Hello and welcome to episode 45 of Linux After Dark.
I'm Joe. I'm Chris. I'm Gary. And I'm Dalton.
Welcome back Chaps. Before we get started today, we want to plug a new show
to the late night Linux family called Ask the Hosts. And as a name suggests,
you can send any questions to us and we will answer them.
But the caveat is they can't be about Linux or open source. It's about anything else.
And so this is going to be once a month to start with. And it's going to be me
and a random selection of hosts from the various shows.
The first episode we recorded is with Poppy from Linux Matters
and you Gary from this very show.
Yeah, it was great recording with you guys.
Yeah, look forward to doing more in the future.
And if you want to hear about the crazy places that we enjoy traveling,
definitely give it a listen.
Now, episode one has already been released to patrons.
And there's going to be a two week delay until it goes in the public feed
at askthehost.com.
If you're listening to this when it's just come out,
that's going to be about a week's time.
But that's what we're going to do every month. It'll come out to patrons first.
And then two weeks later, it'll go in the public feed.
So check it out and send any questions for us.
Dalton, you recently found yourself playing with some fun open source software
for three hours. And you asked us whether we have ever found ourselves
in a similar position.
Yes. So I recently downloaded a copy of mix.
It's got three X's, I don't know.
It's a DJing software.
And I have never once, never once, ever wanted to be a DJ,
ever tried to be a DJ, or ever wondered what DJs actually do.
But I downloaded a mix.
And I was basically just trying to figure out how replay gain worked.
I wanted to know how software analyzes the loudness of music
to equalize two different tracks.
But ended up instead playing with music for about three hours.
So I would take two different songs that are in wildly different keys.
And it would figure out a way to match their tones so that they would transition right.
And I'd speed them up and slow them down and make them go,
woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.
It was so much fun.
I spent hours and hours doing this with some of my favorite music.
And just being able to go, after all, I don't know.
I haven't had an experience like that with software in a long time.
I'm wondering if any of you have had anything like that recently or ever?
I definitely went down the rabbit hole of mix.
And it's non-free software counterpart, virtual DJ, about 10 years or so.
And yeah, it was really fun.
And for a while, I used it just as my default player, or MP3 files,
and let them all mix into each other and use the auto-cubing features and stuff.
But I haven't been down that rabbit hole for a while.
I think for me, it comes down to not so much a specific piece of software.
But I think anything that I can just play with and learn something.
Say, a lot of the time these days, that's work related.
Because now I've got kids at my time that I get to spend upstairs locked.
And the computer is much less than it once was.
But if I can learn something from it, then yeah, that's great.
Say it might be a new cloud technology.
It might be a new piece of open source software.
It might just be playing around to see if I can build something and get it to work in the way that I want.
But I guess I think that's broadly similar to the way that you went into this Dalton.
Just wondering, how does this shit work?
And now you find yourself three hours down a rabbit hole of playing with it.
Yeah, I mean, I remember getting a DJ software that's a bit similar to this on the front of computer's shopper magazine on a CD-ROM.
So we're going back quite a long time.
I can tell you when that was.
But exactly the same experience, Dalton.
Like the idea of beat matching or trying to come up with interesting remixes.
And it must have been around the time I was at university.
And there was a band called Soulwax.
And they had an offshoot band for their live gigs called Too Many DJs.
And they used to specialize in that kind of thing.
Like what two songs can I put together?
And then there was like the grey album, which was Jay-Z's, The Black Album Mix with the Beatles, The White Album, The Danger Mouse Dip.
And all of that kind of stuff.
And it is really, really fun.
And sometimes it sounds absolutely horrendous.
But then occasionally, like a lot of people have done it with smells like teen spirit, I think.
It is really, really good fun.
And also trying to like virtual scratch.
Does it let you do that this software?
Yes.
So I think that was probably my favorite thing about the software.
Is that in the options menu, the basic options menu, you have the option to disable or enable spinny.
And you can also enable big spinny if you want.
And that made the software just so amazingly approachable.
The fact that it had, well, spinny in the interface.
But also that everything that it does is very visual.
So it has what looks like a physical deck in front of you that you can click on and have things playing.
And just see what all the buttons do on the deck without really breaking anything, except your ears occasionally.
But that's okay.
I could just trigger the memory for me, Chris, when you mentioned computer shop a magazine of what I was much younger.
I'd go to the supermarket once a month and just buy some random Linux magazine.
And like you said, they all came with the CD-ROM on the front.
They all had some random software that you could install and spent hours playing with.
And I remember just going by a copy of Linux format and it had all of the devs and RPMs for the various pieces of software
that were in the magazine and reviewed that month to install some random dev from CD-ROM.
Spent hours playing with it.
Or even random distrares, like they had special quadruple boot DVDs that they'd put on the cover.
And yeah, you could swap around and change and play with different distrares.
And it was hours and hours of fun.
And I guess things like that just don't really exist anymore unless you go looking.
