Series 6 Episode 2 – Mark is excited to be going to the Dublin Maker Fair, hopefully more on this next episode, he also speaks of the decentralised web camp and sysadmin day, Wayne updates us on the SnipeIT asset management implementation at work alongside number tips to use linux more efficiently, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Episode 2 of Season 6 from a cloudy but sunny Bristol. A slightly stressed Mark tells us it’s only kind of raining in Kilkishen and looks to stay that way til Monday. Dublin looks to be not as rainy and he’s hoping it will stay that way since he and his family are heading to the Dublin Maker Fair. Mark goes on to tell us that Irish Rail’s family tickets are very reasonable and incredible value for families. The guys discuss Mark’s exploding head of ideas and blissful holidays.
04:51 Mark tells us that he’s upgraded his openSuse 15.0 Leap instance to 15.1 using a guide he found. He tells us he’s considering changing to openSuse Leap on his main desktop, much to Wayne’s consternation.
Mark goes on to tell us about a couple of things happening now or soon, the first being the Decentralized Web Camp happening near San Francisco at the moment, brought to us by our friends at the Internet Archive. Mark says he will put a link in the show notes to some of the videos that are available from previous Decentralized web summits.
Mark also wants to mention that Sysadmin Day 2019 is happening next Friday, 26th July.
12:01 Mark asks Wayne what he’s been at. Wayne tells us it’s all a bit foggy. <a href=https://snipeitapp.com/”>Snipe-IT being used full time at work, the users like it and the software is meeting their needs. In fact it’s way more useful than what they were using before. Wayne goes through some networking hoops he had to go through with it. He has some usability feature requests he might ask of the Snipe-it people on their forum. Wayne’s quite pleased with his back up stratgy which includes OneDrive and Rclone. The guys discuss the benefits of using Open Source Software.
18:24 Wayne tells us some more about his journey with Ubuntu Touch and relates some of the privacy features of the OS. In Ubuntu Touch you can open as many apps as you like at the same time but ‘open’ does not mean the same as it does with other operating systems. With Ubuntu Touch’s competitors, apps which are running in the background typically are able to monitor – some would call it spy on – the activity in the app which you are using. In Ubuntu Touch, apps running in the background (with a few exceptions) use no resources and there is a system in place to confine apps so that they are unable to see what other apps are doing. This is usually called ‘sandboxing’ and it is basic to the way that Ubuntu Touch works. It is not an afterthought but safeguard of privacy. The guys discuss openness, transparency, wishes for more development and core devs in Ubuntu Touch, especially around NextCloud. Mark suggests supporting them via Patreon and also suggests watching Frank Karlitschek’s talk from this year’s openSuse Conference. Wayne talks about Pico CMS.
31:25 Not under the Hood! Wayne tells us about ffmpeg. Wayne provides some examples, as follows:
ffmpeg -ss 00:00:30.0 -i input.wmv -c copy -t 00:00:10.0 output.wmv
where:
-ss : the start time hourminssec
-i : the input file name, ie the master video file
-c : make a copy
-t : the duration of the video to be cut
You can use -to instead of -t to specify the timestamp to which you want to cut. So, instead of ffmpeg -i [input] -ss 30 -t 10 you could also do ffmpeg -i [input] -ss 30 -to 40 to achieve the same thing.
Joining video files (need to be converted into a suitable format for concatenation first) can be done as follows:
ffmpeg -i input1.avi -qscale:v 1 intermediate1.mpg
ffmpeg -i input2.avi -qscale:v 1 intermediate2.mpg
cat intermediate1.mpg intermediate2.mpg > intermediate_all.mpg
ffmpeg -i intermediate_all.mpg -qscale:v 2 output.avi
Wayne tells us that Winff is a gui frontend for ffmpeg, and is as easy to install as typing sudo apt install winff from the command line in Ubuntu. The guys talk a bit about Kdenlive as well.
39:34 Wayne talks about Windows licensing and the guys ponder why businesses use Windows
42:25 Under the Hood – Jon the Nice Guy Spriggs has suggested Language Tool as an open source alternative to Grammarly. Ben suggested Barrier, a Synergy clone, which are applications to share your mouse and keyboard with other computers.
Wayne suggests using dpkg -l from the terminal to list the packages you have installed on your system, assuming you’re using a Debian based distribution.
Feeling the need to double up on Under the Hood, Wayne talks about fslint
49:01 Irish saying of the podcast – Oscail an fhuinneog, or Open the Window
We hope you enjoy this as much as we did making it!
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