Hello and welcome to episode 2 to 1 of late night limits recorded on 10th March, 2023.
I'm Joe and with me I've been him.
How's it going?
Graham?
Hello.
Good evening.
Well, before Graham jets off for his latest holiday, we'll do some discoveries.
We'll calculate with a cue.
This is a fancy calculator.
Yeah, so I hate the GNOME calculator and I hate the default XFCE calculator, which is
the Marta calculator.
So I'm kind of 80% of the calculators that are default.
I hate and it's all for the same reason, which is when I open the calculator, sometimes
the default input does not go to the calculator input a bit.
So when I press the calculator button on my keyboard and start typing numbers, sometimes
it doesn't work.
And if I alt-tab between what I'm doing and the calculator, sometimes it doesn't work.
And sometimes if I click in the window, it doesn't work.
And this has annoyed me to such an extent that I went looking for a different calculator.
If you search for best Linux desktop calculators on Google, the top hit was a thread on Reddit,
or at least it was when I searched.
And the answers to questions on there about alternative calculators were predictably,
why don't you just install Python and use NumPy?
Or why don't you just do it from the command line, which is stupid?
So I carry on looking and I found calculate, qual, curate.
And it's all right.
I don't use any of the advanced functions in it yet, but as a calculator, it works.
I can click in the window.
It takes the focus.
I can type numbers in.
It works.
It's got a prebuilt binary for GTK and for Qt.
You can install it on Windows and Mac and Linux.
And it has got a whole bunch of built in cleverness that I don't need to use.
But as a normal calculator, it's easy to use.
It works.
And it's a much improved experience for me on the desktop.
So highly recommend it.
It's working well.
Can I give a shout out to K-Runner?
The tool you get when you do old and F2 on KDE, because that's the calculator I use.
You know, it's like it got that text in book, launching.
But you could just type in loads of different maths stuff, or the common kinds, but also
like permutations and combinatorial stuff.
And it does square root and sign.
And it does currency conversion all just by typing into that prompt.
I like it.
And you don't need to pretend to click on a pretend calculator on the screen.
How's do I, Graham?
And I think you've talked to these two Neanderthals.
You're never going to get anywhere there.
It's best we live in the future and them in the Stone Age.
How do you do a square root on a typey anything?
It's SQRT in brackets, the number.
It's much easier than clicking a button.
Yeah, that's mad.
I don't know what's wrong with you two.
Nothing.
Well, it's funny you mentioned calculators, Will, because I don't like...
The calculator that you get on the Pixel 7.
It's one of the last annoyances.
I still can't move the clock.
That's just never going to happen.
But I could replace the calculator.
I did quite like the calculator in Lineage.
How do I get that failing on my evil Google phone?
Scrubbish and solid-legend.
Live the free land.
All right.
Well, I'm not going to do that because it was the same with the calendar.
I didn't like that.
But then I found ETA, ETA, ETA, ETA, something like that.
So there must be some equivalent, but I just haven't been able to find it.
This calculator is just terrible.
Everything's in the wrong place and I don't like it.
Have you tried f-troyds calculators?
I had a quick looking f-troyd and I couldn't find anything that was just the same as the
one I've been using for years.
Just make sure you don't pick the app that is.
Mascorating as a calculator but isn't an emergency beacon transcender.
I think it's called Calculate Exclamation Mark.
Okay, I probably have tried that in my travels there.
I just want the one from Lineage.
How do I get that?
I'm sure it's really easy and I'm just dumb for not looking into it.
But someone please email in, show it alone at Linux.com.
Fail him.
Nice gooey.
It is a nice gooey.
Thanks for asking.
I hate doing web development.
I hate Shamel JavaScript.
I can fuck off.
I hate them.
I hate them so much.
I wish I could use Python and it looks like I can because this is absolutely amazing.
Absolutely fantastic, especially if you're trying to do small, simple sites.
It might be turn smart lights on or God knows what.
I think you might like this will.
It is a really pretty simple interface and loads of examples and really excellent documentation
and a really nice API.
It's fantastic because it's all in Python and I don't have to touch any of that nastiness.
It's been essentially runs its own web server that you can then just, you know, if you want
to set nginx in front of it to take load and stuff.
But I wish I'd known about this ages ago and I'm going to retroactively try and fix some
of my projects with it.
It looks amazing.
It's such a beautifully designed site and if it's as simple as the examples imply to
create that kind of UI in a web browser, then I can see it being really powerful.
And the best part is the web page is written in itself, which is an even better example
of it showing how nice it can be.
