playing with Batocera again
  • Tony H
    • Since the last show I have been playing with the waterslide decal paper again, this time to make decals for coffee mugs, I have done a couple of mintCast Mugs and a Distrohoppers Digest Mug. While after they have been cured in the oven for a little while they are hand washable it is suggested if you want to make them dishwasher proof then you use a special lamination sheet during the process, as I don’t have a dishwasher I’ve not done this and they have stood up to hand washing in warm soapy water so I’m happy. 
    • I have again travelled to Woodbrooke so I am in studio Z on the 15” Dell laptop that stands in as my podcast PC when on the road.
    • I’ve written another couple of articles in my Full Circle series on podcast production.
    • So I was wondering what to review on Distrohoppers for the next show and looking on Distrowatch came across KaOS which is a rolling distribution built on Qt and KDE, and uses the Pacman package system, but is totally independent of any other OS. I’ve had a few issues with Dual Booting but it is on one of my Toshiba Z30’s as a solo install.
    • I made a video tutorial of using Drive to store and share files, for a friend using the OBS screen capture facility. So as well as showing her in person she has the tutorial as an aid memoir if not sure what to do.
  • Moss
    • I received a computer from our team’s audio editor, Fuzzy P. This is an HP Z400 workstation, with a quad-core Xeon processor running at 3.20 GHz, 16 Gb RAM, and my first-ever Nvidia graphics card, an FX-1500. I got some help from Dale Miracle and others in our Telegram group on some issues I ran into. I removed the unnecessary RAID card.  It also has only USB 2 ports but lots of them. I will be purchasing a USB 3 card this week, to be installed in the slot vacated by the RAID card. I briefly ran this machine with my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive, then replaced that with my 512 Gb SSD. It still does not boot all the way through, I need to hit F1 when prompted, but it boots fine after that. I’m using the FuzZ400 for this broadcast and will presumably use it for future podcasts.
    • The FuzZ400 would not see the SSD at first, so I threw GPartEd at it and it got recognized. There are 6 distro partitions on this drive, with one of them unused. It wouldn’t boot to Mint, so I installed a fresh Mint 20 MATE on it, which worked fine, and the Nvidia driver was added during updates. I checked the Ubuntu Unity partition and did not have to reinstall, plus it added the Nvidia driver with ease. Bodhi required a reinstall, but it installed the driver during initial installation. On the other hand, Gecko STATIC found the driver and made it available, but did not give me any hints on how to install it, and ditto for OpenMandriva.
    • The other computer I was given is DOA, but might have some good parts. And I haven’t yet installed the new power supply on my old desktop mini.
    • After Episode 16 of Distrohoppers’ Digest, I removed 3 of the 8 distros on my laptop, and have installed Pop!_OS in one of the freed spaces. I’m still looking for what to add to the other two partitions. Does this mean I’ll be reviewing Pop!_OS for October? Wait and see…
    • Episode 15 of Distrohoppers’ Digest has exceeded 600 downloads, a new peak for us. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback on various groups.
    • I got new tires on my car today. Quite a saga here but no need to go into it. 
    • My mother is back in the rehabilitation facility after breaking the pin in her hip.
    • My wife and I are racing through Dead Beat (Book 7) in Dresden Files. He’s on the clock trying to find out how to invoke the Erlking. So I’ll just invoke Joe right now and let him talk about his two weeks.
  • Joe
    • Catching up on podcasts for a little while
    • Also going to listen to a classic from Raymond Feist 
      • Magician Apprentice and Magician Master
    • Battle Grounds from Jim Butcher the most recent Dresden Files book
      • Did enjoy although I am seeing some continuity issues
    • Alastair Stone novels
      • More urban fiction.  Not terrible.
    • Rebuilding a few parts on my 3D printer, lets see how well it works
      • Had to pull apart the hot end because of a clog between the ptfe tubing and the throat, ordered a new block and throat but got the wrong size so I had to clean up the old one and use it again
      • That seemed to work just fine
      • While I had it out and apart I noticed that the teeth on the extruder gear were a little worn but I decided to try it anyway
      • Also while I had it apart I replaced the hot bed with one that wasn’t warped.  This helped but the Y carriage is also warped so it is not perfect.
      • It seemed like the gear was not providing enough force so I decided to change it and the y carriage at the same time
      • This turned out fine and the calibration worked but it turned out the issue was moisture in the filament which was making it difficult to extrude.
      • So after a couple more teardowns and rebuilds I was still having trouble with extrusion even with a fresh roll so I redid the ptfe tubing again but then the thermistor broke and the one I replaced it with was broke but the third one worked fine.
      • Got a good print in
      • Was not able to get CURA to connect to my 3D printer for whatever reason
      • But I was able to get repetier to connect and send commands.  More testing is required
        • It was able to send commands and read the internal sd card
        • I can still use CURA to slice on my other machines and then send the gcode over to the laptop that I have set up and use either X2Go or Octoprint to handle everything
        • Gives me a reason to setup octopi and see what I can do with it
    • Researching building a full keyboard on my own, not because I think it is a good idea but because I think it would be fun
      • Seems like it would be an expensive hobby to get into.
      • Probably couldn’t turn around and sell them to make my money back and I don’t know if I will be able to do a good job at it
      • I prefer my hobbies pay for themselves
      • Currently looking at building a Sick-68 keyboard which seems to be where most people start the process.
      • I did purchase a 60 percent kit and put in the rest of the blues that I have and a set of keycaps.  I already know that the keyboard will not meet spouse approval as it is very loud.
      • Plus the use of the function key for many things is going to take some getting used to
      • But still it is fun and I like it. But I do think that a full keyboard might do better for me
      • Also the battery on the board seems to not hold a charge for very long and take a lot of time to charge.  I am going to look and see what I have that might make a better replacement
      • But the keys are super smooth and I know that Leo will hate it
    • Picked up an ideapad flex 4 for a decent price. 
      • Not the greatest laptop in the world but I am liking the folding screen and after I switched the hard drive to an SSD and installed LM, it is going pretty smooth.  Although I think I should also upgrade the ram to 8Gb from 4 and that would help a lot 
      • The spinning disk that was in it before I am pretty sure had some issues.  It was running windows but after it ran updates it would have problems rebooting and coming back from suspend.  Although the issue with suspend would be solved by a power cycle.
      • I plan on playing around with this device for now but I think I will reinstall Windows on it and pass it on to one of the kids.  Either my middle child or my youngest depending on need.  
  • Josh Hawk
    • Issues and solutions with btrfs! I set up a 3 way raid 1 on three 2tb disks. I decided to use one of those disks to install lmde4 on and I thought since it’s a 3 way raid 1 it would just have the data on the other 2 disks. I did this, and then the other 2 disks would not mount. I spent hours trying to fix this to no avail. Finally I came across a forum post that mentioned needing to remove a disk from the btrfs raid before using it. At that point I felt so stupid cause the solution was so simple. All I have to do is add the drive back to the raid, do a scrub and balance to get the data correctly on the disk, then delete it from the raid and I can use it as I would any other drive.
• New hardware!  I just purchased a 1Tb NVME M.2 SSD. It has 3400mb read and 3000mb write (not that I will ever need that speed but I have it!).

