Hello and welcome to episode 2, 3, 7 with late night Linux recorded on the 3rd of July,
2023.
I'm Joe and with me, I fail him.
How's it going?
Graham.
Bit evening.
And Will.
Hello.
Let's get straight on with our discoveries then.
Will, you've got to follow up on your domain, registrar, dilemma.
Yeah.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how Google were shutting down their domain registrar
and were forcibly moving everybody to square space.
So I was looking to move my domain registrations somewhere else.
The first one that I came across was Cloudflare and we asked listeners to send in recommendations
of alternatives that they have tried.
And loads of people got back in touch with us and recommended a variety of places.
Cloudflare was recommended a few times by various people.
Yeah, deleted those emails.
There were a few others on there that I hadn't heard of for a while.
Gandy, for example, was aware that they existed.
They're still going.
They were so recently.
But they're still there.
I looked at them.
That looked okay.
Ventura, who were a company out in Australia, so I ruled that out.
And Porkbun, whose name, for some reason, passes my test, but not quite sure why.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
So yeah, name cheap is unacceptable, but fucking Porkbun is fine.
I don't make the rules.
Did you officially get an email from Google saying that we're hoisting your domain after
someone else yet?
I have still not had that email.
That is unbelievable.
Yeah.
So anyway, I went with Porkbun and it was very easy to move them across.
Google do make it quite easy to export across.
Porkbun make it easy to import those domains as well.
One thing they didn't do that CloudFlead did was duplicate all the DNS entries, so I had
to copy those across.
It's not a big deal.
But I've now moved all but my main domain across.
I'm worried that if I move my main domain out of Google, they will shut down my grandfathered
free Google domains account and I'll end up I'm to pay for my workspace.
So I don't want to do that yet, but I will do.
But long story short, Porkbun seem okay so far.
The tools look basic, but they work.
They've got an API so you can push updates.
They've got a DD client plug in, but you have to install it from GitHub, not the distro,
so you can update your dynamic DNS.
So far so good.
I will report back in the future, but I don't expect there to be any problems.
So thank you for everybody who wrote in with recommendations.
It was very useful.
Failure.
Mastered on plus, intercaps plus screen readers, what's all this about?
So I have always done this back in Twitter and in Mastered on where I have put a capital
letter at the start of every word, well, actually, not the first one, but the second one,
and etc.
Because I like to read it that way because I'm a penned and that is what suits me.
And it turns out that this is actually good for people who are blind and using a screen
reader software.
It can distinguish those words and read them out.
And I just thought, I'm brilliant and I didn't even realize that there you go.
Hang on.
I don't understand what you mean by this.
Well, if I was to say hashtag failum is brilliant and I would capitalize the F, the I and
the B, then that will be intercaps or camel case people sometimes call it, although I'm
never sure whether it's camel case or snake case or whatever, but the first letter of
each word capitalize it.
And that means the screen reading software can actually distinguish that and read it
out to the blind person, not just a big jumble pile of shite like that.
Okay.
Or you could just not use hashtags.
Yeah, but I mean, come on.
People use them all the time.
Not me hashtag winning.
Oh, God's sake, you're just old people.
I'm with it, I think, or I used to be and now it's not cool, but I don't care.
Anyway, just do that now.
That's what people should do.
So there, help people out.
All right.
And Python tools hidden in the STD lib.
Okay, standard library.
I was going to make it short.
It's not an STT.
It isn't the standard library.
So I have only ever really used the inbuilt web server there.
It's dead handy.
If you're on a box, you don't have access to any software you can install something,
but Python is there.
It was always a great way.
It was to go into directory as a stuff you wanted and start up the simple HTTP server.
Well, there's a whole load of the other ones.
And this article is quite cool.
In fact, the guy you ripped grept all the way through it, looking for, there's a terminology
in Python where you set a if name evil to main.
It's using the Dunderscore, which is the double underscore, and it's a way for a thing
to kind of advertise the fact that it can actually be run from standard input.
And that allows various modules to actually be called.
So I have one in my a list's file where I have a pretty Jason output.
The inbuilt Jason comes out terrible.
So you can actually run through the Jason library part of Python, and I can spit it out
in a much nicer, architected way.
There are a whole load of them that he's found things for doing like asynchronous I.O.
There's a cool one for doing tokenizing, which is where you pass through a Python library.
You can see what the actual interpreter makes of the various statements in it.
There's a whole load on there.
