Hello and welcome to episode 2 online of late night limits recorded on the 27th of February
2023. I'm Jorru and with me are failing. Howdy. Graham. Hello everyone. And Will. Alright.
Let's get straight on with our discoveries then and Will, I mean you are just taking
the piss at this point. MQTT shark. You've definitely done this one before haven't you?
I have not because it did not exist before. Roger Light who is a mosquito MQTT server
a grown from Arge and friend of the show has taken a fine previous fine of mind called
T shark and adapted it specifically for MQTT. So if you're trying to debug your MQTT
sessions and you want to understand what's going on you should check out MQTT shark.
It will show you like the full connection in real time when it actually tries to connect
and the SSL packets can be decoded if you've got the pre shared keys in there. It will
show you the messages going backwards and forwards the subscriptions the unsubscriptions
the full low level MQTT conversation broken down printed out and then lovely easy to
read easy to pass format all in one single command. If you do a lot of stuff with MQTT
and you're trying to work out what's going on this is the thing for you. So in the usage
example there's will dash topic and will dash payload that's you then. It is not me.
No in MQTT you have a will topic and a will payload and when you die then you publish your
will and so that's like the thing that the server does for you to say this thing this
device has gone away and this is what it had to say you bastards. That sounds very convincing
but I don't believe him. Yeah I think it's definitely named after you. So what have you
actually used this for? Very little personally because all of my MQTT connections work perfectly
because Roger's done such a good job on Mosquito. Alright what can you imagine it being used
for then? If I had to write some software that ran on a microcontroller and didn't use
a previously available library like I was trying to write something for risk 5 for example then
maybe I would have to try and understand exactly what was going on backwards and forwards with
my personal code and the MQTT server and what I would use definitely would be MQTT
shock. Is that the faint whiff of a point for me? Not yet. Not yet. Is it coming though?
Is it the post? It's in the basket on the site. Yeah it's in the basket. Right okay fair enough.
I don't know if I should admit that I was ordering something from AliExpress the other
day and saw them on the site and I ordered a couple of risk 5 development boards as well.
Yeah are they still somewhere between China and here? No actually they arrive really quickly
you never know whether you're going to get scanned it's one of that. It's part of the
delight of AliExpress. Well there's a slightly funny story. I think it's LaiChi RV these boards.
You can't tell which one you're ordering and there was a Wi-Fi board for like seven dollars
and then there was the board itself which was like 22 dollars so I thought I'll order the board
and I'll order the Wi-Fi. I saw that some people had got the Wi-Fi working within it and then when
they arrived I have actually got two boards one with Wi-Fi so the whole thing with Wi-Fi was
seven dollars and then just the thing on its own without Wi-Fi was 22. No but presumably the
22 dollar one was like a couple of acres extra. Well I look forward to you putting them into
production and me getting a point. Failing you've got loads of discoveries. I have loads of
very meager discoveries yes. All right okay. Steam family library. This is something that I didn't
know Steam could do so we got a new computer in the house which was a repurposed being chucked in
a skip computer which is only like two percent slower than my processor which disgusts me in no
end but it doesn't have a graphics card yet so it's not quite as good as mine even though the
Intel graphics card on it is actually still doing a mighty good job. You can share your library if
you log into the other computer with your steam ID and then you can tell it to forget it and log
out but it then knows that that machine is something that you've logged into and you can add that
machine and the user on that machine to a family account and that means that you can share your
library to that across the network I think even across the internet and they can have access to
the games that you've bought and there's a priority system in it where if I'm playing one of those
or if they're playing one of those games and I want to play that game I can essentially boot them out
of it because I'm the owner of the game so they don't have priority above me but I thought that
was a really cool system because I wish I'd actually set up for my Wii fella a account previously
and then bought all the games that he really likes and I play with him fair enough but I wish
we'd set them up on his own account but it's a bit too late for that now so there's probably a bit
of repurchasing is going to have to happen but until then he can use that share library feature
which is pretty cool you realize he's going to be kicking your arse at games before you even know
it or do you mean will be are your kids beating you will yet?