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News, September 2020
  • Regression in Linux Mint 19 Fixed
    • This regression broke the boot sequence
    • Timeshift could not revert it
  • Chromium is back! Test it!
    • Linux Mint 20
    • LMDE 4
  • A new Sticky Notes app! Give your feedback and bug reports!
  • Do you use IPTV?
  • WebApp Manager in Beta! Test it!
  • Linux Mint 20.1 will be named Ulyssa and release just before Christmas
  • Hardware Video Acceleration on by default in Celluloid for 20.1
    • You can enable it now for testing by:

Clicking the burger menu, “Preferences” -> “Miscellaneous”, and add the following line in “Extra MPV Options”:

hwdec=auto-safe

• • Driver Manager having issues with pulling in recommended packages for Nvidia. To fix this:
    • APT recommends will become enabled in Linux Mint 19.x (they already are in Mint 20)
    • The Driver Manager will switch to packagekit.
    • We’ll soon backport new versions of mintsystem and mintdrivers to all 19.x releases and to Linux Mint 20.
  • A bug, noted here and here, affected people with USB printers when they upgraded from Linux Mint 19.3 to 20.
    • Fix it by removing the ippusbxd package.
    • In the future, the package may be replaced with ipp-usb
  • The clickable area on the close, maximize and minimize buttons will be bigger with no change to the looks.
  • Tray icons (fcitx, KDE connect, Redshift, etc.) got a few tweaks.
  • Acknowledgement of the Cinnamon Spices downtime in early September. Migrated to a new server and framework. Report issues!
• Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla Beta Is Out
• Fedora 33 in Beta

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• To Josh: Where do you stand on Security/Privacy vs Convenience > aka tinfoil hat?

