Late Night Linux – Episode 215

Hello and welcome to episode 215 of Late Night Linux recorded on the 30th of January 2023. I'm Joe and with me I've failed him. How's it going? Graham. Hello. And Will. Hello. Let's get straight on with our discoveries then. Graham, MuseScore 4. Yeah, so I haven't got any music to play I'm afraid. But MuseScore is a kind of famous piece of notation stuff for music notation. So music notation that the staffs and the notes, I can't actually read all right music. But it's an important part of the music ecosystem for education and of course for people who compose music. And in the proprietary world, we do have Lillipond as an open source app. In the proprietary world, this is a very expensive and exclusive kind of club dominated by a piece of software called Cebadius. And Cebadius has always had the edge on MuseScore because I don't know I'm going to make a generalization. But the assets, the right music, they want men's scores to be beautifully rendered. And while MuseScore has got the job done in previous versions, it's never looked that pretty. The horizontal spacings always been off, the rendering's not been very nice. And I know this because I sometimes import music into MuseScore and use it to convert scores to MIDI. So MuseScore 4 has a totally different UI rendering mechanism. It's got beautifully anti-aliased scores and notes and all of those bits that go around the music. Much better alignment, much better horizontal spacing, whole new set of icons. So it looks great. It has VST support. It's got a new mixer. The UI is basically being overhauled. And it's a great app. I do need to make the caveat that the people behind MuseScore are the same people that own Audacity and we know what happened when they initially took over the project and wanted to insert telemetry. And I think this is a discovery because I'm glad at how little they've changed MuseScore with a project that they have more control over. There is still a kind of portal to their online subscription model for getting scores, although the majority of them are free. There's also a new music engine and there's a free proprietary kind of instrument download, which is this huge orchestral sample library. It supports sound fonts by default, which is like an old-fashioned sample, which sounds a bit like SNES music from 1993. It's free download. Free to use. There's no limitations on it, but it's not open source. But the new audio system and this huge orchestral library sounds amazing. And this is something that composers really use to work their scores as a decent sample library of sounds. And it sounds fantastic. And it is a great open source project. It's brilliant. But you don't know your crot ship from your quaver from your semi-breathe. No, I don't. I don't. And I know my daughter does music GCSE and it's a huge help for her because the software is just so exclusive otherwise and a part of this is music theory. I don't understand it, but it must help a huge number of people get into it. And it's still got that kind of expectation that people are serious about music need to be able to read and write music. So the fact that the music score exists is a good thing. Would you say that people who can read music are very racist because it says they've got a new system for slurs and ties? I don't know what those things are, but it doesn't sound very good. That is funny. But I mean, I think I know those are the bits that go above and below the notes and they never used to be particularly aligned with the notes themselves. Ah, OK. That's as much as I know, honestly. I installed it through Arch, I'm sorry to say. The Arch packaging being AUR on completely open source actually cuts out a lot of the kind of buy-in that you might see if you download the binaries from use score sites. So I really didn't have any kind of conflict of their open source and their non-open source parts at all. Which is a huge credit to them, I think. Will, no dread home assistant, Contrip. What's this? Well, I think I talked about this a few weeks back that I've started actually trying home assistant properly now. I tried it a while back and found it to be impenetrable. It was very complicated, seemingly unnecessarily so and pretty much gave up with it. Well, I persevered now on Graham's advice that it was worth sticking with. And I've managed to set up a lot of devices and got a hang of creating sensors and using the templating system in home assistant, which is really powerful and allows you to munch together data from lots of other places into something that you can use. For example, you can take an average of all of the temperatures and just output an average temperature that you can then use in dashboards and things like that. But all of this requires writing a lot of yaml in config files. One of the things that I have not really touched in home assistant at all is the automation side of things. You can set conditions which when met, call triggers and then cause actions to happen. And this is all done through the yaml interface in home assistant and is, in my opinion, quite difficult to really get your head round and make a lot of sense out of. Whereas no dread on the other hand makes this sort of thing extremely easy, not only with the joining the blocks together UI aspect of it, but the fact that you can just get in then write code, albeit JavaScript, and change the way that things work very, very straightforward. And so on the one hand, you've got home assistant, which talks to all of your devices very easily and exposes all the data. And on the other hand, it's very complicated to join those things together. And you've got no red sat there, which is really good at joining these things together and making stuff happen. So node read home assistant contrib specifically node read contrib home