I haven't tried vast majority of them, but this has given me a bit of a challenge to actually
walk through the list and anybody who's interested, I think it'd be a bit of fun to try out
because if you've got no way to install stuff on a server, if you're locked down or whatever,
and those Python there, you have a fair whack of tools that you may not even be aware of.
Can we talk about the STD library?
Like you've got a lot of me.
Gunnery is out.
Yeah, a shot for that.
Yes, yes you can.
Graham, Node editing in Blender 3.6 LTS.
Yes, so Blender 3.6 was recently released.
So Blender's the modeling 3D animation studio powerhouse, amazing open source application
that used to have a really complicated UI and still does, but it used to have one too.
But I used to be into 3D graphics.
This is like in the mid-early 90s.
I had a legitimate copy of Lightwave on the Amiga and spent a long time actually messing
with stuff after.
I think Imagine 3D came for free and I covered this.
Anyway, I haven't played with it for a long time, but I wanted to have a go with Blender.
It's been a few years actually.
I think that the next voice covered dropping thing for the crowdfunding was the last big
thing I did and that wasn't that big.
But what's really put me off is the way that a lot of things now have become parametric,
which sounds complicated.
So instead of kind of modeling things like by editing meshes and dragging with the mouse
on points and vertices in different viewpoints on a view, you can do this kind of like programmatically
but it's like a modular view where you can change parameters and change the connections
between things and Blender uses this for materials and shaders and you can use it to change
the shape of objects.
And I finally got my head around a little part of this and it's really amazing and also
really not that difficult.
And so I've spent quite a bit of time learning the new user interface, which I have to say
is a lot better.
The trouble is that it's so flexible.
The view can still be split so many times and each different panel can have a different
function and each function has its own toolbar and the toolbar isn't always displayed compared
to how wide it is.
And it is still complicated but it's a lot easier than it used to and I got some great
results.
But the node editing, it's just so powerful so you can create like a, it's a bit like
a modular synth where you wire the output from, you're obviously okay, I don't mean to
say that actually but it is a lot like that.
You can have it on an object and then you can drop in a box that says I want the angle
that a face is going and you can put that into something that will change the colour
of a face or a material and you can put that into something that will change how reflective
it is or how it emits light.
And you can create these amazing materials just by graphically linking and interlinking
things and interlinking things with other things or downloading a material from somewhere
else and it's, it's really amazing that this is open source software so really this is
a shout out to Blender and how far it's come.
I now understand how normal people feel when you start going on about audio and stuff
around.
Just everything you said was just over my head there but no, I think we do need to give
Blender more love because that is, we've said it before, it is a totally open source
bit of software that is not an also ran, it's a proper industry standard isn't it?
It's like it's properly up there with the proprietary tools.
It's not just a sort of RWL, a cheap alternative, a free alternative, whatever, it is a proper
professional tool and a real flagship bit of open source software so you're right to
give it more love even if I have no fucking clue what you said in any of that.
Well, it's like that thing that I found, I found a video of people converting the dinosaurs
in Jurassic Park into what we really think they look like and your man was using Blender
all the way through it.
It was really cool.
I thought, Blender, I mean, who cares about dinosaurs but yeah, Blender, it was in
there.
It is really good and it was nice to see it in a real world usage by a non-foss person.
Yeah, and I'm sure that there's thousands of others or maybe hundreds I don't know,
it's a pretty specialised skill, that's probably thousands, I don't know.
Millions.
Millions, bound to be, yeah.
All running on Linux.
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Onto a bit of admin then.
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Will, what's Quodam?
Well, I think we file this one under, I'm not having a mid-life crisis, you're having
a mid-life crisis.
I was poking around looking for some bulletin boards the other day and trying to find a nice
terminal that felt like the good old days of bulletin boards.
And Quodam was what came along.
Quodam is a re-implementation of Q-modem and if you are of a certain age, Q-modem will
almost certainly be the terminal that you used to access bulletin boards.
And this is just a, yeah, a public domain, so not strictly open source, but all the sources
out there, re-implementation supports all the same feature set.
And it's just a really lovely feeling terminal text-based application that supports all
of that wonderful ANC art that you may remember from logging into bulletin boards.
It's got a whole feature set which nobody really cares about, but it's just a really good
implementation of a ANC terminal.
It's relatively up-to-date, there was a push to their GitHub, I think maybe a year ago
or something like that.
So considering the sort of technology we're talking about, that's pretty up-to-date.
Was that the sort of like two-year-date version versus four-year-date?
Possibly.
Possibly.
But yeah, it's just a nice, easy-to-use, nice terminal.
