Late Night Linux – Episode 235

Hello and welcome to episode 235 of Late Night Linux, recorded on the 19th of June 2023. I'm Joe and with me are fading. Hello. Graham. Good evening. I'm Will. Hello. Let's start with some feedback. Gareth writes, I'm about to start at a company which is open source. I'm excited because this is the first time I'll be paid to work on code which is publicly visible, but it's a start-up, hence the risk it may not work out. I'd love to hear your thoughts on companies taking an open source approach. What opportunities does it provide over a closed source which may help to ensure a company can keep paying for people directly to work on open source code? Well, surely the first advantage is that you can get community contributions in theory at least. Yeah, I agree. I think there's two aspects to this. There's the companies that are using open source and allowing you to contribute to open source. That's one aspect of it. Working for a company which is paying people to work on open source is a different part of it. I think if you're being paid to be a developer and you as part of your job, you are enabled to contribute to upstream projects in the open, then that is an incredibly valuable thing for your resume that you get to be seen as being a contributor to an upstream project. You get to learn how to work with the community. You get your name out there and your resume is now your GitHub page where people can see the things that you've worked on, the contributions that you've made and how you've engaged with the community. That in itself is valuable, both monetarily and career-wise. To find a company which will pay you to work on open source, I think is perhaps more difficult to pay you directly, canonical red hat, those sorts of people will do it. I think the real value is in working for a company which is aiming to make a profit and is producing a service which also contributes to open source in the best way they can, which is by putting people onto the upstream projects and getting involved in that and learning interaction with the community and getting your name out there as an established expert in whatever it is that you're contributing to. Well done for managing to get the Holy Grail there because that's what you really want because it's great to have the right software and it's great that it's open and yeah, as long as you can appreciate to take, well, not criticism from different people contradicting what you might say, but learn from each other. It would be a hard place to be, mind you, where you're in the open spotlight, whereas in another close source company, you might be behind a sort of a curtain of a team who's doing something and it might feel a bit safer, whereas right here, you're kind of wide open for everything. It's one of those things where you just have to sort of roll with it somewhat and not take things personally and learn where you can learn and just maybe help you up the shut up after being in our souls. I think that's good advice. And I think the board a point of the companies themselves, how they can benefit, well, they end up with people like you, Gareth, the best and the brightest because there's a lot of people who really want to work on open source and do it all publicly. And that is really attractive to people who are looking for a job. I think it's more nuance and we don't know what the company is doing. To me, the open source part isn't the most important part. I'm assuming this is a startup that somebody or some people have seen an opportunity and the opportunity happens to be open source and that's genuinely exciting. But it's not the fact that it has to be open source because of some idealism. It's an opportunity. And in that case, I'm hoping the risk is worth it for all the reasons that will and fail him and you have said, Joe, if you can find a system that works and it's open source, that's great. But I think that's much more difficult. Most of the world doesn't care. And so without knowing anything about what the company is, I'm finding it difficult to comment because it's going for the sake of it being open source, it's going to be a struggle. And so I just hope that there's some unique aspect to this that we can all kind of learn from. Yeah, but from Gareth's point of view, being able to have his work out in the open, like Will said, having the nice green blocks on the GitHub thing, that's always about this. Yeah. And it's what personally drives me as well. I mean, I don't think I could work for a company that isn't Linux or open source for all the pros and cons of everything else. It's the only thing that really makes me feel I fit into something. Just you wait to get laid off and need another job growing, you'll change your turn so enough. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. But I would try very, very hard to find something involved with Linux and open source. I'd be the problem isn't like idealism. It's my own kind of laziness and being unable to engage with something that isn't also something that I care about. If I get a job in banking, I would just glaze over and be rubbish at it. It has to be Linux open source for me to like wake up in the morning. Honestly. There's a bit of a danger though where you can sort of worry about the open source side of things too much where it sort of consumes you a bit, maybe. For the people who are able to switch off at like 9 to 5 and just go, I don't care. I do my job. I come in. That's it. I'm fine. Whereas the fast side of things, it's a bit more involved because you feel like you've got a part in it. Well, certainly from my aspect anyway. And it's where you just go, you know, I wish I could just be excited about the latest iPhone come out and I could just pay the money, be part of the people and just do the thing. But it's a bit more of a slog when