Hello and welcome to episode 245 of Blade 9 Linux recorded on the 28th of August of 2023.
I'm John, and with me, our fan.
What about you?
Graeme.
Good evening.
And Will.
Hi!
Let's get straight on with our discoveries then.
Will, what is UV mod?
Well, full disclosure, I haven't tried this out yet, but let me tell you about it anyway.
UV mod is a website which implements a piece of software which allows you to mod your quenching two-way radios.
They look a bit like Balfang.
I suspect that they come from the same factory, but they've got slightly different functionality, but they look very similar.
These are entry-level, cheapest chips.
They do CB radios.
They do ham radios.
They do what they call PMR, which is like private business radios for security on a building site or something like that.
They make a whole bunch of these radios and they are reliable and they're cheap.
But the software tends to be a little bit crappy.
And what UV mod lets you do is build your own firmware choosing from a menu of options that you can go to this website,
toggle features on and off, increase the power here and change the frequency slightly there,
enable all these other hidden features, and then flash your radio with that firmware from the browser.
Now, you do need a USB to radio cable, but you can pick those up on eBay really cheaply.
And they seem to be standard between a whole bunch of radios.
It's a USB plug on one end and two jacks on the other, a three and a half mill and a two mill jack on the other end.
And you plug that into the radio, go to this website, choose your options, click go, and it will flash your radio there and then,
and then you can play with all these features that were previously there.
A caveat is that some of these features were disabled for good reason, and turning them on is not advisable.
Or perhaps legal, so I didn't tell you.
But check it out, if you're into this sort of thing, you've probably already found and played with this website.
But if you're not and you fancy having a radio that you can tune into, I don't know, the how frequencies or the CB frequencies just for lulls, then check it out.
It's good bit of fun.
You know that John the nice guy sprigs is going to write to us now.
I tell her this is a legal, you need a license and blah, blah, blah.
And he would be right, so you should not do this.
Yeah, you should do this.
I love the bit.
The warning of the top say that there are unauthorized clones of UV mud.
How ironic that the cloned radio company of a cloned radio company has a cloned radio website for a miracle company.
Love it.
The suggestion at the top that it's dangerous, I think is talking about like over driving the power of these radios.
So you know, potentially you might catch fire or something like that.
Right.
So it might explode.
Yeah.
That seems a bit so definitely don't do this then.
But definitely go to the website because if I was going to name the CSS file that does the background color changing, I'd name it every 90s color because it's just from every kind of
turquoisey shell suit pink and back again, it just keeps just fading in and out of all the 90s colors.
So well done.
But come on, just think of all those electronic things that you get that have LEDs on.
They always have this demo mode.
It's only replicating that.
I know, but that demo mode is never quite as 90s looking as these colors for some reason.
I quite like it.
Well, you would.
Debian upgrades.
Yeah, I celebrated this on massed on a few weeks back.
But my server was sitting on Debian 10, not quite as bad as Graeme server, but it was sitting on Debian 10 a couple of weeks longer than it should have because I was full of ideas to upgrade it.
But then family went going away at the time and I was going to only do it when they were gone.
So I ended up just doing it one weekend and I went from 10 to 11 straight to 12.
Not a problem.
Fantastic.
Debian should pat themselves in the back.
Great work done.
And even the fact that it went from Python to up to three because 11 would have had both.
But I skipped along.
Pass that point broke my podcast downloader script.
So then I've finally upgraded to using an app now.
Antennapod.
It is Antennapod.
Yes, I was trying to use casts, but casts doesn't quite work yet. It's still on the nightly build.
Welcome to the 21st century feeling.
Is it really though?
I think it's more the 20th in all fairness.
Like, I mean, I knew I was already behind the times of this, but I'm pretty sure it's not even the 21st.
It's quite handy.
Did you know that you can actually like search for podcasts in the app?
Yes.
And then you can like subscribe to them.
And then now I've got to say the thing I didn't like was the mark all as red or listened to rather.
That is a right ball like because you have to select one of them and then say select all the other ones too.
And then mark them as red because I kept getting suggestions for things I'd listened to like years ago.
And yeah, that was a bit annoying, but other night it's been quite good, yeah.
It's absolutely excellent.
Antennapod.
Yeah, it's okay.
That's good as my script, but I looked at trying to convert it from two to three and a went.
It was chunky to begin with.
It's just no saving it now.
So I took it around back and shut it in the face.