Fortnite my eldest is thrashing me mercilessly but we do use their family sharing my eldest is
I don't know seven years eight years older than my youngest and so has got a massive back
library of games that he once played a lot of and now doesn't play anymore and so we haven't had
to rebuy them he just be able to play them out of the library it's been brilliant it'd be nice if
you could actually physically give them and the save games over to somebody else say no this is
actually they were playing at my pc now they can have it on their own that'd be great if they did
that game if you're listening go on make it so all right device idea is to get steering wheel what's
all this about so CX is a terrible terrible place and it just lured me in with a 50 euro steering
wheel and was pestered by the we fella to get and it works for things like supertux car and
things like that that are native but steam doesn't recognize it as a steering wheel and
now i don't know if this is actually true but apparently the stl library that gets pulled in by
steam and built identifies the uspid so i submitted a very quick one-liner patch i must add that the
new github dev interface is absolutely awful and i want the old simple line one back thanks very
much if i wanted to use vi in a browser i'd just amputate both arms but uh the thing was easy to do
i got the ideas and i submit it and then i got a tweet saying oh thanks i've been submitted by the
stl team so that's really cool and i hope that that actually gets pulled into steam otherwise
somebody will have tricked me into doing fast development for free which i
so fingers crossed but every day he comes into me says is the steered we're working as you know
it's not working it doesn't work quite that quick yeah well he's got supertux car as he said so i'm
sure i'm really fine it's exactly the same have you played net hack with him yet oh no i'm not
going to subject to that it's just cruelty you should introduce him to jet set willy and bolder dash
and stuff see what he makes of proper old school games oh god all right and uh you've been pretending
to learn a programming language called nim yeah so you know boyed by my success of not looking at
my russ book aside to look at a book online which is a nim book and nim looks really interesting and
the thing is it looks similar to python as in a nice clean syntax and not shite c based stuff
but it compiles down to c or javascript and i think there's even a c plus plus one it can
compile down to as well and i just thought it was pretty amazing where you get a nice
cleans and tactically beautiful to look at language but you can actually produce a really fast
executable at the end of it as well so i'm actually starting to look at this it's quite cool i don't
know how far i'll get with it but so far i've actually read more of the online book than i have
of the paper book sitting on my desk and you've got one more mystery one phone in i do so i was
listening to the hacks which is by the guys who run salt stack and there's one of the guys who runs
their sort of community thing is a guy called chimichunga he used to be an actor and now works
for salt stack and does their PR and training stuff things like that and they were talking about
being trekkies whatever and they said scott bacula and i always thought the fella from quantum leap
was scott bacula but then i thought oh my god is that because bacula the software that does backups
is a quantum leap back through your data what i know yeah i was sort of bacula but there you go
it's scott bacula he said and he's in hollywood so he clearly knows more than i do anyway and then i
thought bacula with a c is the backup software bacula but a k is the sam quantum leaping with ziggy
the computer etc and i thought is that why they named the backup software that i don't know i mean
i can't answer this question mind blown i know i was picking up a dog shit at exactly that
moment okay this episode is sponsored by linode go to linode.com slash late night linux support
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gram you've got a couple of gaming related things first of all turakan to aga on the amiga yes so
turakan 2 was an amiga game released in 1991 and one of the best amiga games it's like a sideways
scrolling adventure shoot them up game a bit like super Metroid on the snares but a bit more frantic
and it was a great game the aga part in this release is that later amigas like the 1200 and
the 4000 had bigger colour palette and could have more colors on the screen but they couldn't take
use those colors on the old games they were just baked into their 32 colors or whatever they
happened to use this person called sonic sloth has actually reversed engineered the original pc
version of turakan 2 because that used 256 colors which is what an aga amiga can display
and developed it into turakan 2 aga a new version of turakan 2 for the amiga and this more than nostalgia
or retro gaming getting on my amiga is a whole different story i had to use a device called
a flip box which is a parallel port arduino thing i built and 3d printed the case for pretending
to be an ethernet device so i actually copied this 8 meg game does it easily even exist in
fact that grandbreath is a greele there are kind of drivers with tc there's ami tcp which is