What's with those three buttons on the side of the windows?
No.
Red, yellow and green.
I don't recognize those.
I don't either.
I've never used any system that has those.
I do have my buttons on that side as well, but they're monochromatic.
I've seen that.
It's a Mac OS theme for KDE.
Yeah, that was very nice.
That's good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Even one for XFCE, who knows?
Graham, entropy piano tuner.
Yeah, so I don't know anything about piano tuning, but we do have an old, cheap upright
piano in the house and always have had the remarkable pieces of machinery.
The engineering that's gone into them, they're all 100 years old and they're heavy as hell
and nobody wants them so you can get them for cheap tuning them.
You have to pay an expert to come in and spend 100 pounds or whatever on tuning it.
I thought I'd give it a go myself for this thing.
It's not as rigid as it should be or something.
I don't know, so it doesn't stay in tune over six months.
Changes in atmospheric pressure, I don't know.
Behind an upright piano, it's like a huge harp with the bass strings being really long
and stretched across the height on the left and then the hip hit strings being really tight
on the right.
On the left, you'll only have a single string for the bass notes in the middle.
You might get two or three or four depending on the piano.
So, all tune to the same pitch that is for each note.
So you've got hundreds of strings for an 88 note piano and each one of those strings has
a little nut you can change, turn, just like the nut on the top of a guitar really, although
you need a key to do that.
And it's not like tuning a guitar or any other instrument because it's not tuned to what we'd
call chromatic pitch.
Now, I'm really not an expert in this, but because the strings have different kind of
vibration characteristics depending on how tightly they're stretched and some of those
strings are very big and some of them are very small so they don't have the same kind
of physical something or other.
You can't tune them with an exact interval between them because the imperfections in
the strings will cause harmonic clashes.
So what you do is you have to tune them in a weird kind of wave which is called stretch
tuning where the octaves are stretched across one part of the tuning more than they are
another one and then tightened in a little bit.
It's like a big S curve on its side.
I don't know what that real name for that is.
So it's complicated.
But this piece of software, entropy piano tuner.
Entropy is what it's calling this weird curve that you have to calculate per piano.
So you start up the piano tuner.
Your first task is to press every single key and it'll record the pitch of every single
key so you just go through the whole 88 notes.
It takes a lot of patience.
And then it comes up with this curve for your piano and that curve is what ideally each
string should be tuned to.
And then each note has a block on this curve and some notes will be further out of tune
than others.
Some keys and then you go through all of these keys and you try to get them to match
the curve as closely as possible.
So the keys with multiple strings you have to find a way of just muting the strings you
are not tuning and then making sure that they all correspond or tune to one another.
You can do that by ear because it's just like a guitar.
It takes a bit of time.
Takes a long time.
But it's fascinating because I found it quite relaxing.
And this is open source software.
If you look for proprietary solutions, they're subscription models that are expensive.
They're professional piano tuners.
A piano tuner for us would cost 100 quid every six months.
So this is open source, I think it's Java and it's brilliant and it worked.
So I have a question with two parts.
One was at what point did you regret this massively painful decision?
It hasn't.
How many strings exactly?
And the second one is have you noticed that you've been followed by a piano tuner coming
to break your fingers at any point?
Is there a golden retriever outside now?
Well, I have to say that my daughter likes to play the piano and after listening to weeks
and months of painfully badly tuned keys that she keeps hitting, it was worth the time
investment to fix it.
Is it actually perfect though or is it still a little bit hunky-tunk?
I could make it perfect if I had the equipment that I've got a really cheap tuning fork and
the slightest turn on those things makes it noticeably out of tune.
So you get within a few cents of tuning for each one.
If I spent more time on it, it would be perfect but really it's my patience that gave in and
the tools that had available to me.
But it sounds perfectly in tune.
There's always some kind of chorus effect from them not being in tune.
It doesn't sound like hunky-tunk at all.
It sounds near enough perfect.
It's good as when we had a tuner in to first tune it a few years ago.
So where will it be motorizing the tuning pegs and putting a bunch of arduino's in there?
Yeah, I did think that it requires tons of torque but it must be possible.
I mean maybe the role modern pianos that automatically tune themselves.
I don't know.
I thought I had the exact same thought.
Well Gibson tried to make guitars that automatically tuned themselves in 2015.
Well actually a little bit before then but 2015 was the big year and now on the second
handmarket good luck trying to sell a 2015 with the robot tuners on it because they're
shit.
Robot tuners.
Oh my good.
Yeah, so I wouldn't have much faith in that to be honest.
But if you made it yourself though.