Well, that's why I was going to say probably that manager or boxes these days would be the software that I have found myself spending hours and hours in.
Not because they do anything exciting themselves, but because of what they allow you to do, they allow you to play with distros.
And it's been a while since I've actually done this.
And I suppose really it goes back to I must have talked about the EPC that I had the E901.
And that was what I learned about the various distros on.
That must have been 15 or more years ago.
And just being able to just try out all of the cool distros and open source software on those distros and finding new bits of software that's pre-installed that you'd never heard of.
That's one of the funnest bits for me of playing with distros now.
And I do have the stack of laptops now had to mention that obviously so tend to use them.
But then it's kind of easier to do virtually these days.
Well, it's a lot easier, isn't it?
You don't have to find the charger for the particular laptop that you want to try it out on.
So for me, it's just sort of open source software generally, which is a bit of a cop out because you were looking for something a bit more specific.
I think one of the other ways that I end up losing hours and hours is rediscovering software that I used when I was a kid or like in my early teens.
Like I went down a rabbit hole recently of pulling an old think pad out of the drawer and it's definitely not open source.
But installing a copy of Windows XP and then finding the box of CD-ROM games from when I was a kid in the loft.
And I spent about three hours playing SimCity2000, one evening sound safer.
And I find things like that more and more these days are actually just as enjoyable as discovering that new random piece of open source software.
That's interesting. There have been a lot of re-releases of some of those games, so now you can just get them on steam.
For me, it was the humongous entertainment collection.
I just triggered a lot of memories for some people in the audience and everyone else has absolutely no clue what I'm on about.
But all of those games were just scum VM and have been re-released on steam.
Yeah, that's a rabbit hole you can go down.
I don't know. For me, that's just, it doesn't recapture using the machine that I used 15 years ago to play those games.
But there's something about the clicking and wearing of the hard drive or the crappy passive matrix display on my Windows 98 machine that needs 20 minutes to warm up.
There's just something about it that I never quite get when I emulate that stuff.
Wow, this is awful.
Yeah, exactly. I could look at that machine and be like, wow, this is absolutely terrible.
But at the same time, it's just something somewhat charming about needing to turn on pointer trails.
Well, if accounting proprietary software then Flip Sampler for Android has allowed me to waste an awful lot of time recently.
All I did do the drums for the Linux matters theme tune on it, so therefore it was work.
And it's just a very fun piece of software that lets you sample things and play beats and make melodies out of it and stuff.
And really, back in the day, it was a reason on Windows, which is, it's kind of virtual rack mount hardware.
You've got samplers and synths and sequences and all that kind of stuff.
And it was all based on the rack mount gear.
And you could press tab to flip it around and see the back of it and connect wires to stuff, LFOs to filters and all sorts of stuff.
And I kind of tried that with VCV rack, which is the Ubuntu modular synth software.
And I must have lost a good couple of hours to that.
But it just wasn't as fun or maybe I didn't have as much patience, I suppose.
And I could do that with our door as well, potentially.
And the various discoveries that Graham comes up with quite frequently on late night Linux, all that call audio software.
But I just don't really have the time these days, I think, to waste three hours, best around with DJing software in your case, Don.
Well, I obviously don't have that time either, but you did trigger another memory.
It actually wasn't all that long ago, and it is proprietary.
Though I think there's an open source replacement that I don't know the name of Cisco packet tracer.
Cisco packet tracer was a tool that's used in the CCNA exams and stuff and training that let you hook up a bunch of Cisco branded networking equipment and computers and stuff.
And plug cables into their virtual ports and get onto their terminals and everything.
And I thought that was fun too, because of its simulation of the physical world that it just gave you.
Well, there's a common theme there, isn't there?
Between the mix software reason and the Cisco thing that to some extent they're all emulating hardware in software.
Yeah, there's something about the stakes being a bit lower as well, isn't there?
What happens if I poke this over here and poke that over there?
Knowing that you can just refresh everything and go back to how it was when you started and not have farts everything up completely, which is quite nice.
And also, some of them give you a little bit of assistance in skill level, because I don't know about you, Dalton.
You put me in front of a real set of decks, which I have been in front of many times because I've met DJs over the years.
Some of them are professional DJs now, but I was at school with and I am shit watching them use it.
And then trying to scratch, for example, with a scratch man and a good needle and everything.
And then they take over and show you there is that kind of level where it gives you a kind of taste of having more skills than you might possess, at least in my experience.
Yes, absolutely.
One time I bought a pair of techniques, 1200s, the silver ones and a mixer and everything and tried to learn beat matching.
And in the end, I had two identical records set one of the speeds randomly and could just about get the other one that was the same song matched with it.
Wow.
Yeah, that was when I sold them when I realized, no, this is not happening for me.
The thing is that I couldn't afford an actual set of decks when I was a teenager.
I'm not saying that this would have got me to the level to be a professional DJ, but in the same way with the Cisco stuff,
a couple of my friends have bought the required hardware second hand on eBay to do the CCNA.