oh god there's a whole new world proprietary software on amiga still even getting a modern
browser on the amiga or ssl certificates is difficult i've done all that i mean the best
browsers are proprietary you forget there's a world out there like that and there still is
on the amiga it took i don't know about 40 minutes to copy this game over the parallel port
40 minutes another i don't know 20 minutes to decompress the files oh wow but it's definitely
worth it honestly it is definitely worth it i'm i'm sure the pc version is rubbish and it's much
better to actually play it on an amiga appreciate the beige plastic i can't believe that games like
that still be made but it is a great game and there is something nice about playing on the
authentic hardware with this authentic crappy joystick with one button is it the smell of burning dust
yeah yeah and zelda a link to the past on linux yeah so this is similar in a way from a very
similar period this is a project called zelda three a link to the past was my favorite zelda game it
could be because i came across it one christmas when i was stuck in the u.s actually had nowhere to
stay so i stayed with the friends distant relatives in canada in the snow and they had a snez machine
and i was kind of locked away in the basement with snow piled up outside the windows and they
and played zelda a link to the past it was just great gaming experience and i didn't do very much
else for three weeks anyway this project zelda three is a commented source code reverse engineered
version of zelda oh wow so it's a great game it's it's a game that's historically important so the
fact that this kind of its techniques are documented in the same way kind of elite has been i think
is good in its own right it doesn't have any of the original nintendo ip which is right as well
if you want to play it you have to own the cartridge you have to rip the cartridge you have to then
use a python command that's included in the project to turn that into load of table data
which is then imported into the reverse engineered code and they've even added a few features like
a couple of slots for items wide screen a few other nice convenient pieces i build this is
another thing that blows me around mind about the 21st century the whole thing takes to build
i don't know less than two seconds it's just amazing and the game plays really well i have to say
there's a whole world of retro gaming that tries to emulate the feel of this particular game but
playing the original it still stands up well and it's worth actually playing it again one cold winter
if you're stuck in some snow somewhere all right well i feel like the things that i've discovered i
should have known anyway but uh it's always a learning experience isn't it lennox so what i learned was
that if you reinstall a bunto and go to the advanced partitioning or whatever choose the
partition where it was installed already but don't tick the format partition box it will selectively
delete the system stuff but it'll keep all of your home directory and everything and then when
you boot into it yeah you haven't necessarily got the same applications that you had installed but
they're an apt to get away or whatever but all of your config files are there and you can just get
up and running immediately but how i discovered this was not having a recent enough kernel for
something that i wanted to test out and so i thought oh well all right i'll just go for 2210 instead of
22.04 and then the next day the point release of 22.04.2 came out with the new updated kernel i was like
fuck's sake well let me just try going back then and sure enough it worked absolutely perfectly
and i've got the new kernel and i'm on the lts didn't lose any of my config files and when i had
it all backed up anyway so that's why i took the risk on it but yeah i'm and presumed you must be
able to do that with other distros as well but with subunto specifically it worked absolutely
perfectly i genuinely don't think i've ever done that i had never i'd never needed to do it but
i just thought i wonder if i don't just wipe it and copy all my stuff back on what if i just try
and take the shortcut what's going to happen what's the worst that can happen and it turns out the
worst that can happen is fucking brilliant seamless situation that didn't require any effort at all
yeah i didn't realize that didn't happen for a long time i had home as a separate partition and
so i wouldn't click that and that's really where a lot of my current problems still stem from when
something isn't working is that i'm using a config file from 2007 yeah but it's interesting that
it's purposefully blanks everything else i just thought it overrotes something and you'd be stuck
if there's still an old library knocking around well no my understanding is it's clever about which
directories to overwrite and which ones not to i don't know if it took a little bit longer than
normal or not i can't really remember i would have thought it must do it must have to work it out
rather than just right we've got a totally blank canvas just stick everything on there
but it wasn't noticeably much longer i don't think so a huge thumbs up i think to uh i don't
necessarily think it's the zubun two team i think it's probably more likely upstream urban two where