assistant web socket, which is the new version. There's an old version without the web socket bit on the end. And that is years out of date now. So make sure you use the web socket version. This allows you to expose all of the devices that home assistant has discovered on your network or you've configured on your network and expose those through a very straightforward entity or device sort of interface into node read, which you can then query, you can set, you can join bits and pieces together, you know, if this then that style drag and drop logical flows, you can do all of that in node read and remove all of the requirements to know how to use the templating system and how to use automations in home assistant, which I think is overly complicated. So a combination of home assistant to find the devices and node read to join them all together seems to be the sweet spot for me. It's really made quite a difference to the amount of stuff that I can do with it. And this extension to node read has made it all much easier. So highly recommend it. That's a really great idea. Well, I haven't done any of the logic in node read, but I also you've just reminded me I've got a Garmin smartwatch and I want to be able to turn off our bedroom lamp because we don't have any phones or anything up there. And the Garmin smartwatch can send a call to a rest API. Now home assistant hasn't got any. It's really hard to get to the rest API and home assistant and I wouldn't want to try to, but I was solved the problem with exactly this component in node read because node read is just so brilliant at creating kind of an end point. And then you can link that to one of these components. It just took three elements. It was just really good. I completely agree with you. It's a really important addition if you're going to use home assistant. Hang on. Did you just say that you don't take your phone to bed? So what do you do for the first sort of 20 minutes, half an hour when you wake up? Yeah, I don't. I just get up and go and get a coffee. So you wake up and then get out of bed immediately. Yeah, I can't hang around in bed. I don't understand. I also understand the last thing I want is to be turn the lights off. This is which I got an extension cord for six year old 50 from being cute. Jumped on. There you go. So great. You've posted in our telegram chat the flow graph of this and it is very nice to be quite honest and I could steal this for doing my IVR stuff and my asterisk interface thing. It reminds me of configuring Jack with one of the graphical tools. Yeah, it's just, I mean, what they, what it's showing is I guess the three nodes. There's an incoming node which is just get in node red and you just create an endpoint that you can call from my watch or whatever happens to be. And then that's linked to the lamp device and then 200, which is the okay HTTP signal that you send as well so that it knows that the signal's been sent. Is it a four runner Garmin that you've got? It's a Phoenix five is quite old, but it's a great watch. I must never show this to my son who has a Garmin watch that he got from my brother as a hand me down and if he knows that he can turn lights off and all of it is right. Okay. This episode is sponsored by Linode go to Linode.com slash late night Linux support the show and get $100 free credit from their award winning support offer 24 seven three sixty five to every level of user to ease of use and set up. 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So let's go to the start where I was getting a thing. It was a birthday present from the UK and DHL were delivering it. For me, DHL. I mean DHL, yes. I don't mean the other one that you just said because that's ridiculous. That's ridiculous to say H is it? Stop trying to trick me. You're trying to trick me with letters. I don't know which is right. And so I knew I was going to have to pay that. That's fine. Coming from some stone age country outside the EU, in came the package and then I got an email from DHL. I thought, oh, look at this email. That looks remarkably similar to all those fake emails I continually get that tell me to pay a package. I'm like, I know it's probably the one. It's too specific. I know it's roughly the right price. But what if it was one of those hacks where they're sitting on top of a international domain, you know, that it's a lowercase Greek tea that happens to look like an L or God knows what. So I thought surely there's a way to see if something is outside of the ASCII range. And I dug around and eventually I found in the settings in a boat config on Firefox, you can set the IDN show puny code to true. What that does is if it's a international domain, I actually had to go and look for one because it turned out the email was fine. And I paid my VAT and it's all good. But I found a lot of articles telling me about the thing, but not just giving me an example domain. So I do. What it does is you get a the letters XN and dash dash or like two minus signs beside each other. And then what looks like a very bizarre code because I looked at one that was an example of a Chinese like domain. I don't know what it pointed to, but they converted it into the puny code. And then you know you're looking at it going, yeah, that is not apple.com or DHL.com or anything that they're trying to fake. You can see that it's obviously gibberish. Now, there is a link to a Firefox plugin that I did not install because I thought, it's one of those kind of community ones that I wasn't sure how legit it was. And it's no homo graphs is the name of the plugin with a terrible URL, but I'm not going to say it. You can look at it in the links for the show. Just happens to be the look of the draw. But yeah, this claims to make it easier. It splits out the domain and it does essentially what I have done, but tries to