Series 8 Episode 4 – In this episode, true to form the guys expand on the recent weather events, Mark introduces the ideas behind a Cory Doctrow article and the conversation takes many twist and turns from there , more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:24 As a weary soul, Wayne welcomes us to the Series 8 Episode 4. Mark’s so weary that he’s even forgotten to pull up wttr.in and instead relies on met.ie for his weather report. It must be something to do with the hot weather. However, due to the magic of audio editing you don’t get to hear any of the key tapping that Wayne alluded to. The guys discuss hot summers, glowing pale legs exposed to sunlight and grapes exposed to too much heat in France.
The conversation follows this road as the guys discuss climate change and Cory Doctorow’s thought provocative article in locus on the subject called Full employment. Cory discounts the fears of people with regard to automation destroying peoples’ livelihoods as he thinks we will all be busy remediating the effects of climate change. It will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland
. Mark mentions Indonesia’s plan to move Jakarta as an example. The question becomes more one of funding. Mark goes on to quote the article’s learned lessons:
The pandemic crisis has taught us two critical things:
1. Blind adherence to government austerity destroys capacity – it doesn’t build it.
2. Sovereign currency issuers do not experience cash shortfalls during crises – they experience capacity shortfalls.
Mark then mentions the David McWilliam’s podcast and Angrynomics, a book about the rising tide of anger at inequality in the world and radical new solutions to tackle the inequality, while continuing to talk about Cory Doctorow’s article. The discussion takes off from there while the guys try and find a way to solve the world’s problems. Mark quotes the last lines of Cory Doctorow’s article to give us something to ponder:
Keynes once proposed that we could jump-start an economy by paying half the unemployed people to dig holes and the other half to fill them in.
No one’s really tried that experiment, but we did just spend 150 years subsidizing our ancestors to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground. Now we’ll spend 200-300 years subsidizing our descendants to put them back in there.
The guys don’t ponder so much as continue their talk on the subject, and there’s much to talk about, including World Leaders failing to act, Greece and Turkey squaring up over oil and gas, competing to win, and survival of the fittest vs survival of the most adaptable.
27 minutes into the show, Wayne manages to swing the conversation around to Free Software (in a way) when he discusses work IT spend. He has £900 to spend on three laptops and a tablet. Mark tells Wayne how he was recently able to purchase a Core i5 4590T to replace a G3220 for €30 so that he could install and play with Big Blue Button, a web conferencing system designed for online learning, so his point is computing can be cheap.
32:54 Wayne moves the conversation onto our recent move away from Telegram Chat to Matrix or Element. Mark explains that the main reason they moved over to Matrix was that it is Free and Open Source Software and more in keeping with their philosophy. Wayne is glad they’ve done it and uses Google as an example of how easy it is just to accept the convenience of it all without questioning the practise. Mark makes the point that it took a while for him to question these things, and Edward Snowden’s revelations really made him aware. Mark goes on to say that he’s disappointed that Mozilla’s and Google’s deal will continue but can rationalize it as a tax on Google’s dominance. Mark wishes that Mozilla could be properly funded to provide a free internet for us all. Wayne concludes that we should all be out there banging sticks before moving things along to under the hood.
45:01 Under the Hood – Mark’s one is a simple one and perfectly acceptable considering what they’ve just been talking about. For Sysadmin Day he suggests that everyone should go to Admin-magazine’s site and give them your email for marketing purposes and free sysadmin tools!
Wayne’s first under the hood is a script from one of our listeners, Vicky, that helps her deal with redshift. It goes like this:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Adjust your levels accordingly, redshift options:
# brightness - max value is 1.0
# temperature - normal is 6500, set lower value for less blue
#
# Add a startup item which sets a level, example:
# bash -c "redshift -PO 3900 -b 0.7 ; echo two > $HOME/.red_status.log"
#
# Use keyboard shortcuts to run this script, example:
# Alt + PgDn
# bash -c "$HOME'/Scripts/redshift_keyboard_shortcuts.sh' decrease"
# Alt + PgUp
# bash -c "$HOME'/Scripts/redshift_keyboard_shortcuts.sh' increase"
#
#
keys_pressed="$1"
log_file="$HOME/.red_status.log"
level_status="$(<"$log_file")"
set_level_four () {
redshift -PO 4700 -b 0.9
echo "four" > "$log_file"
}
set_level_three () {
redshift -PO 4700 -b 0.8
echo "three" > "$log_file"
}
set_level_two () {
redshift -PO 3900 -b 0.7
echo "two" > "$log_file"
}
set_level_one () {
redshift -PO 3200 -b 0.6
echo "one" > "$log_file"
}
set_level_zero () {
redshift -PO 2400 -b 0.5
echo "zero" > "$log_file"
}
decrease_level () {
if [[ "$level_status" = "four" ]]; then
set_level_three
elif [[ "$level_status" = "three" ]]; then
set_level_two
elif [[ "$level_status" = "two" ]]; then
set_level_one
elif [[ "$level_status" = "one" ]]; then
set_level_zero
fi
}
increase_level () {
if [[ "$level_status" = "zero" ]]; then
set_level_one
elif [[ "$level_status" = "one" ]]; then
set_level_two
elif [[ "$level_status" = "two" ]]; then
set_level_three
elif [[ "$level_status" = "three" ]]; then
set_level_four
fi
}
if [[ "$keys_pressed" = "decrease" ]]; then
decrease_level
elif [[ "$keys_pressed" = "increase" ]]; then
increase_level
fi
Wayne uses a transparent terminal in MATE and has discovered that alt-page-up turns his terminal to non-transparent and makes his terminal easier to read
Wayne also talks about barrier, a keyboard and mouse sharing utility
50:12 Irish saying of the show is “Níl áon chat séomra mar do chat séomra féin;
We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it!
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