The Binary Times - Series 6 Episode 5 - The Other Side Podcast Network

Series 6 Episode 5 – We welcome Ben Klaasen on the show this week, Ben has a new job, speaks about his Nextcloud upgrade path, Wayne continues to explore the myriad of options around pfsense and chats about dual sim freedom loving phones, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.

This fortnight we are joined by Ben Klaasen, a software tester, linux advocate and long time supporter and listener to the show

We begin chating about using Linux in the workplace. Not every machine runs Linux perfectly, be warned. We seem to do the research without even noticing it to ensure Linux compatibility.

Ben purchased a standard usb Silvercrest video encoder from Lidl/Aldi, and it worked a treat. Here’s the ffmpeg command used to convert video using this device:

ffmpeg -async 1 -vsync 1 -f v4l2 -video_size 720x576 -i /dev/video2 -thread_queue_size 1024 -channel_layout stereo -f alsa -i default -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -b:v 2M -crf 23 -c:a aac -b:a 128K -to 00:35:00 -preset fast -report "Free Text Output File Name.mkv"

Ben has started a new job with an emphasis on making working the workplace more humane. He then takes us through his Nextcloud history and setup and it was quite a journey.

Wayne chats about his upgrade to pfsense. He has been watching Lawerence Systems networking videos on Youtube. This video shows you how to set up pfblockerng. Using aliases in pfsense is also very helpful in making firewall rules.

Ben asks about Proxmox VE, Wayne has tried it but didnt really get on well with it. He prefers using KVM and Virsh for this purpose.

Wayne has been looking at the Xiaomi Redmi 4 and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 as possible dual sim contenders to run /e/. Ben chats about the fairphone 3 which has been released on the 27th August. Fairphone OS includes all google services, Fairphone Open doesn’t: https://code.fairphone.com We then move on to chatting about trying to make ethical considered purchases.

Ben chats about the latest release of Thunderbird 68.

Under the hood – Wayne starts off chatting about some great Humble Bundle releases, IT Security”, Keep Books Weird”, and Python Programming books.

We also chat about the find command and Wayne introduces the -icase flag to make the search case insensitive

find / -iname kodi.log

Ben goes now to say how he uses command substitution with find to move around the file system…
find ../../../ -name *justenough*
That gives me the full path to the file, relative to where I am now…
dirname $(!!) gives me the directory name only…
cd $(!!) brings me to that directory.< br />
!! means “run the last command again.
$(!!) is the output of the last command.

Ben talks about NuShell and python-mario. These give nice new ways of interpreting data.

Irish saying of the audiocast is ‘Beimid ar ais’ which means ‘We’ll be back’.

We hope you enjoy listening to us as we enjoyed making it!