Announcements:

Our next show will be on October 18, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC. Check https://everytimezone.com/s/a5d26573  to convert to your local time.

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, 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 …

• 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Attempting and being slightly successful with jack.
  • I did actually get some recording done in Ardour. The amount of bells and whistles on that software is mind boggling.
  • Jack is just about as complicated as I had originally expected. This isn’t really a bad thing because there’s just so much to audio production.
  • I really feel like I did way back when I started diving into the world of IT. Everything is new and shiny and every button press leads to a crash.
  • The thing that led me to fiddling with jack, however, was an issue with my Focusrite audio interface. It will pitch shift my audio down (or up depending on the settings) if I do certain things. On my main recording box, that trigger is if I use the interface’s audio out in Linux.
  • Here’s the fix:
  • In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf , edit the following lines to match your interface’s preference, and remove the semicolons at the start of the line

default-sample-rate = 48000

alternate-sample-rate = 48000

• Tony Hughes
  • So first of sorry for missing last time but I went out on the Sunday morning and as I was bending down at the Cash/ATM machine to see the screen in the bright sunlight my back decided to object and went into spasm, not a major one but it took several days before I can sit for long periods comfortably and last Sunday evening it was impossible. Last saturday evening I joined the BDLL Euro live chat and was reasonably OK!!!!
  • Since I was last on the show I returned from Woodbrooke, I go back again next Sunday for another 2 weeks, and after my return we are both planning to go to Scotland for 5 days, a delayed holiday due to Covid, we should have gone in May. 
  • This last 2 weeks I have been joining in with the diecast ‘Paint it Pink’ challenge to raise awareness of Cancer and I have a couple of videos of my attempts on my YouTube Channel which is linked in the show notes. I plan to record a little of the process and the final results of more of my general restorations in the coming months. 
  • As of yesterday I have been playing with Openshot to do some basic editing on these videos and this allows me to crop and scale to zoom in the video clips making them a slightly better experience for the viewer.
  • Myself and Moss recorded Distrohoppers last Thursday and after a few final tweeks I published it today. Five, yes 5 reviews this month, giving the listeners their money’s worth, oh I forgot they don’t pay for it do they!!!! lol. 
• Joe
  • Privateer Tales Jamie Mcfarlane
    • 18 book series although some of the books are just short stories
      • On book 17 right now
    • A very interesting space opera and the author is very prolific so I will be 
    • going through the rest of his series of books.
    • A couple of them were listed in the previous show
  • Wizard in a witchy world book 2 and 3
    • Imagine the guy from Unsolved Mysteries (Robert Stack) reading you a book.  Its kinda like that
    • Pretty good
  • Got a ring video doorbell and a ring spotlight camera
    • Easy to setup and install the android app
    • Also easy to integrate with Alexa
    • No Linux installation or access 
    • I chose ring because it is more likely to be accepted by authorities than a roll your own solution
    • My neighborhood has seen several vehicle break ins 
    • Also porch piracy and garage robberies when they are left open.
    • My neighbor’s car got stolen and I would like to help prevent this.  Hopefully my floodlight camera will not be a nuisance for the neighbors 
    • More expensive than a roll your own but like i said it is more likely to be usable by the authorities
    • Nothing set up in the house just outside.
  • My new workout routines are coming along.  
  • Built another macro keyboard.  Much lower profile then the last 
    • Used petg for the first time which should be a bit sturdier
    • For the petg i used rafts because i understand that it has a tendency to be hard to remove and the rafts make it a bit easier
    • Also at the suggestion of Ben Heck in one of his videos I ordered a small roll of multicolored ribbon cable which made the soldering much neater and easier to cable manage.
    • This one is 4×3 instead of the previous 6×2
    • The petg came out very well as did the cable connections
    • I am going to have try writing some different code for it however because what i am using now feels very restrictive 
  • Got a very good price on a mechanical bluetooth keyboard with full num pad
    • 25 dollars for a Logitech g613 which retails at 75
    • Very heavy at 3.2 lbs
    • The only thing wrong with it was the f3 key was broken off.  It uses romer switches instead of cherries so I had to order a couple.
    • It turned out to be a very simple replacement that only took about 10 minutes, It took more time to take the thing apart then it did to do the desoldering and resoldering.  
    • A bit of flux and some solder wick got the old pieces out and the new one popped right into place 
    • It has both a dongle and bluetooth capabilities so I can use it with 2 machines
  • Traded for a new microphone because I wanted to test it out and maybe replace my backup mic
    • Got the Hyperx Quadcast which I traded my old Dell venue 8 pro that I was no longer using and one of the usb 3.0 thinkpad docks.  Think I got a good deal considering what i paid for each
    • I think it makes a better interview mic than it does a solo podcasting mic because of how much it picks up in the room.
    • The guys from the linux lug cast helped me test the settings and it as dialed in as possible
    • Also it did not come with the adapter for an arm mount so i ordered a cheap articulating adapter that looked compatible
    • But it was not so i fabricated an adapter for that mount to the microphone mount
    • Took a couple of drafts to get it right but the adapter is printed in petg and holding up well.  Might do one more iteration to get better articulation
  • Found an interesting configuration change in Linux mint that i find very useful 
    • Make it so that the num lock key does nothing and the num pad is always a num pad.  I don’t need it for directions
    • Under keyboard > Layouts > Numeric Keypad always enters digits
    • Which worked for one of computer but not the other
  • Had to redo both sets of the mmcx modded 1more triple drivers and have a third set I’m getting ready
    • Changed up some of the techniques for what i hope will be better longevity
• Bo
  • SkiFree
  • Getting Jacked!
  • Playing card games on TTS
• Tony Watts
  • Music!
    • Recording a couple of test tracks with Echoes to send off for mixing
    • Now have 2 bands active again, one practicing at my house
    • No acoustic gigs on the map but they are out there, just need to put some work into getting booked
    • Still one more music project in the wings to start up when state of the world is in a better place
  • Recycled a bunch of old computers
    • 2 desktops and 4 laptops
    • Decided anything older than core duo had to go
  • Hard drive cloning and replacement on Asus ROG GL551
    • Explain the “why” 
    • Attempted with Clonezilla, Gparted
    • Ended up using macrium
  • Fixed (or at least greatly improved) my phone charging issue with a good port cleaning.  May rock the oneplus 3T a while longer
  • Actually burned some DVDs and CDs recently for the first time in a long time

