Series 6 Episode 12a – This is our final episode of season 6. We chat about audio in Linux, a brief look back throughout the year, Automate the Boring Stuff, snaps or ppa’s and a load of other random topics for your enjoyment, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:28 Wayne welcomes us to Season 6 Episode 12 of the Binary Times. It’s looking clear in Bristol and foggy in Kilkishen. Christmas is only around the corner! Mark sympathises with their Australian listeners with the weather and fires they’re having to put up with out there. Mark goes on to tell us he’s found a new graphical cli weather app. You invoke it by typing the following: finger [your location]@graph.no. This will give you the meteogram for your location, including temperature, along with symbols for sun, cloud, rain etc. for the next 24 hours or so.
05:05 Wayne asks Mark what he’s been at and Mark tells us that he’s got a new laptop, a Sony Vaio from one of their Australian listeners. Despite being sent the laptop gratis, customs still wanted their pound of flesh, as is their want. Mark loves the display on the laptop, and he thinks it may well become his daily driver. He installed Ubuntu 19.10 on it and it all went incredibly easily. He congratulates the Ubuntu team on doing such an incredible job on making such a great and easy to use desktop operating system. The lads discuss Ubuntu MATE and what Wayne had to do to get the date on the notification bar on 19.10.
Mark goes on to look back over what they’ve been looking at over the year. After a brief trip back to the early noughties, Mark tells us how well Nextcloud is doing at keeping our private data secure. He goes on to tell us that LibreOffice has continued to improve throughout the year and that they are currently looking for help, and they have suggestions as to how you can help.
The guys go on to discuss the recurring theme of Humble Bundles. A current bundle that catches their eye is the O’Reilly Classics Bundle. The guys go on to discuss a bit of humble bundle fatigue but seem to conclude that they’ll continue buying them. The discussion moves onto reading, reading articles online, and the modern mind being distracted. Wayne goes on to say that he got further with Automate the Boring Stuff on Udemy than he did with the book itself, the video tutorials helped as Wayne feels he’s better with video than printed material. The guys give a shout out to Al Sweigart, the author, who releases his books under a creative commons license. Wayne tells us he’s getting the 2nd edition of automate the boring stuff, and Mark goes through the “what’s new in the 2nd Edition of Automate the boring stuff”. Wayne’s already looking forward to resting his mug of tea on that book Christmas day!
Wayne goes on to talk about the wonderful Unfa, who’s brilliance is depressing for the rest of us mere mortals. Wayne mentions the new Vital wave synth, by Matt Tytel and recommends trying it out. Wayne goes on to speak about the virtues of Ableton and this sparks a bit of a conversion on the virtues of software. Wayne also recommends LMMS as something to try. Wayne tells us he recently sold an APC 40 midi controller that worked well with Ableton. Wayne rounds out the discussion by stating he will use open source software whenever he can, though Ableton is hard to beat! Also, go buy the the 2nd edition of automate the boring stuff book!
44:04 Wayne tells us about some of the open source hacky stuff he’s been doing at work with proprietary software. He used Ubuntu MATE to boot into the machines in question, though found Window’s 10 doesn’t fully shut down when you shut down, rather it hibernates the kernel to allow for quicker bootup. You can turn this off, which Wayne did so that he could delete the profiles as required.
48:05 Wayne decides to get all controversial and say that you need to use Ardour and JACK to do audio, even podcasts. Mark disagrees and thinks Audacity is sufficient to do podcasts. They also disagree on tinwhistle playing.
52:24 Under the Hood! Mark’s under the hood is a discussion about a blog article on proton mail that is how to stay private on android, that leads to an open ended discussion about all things telephony and privacy, which touches off of news that was in the Ask Noah Show and poor Disney+ passwords.
Waynes Under the hoods are Ryans Tutorials and Chris Titus’ How to secure a web server.
01:09:17 Irish saying of the podcast is Bualadh Bos
Instead of finishing, the lads chat about all the cool things that they could be chatting about next year, and carry on into talking about Desktop Environmnets and Snaps vs Debs / PPAs.
We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it!
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