Late Night Linux – Episode 233

Hello and welcome to episode 233 of Late Night Linux, recorded on the 5th of June, 2023. I'm Joe and with me are Faelin. How's it going? Great. Good evening. And Will. Hello. Let's get straight on with our discoveries then. Faelin, what is zildox.org? zildox is fantastic. It is pretty much like that thing I've found before which I've totally forgotten the name of. That was the documentation thing for your phone. Zildox is a application that allows you to download various projects and there's a lot of projects on there and pull down the documents just or locally and you might say that's ridiculous I have the internet. Well, do you have the internet on a plane? Well, you might do these days but you might not necessarily have it. Well, it also makes it handy that if you've tried to research on a lot of different projects for somewhere where you might be offline or have spotty internet connection, you just want to know that you've got the docs with you so you can do the work. There you go. You've got them right there and it manages them like it's a repo of all the documentation itself. Pulls them down. They look pretty good. Ironically not the HTML 5 ones are just like the point out. They picked up that I had a dark team and made the back of the page dark also so I could see pretty much black on dark gray. It was like cool. Cheers guys. The one document I thought I would look alright wasn't but yeah, really good. I say they've got old versions of things as well so they've got your favorite Python 2 as well as 3. How dare you, sir. I use Python 3 mostly. Yeah, no they do and that actually makes it really good because they have other things like there's 209 docsets. They call them a docset so you can store it locally wherever and it's very handy if you're doing web dev stuff where you might have various versions of JavaScript libraries or if you're doing Java development, God help you, you know, the various Java versions that are about and things like Django and Python and all sorts of things like that. It's just really handy. So when you download it, is it just everything in one package or do you have to specifically cache stuff? So it kind of manages the cache for you. So the docset is their term for essentially that version of that document for that specific language or whatever it is and you say you take a box nice and simple, yeah, give me Python 2, Python 3 Django and say the JavaScript view or something like that and off it goes and get some for you and it stores it locally wherever you've set your cache directory to be and that's it and then you can just run an update at some point and there might be point releases or whatever and yeah, it'll pull up down and save it locally for you. I love this. I haven't traveled on a plane for a while now but when I was frequently traveling and wanted to try and do a bit of development to pass the time, this was the thing that always tripped me up, I can't quite remember how to do it and I can't get online to Google it and I'm so used to being able to just not remember things and look them up being constantly connected. This is a really elegant solution to that problem. Yeah, and to be quite honest, I quite like it because I have my left mouse monitors in a portrait mode, standing tall essentially and I use that for ducks and a lot of the time it's PDFs which aren't great because they're designed for A4 sheets of paper which it is not HTML is generally better so I had a browser falcon that literally was my document looking up browser but that wasn't handy because then it didn't have my Firefox passers and stuff like that so I had two copies of that line around and it was just annoying just for documentation. So yeah, this is a purpose application like you just shove over on that monitor and then pin it and whatever and have it in all views or whatever and it's on my dev stuff on there. We all know you use that vertical monitor for YouTube shorts. I do your rights. I can put them in full screen and sit back and relax, shut up what I do now. Will, clonezilla. Clonezilla is one of those applications that's been around for as long as I can remember nobody knows where it came from. It just appeared one day and yet everybody has used it or at least know somebody who has used it and I just thought it was worth giving it a shout out. I had reason the other day to move the windows installation on one of my kids gaming machines onto some new hardware and I had to replace the hard disk because that was one of the things that had failed and I just thought, oh God, how do I do this again? How do I make sure that I don't deactivate windows when I change too much of the hardware and what do I do about moving the disk partitions around and all of this stuff? And I thought, oh, I remember clonezilla, I wonder if that's still a thing and would you believe it? It hasn't changed for about the last 20 years. It works brilliantly. It allows you to just make a whole clone of a disk exactly as it is or you can clone a particular partition, you can move partitions around. So if you want to move