THE NEWS: 

•  Bo – WSL2 Adding Linux Disk Support
•  Nvidia to acquire ARM Joe
  • Unites NVIDIA’s leadership in artificial intelligence with Arm’s vast computing ecosystem to drive innovation for all customers
  • NVIDIA will expand Arm’s R&D presence in Cambridge, UK, by establishing a world-class AI research and education center, and building an Arm/NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer for groundbreaking research
  • NVIDIA will continue Arm’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality and expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA technology
  • Consideration of $40 billion to be met through a combination of NVIDIA shares and cash
• Next Gnome Version to be 40, not 3.40
• Gnome Extension Development to Be Made Easier
  • Proper documentation of how extensions work, reasonable expectations to be an extensions developer, participating in the GNOME extensions community.
  • Build CI pipeline (a virtual machine) for extension writers to test their extensions prior to GNOME releases.
  • Centralizing extensions for break testing on the GNOME gitlab space
  • Creating a forum for extension developers and extension writers to work together for the GNOME release cycle
• Arc Menu Development Leadership Changing hands
• Ubuntu 20.10 release date and planned features
  • “Groovy Gorilla” Oct 22 release date
  • Ubuntu’s Feature Freeze Means – Tony W?
  • Gnome 3.38
  • Linux Kernel 5.8
    • Linux Mint gets this soon after it hits the streets
  • Features
    • Support for fingerprint 

SECURITY UPDATE:

•  Tony – Tinfoil Hat!!!
  • This is an interesting topic that you guys discussed on the last show. Personally on my PC I’m not overly paranoid, I usually set up my firewall but do little else in regards to security apart from this and even then it is only the basic setup.
  • As for my Phone i’m more careful, I only allow apps access to things they need, so obviously the camera app will need to access the camera, but if an app requests access to the camera that should not need it this is denied. For some reason a lot of apps request access to your contacts and apart from the phone and messaging there are only a couple of other apps that I’m happy having access to contacts, such as whatsApp but other things get blocked or even deleted.z
  • I do switch off bluetooth and the GPS location on my phone and only use these when absolutely necessary such as my hands free use of the phone when driving, and using google maps to navigate. 
•  Bo