It doesn't need any kind of extensions either, so it will run.
If you can get a Linux box to boot to just a terminal, then you can use this and it supports
all of those graphical extensions, probably EGA or something, it supports Z-modem and
Kermit and things like that, all that good old-fashioned stuff.
And feeding on from that, as I was poking around looking for things to now telnet into,
because very few of these bulletin boards have actual phone lines connected to them anymore,
I came across the telnet bbsguide.com, which is a list of 977 bulletin boards which are
still online, which you can still connect to with SSH and telnet, which Quodem supports,
so you can use that and connect up to all of these bulletin boards.
And the scene is seemingly still alive.
In the last 30 days, there have been eight new bulletin boards added to the bbsguide website,
which is not as much as ten, but eight more than I expected.
Okay, that's fair.
It's pretty good.
Any boards or posts on boards?
Oh, fair point, fair point, but that's not what it's all about.
It's lovely to see there are still people out there who care enough about bulletin boards
to bother setting one up, even if each one's only got one user.
It's nice to telnet in and see some of those familiar logging prompts and the way that
the page flow goes through.
It's something very nostalgic about it and I recommend checking it out.
If you've got a spare hour, go and just tell it to some of these bulletin boards.
There's an Amiga one as well, so you should go definitely check that out.
A spare error, is that how long it takes to log in, yeah?
I can link this to an ESP device as well, because on my Amiga, there's this ESP embedded device
you can create the touches to the serial port.
And there's a firmware called Z-I mode, or Z-ModeM, that you put on the ESP.
And it basically connects to your Wi-Fi, but simulates the entire AT modem command set.
And you can use that to telnet from your Amiga or Commodore 64, even, to any of those
BBSs.
But I didn't know about this general list, so I'm definitely going to try it.
There's even an Amastrad one on there.
Well my discovery is there's a phronics article, Steam on Linux use, steady for June, around
40% of Linux gamers are using the Steam Deck.
And this is just about the latest Steam Survey.
And that 40% of Linux gamers using Steam Deck really jumped out of me, because we know
that they've sold at least a million Steam Decks.
And so if you assume that they've probably sold more now than a million, and some people
will have installed Windows or whatever, so let's just say for argument sake, there's
a million Steam Decks running Linux out there.
That means, and I work this out using Maths, there are two and a half million Linux gamers
on Steam.
That is a lot of people gaming on Linux.
Yeah, I reckon there's more because I constantly ignore those survey requests, and I've had
two or three on the Steam Deck.
I must be catching up for you though, because I think I've had about four or five of them.
And I always had, and I was like, yes, yes, take my results.
I think it's very positive, and also, I mean, I know it's the Steam sales at the moment,
but Steam Deck is a 10% discount, and it's still top of the top sellers by revenue.
And it has been off and on for like a whole year or longer, so they must be selling a lot
of them.
I know that the revenue on a device like that is going to eclipse other games, but it's
still huge.
Yeah, and every Steam Deck sold is a potential Linux user, which is good.
Will, ESP Home I Boost?
Yeah, a bit of a cryptic name on this one.
ESP Home I've talked about before, surprise, prize, which is an alternative to like the
tas motors of this world.
It's a standard image that you can flash onto an ESP 8266 on ESP 32, and it will integrate
with Home Assistant very easily.
So that's part A. This is the base on which it is built.
Part B is if you've got solar panels on your house, there's a reasonable chance that you've
got some sort of solar diverter, which is actually a box of tricks with a clamp that goes
around your main incoming electricity feed, and it monitors how much electricity you are
exporting at any one point in time.
And the other half of it connects up to your immersion heater in your hot water tank,
and instead of sending AC full three kilowatts of power down to your immersion heater, it
sends DC, and it modulates it to be more or less the same as what's going out of your house.
So in other words, this is a way to dynamically adjust how much water heating power you're
using based on what is effectively spare electricity from your solar panels.
Oh, that is really cool.
It is very cool.
The option of this is that you can eliminate all gas usage, for example, from your home during
the summer months.
You can heat all of your water during the summer through this sort of free electricity.
So all very good.
Now, one of these boxes, normally, there are a variety of brands.
One of them is called a solar iBoost, and it costs about 400 quid, and it sits in your
air and cupboard and connects between the electricity and the immersion heater.
It's all automatic.
You don't have to manage it, but where's the fun in that?
What you want to be able to do is draw graphs and control this thing from software.
So the company that make the solar iBoost also make a thing called a buddy, and this hooks
up to the same 868 megahertz band.