Oh, I know.
And you can SSH remote into Ubuntu server installs.
Yeah, this is something I only just discovered, which I just have not seen.
It's hidden up in the help menu, which is, you know, what were they trying to do?
Never get it discovered.
Because yeah, it was up there in the help menu.
You can go up to that on the new, it's the new installer.
And if you click on that, it can actually fire up the network, generate all the keys for server.
You can, I think you can even upload your own keys on that side.
And you can SSH into the installer and also have other terminals there.
Because I had a problem at a client site.
And the person there wasn't quite used to doing installs.
And in fairness, this was a broken bootloader.
So it was a bit more tricky to deal with.
You know, when you're trying to talk people through stuff that you do automatically,
it's quite hard to sort of like break down every single step.
And I just thought, why is there not a boot disk that I could just send to people
that would have all this thing ready to go?
And then I discovered this event, right?
Okay, like usual.
All the things I think of are already invented.
And yeah, so for anybody else who has to do a remote install.
And someone can just boot the CD and then pick this menu option from the help menu
where you're at the choosing the language stage.
Yeah, off you go.
So can you get to like the rescue command prompt from SSH then?
So you've got like pure bare metal access.
You can even do the actual full install as well.
You actually run the installer.
You know, the modern installer that they've got on the server one.
I think they call it live, but I mean, it's not really live.
But yeah, that installer can be run through this through SSH.
Or yeah, you can jump down to a rescue console and do all sorts of things you'd want to.
I can see this saving a lot of tire rubber wear on your car from not having to travel about.
That's amazing.
I know.
Why is this not remotely sort of advertised or if it was I missed all of it?
I can even see it on a more sort of local level being handy.
Because you know, going to your basement server rack or whatever,
you know, just kick it off, get this SSH stuff going.
And then you can just go back to your nice comfortable office rather than being in the horrible basement.
Or you know, cause it wherever you've got your home server.
Yeah.
And you can presumably use this fire, for example, the AWS web interface.
Like you can get a rudimentary shell.
Well, it's not rudimentary.
It's kind of okay.
Shell through AWS.
But if you can get it to the point where this is on the screen and then enable SSH,
then you can drop out of those tools that are designed for bare metal access or even like IP based KVMs,
which is and you can do it straight over an SSH connection.
Yeah.
We're proper sort of scrollable size resizing and things like that.
You're not stuck to like a 800 by 600 or something.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's I think they even say that in the thing.
I just wish that it wasn't hidden up on a help menu.
Just I don't know how I found that.
It was just pure chance.
Graham, cute browser 3.0.
Cute browser.
I think I've mentioned it quite a few times over the course of the podcast.
It's a web browser with VIM bindings.
So you can control almost everything about how you navigate the web using the same keys that you use
or similar keys that you use for navigating through VIM.
So if you use VIM as an editor, you already know how to navigate the web with cute browser.
It works brilliantly.
I've used it for a long time.
It's a really great project.
It's minimal.
It's very, very configurable.
You can get it to theme exactly in line with everything else.
You can get it to tile perfectly.
You can get it to run scripts.
It uses cute web engine as the web engine back end.
So it's linked to chromium in terms of rendering.
So it runs everything.
You can log into everything.
You can access everything.
There's primitive ad blocking now with the Python ad block library.
So cute browser 3 is a major update to this.
The most of the work has been done to port it from cute5.x to cute6.
And this release works with cute6.
So it's kind of the future of cute browser.
There's lots of ways of installing it.
There are packages for Ubuntu. There's a flat pack.
I've tried most of them.
The way that I actually use is the manual install method
from the GitHub repo.
And it's really, really easy.
It's Python.
So there's a script that will create a virtual environment in Python
and install cute browser.
And all of its dependencies within that virtual environment.
And I found that a really great way of running it.
When you want to update it, you only have to run the script again
with the next argument and update it and it'll do it quickly
because it's just pulling from Git.
I upgraded it, read all my configuration files,
which are quite complicated.
It will notify you of options that have changed.
And there's been a lot of kind of improved the kind of terminology.
Things like that in a lot of the commands.
Because there's hinting just like with them.
There's inline help.
So you press colon. You see a huge list of commands.
And they'll auto-complete as you start typing them.
And you can do so much with browser.
And it's too much for most people.
But it's a really powerful, enjoyable way of using the web.
This new version they've updated scripts for lots of password managers.
