The Binary Times – Series 7 Episode 4

Series 7 Episode 4 – In this episode The Binary Times guys are are joined by Ben Klaasen, Ben has been to FOSSDEM 2020 and gives us an insight to what it is like to attend this conference, Mark has been playing with Kubuntu 20.04, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.

00:27 Wayne welcomes us to Season 7 Episode 4 from a windy and wet Bristol. Mark reports that Kilkishen is much the same, and our special guest Ben Klaasen tells us that Dublin suffers from the same affliction, that being Storm Dennis.

02:38 Mark tells us he’s been continuing to test Kubuntu 20.04, and all is going well, he’s looking forward to the release. Mark also noticed that LibreOffice 6.4 is now available as a snap, and recommends that people start using it, as it is an “essential release” as noted in the release video. Mark also notes that the Document Foundation released LibreOffice 6.4 on the 29th January, while the snap was released on the 11th and has been available since February 3rd on OpenSuse Tumbleweed’s repositories , so Mark suggests that if the Document Foundation are encouraging people to use a Linux distribution that has the latest releases of LibreOffice then they should suggest OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Apart from that Mark has been watching videos of FOSDEM, at which point he suggests who better to talk about FOSDEM than Ben.

04:33 Ben tells us about FOSDEM. He decided on a whim to go and he’s really delighted that he went. He notes that it’s free to attend and run by volunteers. He describes that FOSDEM stands for the “Free and Open Source Developer’s European Meetup”, and that it has taken place on the Université Libre de Bruxelles du Solbosch Campus for the last twenty years. First impressions were a bit chaotic. He relates that the scale is hard to comprehend, but he gives us some statistics saying that there are 841 speakers, 873 events and 71 parallel tracks, all taking place more or less simultaneously across 35 rooms. Wow!

Ben goes on to tell us that FOSDEM is organized into a number of keynotes, with maintracks of Community and Ethics, Containers and Security, Databases, Freedom, History, the Internet and Miscellaneous! There are Developer Rooms helping developers to get together and solve problems, Lightning Talks on many subjects, and a part that he really loved, the stands. It stood out to him because while Corporates like RedHat and Suse were there, they weren’t there in their glossy booths; it was more like a school fair, with representatives of the companies and projects standing behind school desks ready to answer whatever questions were thrown at them.

There was so much going on Ben found it frustrating at the start, just because there was so much going on, but once he made the realisation that that was the whole point of the conference and just to go with it, he found it amazing and would thoroughly recommend to anyone interested in Free and Open Source software to go there.

The topic changes to the male to female ratio that was quite apparently skewed. Ben describes a book by Marie Hicks, a University Professor of History who wrote a book called Programmed Inequality, which describes how Britain discarded their technological lead in computing when they discarded their women technologists. Mark tells us that there is a documentary about Kay McNulty (one of the original Eniac Programmers), available to view on the RTE player (which Mark isn’t so sure is available outside of Ireland).

Wayne asks Ben what talks did he get to see and what tweaked his interest. Ben tells us he got to meet Mike Saunders, who’s a proper gent by all accounts. He also got to see the State of OpenJDK, a review of the past year in the life of the OpenJDK Community given by Mark Reinhold. Another talk that caught his eye was The Hidden Early History of Unix by Warner Losh, describing the early history of Unix, funnily enough. He also talks about Generation Gaps by Liam Proven. This leads to a general discussion around programming. Ben goes on to tell us about What’s up at Haiku, a talk given by Francois Revol, one of the developers of Haiku, on its current state. The guys have a general discussion around Haiku. Ben rattles off a few more talks to give us a feel for the scale of the event, namely BASICODE: the 8-bit programming API that crossed the Berlin Wall, Infrastructure testing, it’s a real thing!, Correlation analysis in automated testing, Thunderbird in 2020 and Beyond, dqlite: High-availability SQLite, and Reinventing Home Directories. This leads to a more general discussion on having to relearn everything and building in complexity to solve problems for some but having the effect of pushing others out. Ben recommends another book by Cal Newport called Deep Work.