it comes down to the fast side of things and it can be wearing on yourself and that would be a danger to look out for because you can feel like you're on a, well, not a pilgrimage or something, but you feel like you're sort of taking the right route, maybe, but it can be awful, sort of lonely and hardcore sometimes as well. And it's a definitely thing to look out for, I would say. And you're also open to more public scrutiny, like Will, you were in quite a prominent position being the head of a Ubuntu desktop and that did grind you down a bit, didn't it? All the shit that you got on reddit. Yeah. And exactly what's failing was saying, it is exhausting dealing with flak every day and having to have an opinion about things that you've upset a particular person by making a particular decision and you think, oh, how come I didn't think of that at the time and you really beat yourself up over it and it's exhausting and there were definitely times where you think, oh, I wish I could just go back to being a normal again and not my world was much smaller before and sometimes I wish it was small again, but generally speaking, I think expanding your horizons is a positive outcome, but yeah, I think you do have to get a bit of a thick skin and you need some coping mechanisms and those coping mechanisms should not be drinking heavily. But the flip side of that must be that you do get people saying really positive things to you as well and really appreciating the work that you do. And if you're out in the open, do an open source work, then you're going to have both people giving you shit and also saying they appreciate you. And if you develop that thick skin and coping mechanisms, then it surely must be better than just working in total obscurity for a proprietary company that no one knows what you're doing. Everything's just done totally in secret. Yeah, 100%. Totally agree. And I think that's what Graham was making that point earlier on, right, that when you wake up in the morning, you want to be going and doing something which is open source because you do want to feel that you're contributing to something bigger than yourself and you want to be part of a bigger success. 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 debi-in-based and combines the legendary data management, protection and scalability of OpenCellFS 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. Let's do some discoveries then, Graham, stream android with screen copy, that's what I'm going to call it, even though it's spelled S-C-R-C-P-Y, but that's got to be scra-copy, screen copy, it's got to be something like that, anyway, with badly named project. Oh, it's a terrible name for a project, it's terrible for anyone let alone dyslexics. Oh, a pronounced screen copy, yes, I've got that with that even reading it, yes. But it's worth persevering, I think, I don't know why, but for a long time I've been looking for something that will stream my Android screen to my Linux desktop, it's sometimes convenient to be able to have your phone display on there and this is what Scrup does. And it does it brilliantly and you don't need a rooted device, you just need like ADB enabled in the developer settings on your Android device and then you run this client and the two things talk to each other and within a second, you get this perfect representation of your verbatim of your Android display on your desktop. It supports up to like 120 hertz, it's super smooth, it's all accelerated on your Android device, it looks brilliant and it does loads of things, but you can use your keyboard on your mouse on your Linux machine to interact with your Android device, it'll appear as a webcam or as a camera on your Linux system so you can use it in other apps. I mean, it's really useful if you ever have half a need to get your Android screen on your computer, such as, I don't know, for an app you may use or for debugging app development or just if you want to be able to see notifications while you're in important business meetings. So it's not just one way then, it's not just streaming it, you can send keyboard events back to the Android device. Yeah, just in that, I think that's like the only example, I think it comes up as an HID device on Android and so you can just kind of control it. It's not built to be a two way thing, but that is two way the element of it. So you can mouse and select apps and then type in the keyboard, it's just really all you need. Can you swipe around with your mouse then? No, I've not been able to do that. It appears like an Android mouse cursor, you know, if you've ever plugged a mouse into an Android device. Right. Yeah, okay. But I find it really useful and it's amazing the performance of it because it just, it just works. So well, you'd be able to, I haven't tried this, but I mean, it'd be perfectly fine playing games on your Linux machine that you may have on your Android device. That kind of thing. It's just, there must be some latency, I think the website says it's like between 50 milliseconds or something like that, but it feels very quick and natural, much better than VNC, which is what I was kind of expecting it to be like, but it's not like that at all. There's no compression. It's like one to one, super high resolution, if you've got high resolution device, really impressive for such a small tool with a terrible name. I am struggling a little bit to think of a use case for this. It seems like one of those things that's really cool, but like, why would I want to? So I do it for notifications mainly. There are a couple of apps I have on my Android device, like an RSS reader that I like, and it's a small window with a lot of functionality that you keep on your screen when you're doing other things. This is really geeky as well, but I've also used it in virtual reality so that I can access my phone where I've got my headset on. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I wasn't even going to admit to that because I knew you just would love it. Now you have. Sweaty me. I hear it. Kind of my phone. The RSS reader thing I could maybe see. Yeah. I don't know about this VR nonsense though. So it doesn't need anything on the phone itself then, just the Android. Yeah. Debug mode. Well, it's quite handy now in our friends. Yeah. I don't know technically. I don't know, actually. There must be some way of in ADB sending the video data. Yeah. Interesting. Fail him. Lobster. RSS. Lobsters. Yeah. This is probably not new to a lot of people, but it is similar to hacker news and the only reason I got myself in a bit of an annoyance with hacker news was I discovered the whole companies with AI being promoted by their own internal things and the whole backhandy thing where anybody getting access to AI was essentially just this giant scheme of circle jerky, hacker news, why combine your ownership that may be quite annoyed and I went, you know, even going to hacking news now, I'm irritated enough that I don't want to be there. So I already had Lobsters. I was using it now and again and I just decided to cut it, stick with it a bit more. Okay. Fair enough. There are some things in hacker news that are quite good, a bit out of tech stuff, but I don't know. I just don't want to give them any more of my effort anymore. I just don't even go there. I'm just sick of all the tech bros, really sick of them and Lobsters is a nice news aggregator that people who are decent human beings put their stories into. So there you go. Yeah. And you only need an account to upvote stuff or submit stuff, but if you want to just read it, then you don't even have to log in or anything. Yeah. Exactly. And to be honest, I'm not going to be doing much uploading stuff either. So yeah, read only is fine. All right. I found him gyro floor. Yeah. So I thought this would be really cool. And I liked the video or gifts that they had showing you how to use it. But it is a way to reduce via was a camera shake or whatever, wobble, whatever, I don't know what you would term it as properly. But essentially use up some of the space of the picture to stabilize the image inside. Oh, yes, image stabilization. There we go. I got there eventually. Now I have no skills with a video. And I thought I could just ease the plug in a video here. It looks like it's simple to use. It'll be great. Wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be. And it kind of needs to know what type of camera you've used. And I thought, well, okay, I'm sure they have phones. So I'll use one of my phone videos. Load it in. Went for OnePlus yet. They have a mobile section OnePlus. No, no 3T because my phone's too old. So I got something to kind of do something, but it didn't look quite as good as their demo videos. Let's put it that way. But I imagine if I had sort of modern recent gear and had a slightly more clue of what I was doing, it might actually look good. And yeah, I think there are people out there who maybe don't know. There's a free GPL 3 version piece of software that does this and could very well do well out using it. So it's kind of one of those four smarter people at home to use, not me. When I saw this link and looked at the GitHub page for the source. I saw those two demo videos and I thought, oh, wow, this looks absolutely amazing. And then I quickly went on YouTube to look at some other examples and what I was met with was page after page of tutorial trying to show you how to use this thing. It looks complicated. I've never tried using it, but just looking at these people talk about it, it looks complicated. Yeah. Well, it is necessarily a complicated thing to do, isn't it? To take a shaky video and work out how to make it not shaky by cropping in and stuff. And the link that we'll put in the show notes, you'll see these two examples. One of them is someone running down a mountain and it is night and day before and after. And then you see how it's done and it is very complex. This seems like one of those kind of professional tools. This is not a, you know, something that you're going to do in five minutes. This is something that you have to really know about video editing and video software generally to be able to use. But like Fabian said, it's great that there is a GPL3 piece of software that seems to be really competent at this. Not only that, but written in rust and using QML. Oh, it's like a double win over. I think I tried this before quite a while ago and I couldn't get it to it because at the time, it didn't seem to understand the gyroscope data from my GoPro, which is what I think it uses to predict how it's going to change the video footage. Right. But just looking at the read me now, it seems to support all kinds of cameras gyroscope data, including lots of GoPro devices. Yeah, like I was looking at the library there actually for and there is a huge number of stuff in there like mountains of stuff, but just not anything I had. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, this episode is sponsored by TaleScale, go to talescale.com. TaleScale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you are in accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. 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Onto a bit of admin then, first of all, thank you everyone who supports us 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 for various amounts on Patreon, you can get an advert free RSS feed of either just this show or all the shows in the latenightlinux family. And if you want to get in contact, you can email show at latenightlinux.com. All right, well, a quick update from a couple of weeks ago when I talked about the Pixel 7. It actually gets worse, believe it or not. