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The Binary Times – Series 6 Episode 10

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Series 6 Episode 10 – In this episode Mark has been to insomnia in the RDS in Dublin, its also the year that Blade Runner was set in, a short story about Scratch 3, the guys try out Delta Chat, Wayne upgrades to MATE 19.10, internal DNS with pfSense, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.

00:38 Wayne welcomes us to a slightly late Episode 10 of Series 6. As well as being late, it’s late in the day, and it’s getting colder, but at least our hosts don’t have to report on radioactive fallout as they would have to if they were living in the BladeRunner Universe, the movie of which was of course set in November 2019.

02:53 Wayne asks Mark what he’s been at. Mark tells us he’s still exercising, that he’s been reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”, watching Bladerunner and Bladerunner 2049 and generally geeking out on all things Bladerunner. Mark goes on to tell us that the background ambience has been provided by Crysknife007, which was released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.. Thank you Crysknife007!

Mark goes on to tell us that he went to Insomnia 2019, and that there was a whole lot going on. Cosplay featured, and Nathan’s Crafty Creations was there in his Fallout costume. Romero Games also featured, John and Brenda Romero were there talking about their new game, Empire of Sin, coming out at the start of 2020, which Mark hopes will play on Linux via Proton, or as Wayne suggests, Lutris. Mark tells us how he was able to meet both Romeros after at a meet and greet and was able to get a signed copy of the book Challenges for Game Designers and a signed copy of the Sigil boxed set. Mark goes on to talk about the fact that Sigil came about because people were asking John to make a new episode for doom and he thought it was a pretty cool idea to do something for Dooms 25th Anniversary. Mark tells us that since Doom has been opensourced and he plays other opensource games like SuperTuxKart, Warfork, Warsow, Quake and variants, it inspired him to look into OpenSource Gaming a bit more and he was blown away by what he found! He tells us to go to What is Open Gaming for some definitions of how open source applies to games, and to the Linux Game Consortium, FreeGameDev and Opensource Gaming for more information.

This brings the conversation around to Scratch 3 and how it is being used in Circomedia. One of the teachers there is using Scratch to inspire students to create art. Wayne goes on to speak about Edublocks and how Josh gave a talk about Edublocks at Oggcamp.

18:35 Wayne tells us what he’s been up to. He tells us all about Delta Chat and the guys relate their experience. It all sounds good, just need to convince everyone to move to yet another messaging client!

Wayne tells us that he’s upgraded his work laptop to Ubuntu MATE 19.10 and tells us about the experience. It all seems to have gone well, with this release being a “significant improvement over 18.04” and Wayne still remaining a committed Ubuntu MATE user. He also provides the following key bindings:

  • Cycle external displays: Super + p
  • Lock Screen: Super + L
  • Screenshot a rectangle: Shift + PrintScr
  • Open File Manager: Super + e
  • Open Terminal: Super + t
  • Open Control Center: Super + i
  • Open Search: Super + s
  • Open Task Manager: Control + Shift + Escape
  • Open System Information: Super + Pause

He also tells us that Ubuntu MATE 19.10 has LibreOffice 6.3 installed.

Mark recounts his own tale of updating on a whim to the devel channel on Ubuntu Touch on his tablet after reading this item and it all went well, though he was originally thrown by the lack of scopes.

39:59 Wayne goes on to tell us about setting up local DNS on PFSense. Wayne thinks it’s best to do DHCP for everything and use the static leases feature, that way pfSense picks up the local hostname of the device and adds that to the DNS resolver in pfSense. This leads to a discussion around knowing when enough is enough. Mark suggests listening to the BlindBoy Podcast. The guys discuss art and freedom fighting in the face of apathy.

49:46 Under the Hood. Mark’s Under the Hood is about Wireframe Magazine, “Lifting the Lid on Video Games”, and that it’s reached its first anniversary issue. Mark also wishes to draw attention to an article they had in issue 25, called “A World Without Bosses” in which worker owned video game co-ops like The Glory Society, Pixel Pushers Union 512, Motion Twin Games and game worker unions like Game Workers Unite are discussed. Mark thinks these things are important and worth bringing to people’s attention.

Wayne’s Under the Hood is about the Humble Bundle’s Design like a Designer bundle. There’s just too much good stuff on humble bundle!

Mark decides to quote some Bladerunner:

“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

Grim stuff!

Wayne rounds out Under the Hood with a tip on Handbrake to set the audio language default to English

Irish saying of the Show: “Téimid uilig amach ina n-aonar” – We all go out alone.

We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we did making it!

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