Before moving on to Under the Hood, Ben gives a shout out to Mike Saunders and the Document Foundation Group.

55:33 Under the Hood – Mark’s Under the Hood is to listen to the latest series of Command Line Heroes, as the first two episodes of season 4 have been about the history of computers, with the first episode about Minicomputers, followed by Mainframes and soon to be followed by more interesting talks on hardware.

Ben’s under the Hood is to recommend legacy code rocks. He also tells us that Firefox’s Multi-Account Containers will now sync your container configuration and site assignments.

Wayne’s Under the Hood is the How to Geek article on How to work with variables in Bash. He also mentions an indiegogo campaign for NVMe ExpressCard Adapters for ThinkPads!

Irish saying of the show is “Tá grá mór agam ar an Binary Times” or I love the Binary Times!

We hope you enjoy this show as much as we did making it!

#601 – Dave’s Faves

This week on The Bugcast: it’s Dave’s turn to bring you his ultimate selection of 16 pieces of Creative Commons music played on the show in the last year – it’s Dave’s Faves!

Songs played

Intro: <a href="http://chrisjuergensen.com/">Chris Juergensen</a> – Bug Lips<br />
Outro: <a href="http://markmarshall.com/">Mark Marshall</a> – Man Walking

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Topics

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Upcoming events

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Announcements

  • Please leave us feedback on the music or any of the topics that we’ve discussed.
  • The next live show will be episode 602 Moo’s Tunes, which will be streamed live in the chatroom on Friday 21 February 2020 at 21:30-ish UK time (GMT/UTC).
  • Join us during the week on our Telegram group chat – click here to join
    (you’ll need a Telegram account)

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Podcasts mentioned

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Special thanks go to

Our <a href="https://thebugcast.org/support">supporters</a>!<br />
The artists for allowing us to play their music.<br />
Everyone who joined us in the chat room for the live broadcast of this show.<br />
<a href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> for hosting the media files<br />
<a href="https://euterpiaradio.ch/">Euterpia Radio</a> for the use of their Shoutcast server

The Bugcast is a proud founder member of the Other Side Podcast Network

The post #601 – Dave’s Faves appeared first on The Bugcast.

TuxJam 80 – Uncivil but free

In this episode Kevie and Andrew are delighted to be joined by Ken Fallon. Dave was MIA but will return. After the usual round-up of lesser-known releases on distrowatch, Ken and Andrew discuss their experience at FOSDEM 2020 and the stand they ran for the nascent Free Culture Podcasts project along with other Hacker Public Radio stalwarts Beni and JWP. Andrew’s sort-of-live-off-the-cuff thoughts on his first FOSDEM can be heard in HPR show 3010. Andrew and Kevie press gang Ken into looking at the FOSS Civ-V-like game Unciv and rather unique application Track & Graph.

Tunes played in this episode, all licensed under a Creative Commons license:

Maps and Legends

Maps and Legends

In this decaffeinated episode, Michael Tunnels, from TuxDigital and the Destination Linux Network, joins Dave and Yannick. They review Maps and Legends, the second episode of the first season of Star Trek Picard. After that, they have a chat with Michael about almost every Star Trek series.

Call to action

We would like to know what you think about Star Trek Picard. Does it live up to your expectations ? Send us your thoughts !

In this episode

Thanks

Thanks to all our listeners, we are very grateful you chose to spend a little bit of your precious time to listen to our show !

Legal

The review featured in this episode is a modified version of the work done by the team at Memory Alpha and is released under a CC-BY-NC licence, which means you can use it, transform it, and redistribute it as long as you give appropriate credits to us and Memory Alpha, and you don’t use it for commercial business.

The rest of this episode is released under a CC-BY-SA licence, which means you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, as long as you credit us as the original authors. If you publish something based on this episode, then you have to release it under the same license.

The post Maps and Legends appeared first on Tea, Earl Grey, Hot !.