this is coming from but either way well done everyone it works brilliantly is it just me it is it like
you feel like you need to scratch the inside of your eyeballs thinking about all the old shit that
might be left lying about on there i was a bit worried but then i just thought life's too short
to worry about that if it all goes wrong i've got backups i can just totally wipe it all again and
yeah start again i mean i am sitting here recording on this very machine so if this episode never comes
out then i suppose we'll know why oh don't worry i'll release my bit of it just to prove it
well i did check in at 37 hours left on the hardware recorder so if i need that backup we
should be fine but i would imagine other distrust like fedora must offer this but i've just never
really tried it before it just isn't a thing that has come up for me but i was just feeling really
lazy couldn't be asked to plug in the sst where the backups were essentially so do let us know if
you can do it on other distros as well onto a bit of admin then first of all thank you everyone who
supports us with paper and patreon we really do appreciate that if you want to join those people
you can go to late nightlinx.com slash support and remember for ten dollars or more per month on patreon
you can get an advert free rss feed that includes this show lennox downtime and then
it's south to dark and you occasionally get episodes early and if you want to get in contact with
those you can email show at late nightlinx.com and if you want to chat with other listeners
on telegram matrix irc or discord you can go to late nightlinx.com slash community for details there
okay this episode is sponsored by collide and collide has some big news if you're an octa user
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so visit collide.com slash late nightlinx to learn more or book a demo that's k-o-l-i-d-e dot
com slash late night linx let's do some feedback then and loads of people got in touch about backups
time shift is the linx mint one that i mentioned i don't know how many emails we got about this
tweets masterland posts all the community places time shift of course yes that is the
linx mint one so thank you everyone for that gene recommended copier with a k copier copier
that has gooey and cli options john recommended gr sync which is a gooey for r-sync which is in
most repos i'd never heard of this one but i feel like i should have have a look because
it's always nice to get some kind of visual feedback especially if you're just starting out
with r-sync what's funny is that the wikipedia article has got a screenshot for gr sync which is
from like proper old school gnoam two of them two i was going to say i'm sure i remember gr sync
and that is the vision in my mind that that screenshot on wikipedia is exactly how i remember it
so it must be a long time ago seeing an old screenshot there's nothing like that for reassuring
you that your backups are sure to be fine well no come on this is software that is clearly finished
i mean what has changed with r-sync over the last 20 years fucking nothing pretty much
and a gooey on top of it i mean all it's doing is running commands hopefully i seem to remember
that gr sync is just a front end to the back end commands and you can get it to show you what
commands it is that it's built by you toggling the options on and off i'm pretty sure you can get
it to give you the command line so even if you just use it as a way to generate the right options
it's still useful yeah it's got a simulation button from this ancient screenshot as well so
yeah it seems like a good show and don recommended chrono pete i think or chrono peti i don't know
and says it works great and it's got a gooey i've never used it over network connection so
i can't speak to that it's very similar to apple's time machine and jeremy recommended you are
back up or you're back up you're back up my euro back up he said you run your own server with a web
interface that pulls backups from multiple machines it really is fantastic and works on Linux and
windows it supports backing up to a local server and remote server so thank you everyone we'll have
to stick links to all of them in the show notes so check them all out oh and just while we think of
it zach wrote to me unmasked on to say to remind me when do i said print out your board key but
don't forget to put your board password on it and i actually do have that on my sheet of paper which
i retrieved from a save to check but yeah it was a long time since i've done it but yeah do both of
them on to the sheet of paper otherwise you're really hosed so dare you so we got a message from
mike who says regarding microft for some good news about the same time michael lewis was announcing
the bad news mark two and dev kit owners received an email offering free usb drive for neon o s
neon has officially partnered with microft neon o s is based on the microft core code and the usb
is a drop-in replacement for the one that came with the mark two people who bought the device can
get the key for free or it can be ordered for twenty dollars yeah and it runs kde the latest
version as well no hang on the name crash yeah yeah so shame about the name but otherwise that
sounds pretty good that the people who backed it are not going to be just totally fucked and that's