make a nice interface to it. I am not so sure if you need that. I think if you see the XN dash dash, you'll realize that you've got something, you know, if you were looking to go to your bank and then you saw something like that, you would go, okay, that's clearly not my bank. And for people who are on the other side of things and on Chromium, there's a link to a GitHub page for that too. I don't know if it's inside a store or not. It looks quite old, but maybe there's more update things. And that one's called Fish Protect. And it's from fish.ai. And if you use Chromium, I hope all the AI misery comes to you. There's me thinking that you were going to give me a point from the predictions. No, you're going to use this one. I don't even have Chromium installed. It can just go f off. Well, you don't have Chrome installed for that odd time that you need it. I have a thing that uses the Chrome engine, which is Falcon, which is a KDE browser, but I don't have Chrome itself. And you've got a bonus discovery, awesome privacy. Yeah, this is a absolutely brilliant list for people who often say, oh, yeah, what do you use to do that if you don't use such and such? And it's a proprietary app, like the likes of Spotify or one of the ones that can listen and pick the music of what it's actually playing. This is a curated list that somebody has done of all the open source apps that you can get for phones or open source services that you can run them. And obviously it keeps growing as they make changes to it. But it's really, really good. There's some brilliant stuff on there. And anybody who's trying to eke their way out of the Google or Apple ecosystem, it's a very, very cool list. Yeah. And if you want to get away from the tyranny of Wikipedia, there's an alternative to that as well. There is. I didn't check that out actually. Oh my God, wiki less of. Yeah, this makes me think that maybe this might be curated by someone who takes privacy a little bit too seriously. Perhaps, but, you know, there's nothing like reflect a glory from 10 files. So. And Graham, you've got some more thoughts on tiling in KDA. I've been talking about tiling scripts for KDA recently. And a few people on our telegram group suggested I retry Bismuth. I did try it. I don't know, a year or two ago. And I wanted to give a little bit of feedback because I use the K-win tiling scripts, which are no longer being developed. Bismuth just can't, in particular, I use a half layout because I have an ultra wide display. And this allows me to have a column split into two or more. And I couldn't do that. And there's no blade layout, which lets me do three or four or five columns as many as I need. But also I found when I clicked and dragged windows, they would pop out of the tiling. There was a bit of a problem with Bismuth. It couldn't track them. And then I couldn't pop in windows from being untiled to tiled again. The floating toggle, that is. And I couldn't lock to the destination areas of the display in the same way that I could with K-win tiling. So I'm still stuck with K-win tiling for now until, I don't know, I'll try the next tiling script that comes along because it sounds like the next version of K-D might have it. Yeah, maybe we won't need any of these hokey third party ones. I've got three distro releases to talk about. The first one is Blendo S from Rudra, who does, he's that young guy who does Ubuntu to Unity remix and a bunch of other stuff. And this is a very ambitious distro. It is yet another immutable, fast system one, but it blends together. Blendo S, see what I did there. Using distro box, loads of different distro. So you can have arch, Ubuntu and Fedora all on the same system. And you can use those package managers just side by side. It sounds very ambitious to me, but it wouldn't boot for me. Sorry. I am surprised. I mean, I'm sure I did something wrong. I tried it in a VM, it didn't work. I tried it on bare metal and it didn't work. I may be to do with my BIOS settings, I don't know, because it only seemed to support the FIBoot. And I did try that as well as legacy. But anyway, it sounds very interesting and want to check out. I don't think it is necessarily daily driveable just yet, but I don't want to give it a go. And two ends of the same spectrum, let's say. The first one, Hello System. This is a FreeBSD based distro that just you wait failing aims to look like Mac OS. Oh, good. Combine both of them together. Yeah. What you end up with is FreeBSD with a graphical interface that looks like Mac OS of more like OS 10 from several years ago. It seems to me cool. Well, look, not everyone has got an irrational hatred of all things non GPL like you. So if you want to learn a bit about FreeBSD and you want to start with a nice GUI, I've traditionally recommended ghost BSD, which is Marta based and excellent. If Marta isn't for you for whatever reason, then Hello System is a perfectly reasonable alternative to me. Now, okay, get ready to laugh hard to be failing him. Hi, Will. Don't you worry? I connected to my wireless network and it worked. That is the first joke. The punchline is that you really didn't realize that the cable was plugged in. Yeah. No, the punchline is that instead of my usual, I don't know, about 200 megabit that I get from wireless here in the studio. I got about three. So I don't think the driver is perfectly tuned, shall we say. So FreeBSD strikes. But anyway, it seems to me like it's a great distro to check out FreeBSD if you are curious about it and are not a cynical fucking bastard like that. It's good to keep those 10 developers out of harm. At least we can see what they're up to. Oh, dear, oh dear. Well, on the other end of the slightly Mac OS E type thing spectrum is elementary OS. And elementary OS 7 has been released as you're listening to this, but not as we are