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Attempting and being slightly successful with jack.
  • I did actually get some recording done in Ardour. The amount of bells and whistles on that software is mind boggling.
  • Jack is just about as complicated as I had originally expected. This isn’t really a bad thing because there’s just so much to audio production.
  • I really feel like I did way back when I started diving into the world of IT. Everything is new and shiny and every button press leads to a crash.
  • The thing that led me to fiddling with jack, however, was an issue with my Focusrite audio interface. It will pitch shift my audio down (or up depending on the settings) if I do certain things. On my main recording box, that trigger is if I use the interface’s audio out in Linux.
  • Here’s the fix:
  • In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf , edit the following lines to match your interface’s preference, and remove the semicolons at the start of the line

default-sample-rate = 48000

alternate-sample-rate = 48000

• Tony Hughes
  • So first of sorry for missing last time but I went out on the Sunday morning and as I was bending down at the Cash/ATM machine to see the screen in the bright sunlight my back decided to object and went into spasm, not a major one but it took several days before I can sit for long periods comfortably and last Sunday evening it was impossible. Last saturday evening I joined the BDLL Euro live chat and was reasonably OK!!!!
  • Since I was last on the show I returned from Woodbrooke, I go back again next Sunday for another 2 weeks, and after my return we are both planning to go to Scotland for 5 days, a delayed holiday due to Covid, we should have gone in May. 
  • This last 2 weeks I have been joining in with the diecast ‘Paint it Pink’ challenge to raise awareness of Cancer and I have a couple of videos of my attempts on my YouTube Channel which is linked in the show notes. I plan to record a little of the process and the final results of more of my general restorations in the coming months. 
  • As of yesterday I have been playing with Openshot to do some basic editing on these videos and this allows me to crop and scale to zoom in the video clips making them a slightly better experience for the viewer.
  • Myself and Moss recorded Distrohoppers last Thursday and after a few final tweeks I published it today. Five, yes 5 reviews this month, giving the listeners their money’s worth, oh I forgot they don’t pay for it do they!!!! lol. 
• Joe
  • Privateer Tales Jamie Mcfarlane
    • 18 book series although some of the books are just short stories
      • On book 17 right now
    • A very interesting space opera and the author is very prolific so I will be 
    • going through the rest of his series of books.
    • A couple of them were listed in the previous show
  • Wizard in a witchy world book 2 and 3
    • Imagine the guy from Unsolved Mysteries (Robert Stack) reading you a book.  Its kinda like that
    • Pretty good
  • Got a ring video doorbell and a ring spotlight camera
    • Easy to setup and install the android app
    • Also easy to integrate with Alexa
    • No Linux installation or access 
    • I chose ring because it is more likely to be accepted by authorities than a roll your own solution
    • My neighborhood has seen several vehicle break ins 
    • Also porch piracy and garage robberies when they are left open.
    • My neighbor’s car got stolen and I would like to help prevent this.  Hopefully my floodlight camera will not be a nuisance for the neighbors 
    • More expensive than a roll your own but like i said it is more likely to be usable by the authorities
    • Nothing set up in the house just outside.
  • My new workout routines are coming along.  
  • Built another macro keyboard.  Much lower profile then the last 
    • Used petg for the first time which should be a bit sturdier
    • For the petg i used rafts because i understand that it has a tendency to be hard to remove and the rafts make it a bit easier
    • Also at the suggestion of Ben Heck in one of his videos I ordered a small roll of multicolored ribbon cable which made the soldering much neater and easier to cable manage.
    • This one is 4×3 instead of the previous 6×2
    • The petg came out very well as did the cable connections
    • I am going to have try writing some different code for it however because what i am using now feels very restrictive 
  • Got a very good price on a mechanical bluetooth keyboard with full num pad
    • 25 dollars for a Logitech g613 which retails at 75
    • Very heavy at 3.2 lbs
    • The only thing wrong with it was the f3 key was broken off.  It uses romer switches instead of cherries so I had to order a couple.
    • It turned out to be a very simple replacement that only took about 10 minutes, It took more time to take the thing apart then it did to do the desoldering and resoldering.  
    • A bit of flux and some solder wick got the old pieces out and the new one popped right into place 
    • It has both a dongle and bluetooth capabilities so I can use it with 2 machines
  • Traded for a new microphone because I wanted to test it out and maybe replace my backup mic
    • Got the Hyperx Quadcast which I traded my old Dell venue 8 pro that I was no longer using and one of the usb 3.0 thinkpad docks.  Think I got a good deal considering what i paid for each
    • I think it makes a better interview mic than it does a solo podcasting mic because of how much it picks up in the room.
    • The guys from the linux lug cast helped me test the settings and it as dialed in as possible
    • Also it did not come with the adapter for an arm mount so i ordered a cheap articulating adapter that looked compatible
    • But it was not so i fabricated an adapter for that mount to the microphone mount
    • Took a couple of drafts to get it right but the adapter is printed in petg and holding up well.  Might do one more iteration to get better articulation
  • Found an interesting configuration change in Linux mint that i find very useful 
    • Make it so that the num lock key does nothing and the num pad is always a num pad.  I don’t need it for directions
    • Under keyboard > Layouts > Numeric Keypad always enters digits
    • Which worked for one of computer but not the other
  • Had to redo both sets of the mmcx modded 1more triple drivers and have a third set I’m getting ready
    • Changed up some of the techniques for what i hope will be better longevity
• Bo
  • SkiFree
  • Getting Jacked!
  • Playing card games on TTS
• Tony Watts
  • Music!
    • Recording a couple of test tracks with Echoes to send off for mixing
    • Now have 2 bands active again, one practicing at my house
    • No acoustic gigs on the map but they are out there, just need to put some work into getting booked
    • Still one more music project in the wings to start up when state of the world is in a better place
  • Recycled a bunch of old computers
    • 2 desktops and 4 laptops
    • Decided anything older than core duo had to go
  • Hard drive cloning and replacement on Asus ROG GL551
    • Explain the “why” 
    • Attempted with Clonezilla, Gparted
    • Ended up using macrium
  • Fixed (or at least greatly improved) my phone charging issue with a good port cleaning.  May rock the oneplus 3T a while longer
  • Actually burned some DVDs and CDs recently for the first time in a long time