the power of open source i suppose james got in touch with the call to action he says volunteers
at next cloud assist with submitting and verifying translations mostly managed by a small group
because the project is growing at such a massive rate and finding native speakers of a certain
language can be difficult perhaps you could help raise awareness of this ongoing effort and let
your audience know about this opportunity to contribute back to an open source project thank
you anyone interested is welcome to join via trans effects and the link will be in the show notes
you asked and we delivered james aj asked do any of you use your guitar with linux i've only
ever played a guitar with rock smith in 2014 and it came with a special usb cable that works with
the game via steam from my searching it looks like i need an audio interface to connect it
are there any you recommend now phaelyn you talked about this when we did the fossack live show
yeah i did i mean i don't sound like i'm some sort of uh authority on this because i kind of used it
and then i just kind of strum my guitar on its own most time but i bought myself an interface for
the pi three that was running guitarics but i got for myself a baringer euphoria umc 22 audio interface
and i'll try and find out how much it cost but it wasn't very expensive i think it was around 50
ish quid i'm not sure but it is really good plugs in by usb and then yeah i mean that was a pi
running that so that worked fine and i've got plugged into my main pc as well it's really good
but to be honest it sits there most time because i'm a bit too lazy to get the cable but guitarics
is the software you want to run on the pc or whatever it is whether it's for pi or you can just
install that on a normal distro yeah and it is surprisingly good i mean somebody affects out of
it really good i mean yeah it takes a bit of learning to figure out how you have to do it but
i mean it was in chorus and echo and distortion and stuff like that some of them are really really
good well i wouldn't know about this because i just plug into my valve amps at home that i have to
have on like 0.1 because they're so fucking loud and i don't want to piss my neighbors off but uh
yeah as for interfaces i think that most of them work on linux because they just
use the basic usb drivers so um yeah just look on amazon or wherever you're gonna buy and barynger
i mean they are pretty cheap and not necessarily going to last very long if you don't treat them
well but just look them up on amazon or whatever and then just search for the model of that and
linux or a bunter or whatever and see if people have had success with them and you're generally
going to be fine all you need is a quarter inch in and usb and you should be ground is it worth
mentioning to look out for a di input on an audio interface i don't think necessarily if you're
only playing at home for fun i don't think you need to necessarily worry about that you know you
might have a bit of um hiss and stuff but you know if it's just a hobby thing then you should be fine
but uh phalem's got a link to the um c22 i think there's like a um 20 i can't remember now there's
there's various cheap barynger interfaces anyway and my understanding is that most of them work
but your mindage may vary i was also of ideas that i get whatever the correct microphone that
you would tell us to and not use my snowball mic but my snowball lives on yeah well the snowball
builds itself as a condenser but i am convinced that it is basically a dynamic mic ultimately
i'm convinced mine's better than all the other ones out there if there's some weird batch i got
maybe i mean yours sounds all right but you know okay this episode is sponsored by introware
go to entrawear.com entrawear sells computers with a bunter and a bunter marty pre-installed
they've got a range of desktops laptops and servers and most parts are configurable
so you can pick the cpu ram and storage that's right for you if you can't find exactly what you
want then do contact them and they'll work with you on a bespoke solution that's perfect for your
needs the ship to the uk republic of island france germany italy and spain and if you do buy one of
their machines there's a little drop down at checkout and you can select late night linux so
they'll know that we sent you so go to entrawear.com for all your linux computing needs christ wrote
in to say that they have a nephew who's eight years old he has recently started using arrozby
pie and doing a little bit of web browsing my sister has been sitting with him and they have
been learning together but she tells me that while she popped out of the room he must have clicked on
something that frightened him are there tools for linux that you're aware of that can allow
youngsters to use the internet but prevent them from accessing adult content when i say adult
content i don't just mean pornography but also bad language and things that are scary gory and
violent etc if i'm not mistaken on windows they have something called net nanny is there anything
equivalent to that on linux my sister is just an ordinary computer user and not a computer
enthusiast so it has to be simple and it has to be user friendly with a gooey interface my sister
knows nothing about the command line or editing text files or anything like that so an overly