Maybe.
What did you use to record the initial recording?
Is it run the phone or what is it?
I ran it on my laptop.
Ah, okay.
It could actually run on a phone I'm not sure if there's a version but I ran it on a laptop.
I didn't use any.
I just used the microphone on my laptop.
It needs to be quiet but it doesn't need high quality because it's pretty easy to work
out the pitch.
Well it's actually available for Android on the Play Store and on the Amazon Store, on
the Apple App Store, macOS, Windows Vista 7, 8 and 10 and 11 and Linux.
There's a snap of it which I presume you got.
Oh yeah I did.
Yeah.
Or there's repositories and stuff.
It's very much cross platform and GPL3 which is excellent.
If I ever have to tune a piano I might give this a go but at some point surely you have
to ask yourself how much is your time worth and a hundred quid versus like how many hours
did you spend doing this?
How many litres of blood do you lose before you die?
I think a lot of people I like to know how things work.
I would do it again but now I know.
Now I've got a good feel for how it works.
Now I know because you did it.
I've never got to do it.
I mean no.
Yeah exactly.
I did enjoy a couple of hours honestly.
I'm just weird.
Have you heard of this thing called MIDI?
Instead of actually having hammers hitting strings you can just have it all in a computer
these days you know.
But it's the imperfection that makes it though.
That's what gives it the character and the very physical vibration from the wooden box.
Now just stick it through a chorus pedal and be the grand.
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Well my discovery is from the old system AU Telegram channel it's not called that anymore
but that was an Australian podcast about Linux.
Oh I used to love that.
The preamined Windows RT or whatever the fact they were using every time.
No it was they were the preamined react OS podcast.
I'll react to us that's it thank you.
Yeah and then to grow greater in the voiceover all the news that's new to news and all that.
Anyway in their Telegram channel Nick who was the host of that posted about auto darts.
Now what this is is a bit of software that you connect three cameras to pointing at your
dartboard and then it works out automatically which segments you've hit with your darts.
Oh for God's sake.
And Mike does all the calculations for you.
Now I am terrible at maths.
I'm reasonably good at darts and if I ever bloody move that's been supposed to be happening
for like months at this point but I'm hopefully gonna have room for a dartboard so I'm totally
gonna do this.
He needed to 3D prints and mounts and stuff.
You need one of those modern dartboards with the 360 ring of LEDs around it to give it
even lighting and avoid shadows and he said that it is about 90 something percent accurate
and there's a video that I couldn't link to as well of someone else demonstrating it
and it gets one of them wrong but it's pretty easy to then just change it in the software.
I kind of update it.
No I actually hit a tribal instead of a single or whatever and it just takes the pain out
of darts that having to do the maths and work out what you've got left and what you should
be going for and it just is such a brilliant example of open source software that is scratching
an itch.
One thing darts had gone for it the bit of maths that you had to do you took that away.
I'm terrible at maths.
Yeah but that's why you keep repeating it and then you get better at it.
I mean it's not like it's an unending number a series of numbers that you've got on a dartboard.
Jesus.
If I was playing in a pub and I'd had some refreshments this would be incredibly helpful
and would really make the rest of the evening more enjoyable by just like loving darts at
a dartboard and not having to worry about all of that troublesome maths stuff.
I would quite enjoy this although the first time I read this in the doc I read it as audio
darts and I watched a video on mute and I convinced myself that this thing could tell
where the dart had landed by the sound it was making and I was more impressed by that
I'm afraid but it doesn't exist.
No rather than triangulating it with three cameras which is a little bit more realistic
and plausible.
Well yeah.
Onto a bit of admin then but first of all just a quick thank you to everyone who supports
us with PayPal and Patreon.
We really do appreciate that.
If you want to join those people you can go to latenightlenix.com slash support and remember
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And if you want to get in contact with those you can email show at latenightlenix.com and
if you want to talk to other listeners you can go to latenightlenix.com slash community
for all the details there.
Let's do some feedback then.
Rasmus said, A listener asked if the real tone cable for rocksmith could be used with
Linux, having read that it could not.
The fact of the matter is that it can be used with Linux.
Distro is with recent 5 plus kernels pick up the real tone cable as a standard USB audio
input device so it pretty much works the same as any USB headset microphone you can buy.
I've used it with guitar X with pipe wire on the host system and then guitar X was installed
via flat pack.
It uses jack and works just fine.
A couple of other people said this as well so you don't even need to buy an audio interface.