from one disk to a new disk which is bigger, clonezilla is a really convenient way of doing that for no money. If you Google how to move windows onto a new disk, you will get hundreds and hundreds of results for seemingly free software packages that only do about a third of what you need them to do and by the time you've installed them and tried using them, you've probably wasted half an hour for each one. Don't bother with any of those things that claim to be free. Just get clonezilla and it will solve all of your problems. The documentation is pretty accurate. It's been around since the year dot, so there's lots of advice and help out there to look for. It just works and it's a really great example of a useful Linux based free software tool that does things better than the paid options. Isn't it just a wrapper around DD? Oh, stop. You're so, you and DD, did they pay you money or something? Yeah. It just feels like DD, but like you opened it and then pressed up, up, down, down, left, left, right, right, or whatever and got the cheat mode for it. No, it can use DD if you what you want is a very blunt instrument, but it's built from a whole load of other parts, which are primarily around creating clones of partitions or images of partitions rather than just copying the whole disk exactly as it is. If you clone the partition, you can clone it to a file, you can clone it straight to a new disk. It supports all manner of USB connected disks by the way, so I got an NVME drive and a USB adapter, plugged it in, booted up clonezilla and said from that disk to that disk, and it's sorted that out and resized the partitions for me, DD won't do that for you. And also I think it's got some clever stuff in there that will let you didle with the Windows registry. So if you want to move it to a new machine, it can effectively clone it so you don't have to reactivate it and all that crap. Did you mention that it's also a boot disk? Oh, I didn't. Yes, it comes. There are a few different versions of them. There's a net boot version, which is fun. If you just, you know, running centrally, then you can clone all of your machines on your network very easily. But the most useful version is a live USB stick image that you just pop in and boot from and then you're straight in. Yeah, I've used that to save sort of company data off machines, stuff, clients have had or, you know, oh, banger workstations that should have long been been, but haven't been because they're the vital machine with the vital software on it. And yeah, so, you know, rescuing accounting packages and such, and yeah, it's brilliant. There's one more use case I want to mention, which is a bit niche, but very cool. If you had an image that you wanted to blat onto, let's say, 10 workstations, clonezilla has a server component that you can host that image on and then image, you know, multiple machines at the same time through multicast. And yeah, you could be building hundreds of machines simultaneously with a free software solution. So if you're into Windows admin and this is a problem that you have to solve, clonezilla is a really good option. Oh, that is really cool. It didn't have that back in the day when I was doing Windows stuff. That sounds awesome. Okay, some listeners of late night Linux already used Trunas and this episode is sponsored by iXSystems. In case you didn't know, iXSystems is the company behind Freenas and Trunas, and has chosen Linux for their latest open storage distro, Trunas scale. Trunas was originally built on FreeBSD, providing unified storage for millions of users from the enterprise to the home. Trunas scale is Debian based and combines the legendary data management, protection and scalability of open cell FS, with the power of Kubernetes apps and KVM for virtualization. Trunas scale is open source and completely free to use. And when you're ready for a mission critical business solution with 24.7 support that won't lock you in with overpriced licensing, iXS is ready to help with Trunas enterprise. To learn more about Trunas and download it for free, visit trunas.com slash LNL. That's trunas.com slash LNL. Graham, you have decided to ignore all the cool new features in pocket and move to something that's open source instead. Well, I'm back. Yeah, I was an avid user of pocket for years, was it read it later and then Mozilla bought it and I've been bookmarking things. I use it as part of work and for finding phosphics and things that I don't have the time to read. It's basically like a cash bookmark tool, you know, if you bookmark something, it'll download a cashed version. You can read it through the apps or through the browser. And I have to actually thank failin' for this and also a couple of listeners the last time I talked about using pocket and not being happy that it wasn't open source. Both failin' and the listeners recommended Waller bag as an alternative. And I mentioned it a couple of episodes ago when Mozilla dropped the support for emailing links to your pocket account. That broke it for me because I used cute browser and had a script to email myself links