If you don't have the means for that, then this stuff is great.
The same with solid virtualization things that you said, Joe, you have fun enough, I've just been looking this week.
Someone's launched another website, which is called Distro C.
It's a web browser based sort of virtual platform for tasting different Linux distributions.
And you don't have to have a stack of laptops to do it.
And I think all of this does enable an accessibility to playing around with stuff without necessarily having the financial outlay all the physical space,
because the CCNA kits take up a lot of space if you buy the recommended hardware.
So the more computers advance, the more you can tie this stuff together in a way that has a small physical footprint and a low financial outlay, especially if it's fast.
I think that is actually a really positive thing.
Okay, this episode is sponsored by Tailscale. Go to tailscale.com.
Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you are in accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly.
It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using WireGuard, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other.
Unlike traditional VPNs, which tunnel all network traffic through a central gateway server, Tailscale creates a peer-to-peer mesh network.
It handles complex network configuration on your behalf, so you don't have to.
Network connections between devices pierced through firewalls and routers as if they weren't there, so there's no need to manually configure port forwarding.
Tailscale is available for Linux, Mac, Windows, Raspberry Pi and ARM, Android, iOS, Synology, and for devices that don't allow additional software to be installed such as printers and other embedded devices, where you can set up a subnet router to act as a gateway relaying traffic from your Tailscale network onto your physical subnet.
So go to tailscale.com to try it for free and up to 100 devices. That's tailscale.com.
Let's do some feedback. David wrote to us with a challenge suggestion, and that was to report as many bugs as we can over a specific period of time.
He goes into details about that, but this just rubs me the wrong way.
We've had this before, haven't we? We've had challenges of contributing to open source projects to win a t-shirt and stuff, and I just don't think it's a good idea to game this kind of stuff.
I mean, between the four of us, it'll probably be fine.
I'm with Joe. I have to say, I did. It did make me think of various. It made me think, I don't know if you saw, I can't remember who it was.
On social media about a month ago, a tweet went around because someone posted a screenshot of someone's blank GitHub history for the past year with no green.
And was like, if your GitHub history looks like this, don't bother applying for any roles I have open to which he was rightly pilloried with the GitHub history of some incredible programmers and maintainers who don't have any of that stuff, but could clearly do anything that he would be asking in any of the roles.
I think at the moment, especially, there's been some quite salty exchanges in pull requests and GitHub issues.
I don't think we want to be adding to that noise with this kind of thing and pissing people off even more than they already are, so I'm not on board with this one. I'm afraid.
We could do like how many bugs can Dalton fix in a month?
Zero!
Carrie might be able to fix some yaml or something maybe.
Yeah, I'll change some taps to spaces or something like that.
This is what's difficult you see because there is a version of this where we sincerely and genuinely try to fire a bug for things that we come across without trying to win necessarily, but it's more a document of our experience.
I think it would have to be over a reasonable period of time to see what it's like because I think a long time ago we recorded an episode of why we're not good for citizens and why don't we do this?
I still don't. I have to say quite often I will give advice to someone that I really should. It'll be in a telegram channel or something.
Someone will pop up and say, this isn't working. What should I do?
And I'll know the answer. I'll help them. But then it's a bit like when you put something in Slack, it goes up and up and up and up and up and then it's gone.
And it's not documented. I haven't put it in a blog and I haven't put it in any kind of get our issue or pull request.
And I'm not helping anyone else that has that issue.
But it would definitely not like Jason with the free t-shirt thing. Once you start gamifying this type of thing, it leads to bad.
Shoot, was this just the be a good person challenge?
Oh, we failed.
Well, David also said another challenge might be to see how much of your computing you can do at the command line.
It might be interesting to talk about the types of activity you prefer to do in each type of interface that you use.
Oh, yeah, that could be fun.
This I do think could be fun. Yeah.
We definitely have to segregate that from work and personal because my job is almost exclusively on the command line all the time.
So it would have to be personal, I think.
Yeah, and my job I never use the command line anymore. So yeah, good luck getting on a team's call in bash.
Oh, you're too senior to actually get down and dirty with the terminal these days, I think.
I don't do much real work in work anymore.
I would be up for this though. I think when it comes to like our personal workflow, again, it's more of a document.
Every time you go to use a GUI, try to do it in the CLI, whatever it is.
I'm really going to encode right MP3s with FFMP on the command line when I could just open it with audacity and export it.
Yeah, just set up a bash alias. What could get wrong?
I mean, I do actually have somewhere in my bash history, the FFMP command that I need to do it.
But it's just so much easier to do it with audacity.
I think that's the challenge that was talking about what's easier in which. So yes, let's do that sometime.
All right, let's not commit to any time frame on it. But yeah, good idea, David. We'll certainly keep it in mind.
Right, well, we better get out of here then. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. But until then, I've been Joe. I've been Chris.
I've been Carrie and I've been Dalton.
See you later.
You