So there isn't an integrated password manager,
but there are scripts for sending it to,
or I use past, that script has been updated.
I think last past, there's now support for that.
And now the support for one password as well.
There's lots of small options.
But otherwise, I just wanted to kind of bring it up
because I think the project.
So it's like a single developer who works part-time from sponsorship.
That single developer is Florian Bruin.
And they do such great work on their browser.
And it's a really enjoyable way to browse the web.
And it kind of stops you from wasting too much time as well.
Because you can...
I have other browsers open at the same time.
But cute browser is my home browser for all the things that I use.
And I've got such great muscle memory for all the forwards and backwards.
And opening things and bookmarking things and going and searching the history.
And just like it is with a text editor.
And it's just a great way of accessing the web.
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All right, well, I've discovered that Linux is awesome.
Again, I've sort of rediscovered that.
Because I had a problem, right?
The problem was I wanted to know exactly how good a laptop's battery was.
Now, I've talked before about i and x i dash capital B
will give you a percentage of the battery health.
But that doesn't necessarily tell you the truth.
What I wanted to know was, are there any jumps?
So as it runs down, sometimes it'll jump from like 50% to 15%.
And then the estimated time left will just be way less than you thought.
And so I thought, hmm, there's got to be a way to tell me
via the command line what the current battery level is in percentage terms.
And sure enough, acpi dash B.
That tells you what the percentage is
and the estimated time that you've got left.
And so I thought, hmm, how am I going to do this with a laptop?
Well, simple.
I'll just do a con job with five stars so every minute
and write the output of acpi dash B
to what I called bad stats.text.
And you can do that either to the laptop
or to a USB stick or to a NAS or whatever.
And then just say, I use sky news
because that's just a 24, 7, 1080p stream on YouTube.
Full brightness.
Just get it going.
Make sure that it is writing out to that text file every minute
and then just leave it for a couple of hours.
And then you see, okay, right?
So it's gone from 40% to 15%.
Right?
Something's not right with this battery.
And it just tells you exactly where you are
with the laptop battery.
And just maybe think that there's got
to be a gooey way to do this on Windows
and probably in Linux
and probably about 50 other ways
to do it via the command line.
But it just made me really love that
you can just put this stuff together in Linux
where the few commands or con job
could have done it with a system de-unit no doubt
instead of a con job.
There's always 50 ways to do it.
But I just found this simple way of solving
a relatively complicated problem of exactly
where do I stand with this laptop's battery.
Yeah, I love that stuff.
And I had a great interaction during the week
as well on Maston with some of the things
that I thought I knew.
And then I found some other stuff
and just peeing back and forth between people.
It's just great.
It's like, oh, did you not know if you do this flag?
And you're like, oh, fucking hell.
We did it wrong last time.
It's great.
Yeah, it really is good.
And yeah, gooey could never do it.
And it's just all that, this is what I hate about
like all the other operators.
It's like, oh, yeah, let's go to the App Store
and buy the Shite UI app from this lab for three quid.
That literally does something like this
and pipes it into a nicer text file or something.
That's cool.
Well, I don't know though.
On Android, there's a thing called NetScan
which is just a gooey for NMAP.
And NMAP, I can never ever remember this syntax
and exactly what you've got to type.
Whereas this Android app just connected to Wi-Fi,
hit a button and it just gives me the same output
in a nice, friendly gory.
Sounds to be like you should have got the network tools
library from ETHROID and that would have cost you nothing.
No, this cost me nothing either.
Oh, okay, fine.
Boo.
I thought I was coming in high and mighty there.
You just hacked the legs off me, you bastard.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes a gooey makes more sense,
probably for most people.
But I just love that there's always that command line option
for whatever that little thing you want to do is.
What did you learn about your battery then?
Did it work?
Like, was the experiment a success?
Did you discover anything?
Well, I discovered that it was reporting at 82% health
and sure enough, when it got down to about 17, 18%,
it would drop to 4%.
So exactly what I suspected.
You need to top your battery up with a bit of water, little joke.
Yeah, yeah.
One of the poles might be running dry.
Well, also, I discovered that one of my really quite old laptops
at this point is still doing very well.
It's 90 something percent and sure enough, just all the way down,
97, 96, didn't skip a beat all the way down to zero.
You know, I didn't last quite as long as it once did,
but nevertheless, there were no big jumps in it.
So, yeah, it did definitely do what I wanted it to do.