#600 – Listeners’ Choice

This week on The Bugcast: we bring you the ultimate selection of 14 pieces of Creative Commons music played on the show in the last year, but this time our listeners’ choice!

Songs played

Intro: <a href="http://chrisjuergensen.com/">Chris Juergensen</a> – Bug Lips<br />
Outro: <a href="http://markmarshall.com/">Mark Marshall</a> – Man Walking

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Topics

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Upcoming events

–>

Announcements

  • Please leave us feedback on the music or any of the topics that we’ve discussed.
  • The next live show will be episode 601 Dave’s Faves, which will be streamed live in the chatroom on Friday 14 February 2020 at 21:30-ish UK time (GMT/UTC).
  • Join us during the week on our Telegram group chat – click here to join
    (you’ll need a Telegram account)

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Podcasts mentioned

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Special thanks go to

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the Listeners’ Choice this year!<br />
Our <a href="https://thebugcast.org/support">supporters</a>!<br />
The artists for allowing us to play their music.<br />
Everyone who joined us in the chat room for the live broadcast of this show.<br />
<a href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> for hosting the media files<br />
<a href="https://euterpiaradio.ch/">Euterpia Radio</a> for the use of their Shoutcast server

The Bugcast is a proud founder member of the Other Side Podcast Network

The post #600 – Listeners’ Choice appeared first on The Bugcast.

Remembrance

Remembrance
Remembrance

In this episode, Dave and Yannick have a guest : Caroline, co-host of the Bugcast, with none other than Dave himself. They review Remembrance, the first episode of the first season of Star Trek Picard. After that, they unfortunately don’t have time for a chat with Caroline, but they managed to submit her to the seven questions before she had to leave.

Call to action

What did you think of Remembrance ? Let us know, via one of the many means of contact detailed below.

In this episode

Thanks

Thanks to all our listeners, we are very grateful you chose to spend a little bit of your precious time to listen to our show !

Legal

The review featured in this episode is a modified version of the work done by the team at Memory Alpha and is released under a CC-BY-NC licence, which means you can use it, transform it, and redistribute it as long as you give appropriate credits to us and Memory Alpha, and you don’t use it for commercial business.

The rest of this episode is released under a CC-BY-SA licence, which means you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, as long as you credit us as the original authors, and if you publish something based on this episode, you have to release it under the same license.

The post Remembrance appeared first on Tea, Earl Grey, Hot !.

The Binary Times – Series 7 Episode 3

Series 7 Episode 3 – In this episode The Binary Times guys are upgrading OS’s for family and testing, Mark has been working with Linux Mint, Wayne has been knee deep in Mikrotik’s RouterOS , more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.

00:27 Wayne welcomes us to Season 7 Episode 3 from a wet and windy Bristol. It’s wet and windy in Kilkishen too, as Mark relates that the wttr app is reporting much the same weather as he can see outside. It’s a momentous day on the day they’re recording, with many new beginnings happening, like it being the first day of spring and the first day of FOSDEM 2020. The guys plan a short show so they can watch the live streams.

03:11 Mark tells us what he’s been up to. He tells us that his parents’ PC was displaying a “system problem detected” error message that turned out to be nothing more than a prompt to upgrade from Linux Mint 19.2 to Linux Mint 19.3. Mark did the upgrade and it went very well, everything was plain sailing, but he voices his concerns regarding the fact that error messages like this are unnecessarily worrying for new or inexperienced users.

Mark goes on to talk about the upgrade of his parents’ laptop from Linux Mint 18.3 to Linux Mint 19.3. This was a more involved process which first involved changing the display manager from mdm to lightdm, as Linux Mint changed display managers . He did this with these commands:

sudo apt install lightdm lightdm-settings slick-greeter

sudo apt remove --purge mdm mint-mdm-themes*

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Reboot your machine, and once back at a terminal, input:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Once fully updated, install Linux Mint’s upgrade tool to upgrade from the older LTS to the newer LTS. You can do this as follows:

sudo apt install mintupgrade – to install the tool

mintupgrade check – to simulate an upgrade and check for any possible breakages.

mintupgrade download – to download the upgrade

mintupgrade upgrade – to do the upgrade

The guys discuss the number of steps involved in upgrading between LTSs.