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Glow while you can. So I had the June update and now it's all fine, right, except overnight, I'd go to see porn like, you know, 85% wake up, 75%. It's losing about 10% per night and I have no idea why. And it's just this dodgy, bloody update that's done it. Oh, shame. I know it's a real shame, isn't it? And you know, just after we recorded last time, I talked about wanting to get an iPhone but it was the RSS reader that's really holding me back with feedle integration. I thought to myself, I wonder what the official feedle apps like, I've never actually tried that. Turns out pretty good. So I've tried it on the iPad and I am now really close to just saying, fuck Android man. I think I am close to being old enough. But we'll see, we'll see. I'm not sure how this is gone. This is gone terribly bad. My clothing is gone terribly, terribly wrong here. What's gone on? Be careful what you wish for, Faelin. Just fucking put the image on it. You'll see a difference, I'm sure. Yeah, it'll be worse. Rubbish. Well, what is watchy? Well, would you believe that watchy is a watch and get this? It's built on an ESP32. Yeah, of course it is. No way. Do you like them? Well, I do. But I was made aware of this from a friend of mine at work and he got one just for calls. It's a microcontroller with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. It's an e-ink display, like quite a small one, watch face-sized e-ink display and you kind of bodge it all together with this strap and a battery and it's got some firmware with it that tells the time, but you can just use your Arduino IDE or platform IO and make your own software for your own watch. You can add UI widgets, he's hooked it up to his solar panels so that he can see what solar generation is being produced whenever he wants. It's just a nice little self-contained, open source hardware, open source software, nice little project, lots of hackability, looks like a bit of fun. Oh my God, and you can 3D print your own case for it. Or rather, you can get grained to 3D print your own case for it and build it here. That is fantastic. They've got the sort of start of a little marketplace as well going on, which I think makes it quite interesting that you buy one of these and then you can lean on the community to provide you with novelty watch faces and apps. And I think that if it gets going in any significant number, there'll be custom firmwares on GitHub and that kind of thing because there's no attempt to lock it down. It's purely an open device, so it should be a bit of a laugh. This reminds me of the pebble watches. It seems like a spiritual successor to them. Yeah, it could be. I mean, they were funded from a Kickstarter campaign and it seemed to be successful and I think there are people that still wear those watches because they just love the design and the life that they had, but yeah, shame that they obviously didn't work for Google. Assume you haven't assembled one yet. I haven't and I haven't actually ordered one. I'm kind of waiting to see how it goes, but my mate at works got one. And I've seen here is it looks a little bit homemade, I suppose, which is kind of part of the charm. Okay. Yeah, it's not exactly an Apple Watch series 11, is it? So it's good then? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, my Garmin looks pretty bloody ugly. I've got used to it, but it's this huge block on my wrist. No, that's chunky and cool, Graham. That's cool. If you can't fuck with the teacher by changing channels on the tele with it, then I'm not interested. So what is Tourist Omnia? I'm sure I've not been asked that correctly. I don't know how to pronounce it, but I think you did a good job. It's another piece of hardware and this time it's an open source router and Wi-Fi access point. Oh, good. I better buy that immediately, so you could also get me wrong again. Well, this one is genuinely open source and is built on top of open WRT, so it's actual open source this time. Well, the downside is, it's quite expensive. Four hundred and five hundred. Yeah, that's a bit steep, but it has got four aerials, it means faster. It's got four aerials, it's got Wi-Fi six, whatever that is, but it does a bit more. If you were going to buy a Raspberry Pi to run as a server now, this is only a dual core machine, so it'll have to be a relatively low powered one, then you could perhaps not have to buy one of those devices, but where it actually stands out, in my opinion, is that it's got three PCIe mini connectors inside it, and so you can stick hard drives, it's got the M SATA port built in there, you can stick hard drives or other cards or whatever you want in there. So you can actually use it like a more powerful computer with some actual storage and add-ons in there, so you could run a file server on it. You can run virtualised stuff on it, it's got a SIM card slot in it if you need a fallback. It kind of does all the things, it's also got some interesting software, which I think we touched on a few weeks ago, how do you try and manage what your kids are up to on your network? Well, this has got some Snoopy software in there, which will allow you to monitor and filter and block certain things through a relatively nice web interface. I say relatively nice, because it still looks quite a lot of clicking and pointing that needs to be done, but it looks like an interesting device, however, it is very expensive, I think it's overpriced, it has got all the aerials on it, I'm sure it will cover your house and next door as well, but I don't know, I'm not going to go and buy one and find out. I was going to say, this sounded like some of you are going to play back to your wife later to justify the expense, so you haven't actually bought one then. No, I kind of like all these new WiFi things that do two and a half gigabits, I just