Series 7 Episode 6 – In this episode The Binary Times guys start the show talking about the much debated Coronavirus, Wayne has installed FreeBSD and gone back to using Ubuntu Touch, Mark has been installing Unity of Command II on different distros, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:28 Wayne welcomes us to Series 7 Episode 6 from a mixed weather, early Spring type feel of a morning while Mark thinks the weather isn’t going to be great for Paddy’s Day. It doesn’t really matters this year what with the Corona Virus outbreak and all the measures being taken to help delay the spread. Mark recommends Pizza and Red Wine as the only items that you need to panic buy. He goes on to mention the positive environmental outcome of lower NO2 concentrations over Northern Italy as a result of the lockdown there. The guys go on to discuss the fall in the stock market and the possibility a slowdown may ultimately be beneficial for us all and the planet, while also realising how hard it is to balance peoples’ wellbeing, living standards and the environment.
07:51 Wayne brings the topic back around to Linux. Mark tells us of the OpenCovid 19 Initiative project undertaken by the Just One Giant Lab platform, which is hoping to find testing methodologies to detect the Coronavirus and hopefully a cure.
Mark goes on to tell us that he bought another /e/-phone, this time for his daughter. She is loving the interface, the features and the privacy aspect of the phone. The one drawback she finds with it is the search function as she doesn’t find it very good at the moment. This leads to a conversation around the compromises we’re willing to make.
15:46 Wayne tells us that he’s switched back to Ubuntu Touch and relates his newest experiences with it while making the following points:
- Use a good USB cable
- Nextcloud users can save a lot of time by just signing up to their Nextcloud account in the Accounts section within System settings. Edit the script on the UBPorts documentation to remove all calendar syncing and to sync over your Nextcloud contacts
- Use the Jotit app for Nextcloud notes sync and the UBSync app for syncing folders to your Nextcloud instance
- The camera on the Nexus 5 takes very poor pictures. Here are some tips for better results. Go to the camera settings (swipe up from below) and set the pixel density to 8M 4:3. Hold the camera steady while taking a pic, and, most importantly, tap the section of the photograph that you want to have in focus. This forces the camera to focus on the selected area better than letting the camera automatically decide.
- Use Teleports for Telegram (no phone calls with telegram is a bit tough but not a deal breaker)
- Use AuthenticatorNG for 2FA accounts
- Use Podbird for podcasts
- Use Wakeit for wake on lan instances
- Use Sturm Reader for epubs
- To take a screenshot press the Vol up + Vol down keys together
- Install Libertine Tweak Tool to use firefox
Wayne is enjoying the fact that Nextcloud integration is getting better, being able to get ssh access to his phone is such a lovely feeling, copying files over and back with scp is just amazing, basically its a linux box.
26:52 Mark tells us of the steps he’s been taking to try to get Unity of Command II working in Steam. He installed openSUSE Leap 15.1, installed the additional repositories and the proprietary Nvidia drivers, installed Steam and then installed the game. He set the game to log (by setting the Launch Options in Properties of the game to: PROTON_LOG=1 %command%) and it worked until it crashed, at which point it wouldn’t work any more! Upon restarting the game he got the same error as he did in Ubuntu 20.04, so could no longer compare logs, as the log overwrites itself. While upgrading to openSUSE Tumbleweed didn’t help, Mark compliments the openSUSE team on a seamless upgrade process.
32:04 Wayne tells us that he’s been playing with FreeBSD 12.1 on a virtual machine. He tells us that BSDers have a saying “Linux users hate Windows, BSD users love linux”. Mark has difficulty remembering the name of the Lumina Desktop, while also referring to a point Ben made in his last appearance on the show. Wayne is enjoying his brief time with BSD and is thinking of making an audio workstation using it.
39:51 Under the Hood – Wayne has a mountain of Under the Hoods, the first being curl cheat.sh /ls. All credit to Igor Chubin for another wonderful app!
Waynes next under the hood is explainshell.com, a site that allows you to write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument.
Wayne’s last Under the Hood is a new search engine and that is the qwant search engine. He thinks their privacy policy is worthy of attention.
42:26 Mark’s under the Hood is from Crowd Supply and it is an optically isolated Debounce HAT, which will be able to protect your Raspberry Pi from any electrical surges. Mark also mentions the HealthyPi v4 as an interesting project.
49:53 The guys talk about the latest Humble Bundles.
51:54 Irish saying of the Show: “Ní thuigim” or I do not understand.
We hope you enjoyed the show as much as we did making it!
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