to my pocket account and I could no longer do that. So I really needed to find an alternative and Waller bag. I was put off because it's a, it's a self, it's purely open source alternative to pocket. I wanted to self-host it and as everybody knows, my self-hosting means sentos. I don't know what we nearly had it. I see all the reasons I suggested it to him. I thought whatever you could, weasel that number out of them. So actually I have to say, I've never done this. I used the Leno voucher from late night Linux. I thought well I'll try the Leno at the same time, it really did. So I set up like an Ubuntu server, it is a pain, I must admit, it seems a bit bizarre. I didn't use Docker. I set it all up myself and it's the old kind of MariaDB or my SQL. Populating it with tables, important credentials, let's encrypt PHP. It seems weird installing PHP in 2023. It's a bit of a pain and the other thing is you do need your own domain of some kind to use to be able to forward requests to it and for let's encrypt. Obviously it took me about 45 minutes. I've got it on the cheapest option at the node. So it's just like five pounds a month so far, really impressed. But Waller bag specifically, I love it. It's got an accompanying Android app. It's got a CLI tool which I now use in cute browser to send my links to my account. It could import my pocket links. It could only import two hundred of them, which I think is actually a limit of Mozilla's pocket API, which is a pain because I probably had more than that, but I just accept that I'm done with pocket. Then other things I like about it, there's got plugins for all the main browsers. The plugins all let you tag articles, which I find useful, like synth stuff or a phosphic stuff. It's a bit 99% cover there, isn't it? Yeah. And the user interface in a web browser is really nice. You've got the thumbnail view, you've got a list view, you can filter by tags. Something that pocket couldn't do that Waller bag does is automatically tag posts according to a Red Jets expression, so you could get it to automatically tag synths if I put a big list of synths in the story, in the Red Jets, I mean. And it has its own really powerful API. And best of all, it creates an RSS feed of the things you add to it, so you can subscribe to that. You can add it to Calibre, for example, and automatically send cashed, downloaded versions of the stories you link to your ink device, like a Kindle, and it works brilliantly. It's a great replacement, apart from the setup, it surpasses pocket, and I'm really pleased. So thank you, everyone. Yeah, so the setup, how many times did you forget your semi-colon on the end of your DB stuff? Well, yeah, I must admit, I always have to relearn that stuff and I hate having to do it. I wish there was an easy way to set up something like this. Well, there is. It's probably a Docker container. I did search for a snap, but I didn't find one yet. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why. I don't massively trust just downloading Docker images from places, and I wanted to know what I was installing, I suppose. I think there might be an officially supported Docker image, which supports it. And then I worry about doing that on a cheap Leno shared server somewhere, whether the Docker would add too much to it. At least you know how you installed it, and if you saved it to a text file or whatever, at least you know how to get it back. Yeah, I'm sure that, you know, being someone who works in documentation, you've documented the process from start to finish. No. Oh, it's so funny. The amount of times the fact that, you know, maybe that's why I got into documentation because I never do it. The clever bit is that I find the caching really intelligent. I mean, it downloads, it tries to download as much of a story as it can do. It fails a little bit with things like GitHub links and there are a few rough edges, but far fewer, I think, than with Pocket. Well, that's what I was going to ask. Like Pocket, I remember, wasn't 100% with the caching, but it was pretty good, but it's the same wallabags even better, then. When it works, it's better, and it works with probably 70% of the sites I try it with. When it doesn't work, it's not as good as Pocket. Pocket's much more consistent, and it'll at least get something. And it's not actually the caching that I use these things for. It's convenient if it does cache it, because I do use RSS and RSS reader to go through the feed, and I sometimes need to be reminded of what it was that I was linking. But it can, it's better when it works, and it doesn't always work. I used Pocket for years, and then just moved to a Google Docs workflow, where I'll just paste stuff in, and that's part of what's keeping me on Android, I think, is that it's harder to do that with iOS. And also, I just, I still haven't found a decent RSS reader for iOS that's free. I think that's the problem, that if you want anything good, you have to pay for it. It's probably only like two quid away over, but I'm just quite happy with the feed me, the feed me integration and everything. But yeah, I