recording it. I happen to have the inside information from Danny, who is my friend. And I'm on the press list. And so this has come out now, I think, hopefully out of the cut it, if not. But anyway, it's a very good release if you're into that sort of thing. And what's really interesting about it to me is that there is no sense that it is based on Ubuntu 2204. They don't hide it, but at the same time, it's all about flat pack as your applications. And they've got their own app center, which is very much curated and trying to get people to pay for applications and stuff. But you can sideload as they call it, things like flat hub, but there's not really a sense of download stuff from the Ubuntu archives. I mean, you can. You can just open a terminal and do it. But via the GUI, I don't think there was a way to do it. I may be wrong about that, but it's just, it's all about flat packs, basically. And I learned that the config files for Firefox, if you use the flat pack are in your home directory dot var slash something, which seemed very odd to me. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'd never used the flat pack of Firefox before, but I got my profile all sorted and everything. And it's, it's a final S. The, the, I mean, I hate to do this, but the default wallpaper is just breathtakingly beautiful. I don't want to like be one of those people who reviews this drives by talking about the wallpaper, but it is like really stunning. It almost tempts me to change my black background, but I'm not going to, obviously. But yeah, definitely give this a go if this is your sort of thing. I mean, it's not really for me. I'm just too much of a diehard XFC fan, but it is a destroy with that. It's really opinionated on virtually every way that you should use it. But because it's low next and open, you can have flexibility, but just try it and see if it suits you is my advice. Do you feel there's gaps anywhere or do you feel like it's very consistent all the way through? I don't think there's gaps in the experience. I think there's gaps in the software availability out of the box because it's not that much in App Center, but those gaps can be filled with something like flat hub, which is really easy to install. You just go to flat hub.org. I think it is pick whatever it is you want to install, download the file that opens with that center. It says, right. You're about to install flat hub and you're going to get the whole of flat hub available to you. That's not curated by ours. We can't guarantee this that and the other. Are you sure you want to do this? You just say yes, and then it does it. Suddenly, you've just got hundreds of applications that are in flat hub. Of course, you can always open a terminal and just have to get install something. It can be whatever you want it to be, but out of the box, it is somewhat, well, not somewhat very opinionated. Whether you agree with those opinions or not is down to personal taste and I personally don't agree with quite a lot of those opinions, but I respect it for what it is, if that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. This episode is sponsored by Collide. You know the old saying when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail? The traditional approach to device security is that hammer, a blunt instrument that can't solve nuanced problems. 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We really do appreciate that. If you want to learn more, you can go to latenightlinx.com slash support and remember for $10 or more per month on Patreon, you can get an ad-wet free RSS feed that includes this show, the next downtime, and Linux after dark. You also get episodes early occasionally. If you want to get in contact with us, you can email show at latenightlinx.com. Let's do some feedback then. Now, lots of people got in touch suggesting GraphEnoS for my new Pixel 7. I think some other custom ROMs as well. The whole point of it is that I don't want to try custom ROMs yet. I know what custom ROMs are like when they have advantages and disadvantages. People also told me that, yeah, you can't move the time, you're stuck with that. And it's almost enough to make me go to a custom ROM, but not quite. I want to experience for as long as I can true stock Android and the camera is just so good. I've posted in our Telegram group and- Yeah, looks great. Yeah, fuck off. And in a few places as well, the camera is so, especially at night. If you live at night like I do, then night sight is just- Flood fill for your pictures. Oh, fuck off. No, it's not, whatever, just because you've got a shit camera on yours. It is, it looks terrible. Yeah, it looks really bad, doesn't it, guys? Come on. It's pretty impressive. I think it was generated by AI. I don't care what you say. The camera is amazing. It's nice to have banking apps. All the shit that I said a couple of weeks ago. And I'm just not ready to go to the custom ROM route yet. I'm sure I will eventually, but for now, please stop suggesting it. Once you've tasted the poison fruit. I flashed the fucking Google Apps anyway. All I wanted was regular updates, which I'm now getting anyway. Yes, exactly. I mean, that's why I don't do it because I know it's just convenience and that's the thing. Yeah. And I'm also very stubborn, so. Yes, but anyway, everyone please stop suggesting Graphene OS to me. I'm very aware of what it can do. And it's got this great camera and you can install that from the Play Store. So I did some A.B. testing on it. And yeah, it's not very good compared to the proper Pixel camera, which is one of the best cameras in the fucking world, according to MKBHD's massive study that he did. It's not quite as good as the Pixel 6A, which is much cheaper. But anyway, it's an amazing camera and fuck you, phone him. And I got in touch about captures. They