Series 8 Episode 3 – In this episode Mark has been setting up his Turrix Mox, Wayne has been playing with home automation, enjoying exploring Home Assistant on his Pi 4, the conversation gets a little serious, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Series 8 Episode 3 with a chuckle. The guys are just so happy to be recording the day after Sys Admin Day, and it looks like clear skies all round, though rain is on the way. Mark plans to celebrate Sys Admin Day and the bank holiday weekend with family by foregoing pizza and instead having a barbeque so he hopes wttr.in is accurate and it just stays cloudy for the afternoon. The guys go on to comtemplate how quickly time goes by before discussing what Mark has been at.
03:20 Mark talks about his Volla phone and his beta testing journey with Ubuntu Touch. He also tells us he’s finally gotten around to playing around with his Turris Mox. Mark tells us a bit about the Turris project, the Turris Omnia and the Turris Mox. Mark mentions one of the things that got him back to testing the Turris Mox was the recent release of Turris OS 5.0, which is based on OpenWrt 19.07.3. Mark tells us that some of his testing involved listening to the Bugcast while on the Turris Mox wifi. Wayne gives Mark an excuse as to why it took him so long to do anything with his Turris and that turns the conversation around to the tedium of work.
17:02 Wayne tells us he’s been up to an awful lot. He’s back in touch with Dee, a long lost friend, and they’ve been catching up on tech and soldering amongst other things. Wayne goes on to talk about home automation. Dementor from the Telegram Channel of the Maker’s Corner podcast suggested home assistant requires dedicated hardware for all the extra integrations and the like, so Wayne has installed his home assistant on his Raspberry Pi 4.
On a recommendation from Dee, Wayne has bought 4 Sonoff basics so that he can do some automated switching. Currently he’s using one of them to switch on his bed side lamp table at 10.15 pm at night, which gives him and his room a nice little glow inside. Wayne calls out to our American listeners for assistance in purchasing some of these producst, so if you’re interested please get in touch. He also likes that these gadgets can be made aware of sunrise and sunset in your area. Wayne is pretty excited about the options the Wyze kit he’s hankering after will bring to the table. Wayne’s list of useful hints and tips is as follows:
How to Flash Tasmota onto Sonoff Basic – Home Assistant Basics
How to flash custom firmware to a Sonoff Basic
Running Home Assistant with Docker (docker-compose)
HassOS Release-4 build 11 (Stable)
Deprecating Home Assistant Supervised on generic Linux
Wayne goes on to tell us he’s been playing with LEDs and ESP32s. Wayne’s makery renaissance reminds him of the Rod of Doom and he feels that since electronics are now so cheap and many so open they make for a great hobby. Mark contemplates the true cost of cheap electronics but also thinks Open hardware and software is vital to our futures. Wayne mentions the VPRO Documentary with Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism as an important watch. Mark recommends the book, as well as Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record. The guys have a conversation about surveillance capitalism, ethics, morality, Amish Linux and the importance of the internet.
50:16 Time for Under the Hood – Wayne suggests the use of redshift for late night viewing. Dee sent us in a few beauties: For vi – p3p pastes 3 lines, y3y will copy the next 3 lines. For Android phone, Hotspot & Tethering, enable usb tethering.
Ubuntu MATE Image Viewer (Eye of MATE), pressing F9 in the 20.04 release gives you picture properties in a sidebar view.
Mark shares organisations that he has recently come across that he feels may be useful to people. The first one is Open UK, a UK not for profit organisation committed to develop and sustain UK leadership in Open Technology. The next is OW2, an independent, global, open-source software community, fostering open source projects, claiming to be the only such non-profit open source organisation of EU origin and DNA. He mentions Italo Vignoli’s presentation of LibreOffice’s 10th Anniversary as a good watch from their OW2’s 2020 convention. The final one he wants to mention is Gaia-X, a project which is the cradle of an open, transparent digital ecosystem, where data and services can be made available, collated and shared in an environment of trust.
01:0034 Irish saying of the show is Ceapaim and Ni Ceapaim, or I think or I don’t think.
We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it!
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