think that if I was going to go back to a different workflow, what about it's probably what I would go for, because it's more about just having the links saved somewhere, and the caching's a bonus, isn't it? Yeah. But I also need a quick keyboard shortcut or a button in the toolbar, you know, because I usually haven't got time to really indulge in reading about the synth, and the link comes up. I want something quick without having to copy and paste the URL somewhere, like you could always do that in pocket, copy and paste the URL, and you can in Wallerbag too, but even for Safari, there's a Wallerbag widget that you can just click on or set up a keyboard shortcut for to paste the URL, I mean, to automatically add the URL to your list. But on Firefox, it'll nicely come up with, do you want to tag the story, and you can choose, if you ignore it, you don't have to, but you can choose the tags that you've already created or create new ones directly when you add a story, which I find it really useful. All right, I'm surprised it doesn't just delete Wallerbag and give you a full-screen advert for pocket, that'll come. On to a bit of Ermin, then, first of all, thank you everyone who supports ours with Paypal and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. If you want to join those people, you can go to latenightlinux.com slash support, and remember that for various amounts on Patreon, you can get an advert free RSS feed of either just this show or all the shows in the late nightlinux family. And if you want to get in contact with us, you can email show at latenightlinux.com. OK, this episode is sponsored by TailScale. Go to tailscale.com. 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So go to tailscale.com to try it for free and up to 100 devices. That's tailscale.com. All right, well, it's time for me to mute fail-ims, Mike, while I tell you about my experiences of the Pixel 7. I saw the highlights in our dark, and I'm looking forward to this. Yeah, yeah. So I got this Pixel 7. How long ago was that? It feels like months ago at this point. Maybe like three, four months, anyway. So I've had some time to actually live with it. And I've become less enamored with it, to be honest, from a software point of view. I mean, it's still too heavy. I pick up my wife's OnePlus 6, which used to be mine, and it just feels so light compared to the Pixel 7. But that aside, anyway, charging issues, that's my main problem with it, right? I plug it into charge, and I've just got no idea if it's going to charge today. Or not. And you know, I might get in bed, let's say, feeling a half-cut or what's the double-cut more like. And just plug my phone in, stick it down, and then wake up, and it's 40-something percent plugged in, not charging. And someone said, check the, the thing with MacFail said, check the charging port, make sure there's enough fluffer there. And believe me, I've checked that. It's not that. This is a software issue, man. It just connects with charger, and then decides randomly whether it wants to charge or not. And some cables work sometimes, and they don't other times. It's just very frustrating, to be honest. And some charges work, and some don't, I just, I have to plug it in and make sure that it's actually charging before I can move on to the next thing that I'm doing, which is just annoying. Does it have some kind of intelligent charging thing that stops it overcharging at certain times? The iPhone's got something like that, and it's bloody annoying, and it will stop it charging because it thinks it doesn't need to be charged beyond whatever percent, like 50 percent. Yes, it does have that, and I checked and it is enabled. But if it's at like 40-something percent, it's four o'clock in the morning, I'm getting in bed and I plug it in and then I wake up, and it's still on 40-something percent, then that's not intelligent charging. That is fucking dumb charging. Yeah, for sure. So, I think it might be a bit to do that, but I'm sort of scared to turn off the intelligent charging because I don't want to fry the battery, so yeah, I don't know on that one, but it's either way that is just an annoyance with it. Also, sometimes I get it out of my pocket, and it's just arstyled something. It's fucking unlocked itself, and I definitely locked it before I put it in my pocket, and I don't know, is my thigh somehow doing my pattern on there? Does it think that my thigh has got the same thumbprint as me? I don't think so. So that's very annoying. And then sometimes apps, and to be fair, this is mostly mastered on, so it might be mastered on default, the official client. I open it and it's just a black screen, and so I have to then kill that app and bring it back. And it's just generally a little bit buggy, and it's not really any less buggy than lineage. And I thought what I was getting with a stock pixel was not buggy bullshit like that. So that could be mastered on problem. I don't know. I should file a bug, but I don't know if it is a problem or if it is the pixel problem. But when I first talked about this, I raved about the camera, right? I