Graham, rewriting wipeout.
I saw this recently.
It wasn't leaked and then someone sort of rewrote the whole thing.
Yes, so there's kind of two elements to this.
So, wipeout was a PlayStation 1 game, PSX title.
Racing game, it's still an active franchise.
It was a revolution rate at the time.
It was like a racing game, but a futuristic racing game
where you kind of flew these kind of dark.
They look like paper airplanes and a futuristic kind of trough of a race track.
Like F0X on the N64.
Yeah, exactly, yes.
And the source code for an early PC port for ATI GPUs at the time is a very early GPUs.
ATI 3D rage, if you can remember those.
So, back in the day, you had to write basically execute rules
for specific graphics cards and anyway, that version was leaked with the source code.
So, this isn't really an open source project.
But Dominic Schablowski took this code and rewrote it.
And made it available and you can play it in the web browser,
but you can build it instantly on Linux and play it there if you want to.
It's a good game, but what Dominic did, which is really great,
is wrote a blog post on the state of the original source code
and how he rewrote it.
And it's a really interesting read.
It's like, he explains that, for example, the menu code in the original
is 5,000 lines of if else statements.
Wow.
And of course, he's used the original code to understand how it was implemented,
but he's rewritten everything, which probably isn't enough legally to protect him
if Sony did decide to go after their original IP.
But hopefully, they don't, and the project now exists in a way that can survive
for the future with a modern re-implementation.
And the game is old.
You might not really want to play it, but it's an important game,
and it's great that you can play it and read about how it was reported.
I'm just picturing the developer end of project meeting,
where some guy says, oh, have you not heard of a case statement?
The guy who did all that, if else gone.
What?
It was difficult because it was sort of port of the PlayStation version,
and so there's a lot of code from the PlayStation development kit in the original.
This is a lot of assembler.
There were different times, you know, I don't...
Case has been around for a long time, so I'm sure there was case,
but there may have been a reason why they couldn't use case.
I have some amazing memories of playing this on a tiny 14-inch portable CRT-TV,
and my main memory of it is the music was just amazing for the time.
I think the original came with music by the prodigy on there,
and a whole bunch of other artists of the time,
which were just fantastic, and it still holds up today.
The gameplay is smooth and fast, and it was amazing to see,
and to be able to run it in your web browser, just brilliant.
I love it.
It really captured that kind of...
At the time, that kind of post-pub couple of your mates come back
and turn on the PlayStation and, you know,
have maybe another beer and play some wipeout to the music.
I've get cloned at now just so that someone can do their worst.
Will, you found Bash scripting cheat sheet.
Yeah, really quick on this one.
If you're doing Bash scripting for whatever reason
because you need something that's a bit more portable,
you haven't got Python, whatever it is, and you're using Bash,
there are often situations where you can't quite remember
the exact syntax for whatever it is you're doing.
And I found this the other day,
and so I went looking for something that was detailing
exactly the difference between numbers and strings to Bash,
although it says that it treats them the same.
Yeah, it doesn't really.
And I found this DevHintz.io website,
which has got a page dedicated to Bash,
which is one page. It's quite a long page,
but it is a nice single page.
And it's got basically an example of everything
you could possibly need to do.
No filler, no fluff, just pure information,
presented in an easy to read manner,
and it answered all of my questions.
And they've got these cheat sheets for various other languages as well,
and they're all of the same style.
I've never seen it before, I don't know why,
but it was super useful.
And this is something that I would recommend people
sticking their bookmarks bar,
because I think it will be useful very often.
It is very cool.
And it's got loads of other ones too,
like, Jesus, there's so much good stuff in there.
I do like a good cheat sheet.
Yeah, I can hear your printer whirring as it's been.
The only thing that annoys me at these sites
is that they don't actually fit on a sheet.
Yeah, it should give you a downloadable PDF
that will print out exactly A4.
Yeah, or an exo-plotter sitting in the background
and whirring away.
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Onto a bit of admin then.
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Let's do some feedback then. Wolfgang says,
in episode 241, you discussed GoRead,
an RSS feed reader for the terminal.
While that was interesting, the discussion left me
with the impression that none of you are using an RSS feed aggregator.
I might of course be wrong about that assumption,
but anyway, personally, I use fresh RSS,
but I've also heard people talk about next cloud news for the same purpose.