It listens to the messages from the two devices, from the sender on your outgoing electricity,
and from the device in your air and cupboard, and shows you on a screen what is happening
at any one point in time, how much power is being used, and allows you to manually enable
the electricity to heat the water.
But nobody wants to manually do stuff when they've got home assistant.
So for the last probably couple of years, people have been working on reverse engineering,
the radio protocol on this device, to try and make it so that you can control it from
software, and about a month ago, this project landed, and it works perfectly.
So in the circumstances where you have solar panels, you have a solar iBoost, you have
home assistant, and you know how to flash an ESP8266 with specific software, then this
is the project for you.
You had me at Free Hot Water, man.
Do you need the immersion, is it a special immersion that runs in DC mode?
No, it's, they're all the same, it's just basically a long bit of wire, which gets hot
when you pass current through it.
So it works in DC mode, just as well as it works in AC mode, you need significantly more
power electronics to run it in DC mode, because of the way that electricity works.
So this box that plugs into your air and cupboard is quite big and has got a fan in it.
Wow.
It still, it seems worth it to me, because you get effectively Free Hot Water.
Now, the downsides to all of this is that with Octopus energy, you get paid 15p per
kilowatt hour for energy exported, and you buy gas at 7p per kilowatt now, so it's actually
twice as cost efficient to just burn gas to heat your water and sell electricity, but
that's what the man wants you to do, and I say, fight the power, use free electricity.
So what you're burning toaster ovens in the background with gas.
But what about the efficiency, though, like, it might be 7p per kilowatt of gas, but like,
which one is more efficient?
I think there's maths to be done there.
There is maths to be done, but generally speaking, a modern boiler, which mine is not, can
be up to about 90 percent efficient.
On the other hand, on the electric side, the electricity heating the water is 100 percent
efficient, but you've got to add all of the power electronics into the mix, so that probably
drops a little bit, but not very much.
So efficiency, pure efficiency, electricity is a better choice.
Or you could use that electricity to power a heat pump, like I have, I mean, I don't have
the solar bit, but heat pumps are three times as efficient as a gas heater.
Well, roughly, a heat pump powered hot water tank will cost thousands and thousands
of pounds.
This solution will cost maybe 500 quid.
Well, I had no heat in my house, and we had fireplaces in all the rooms.
Yeah, it's all complicated economics and stuff, but I had no idea that you could effectively
get free hot water.
I'm very interested in that.
I'm going to have to talk to you off air about that, will I think?
Yeah.
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All right, Graham, generating music from DevU random with Linux Wave, please tell me
it creates vapor wave style music.
Oh, if only it did.
Probably if you put it into chat GPT, that would be cool.
You could say.
I mean, it's a bit of a, I don't want to say it's a joke, I'll be patient because it
doesn't really make music you'd like to listen to.
Justin Bieber uses any kind of sort, any device source on the system, it recommends DevU
random.
Well, Bieber will be DevNore, I guess, wouldn't he?
You could compare it to the output to random and, you know, prove the difference, but
really, it creates this kind of melody out of the random numbers and using a very simple
monophonic kind of sine wave note sound.
You can't change that at all, but you can change the scale of the notes that it generates.
You can change the rate that the notes are generated.
You can change the number of channels in the output file.
It'll output as a WAV.
You can say how long you want it to be and it's pretty interesting.
The output reminds me a lot of the, what you'd expect computers to sound like, you know,
in like 1960s sci-fi films, you know, and it's quite good for generating that kind
of output.
You could kind of leave it on and joke people that your computer is how 9000 or something,
but it's a really well written app.
It's got a great set of options for changing the output and it may be the source of some
kind of inspiration and it's definitely interesting if you want to hear what random
music sounds like.
I find it quite funny, Faelim, that your go-to terrible music in quotes is Justin Bieber
who was around about 20 years ago, which shows how not down with the kids you are.
Bieber was around 20 years ago.
No he isn't.
He couldn't be.
20?
No.
Alright, well his big hit baby was released in 2010, so that's 13 years ago, so I was a
little bit out, but nevertheless, you are very much not down with the kids, Faelim.
Oh, that's fine.
Well, I'm down at 1994 and earlier, it's all good.
No, you should've said Miley Cyrus, who is now relevant again with her great new album,
New Ish.
Who?
Billy Ray, what now?
Yeah, Billy Ray's daughter.
Oh yeah, okay.
Yeah, I think she sings about an achy, breaky heart.
Ah, that sounds weird, right?
Let's do some feedback then.