THE NEWS: 

•  Bo – WSL2 Adding Linux Disk Support
•  Nvidia to acquire ARM Joe
  • Unites NVIDIA’s leadership in artificial intelligence with Arm’s vast computing ecosystem to drive innovation for all customers
  • NVIDIA will expand Arm’s R&D presence in Cambridge, UK, by establishing a world-class AI research and education center, and building an Arm/NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer for groundbreaking research
  • NVIDIA will continue Arm’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality and expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA technology
  • Consideration of $40 billion to be met through a combination of NVIDIA shares and cash
• Next Gnome Version to be 40, not 3.40
• Gnome Extension Development to Be Made Easier
  • Proper documentation of how extensions work, reasonable expectations to be an extensions developer, participating in the GNOME extensions community.
  • Build CI pipeline (a virtual machine) for extension writers to test their extensions prior to GNOME releases.
  • Centralizing extensions for break testing on the GNOME gitlab space
  • Creating a forum for extension developers and extension writers to work together for the GNOME release cycle
• Arc Menu Development Leadership Changing hands
• Ubuntu 20.10 release date and planned features
  • “Groovy Gorilla” Oct 22 release date
  • Ubuntu’s Feature Freeze Means – Tony W?
  • Gnome 3.38
  • Linux Kernel 5.8
    • Linux Mint gets this soon after it hits the streets
  • Features
    • Support for fingerprint 

SECURITY UPDATE:

•  Tony – Tinfoil Hat!!!
  • This is an interesting topic that you guys discussed on the last show. Personally on my PC I’m not overly paranoid, I usually set up my firewall but do little else in regards to security apart from this and even then it is only the basic setup.
  • As for my Phone i’m more careful, I only allow apps access to things they need, so obviously the camera app will need to access the camera, but if an app requests access to the camera that should not need it this is denied. For some reason a lot of apps request access to your contacts and apart from the phone and messaging there are only a couple of other apps that I’m happy having access to contacts, such as whatsApp but other things get blocked or even deleted.z
  • I do switch off bluetooth and the GPS location on my phone and only use these when absolutely necessary such as my hands free use of the phone when driving, and using google maps to navigate. 
•  Bo