These aggregators let you categorize your feeds from different sources
and, most importantly, to access the same feeds on all your devices,
complete with read status and favorite synchronization.
So for me, the real question when hearing about some new RSS feed client
is whether it supports the API of my feed aggregator.
For a while now, I've been using news flash as my reader on multiple devices
and it works just beautifully,
letting me keep track of what I've read across devices
and letting me manage what I read in one central place.
So, yeah, I mean, it's not very fuss-friendly or self-hosted,
but I swear I mentioned feedly.
I must mention that before.
That is exactly what you're talking about.
And I don't have to piss around and stalling anything,
but then I am at the whim of feedly's servers going down
and all the rest of it, which has happened before and it has been very frustrating.
It's an interesting subject though.
I use feedly as well.
I think I've used feedly since Google Reader went down
and it was basically my stopgap of importing in all my Google Reader stuff,
but I've just not moved away from it.
I think I tried next clouds RSS aggregator for a while,
but I no longer run my own next cloud.
Yeah, another feedly user here.
I just, having it available in the browser,
suits my mental model.
And I don't have to worry about API compatibility
or applications or anything like that.
So, yeah, sorry.
Yeah, it plugs into most stuff.
I use feed me on Android,
and the feedly app is pretty good on iOS,
or at least on iPadOS,
and I've tried out some desktop clients as well with it.
And as always, you do have to worry about that API,
but that is, well, like you say, Graham,
since Google Reader went away,
it's sort of the name you know in feed aggregators, isn't it?
Feedly.
I use aggregator, which is part of contact.
A KDE thing for him, no way.
I know, you'd be shocked,
but what I had to do was chop right back all the feeds that I used to watch,
because I like to read all the stuff,
but I never had time to read all the stuff,
and it used to really annoy me,
but a fact that had literally like hundreds,
like I'm looking at it right now,
and it's 560 on-read feeds,
and that is causing me to have a twitchy eye
and get really annoyed by the fact that I haven't read them,
but I just don't have time.
The worst is when you put it off,
you think you refresh it, and it's like 80, right?
I'll quickly just read these 80, right? That's done.
You refresh it, it's like 500, it's like,
nope, that is not happening.
And then the next day you think,
no, that's not happening.
And then you read that 500,
and then you fucking refresh it,
and it's like 5000, it's like, oh my god.
But fail him, that doesn't sink anywhere.
No, and that's fine.
Yeah, I use the same feed-leaf feed for three or four different apps.
Yeah, what you see,
what I try to do is I try to limit,
it's like, I don't use Twitter or Massathon on my phone either.
I don't want to,
because I don't want it to follow me around.
I want to just leave it somewhere,
and then if I'm not near it, I can't look at it,
and it's not a problem.
That sounds a bit weird, but it's like,
I just don't want it to follow me around.
I want to be able to walk away from it,
walk the dog and listen to a podcast,
and not have to worry about, like, checking,
was there an update to a feed and stuff?
And yeah, I know exactly what you mean.
Like, I did try actually next cloud before,
and I didn't quite like the way it marked,
stuff being read or not read,
because even if I just brushed past it,
next cloud it seemed to mark it as read.
I was like, well, no, I haven't read that.
I've literally just touched it with the mouse,
and that is not what I mean by reading it.
So, yeah, I don't know.
It never really worked out for me too well.
So, how do you doom scroll in bed there?
I don't is what happens there.
I YouTube watch Big Clive,
and then I follow up with maybe a Tom Scott,
and Scott Manley perhaps might be on,
talking about a rocket or something.
A bit of hydraulic press channel, maybe.
Well, I'm a bit of hydraulic.
Yeah, do like a bit of hydraulic press, that's true.
Yeah, recently they were crushing Lego.
Ooh, it turned out to be surprisingly strong.
What's that one?
Yeah, do you ever see the guy who's obviously
just been engineering with gears and Lego?
And it's like the one to 50,000 time down there.
Yeah, Lego and you're like, okay, right?
That's more powerful than my car at this point.
Yeah, just a little Lego motor loads of fucking gears
and he's like bending steel and shit with it.
Exactly, yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, sorry, Wolfgang.
I'm afraid we all just use feedley,
apart from fan him, who is weird.
Right, well, we're going to get out of here then.
We'll be back next week when who knows that
will probably be September by then.
Already.
Anyway, until then, I've been John.
I've been Salem.
I've been Graham.
And I've been well.
See you later.
Bye.