I have a find I was going to associate with this but I'm never going to build it because
it's far too complicated and it's I think called Quinnie and it's a low latency guitar
effect thing that you can build with a bit of soldering and a screen and a raspberry
pie and it looks amazing.
So if anybody wants to really like up their home built guitar effects game then this is
definitely the way to go.
Oh this looks really cool.
Yeah it does.
I just know it's never happened.
It's too much involved.
It was bad enough trying to install guitar X on a pie let alone actually soldering stuff.
Yeah I don't think I would ever get around to making it but it does look cool nonetheless.
Alex says just wondering if you'd consider separate subscriptions for the late night Linux
podcast so that people could support you for a lesser amount than the current $10 per month
and still get one or two podcasts ad free.
Now I have investigated this and I think it might be possible to have different $5 tiers
maybe.
So is there any interest dear listener in the individual show is having a $5 tier and
then a $10 tier for everything is that just too complicated I don't know let us know what
you think.
And Charlie has got in touch with us she says given that Faelim is concerned about his Hoover
murdering him as he sleeps he might be interested in the dust builder and Vail Tudo projects
valetudo.
The first one allows the routing of many robot vacuums while the latter installs a local first
app and UE that allows you to control the infernal machine.
I use it happily along with home assistant so that my vacuum cleaner is controlled by
me and me alone and not by the Russians the Chinese or the French.
So you all laughed at me when I said this right but I was looking at an issue on my
network earlier this week and there I saw both of the Hovers which are running so I
had to get second one because we have two dogs might as well have two over at this point.
One upstairs one downstairs the bloody thing was sending packets to my computer on port
667 which is IRC and I thought fucking hell it's been looking for a command and control
package here.
So I started capturing TCP dump and it just seems to be sending the same thing I imagine
it's a I'm running I'm running but why the fuck is sending my computer I've got nothing
to do with it.
So yeah I would love to use either of these two projects but unfortunately my Hoover is
supported by neither and it doesn't map either so yeah unfortunately it's a UFE something
or other and yes Jim got in touch to say that they've been hacked and yes it's not
a camera so at least that much.
I was going to say it's not map that you know of.
Well yes.
I'm going to fucking put it in a box and I'm going to analyse every single fucking wave
that comes off that thing.
It's probably communicate with the speaker on my PC it's just Lullingmill Defuzzer security
with bogus Wi-Fi packets the bastard.
Ben wrote in to say I've heard you talk about your favourite desktops like XFCE and KDE
and at length about Ubuntu but I don't ever remember hearing you talk about Arch Linux.
I think Greyman has.
Hey that's mission accomplished.
I'm single handedly trying to change attitudes to Arch.
Yeah.
Well it has a reputation for being elitist just because Judd Vinette it's creator left so
much up to the user especially the installation but I just recently used a new guided installer
Arch installer and got it up and running.
It's the lightest and fastest Linux distro I've ever used.
Lots of software potentially available but I'm loving the minimalism of starting with
such a light OS.
I literally had this as one of my discoveries it was what maybe six or nine months ago.
I do remember you mentioned that alright.
Yeah it's fucking brilliant.
Of course it's like is it not just like a kernel system D and bash is that all that
you get by default.
No come on you get a desktop I think or maybe I installed XFCE4 on top.
I don't know it is minimal definitely and you do have to build it up but that's the
whole fucking point of Arch is you just make your own distro out of all the latest shit.
You tell me you don't even compile it yourself like Gen 2 oh my god it must be so slow.
Well it's old hat now anyway now that Nix OS is like the hot shit supposedly.
But yeah we have talked about Arch and Graham uses Arch to test all software out and everything
all the time don't you.
Yeah I do and it was my daily driver for a long long time eight nine years.
Are you saying it's not anymore?
Well mostly actually with work I'm mostly using neon.
Wow okay interesting.
Yeah with your three grand hypervisor M1 Mac or whatever.
No I'm still using my normal desktop PC for a day to day work unless I'm travelling.
Alright very cynically a gel.
Yeah use the same machine for years.
Oh still the Varch it is really empowering knowing what's running.
Just things like setting up pipe wire and knowing you're not going to have any kind
of conflict with Paul's audio and when you do get something to work you've had to understand
why it's working.
I know it shouldn't always be that way but it is a really interesting way to learn about
Linux and a great way of running plasma in particular.
What's the great way of running whatever you want as long as you want the latest version
of it.
And it seems to me the whole point of arch is that it's for people who want the latest
whatever it is that you want whether that's a test of environment whether that's a particular
application.
It's the first place or among the first places that you're going to get you know say the
new version of audacity or whatever or plasma or can I am or whatever it's just the sort
of the the cold faces it were of open source software.