Mark goes on to discuss how he put Zorin OS on a SSD for a colleague’s parents’ PC.

Wayne goes on to tell us how he’s been upgrading all of his work’s PCs to Windows 10 while also installing Ubuntu MATE on a few laptops.

14:40 Wayne goes on to tell us that Mike Saunders has upgraded MikeOS and provided a link to MikeOS playing “Stand By Me”!

15:53 Wayne goes on to thank Paul for a Vostro 3550 Laptop. In the spirit of paying it forward, which is Paul want, Wayne decided to try out some new distributions on the laptop to report back to everyone how it went. The first distro he tried was Pop!_OS (which he didn’t really get on with) at which point Mark suggests Wayne should try Kubuntu 2020 next, which is Mark’s re branding of Kubuntu 20.04.

Wayne goes on to tell us he also tried Regolith, a Free and Open Source Distribution based on Ubuntu 18.04 with the i3 Window Manager. He really likes it. He’ll play around with it some more and recommends it if you want to give i3 a go.

23:59 The guys go on talk about the concept of “Pay it forward”.

26:27 Wayne tells us about his MikroTik adventures. The guys talk about Network Security, and quickly lose their “pay it forward” feelings towards their fellows, not wanting to be the slowest in the hurd.

Wayne provides some of the links to the topics he’s been covering with MikroTik, and these are as follows:

iptables: Packet Processing

iptables: Tables and Chains

MikroTik VLAN and Bridge Configuration

MikroTik VLAN Routing Configuration with Manageable Switch

Mark mentions the Ubuntu Security Podcast as a good one to listen to as of late they cover other topics besides patches for security vulnerabilities like how to get into InfoSec

38:30 Wayne talks about Shotcut, a free and open source, cross-platform video editor.

40:37 Under the Hood – Mark tells us about Gardiner Bryan’s attempt to create a Free and Open Source Game based on his frustration of Rocket League being discontinued for Linux. Mark plans to become a first rate games developer over the next couple of days and help create the best Open Source game EVA!!! There’s no lack of ambition on this show!

44:21 Wayne’s more understated Under the Hoods are as follows:

Use reader mode in Firefox!

Wayne’s second under the hood is CTRL-L to clear the screen in a terminal

Wayne’s gem of an under the hood is ip -c a which colourizes the command’s output. He’s even aliased ip to ip -c

49:48 Irish Saying of the Show is “Is maith liom ag caint le mo chairde” or I like to talk with my friends!

We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it!

#599 – Bugxit

This week on The Bugcast: we say farewell to UK broadcasting legend Nicholas Parsons, lament Brexit, and play you eight pieces of amazing Creative Commons music!

Songs played

Intro: <a href="http://chrisjuergensen.com/">Chris Juergensen</a> – Bug Lips<br />
Outro: <a href="http://markmarshall.com/">Mark Marshall</a> – Man Walking

Topics

BBC News: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51278023">Nicholas Parsons: ‘Broadcasting legend’ dies at 96 after short illness</a><br />
BBC News: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/uk_leaves_the_eu">Brexit – the UK leaves the European Union</a><br />
WorkingAtTate: <a href="https://workingat.tate.org.uk/pages/job_search_view.aspx?jobId=7013">Head of Coffee by Tate</a>

<a href="https://teaearlgreyhot.org/">Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!</a> – Caroline joined Dave and Yannick to review the first episode of Picard.