said, oh, this is the best camera that I've ever had. And for some extent, I stand by this, yes, fail him, get ready, get ready. So you'll never guess what my problem with the camera is. Take a wild guess what the problem is. Did it keep like some shooting sat on it and set up the moon when it was time to take photos? Yes. That's exactly what it is. Now, what it is, why yesterday I went to an event that was outdoors and it was a sunny day and managed to avoid getting a sunburn just about, but I took some photos with it. And then I looked at them, and this is something I've been suspecting for a few weeks. And even in bright sunlight, they are over processed and have that weird sort of AI look to them. Oh, I hate that so much. It's like the colors are too vivid and no, it's not that. It's just that there's a certain, it's like if you look at Street View these days, right? It's not just pictures anymore. They try and make it look all 3D, but it's got that weird sort of AI-ness about it. Okay. I know what you mean. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but just every photo I take with it, phone off. If it's pitch black when I normally go outside and it's got a sort of makeup, the shit that's in the photo, I can forgive it, but in bright sunlight, I want something that is more realistic and less processed. And I'm sure I can get other apps that would give me a more realistic thing, but this is the stock camera on it. I'm trying. I'm deliberately trying for the last few months to live the stock pixel life. And yeah, like you are going to go out about phone, I think there's too much AI, there's too much bullshit. Although I have started using the okay Google thing, and yeah, it's just lit up now. Yeah, great. Thanks. Fuck off. Have you tried raw photos like using the raw mode from the advanced menu? I tried to look for that and I couldn't see it somehow. I bet if you said, okay, Google, take a photo of this outside garden scene and put black electrical tape over the camera lens, it probably would use a better picture than what it's taken out the lens itself. It is getting to the point where you do wonder, does it actually need it? It's more like an interpretive painting that's happening. All right. So there is an option in advanced raw slash JPEG control. Show option to turn on raw plus JPEG in the viewer. More files preserve details and offer more controls while editing, they take up more storage space. Good look at that. 30 megabyte photos. In theory, it will contain all the data that the camera captures and then you've got to spend a bit of time editing it with something, but it'd be interesting to see if it doesn't have that processing. Right. So I might just do it wrong by having everything default then. No, I mean, I think it sounds like a mistake. It sounds like they've made some bad software choices as what I'm trying to say is, I don't know that you're doing anything wrong. They're choosing a certain aesthetic that sounds horrible. Switching to raw is like a last resort really. It's like old fashioned photography where you have to interpret the photos you want to. Do you have to put your phone inside an envelope and hand it into a lad omelie that's staircase to shop and center every way for like 24 hours for it to come back? Well, raw is a really great way of shooting photographs, but it's not pointing click. We then have to load it into an app or put it on raw therapy or something on Linux and change the exposure and the brightness and the contrast and the shadows and the highlights, all those things that raw lets you do, but it takes time. But it'd be interesting to see if it doesn't do any wonder whether it does any of the processing it's doing with the default modes or whether it just abandons all of that, and gives you something that you might prefer even as just a JPEG. Well, I'll have to do some experimentation with that, but overall, I'm pretty much happy with the Pixel 7 still, but I think the honeymoon period's over and I'm starting to see its flaws. It'd be interesting if you went to a lineage counseling for a bit and see if that's any better. More like a trip to Cupertino for one of their expensive offerings. Ah, stop. I think at some point you just get old enough to just buy an iPhone. No, you don't. Yes, you do. You don't. I'll get a rotary dial phone and a long extension cable before that happens. OK, 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, 7, 365 to every level of user, to ease of use and set up, it's clear why developers have been trusting Linode for projects both big and small since 2003. Follow your entire application stack with Linode's one-click app marketplace, all build it all from scratch and manage everything yourself with supported centralized tools like Terraform. And check out their managed MySQL, Postgres and MongoDB databases that allow you to quickly deploy a new database and defer management tasks like configuration, managing high availability, disaster recovery, backups and data replication. Simple and fast to deploy with secure access, their flexible plans include