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • I’ve finally gotten some time to record a couple more how-to’s. Bashtop and Bpytop.
  • Also, I’m fairly current on Full Circle Weekly News again! I plan on doing a two-week episode this week to get current and it feels good.
• Moss
  • About 2 hours after completing the last episode, I went to plug my speakers back into my desktop, slipped, and somehow shorted out my computer. A new power supply, thanks to Tony Hughes, arrived on Tuesday, and surprise, it was the wrong size. I’m supposed to have a mini ITX machine, and ordered accordingly, but the power supply in the box (and, yes, I should have looked first) was a full sized ATX. 
  • After complaining about that to the Telegram group, Fuzzy shipped me a new tower computer which will blow the socks off what I had. That should get here next Saturday.
  • I went ahead and returned the power supply to Amazon and have ordered the correct power supply from NewEgg, and when I get the old desktop repaired and running, I will find a deserving schoolkid to give it to.
  • On top of that, I went out to visit a friend last night, and came home with a pretty high-end older HP tower computer (Win 7 Home Premium license, early i7 processor). It’s quite dirty right now, so I’ll clean it up, check the specs and whether it runs, and see if I can find someone to give (or sell cheap) it to.
  • I tried using the Pi 4 as my TV machine but could not get my VPN to start, even though it was installed. Mullvad customer support was disappointing, considering how long I have been a customer.
  • So I signed up for a new VPN called Surfshark. If I can get it to work, it will cost about the same for 2 years as I would have paid for 8 months to Mullvad. It’s good when it works, but apparently that’s only on Ubuntu-based systems (a fact they neglected to mention). The Linux app is non-existent, although it has a nice app for Android and anything else. Their tech support was friendly initially, but now they’re falling into patterns of “Well, Linux users don’t want an easy way to run our VPN…”
  • What I haven’t done yet is try Surfshark on the Pi 4. Coming soon.
  • I moved the 1 Tb SSD from my desktop to my laptop last Tuesday night. I started running updates, as it had been about 11 days since these 7 distros had been updated. My Manjaro installation would not load, so I reinstalled it, then installed OpenMandriva on the remaining unused partition. I had both Feren OS and KDE neon which were basically Ubuntu-running-KDE and yearned for more diversity, so I flipped a coin and replaced Feren OS with Ubuntu Unity. I’m way behind on getting all these distros as near equivalent as possible or even evaluating their current status, things have been so much in flux.  I have also installed Surfshark on the four Ubuntu-based distros.
  • I have a new digital watch and fitness tracker. It only cost $7.95 and a two-month wait for it to get here from Szenchen, China. It connects to a phone app and can attach to social media and email but I don’t want that. I have no idea what other data it collects, but I’ve gained 20 pounds since my accident and want some incentive and help to start going the other way again. Besides the time function, it also detects my pulse, blood pressure, and even blood oxygen, as well as my steps. You ease the friction-fit watchband off on one end to expose the USB terminal — yes, you plug the entire watch into a USB port to charge it. A charge seems to last 3-4 days. There are virtually no controls on the watch, everything is run through the app.
  • My unemployment ran out. Not weeks, but dollars. My final check was under $100, so no covid money for Moss this week. On the other hand, I have 3 job possibilities, and it looks as if one of them will go through, although it will be a temporary job. Feast or famine. I’m not completely out of money yet, but it could be a race between that and my first paycheck. I have been encouraged to talk to a lawyer about the fact that I have been getting paid out of Unemployment dollars instead of Worker’s Comp funds, but the covid-19 money received puts a major question mark in that process as that comes only with unemployment money. While the potential fraud was not on my part, I was the beneficiary of it.
  • My mother went back to the hospital after she fell and broke the pin in her hip. They repaired the pin successfully. She has been moved from the hospital to the rehab facility, where she will spend at least a few weeks. She’s 91 now, in case you lost count.
  • We finished reading Blood Rites, the 6th Dresden book, and have started in on Dead Beat.
• Joe
  • Soulwood series by Faith Hunter,  4 books of 5
    • Same universe as the Jane Yellowrock series.
    • Good series
  • Locke and Key audio drama
    • Based on the comics
    • Well done, easy to follow and interesting
  • Junkyard Pirate by Jamie McFarlane
    • Second book as well
  • Also from Jamie Mcfarlane
    • Wizard in a Witchy World series
  • Ministry of Curiosity (10 books)
    • Good series. Feels a bit generic, nothing really stands out for me
    • Sometimes the books in the series felt like nothing really happened.  Like there was no overriding antagonistic event
  • Suggest some good cyberpunk novels
  • 3D-printed a whole setup for the macro keyboards.  
    • 12 key and it works very well
    • I am very happy with the quality and I may do a few more
    • Using it to control my mic mute button and also have it setup for vlc and docker using auto hotkey functions
    • Still looking for the most comfortable position to mount it
  • Also got some very thin wire .1mm to see if I can bridge the bad spots on that other board so I can have another one.
    • Once I get it working correctly I will 3D print a case for it
    • It is also the wire that I used to run the grounds for all the other keys on the one i printed
  • My water heater started leaking.  Went through a good chunk of my garage and most of my kitchen.  Caught it quickly though and got the water shut off so not much damage.
    • Going through the warranty company to get it fixed. 
    • Warranty company has been somewhat hit or miss over the years so…
    • Cost me a bit over 500 so that is not too bad.
    • Need to build a moisture sensor for it and not sure if I should use an arduino or a Pi.  What do you think?
  • This also meant that I had to shuffle my garage around a couple of times.  Once to get everything off the far wall and once to get everything out of the way so that they could get the new one in.
    • This allowed me to restructure my storage and work area
    • My son helped me figure out where to put some things in order to maximize my space and make it look neater
    • Still have a lot more work to do 
  • I have  an iPod docking station that is going to be my next item to work on.  Looks more like a sound bar.  It turns on and the clock works but no sound comes out no matter what you set the input to.  Gonna be fun taking it apart and seeing where the break is.
  • Revamping my workout
    • Dropped weight so i could get the muscles used to the new movements
    • Watching https://www.youtube.com/c/athleanx to get some ideas on new ways of doing things