An anonymous person says, I just listened to Episode 226 and have a suggestion.
You don't need any additional plugins for anti-banner stuff.
You block origin, which you're very likely to be using already, can get rid of them with
a few additional filter lists that are off by default.
Go into the settings, filter lists, and enable everything in the annoyances group.
I haven't seen a single cookie banner since those lists appeared, which was soon after
the GDPR itself was introduced.
They also strip a lot of other craft and make the web much cleaner.
Now, Will, you were quite excited about this, and so was I.
I've done it.
I presume you have.
I haven't noticed a huge difference, I must say.
Yeah, and I'd forgotten that I'd switched it on.
I switched it on maybe, I don't know, two, three weeks ago, maybe.
Now, the first time I switched it on, I went through all the settings, drilled down,
toggled all the boxes, and then checked it was all OK, and came out and went back in,
and they'd all turned themselves off again.
So it's possible, although unlikely, that it's not actually enabled.
Ah, that might be why I keep seeing these annoying banners then.
I might have to check that.
Well, yes, but the other thing is I have since checked that I've switched it all on,
and I have got them all enabled, and I'm still seeing things.
That said, maybe I'm seeing very specific ones, and I've just forgotten about the horror
that is these cookie banners, and maybe they just faded out of memory.
I honestly can't remember whether I see them anymore or not.
So I will keep an eye on it over the next few days and see what happens.
Nevertheless, it's a nice feature.
It isn't obvious, you have to go digging, so do check it out if you're using adblock,
do check it out.
Yeah.
For them, who doesn't trust you block origin for some random reason, then you're shit
out of luck.
No, I just think it's a really bad idea to do it like that, but, yeah, no.
Payhole is pain the arse, because half the time websites just don't work.
RT archives can't watch any of the videos that they produced, like decades ago, because
they don't allow it.
It's really annoying.
Just use you block it.
It'll be fine.
Pretty sure it won't be.
Phil says, the story of facial recognition being used to accuse someone reminded me of
the UK post office scandal, where a bunch of people got fired for theft due to what
the proprietary software said, lost careers, prison time, false confessions and suicides
occurred because of this.
And yeah, that's a good point, actually.
That was a huge scandal.
And it was down to this dodgy point of sale software that said a bunch of people had stolen
money and just ruined lives.
And yeah, just yet another argument against proprietary software and four open source
software.
I expect there's more to come on this post office story, Fujitsu, who were the main contractor,
seemed to have been allegedly in cooots with the government to keep it hash hash.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there is more to come on this and rightfully so.
So for the rest of us, non-British people who don't know about this, is this a recent
thing or?
It's over the last ten years, five years.
Just a bunch of people running post offices, postmasters, they called them.
They were accused of stealing loads of money because the software running on their
point of sale terminals effectively just fucked up and a bunch of innocent people were
prosecuted.
And you know, imagine that post offices generally are sort of the hub of the community, aren't
they?
Yeah, absolutely.
The people who really trusted generally running the post office and it's just a huge scandal.
It's terrible.
Ah, it's pretty shocking, no.
Yeah, it's a bit like that thing where they say you shouldn't let a computer make a
decision where a person's life is involved.
Well, yeah, if nobody's auditing this stuff, it's kind of criminal, all right?
Yeah, and if it's all just a black box that is proprietary software that you're just
literally not allowed to even look at, then shit like this is bound to happen eventually.
And there's no accountability.
That's the thing.
If you don't know what it is, how can you have any accountability?
So Jeremy wrote in to say, I wanted to give another shout out for Clownzilla that you
mentioned a few episodes ago.
We recently used it to migrate machines from a dying blade center Zen cluster to a completely
new cluster running the latest proxmox.
We migrated sent us, windows and a bunch of machines near flawlessly, somewhere even
encrypted with looks others with Vera Crypt.
I think we ended up with only rebuilding one machine out of approximately 170.
Clownzilla saved me hundreds and hundreds of hours of rebuilding by migrating via cloning
them across the network.
Well, I was a bit skeptical, wasn't I?
And I said, just use D-D, but I think I have to eat my words after reading this.
It seems like Clownzilla really is an amazingly useful tool.
I don't think you should have to eat yours.
I think you actually have to do a few windows and stalls back to back, that'd be the way
to do it.
Oh, do I have to do all the updates as well?
Yes.
Right, well, we're a bit of get out of here then.
We'll be back next week when who knows what's going to be happening.
But until then, I've been Joe.
I've been Felum.
I've been Graeme.
I'm Albion Will.
See you later.