daily backups. Go to linode.com slash late night linux, create a free account and you'll get $100 in credit and support the show. That's linode.com slash late night linux. Fail him. You've got some more complaints about flat pack for a change. Yeah, I mean, shocker here, but yeah, so I hinted last week, Leam's PC, it's essentially a game's PC, purity for playing games, runs Linux, Katie Neon, Steam was installed through, he actually installed Steam through discover, so it's the flat pack that came on there because I see only one. The other alternative is the Steam installer. So he has a Oculus Quest 2, I believe that he saved and scraped and had birthday money for, and he wanted to hook that up with the special cable that you have and you can hook it up to your PC. And I looked into it and yes, there is a way to do it. And as a thing called ALVR and it hooks into stream VR games to your PC with Wi-Fi apparently and I thought, okay, magic, it's covered. So that was my checkbox item months ago when you started this process of saving. And so we tried it a weekend to actually hook it up and it didn't work and it was really annoying and I didn't know why it was doing it. So I did a bit of research, he went off in half and played something else and I thought, okay, so it seems to be you dev rules aren't there. So I got a thing called Steam, oh what Steam devices I think it's called, and I plugged that in. And meanwhile at the same time I had a problem with a steering wheel, it was doing the same thing. So I got a logic force feedback steering wheel, I traded the old one back in that didn't work anyway. I got one that I thought would be a bit more reliable. And that works for most stuff, but then some games, it goes, oh, you don't have the you dev rules in, I'm like, I definitely have the you dev rules in, I can see the file right there, it's there, we booted, I know it's there. But Steam doesn't pick it up properly. And I think there is some sort of miscommunication going on with the flat pack, maybe it's containment method or whatever, and you dev or the kernel or whatever, but something doesn't work, it doesn't work with the VR headset, which just seems like five projects that I'll link in together like Steam VR, ALVR, then you have to get this other thing which is called, oh, what is it called? I can't remember, but it's like, it's another application that you have to install separately. Sidequest, I think it's called, and you have to install that and you have to do all things in the right number of steps, but Steam VR still wasn't seen that headset. And at this point, I'm going to have to uninstall his Steam Insoli has now, and then test it with the non-flap pack installed to see if that's the issue. I have a clue, but all I can say is it's a big pile of shite, the whole lot of it. Have you been able to get any support from whoever the manufacturer or a voculous thing is? Whoever that might be? You know who that is. That is just, I didn't pick it. He picked this all myself, and I'm sure it was due to YouTubers or some other influencer or so, but yes, I have not resorted to any support on that. I have tried looking around and not found any, so that's why my next step is to take the flat pack out of the equation. And I'm not mentioning who that manufacturer is. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I've gotten officially supported. I've got an HTC Vive running on the next Steam VR, and it's still a nightmare of U-Dev Rules, even without great with using the Debs provided by Valve themselves. It's still a nightmare. It's still a nightmare keeping the right version of Nvidia drivers installed, and the right specific versions of the library requires. And even then, it doesn't seem to work that well. Great. Cool. Well, maybe this issue, I can just brush them off until somebody develops a piece of hardware that works. Do you use the Steam as in the one from Valve themselves? Yeah, I do. I see. I think that's what that is, because I tried dirt for on my machine, which I have a really old Steam installed off to a separate disk that runs NFS, and that's the reason why I couldn't use the snap back in the day, or the flat back now, because they want to be in your home directory. I will have a way massive thing, and I said, well, all the games can go over here on this huge, you know, double disk system. And I tried the steering wheel out on dirt for, picked it up fine. So I know it has to be the flat back, in some extent, doing it. But maybe not for the Steam VR bit, who knows. But it just can't see it. It just doesn't see it, and neither does dirt for it, doesn't see the steering wheel. So yeah, we really annoy it, and that's why this whole we had stuff working, and now we're going to contain it apps that don't work. It just seems a bit like a backward step. Maybe we're a bit too keen with this, and we should have just relaxed a little bit, anyway. Right, well, we better get out of here then. We'll be back next week when, honestly, who knows. But until then, I've been John. I've been Salem. I've been Graham. And I've been well. See you later.