• Tony Watts
  • Basement finishing continues
    • Added some insulation to the ceiling.  This helps contain music noise a bit but also has the benefit of keeping unwanted noise out of the Studio/Office
    • First jam session in my basement rehearsal space was a success!
      • Despite is playing pretty loud, no ringing ears on our part and the sound didn’t carry outside too much
  • “Adventure” with bathroom flood
  • Some more chromebook crouton tinkering
    • One of my kids accidentally reset the Chromebook due to developer mode screen on startup (my fault, forgot to prep him) 
    • Installed both KDE and Gnome variants of Crouton.
      • KDE was buggy on this particular Chromebook
      • Gnome was just too slow
      • Went back to XFCE which is Crouton’s default and works very well
  • Really debating a new phone purchase, Pixel 4a
    • After 3.5 years of heavy use my OnePlus 3T still holding up well but the charge port is worn out and that is getting annoying
    • Most new phones will support dual sim which is kind of a requirement for me
  • On vacation this week, working on 
    • More basement refinishing
    • Music recording
    • Prep for another Ironshield Brewing gig next weekend

THE NEWS: 

• Mint News September 2020
• Debian News: With no travel money being spent, Debian bought two new Lenovo servers (at a discounted price) and is trying to find ways to spend money… Debian is up to offering around 61,071 AMD64 packages and around 31,723 source packages.
• MX Linux releases Plasma edition
• Third Pinephone Community Edition has landed
• Experimental Elementary OS build for Pinebook Pro released
• Dale in Telegram: Virtualbox Adds Kernel 5.8 Support
• Joshua Hawk in Telegram: Warpinator Available via Flatpak!
• RTX 30 series Introducing GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs | NVIDIA   
• Londoner in Telegram: Fossbytes has an interview with Clem
• Joshua Lowe has resigned as a co-host of mintCast. Thank you, Josh, for your hard work, with the website, Mumble hosting, and all the other things you have done for and with us. Good luck in your future endeavors. Josh is not leaving us completely as he will continue to manage the website we use for the show and our mumble server.

SECURITY UPDATE:

• There wasn’t much Linux centric today, and to keep this discussion episode going with discussion: 
  • How much of a tinfoil hatter are you?
  • What do you do in your life to secure yourself up?
• Londoner: Proton Drive