technical solution is no good well there are some dns options for this but i'm not sure they're
going to filter bad language i think that is a bit of a stretch there might be some um browser
extensions maybe for that but there's certainly dns solutions that will block adult content mucky
jpgs and then like yeah and pie holes getting there in terms of letting you choose which devices
you want to be restricted to which block list or which allow list and i found that useful for
some computers yeah and i think if you can provide a raspberry pie onto her network if you can go
and help her get it set up then i think the ui the web ui with with pie hole is very usable by normal
people and if you're in the EU or not i don't know i know cloudflare you had one will before it was
cloudflare that had a kids kind of version of that and i know there's one called zero dns now i
haven't used it yet or dns zero sorry i haven't used it but they have a feature where there's
like a child-proof version where they try and limit like stuff like gambling sites and things
like that the ironic thing is i think google used to have a kids youtube thing but they they sort of
hamster on it by the fact that you couldn't subscribe to channels anymore because that was seen as
you know promoting content and stuff which i thought was a really stupid way to do it because
if you actually knew there was content producers that you could actually trust you could add them
as channels for the kid but they did away with that it was a ridiculous way of doing things i thought
but there we go it's the elephant in the room here that the internet is just like the world in general
and you can't wrap kids in cotton wool you can't protect them from the bad shit that is out there
and you just have to prepare them for it you either have to supervise or prepare them that
you know i know that eight years old is very young but eventually they're going to see some
fucked up shit on the internet whether you like it or not you're never too young to see a hand
grenade get dropped by a drone into a Russian trance yeah or a balloon get shot down or whatever
you know there's always going to be fucked up shit on the internet and i don't think that there
is necessarily a technological solution or a series of technological solutions to this problem i
think the problem is much more of a sort of social people problem and if your kids are going to go
online unsupervised that's very much like letting them just go out into the world on supervises isn't
it i agree to an extent but there's a product called disney circle that does exactly this you know
and it's even built into like net gear routers but of course all your data's then getting sent to
disney or whoever runs the service and it would be wonderful i think if there was like an open source
equivalent to something like disney circle where you can ease kids into the internet or at least
have some oversight over what they've been looking all the time that they're doing it it would really
help but i do kind of agree with you but it'd be nice if it wasn't like on or off i think that
using the internet is a life skill these days in the same way that tying your shoelaces was when
we were kids that you need to get exposure to it and you just need to to learn how to deal with
the problems as they come up and you need to be taught that and you need to be taught that in a
in a way in which you can understand what's going on and so i agree with you joe that it is
the way that it is but in the same way that i wouldn't take my kids to a truck stop bathroom for an
afternoon out i probably wouldn't let them just have at the internet unsupervised but i'm lazy so
i do let them do that and so they need to learn how to deal with the sorts of stuff that they see
but also having pie hole there in the back to know that they're not actually going to go to
muckyjpegs.com is quite reassuring so my vote goes for having a separate system run it on a
raspberry pie it needn't cost a lot of money it would be pretty reliable and it can take out some
of the harmful content but not all of it yeah i've done exactly that for some of the suicide
chat forums and just because i can't even i can't even think about them getting to that stuff
yeah but you know if they really want to find it they will and they may stumble across it
even if they don't want to and whatever it is the the dark shit that you don't want them to see
and uh you know this is from my ivory childless tower of course but i'm saying all of this but
yeah i think you're right some technological solutions but also communication and asking this
child what upset them and you know having a relationship where they will tell you honestly
look i saw this thing and it upset me and then you can explain to them what it is i don't know
like i said i haven't got any kids i haven't got a fucking clue what i'm talking about but uh
that's what i do if i did have kids and it's probably for the best that i don't have them
right well we're better get out of here then we'll be back next week when we'll probably be covering
what's been going on in the news but you never know until then i've been Jerome i've been Salem
i've been Graham and i've been Will so later
so
so
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