<strong><a href="https://thebugcast.org/choice">Submit</a></strong> your favourite tracks we’ve played since episode 553 for the Listener’s Choice episode 600 at the beginning of February 2020.<br />
<strong>Deadline for submissions: Wednesday 5 February at 20:00 UTC</strong>

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Upcoming events

–>

Announcements

  • Please leave us feedback on the music or any of the topics that we’ve discussed.
  • The next live show will be episode 600 Listener’s Choice, which will be streamed live in the chatroom on Friday 31 January 2020 at 21:30-ish UK time (GMT/UTC).
  • Join us during the week on our Telegram group chat – click here to join
    (you’ll need a Telegram account)

Podcasts mentioned

<a href="https://teaearlgreyhot.org/">Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!</a>

Special thanks go to

Our <a href="https://thebugcast.org/support">supporters</a>!<br />
The artists for allowing us to play their music.<br />
Everyone who joined us in the chat room for the live broadcast of this show.<br />
<a href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> for hosting the media files<br />
<a href="https://euterpiaradio.ch/">Euterpia Radio</a> for the use of their Shoutcast server

The Bugcast is a proud founder member of the Other Side Podcast Network

The post #599 – Bugxit appeared first on The Bugcast.

These Are the Voyages…

These Are the Voyages...
These Are the Voyages…

In this episode, Dave and Yannick review These Are the Voyages…, the 22nd and last episode of the 4th season of Star Trek : Enterprise. After that, they do a brief retrospective of the entire season, and then go over some news items.

Call to action

Star Trek: Picard has been released worldwide. Have you seen it?
Send us your initial thoughts of the first episode, “Remembrance”!

In this episode

Thanks

Once again, a huge thank you to Andrew for joining us on last week’s episode. Also, thanks to all our listeners, we are very grateful you chose to spend a little bit of your precious time to listen to our show !

Legal

The review featured in this episode is a modified version of the work done by the team at Memory Alpha and is released under a CC-BY-NC licence, which means you can use it, transform it, and redistribute it as long as you give appropriate credits to us and Memory Alpha, and you don’t use it for commercial business.

The rest of this episode is released under a CC-BY-SA licence, which means you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, as long as you credit us as the original authors, and if you publish something based on this episode, you have to release it under the same license.

The post These Are the Voyages… appeared first on Tea, Earl Grey, Hot !.

#598 – Going home to Brian

This week on The Bugcast: we say farewell to Monty Python comedy legend, Terry Jones, and play you eight pieces of amazing Creative Commons music!

Songs played

Intro: <a href="http://chrisjuergensen.com/">Chris Juergensen</a> – Bug Lips<br />
Outro: <a href="http://markmarshall.com/">Mark Marshall</a> – Man Walking

Topics

BBC News: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-51209197">Terry Jones: Monty Python stars pay tribute to comedy great</a>

<a href="https://teaearlgreyhot.org/">Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!</a> – Caroline will be joining Dave and Yannick to review the first episode of Picard.<br />
The review of “Remembrance” will be published on the weekend of Saturday 1 February</a>

<strong><a href="https://thebugcast.org/choice">Submit</a></strong> your favourite tracks we’ve played since episode 553 for the Listener’s Choice episode 600 at the beginning of February 2020.<br />
<strong>Deadline for submissions: Wednesday 5 February at 20:00 UTC</strong>

<!–

Upcoming events

–>

Announcements

  • Please leave us feedback on the music or any of the topics that we’ve discussed.
  • The next live show will be episode 599, which will be streamed live in the chatroom on Friday 31 January 2020 at 21:30-ish UK time (GMT/UTC).
  • The next live show after that will be episode 600 Listener’s Choice, which will be streamed live in the chatroom on Friday 7 February 2020 at 21:30-ish UK time (GMT/UTC).
  • Join us during the week on our Telegram group chat – click here to join
    (you’ll need a Telegram account)

Podcasts mentioned

<a href="https://teaearlgreyhot.org/">Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!</a>

Special thanks go to

Our <a href="https://thebugcast.org/support">supporters</a>!<br />
The artists for allowing us to play their music.<br />
Everyone who joined us in the chat room for the live broadcast of this show.<br />
<a href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> for hosting the media files<br />
<a href="https://euterpiaradio.ch/">Euterpia Radio</a> for the use of their Shoutcast server

The Bugcast is a proud founder member of the Other Side Podcast Network

The post #598 – Going home to Brian appeared first on The Bugcast.