really don't need anything like that, so I don't really see a need and a pressing business case to really upgrade. I was really revving up, really revving up to get right stuck in until you mentioned the three bloody PCI mini PCI port and now it got, oh shit, that actually does sound really useful. Really though, the mini ones, the laptop style, how useful are they really? Yeah, you can get really cool expansion port and those though. Well, can you get a set of adapters and stuff? You can, yeah, you can, yeah, yeah, see, ah, you must. You couldn't even let me enjoy scuffing at you, you know, the aerials though, they look so silly. Well, at least it doesn't look like a spider. True, true, that is true. A couple of USB ports as well, could be useful. I think it genuinely could replace a separate router and Raspberry Pi doing networky stuff in your house. I think you could replace it with a single box, but it'll still be cheaper to buy two boxes. Well, you say that, but can you get them? That's the other thing. Well, yes, that's a fair point, the easy you can buy on Amazon. Yeah, I could get this later this week if I wanted to spend the 435 grid. 60-quid delivery though. Oh, that makes it need 500 quid. Ah, that's because you live in Brexit, Stan, though, isn't that, I mean, so. Oh, yes, yeah, well, off Amazon DE, it is five euros delivery and only 375 euros. Okay, so this is not for Brexit Britain. Maybe I'll buy three. Yeah, maybe you will. Then I will send you a phone with a battery in it. Oh, no, I won't be allowed to do that, will I? Okay, this episode is sponsored by Linode. Go to linode.com slash late night Linux, support the show and get $100 free credit. 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So this is a really, really simple application that allows you to crop videos, shorten them, rotate them so if you've accidentally shot them in the wrong orientation and then export them, you can make them smaller. It's just a really, really simple video editor. I don't think you could really call it a video editor because you can't combine clips or anything like that. It's just, if you want to just cut off the last couple of seconds or something or whatever, it could be a super useful tool for that. And I tried it out as a flat pack. So that's how I'm trolling failing with this one. And it's also very much a canoma as well. Maybe I like those types of things. I'm very with it and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I did find a weird bug in it where if you exported it as the same codex and everything that it was and you rotated it, it didn't do that properly, but then it was fine if you did the recommended web M. So I don't know exactly what was going on with that. So it's not 100% perfect, but it could be really, really useful. If, for example, you take a video of something and then you just want to cut just a little bit off the top of it or you want to zoom in like, oh no, I accidentally had my really disgraceful desk in shot to the left of it. I want to crop that out or something. I can see this being really useful for capturing screencast where you capture the whole screen and, you know, a notification pops up in the corner, which says something that you don't want to be there. And you can just shrink it down. Now, I know that you can record specific windows and all that kind of things, but I never remember to do that. And so I can see a lot of years for this. I often want to just trim a little bit off. This would be really good. And the other way that I'll be trawling faded this week is chat GPT Shell CLI. I hope your computer goes on fire. So both of these are stolen from OMG Linux, by the way. So I'll shout out to Jerry there. No, no shout out to Joey because he's evil. That's why. Well, he's been doing it for a year, so well done to him for that. So anyway, this is, as the name suggests, chat GPT on the command line. And you can even do image generation with it, supposedly. Now I tried to use it. And oh yeah, here's the other great thing about it. Not only is it AI and chat GPT to install it, you just curl the Shell script, pipe it to pseudo bash. Good. Good and glad. That's great. Great. So I did do this in a VM on a throwaway laptop installation of OpenSusur. I hope you physically threw the laptop paper window afterwards. Yeah, I did. Yeah, I did. I set fire to it. It's fine. So it wouldn't work for me, though, because my account is too old now. I haven't got any free API credits anymore. So you have to get your API key. And it turns out that when you first sign up for your open AI account, you get $20 or some number of credits anyway, and mine it expired. And I tried to sign up again. It needed a phone number and it wouldn't accept my Google Voice one. So then I had to put in my real one and it said, well, you've got a new account, but because this is a phone number you've used before, fuck you, no points for you, Joe. So yeah, wouldn't work for me. So I was unable to try it out, but if you've never signed up before and are willing to give them your phone number and want to use it, yeah, get right on that one line. What could go wrong? Yeah, that happy to use all of our information to make their products that they then tend to sell back to us. What lovely, lovely people out, nothing terrible, I'm sort of, I'm going to sign up with your phone number. I'm pretty sure I've got it somewhere. It's on your website, I think. It might be. It might be. Go do it now. Shit. Delete, delete, delete. Where's that archive that orange cancel that fucking website back up for? Well, we're better get out of here then, we'll be back next week when who knows what we'll be talking about. It's silly season. We might have to just talk nonsense about Brexit or something. But until then, I've been Joe. I've been Salem. I've been Graham. And I've been Will. See you later.