said try Buster. It's a browser extension that works 60% of the time. 100% if you have a voice recognition API key to give it. I've not completed a Google capture in years. Who was it? It was morning. I hear someone wrote in about the capture stuff. So yeah, I'll put a link to that in the show and it's going to be a buster. Give that a go. I was on about 60% of the time though. That seems quite frustrating. That sounds like that meme from that. I'm coming up. That's what I thought it said as I was reading it. It works 60% of the time. 100% of the time. No, but if you've got this voice recognition API key, then I really get one of those from but I'm sure it's all at the link in the show notes. We had a couple of emails about Wanda Shaper. The first one was from Chris. Yes, I think I mentioned Wanda Shaper as one of my finds of the fortnight for limiting bandwidth on things. Chris says Wanda Shaper has been around in OpenWRT for ages. There are two uses. One, QOS quality of service and two, avoid saturated big buffers to avoid latency. Use Wanda Shaper to set the bandwidth just lower than your ISP bandwidth so that buffers don't ever fill up huge difference. And Oscar said, you recently discussed Wanda Shaper in an episode but it's generally regarded as old news and replaced by SQM. CODL-SQM, controlled delay, smart queue management aims to control latency even under a heavy load, sacrificing CPU resources and some bandwidth in the process. It's a part of the buffer-bloat project. It's great and requires little tuning, mostly setting your upload speed. Set it to 85 to 95% of your actual upload download speeds. Your router will work harder but your latency will stay low even when others are downloading large files, etc. As I've understood CODL-SQM, it will look at your current networking streams and their respective sizes and prioritise the shorter queues by dropping the last few packages of the longer ones, making TCP slow down a bit for that stream. I also think CODL is enabled by default in some Linux distros, sysctl, net.core.default underscore queue disk. Mine returns FQ underscore CODL, an old Debian machine. They provide a couple of links which we'll put in the podcast notes. I see we're all copy-pacing that now. And yet FQ CODL for me. I think it's worth pointing out that Ubiquity use or at least provide CODL-SQM on their routers as well by default now. If you were to set up some sort of QOS profile on a Ubiquity router, it would be using that fair queue management thing. How much are they paying you? Yeah, I'd also like to know that. Not enough because I have got rid of my Ubiquity edge router X because it wasn't fast enough because I don't know if you've heard, but I've got gigabit symmetric internet now. Oh, here you go. I hope it goes on fire. So I had to replace it and I replaced it with a micro tick hex series, which is a similar form factor, like very small sort of size of a cigarette packet, size device with four gigabit throughput ethernet ports. Very good. And it's all built on Linux and you get a shell. So micro tick good. It's funny. I have a custom router board from PC Engines, which is a Swiss based company and it could actually do a gigabit if I wanted to, but I just don't have a gigabit connection. And it makes me very sad that you do. And you had to buy a new router and I don't, but I still don't get a gigabit connection. The model I got was a micro tick hex five port router RB750GR3 and it cost me 65 quid, including that. I hate you because mine cost me several hundred quid and I don't even get Wii replacement because fucking Switzerland had to be outside the Wii sort of agreement, the bastards. So I'm raging. Yeah, raging. Have you found the interface on that micro tick? I think it's pronounced router to be a bit old school, simple. Oh, yeah. Very much so. That's just you to enter ground, Joe. Yeah, that's a good thing. Good LCGIS scripts. Right. I think you're right, fairly much. Yeah. I think if you've got an understanding of like the commands that happen under the hood, like what the sort of raw Linux commands are, then it perhaps makes a bit more sense. Because that's what I've heard about the micro tick gear is that it does work well and it's cheap, but it's not fancy in any way when you've actually got an interface with it. If you're used to interfacing with, I don't know, Cisco switches or Pro-Cursor switches or something, routers, and you know the command line syntax, then their CLI is not a million miles away from that. If you have to use the web interface, it is a bit baffling, but they've got a couple of wizards in there that typically help you out most of the way. I think the trade-off is worth it though. It's been absolutely rock solid reliable and a plug if I may for LynITX.com as a UK supplier. They were very good at recommending the right router for the right price. Well, if they want to pay us, we'll put a link in the show notes, but otherwise they can piss off. I think that would be my next router. God, I'm really annoyed by that. That was... I can't believe you got me onto a bickety nonsense gear and it's like shuddy firmware and now I've got to follow you onto the dodgy rarer. Just buy TP link, it'll be... Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course it will. It'll be brilliant. And you get to say, give me TP. Yeah, TP for my bung hole. My wife does genuinely giggle whenever TP link is mentioned. They're like very recent. Right, well, we've got to get out of here then. We'll be back next week when who knows what we're talking about. But until then, I've been drunk. I've been phylam. I've been cram. And I've been well. So late. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I've been trying to get out of here. Yeah, yeah. I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam. And I've been phylam.