Big shout out to the AUR for being that repository of new software and also the package manager
itself is pretty easy to understand if you want to build your own packages.
I do so I run a VM on an M1 Mac and I do run into problems with the architecture not being
set correctly because there's still so many AUR packages that assume x86 64 often you
have to go into the package and just manually change that.
So you do run into some problems in the AUR but it's still the best repository of latest
releases I've found.
Isn't the AUR a bit of a Wild West though?
Yeah it totally is it is but because it's so easy to relatively easy to create packages
there you get things it's better than it's a step up from building your own you know downloading
git cloning and then configuring and making in a directory.
Well Richard suggested we check out material MK docs for markdown documentation generation.
I'll put a link to that in the show notes and also said I've listened to your podcast since
luddites while proper old school and can't help but feel that rail slash fedora doesn't
have a fair representation.
I mean you're not wrong Richard but none of us use fedora or and rail or centaas or any
of the clones so we just don't talk about it because we don't have a lot of personal
experience of it that's not to say that we hate it or think it's shit or anything settle
down failing.
I said nothing I said nothing.
Yeah but I could hear your thoughts.
You fell into the thoughts.
It's totally fine and you know they're solid distros on that side of the fence but it's
just not something that we use so we don't really talk about it because there's not much
point really.
There's nothing worse than using a distro you're not familiar with and you just feel like
you're lost and you're doing things wrong and you feel like you're typing what your
elbows.
I think we would only be spouting shit and it would be wrong.
And Graham Dent talked about his centaas VPS that is still running like centaas five
or whatever.
God you shouldn't bring that don't keep bringing that up.
He just said it that means it's still there.
Oh my God.
No no that's not there.
You've got to find it.
It's not there what a lie.
There's an interesting question about the sort of news articles we read and share with each
other and generally report on.
They tend to be around the Ubuntu ecosystem.
Now is that because those get reported more often or is that because the algorithm is
pushing those articles to us.
Perhaps we should try and expand our minds a little bit and go looking for other articles
but I just don't know where to find them.
Well I do see quite a lot of articles about the flora world but I just know that I'm
not.
We don't have much personal interest in them and you know I try and keep up with that
sort of thing for professional reasons but I don't have that much interest in running
fedora or rel or its clones on servers.
I'm just perfectly happy in the Ubuntu world and you know if I want a bit of excitement
then something like arch for a bit of the other as it were but it's just not something
that you not give a shit about.
I learnt that a long time ago and stopped putting relevant things in the show I think
fair enough.
When you just said fuck all about them.
So sorry Richard I don't think we're going to be covering much of that kind of stuff
at any time soon but it's not out of any malice or anything it's just the way the chips
have fallen.
He also said, failure's passion for KDE is contagious.
I'm giving it a go on my thinkpad P1 and guess what?
Off down this page, kde.org slash distributions is a fedora KDE spin.
I can let you know how I get on with it.
Well do please let us know how I get on with it.
And homework homework I want this to be done properly.
I want you to point out anytime that you encounter a GTK app that should be not there
because if it's a KDE distribution it should be KDE apps all the way and I genuinely mean
this because I tried KDE on I don't know if it was Red Hat or what I think it might
even be pre fedora back then and what put me off was the fact that every time I wanted
to use a sys admin tool it was always a GTK app because it was trying to integrate and
it felt very much like KDE was a second glasses and so I want to know is it still a
second glasses and so there.
Homework.
And just to quickly mention Bertol's email where he talked about trying KDE plasma after
you fucking banged on about it and compared to Gnoam it was way faster he said and got
longer battery life.
Obviously.
I was going to read the whole thing out but I just can't take your fucking smugness failing.
So it seems that you've got a couple of converts there well done.
Good.
I hope you're proud of yourself.
I am.
Good.
Yeah.
I hope some BSD people are questioning their life choices right now too.
Well in terms of lightness with KDE and Gnoam you've heard of KDE now get ready for
XSCA that's all I can tell you.
It's like what happened if you forgot to buy the car.
Or Sterety 3.0.
Whatever.
I'm just not as good an advocate.
I'm not.
That's the problem.
I'm just not as good an advocate.
Look Ben I tried plasma and it was fine but XSCA is better so fuck you.
Yeah.
Right well we're going to get out of here then.
We'll be back next week when who knows.
There might be some news might not be.
We'll have to see.
But until then I've been John.
I've been Phallam.
I've been Graham and I've been Will.
See you later.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
the.
♪♪♪
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