All of Series 3 episodes

Episode 12, Episode 11, Episode 10, Episode 9, Episode 8, Episode 7, Episode 6, Episode 5, Episode 4, Episode 3, Episode 2, Episode 1

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 12
Mike Saunders chats with us

Sun 9 Jun, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne welcomes us to the final episode of Season 3 from a sunny but slightly cloudy Bristol. Mark tells us that it's murky in Kilkishen, with fog earlier and thunder storms yesterday, while Mike Saunders tells us that its rather grim in Southern Germany with golf ball size hail stones falling on his southern neighbours. The guys don't understand the weather, they just comment on the weather. Wayne welcomes Mike back once more to the show, and Mike's happy to be back!

01:48 Mark tells us that his "studio PC" now has Linux Mint 18.3 on one hard drive and Open SUSE Leap 15 on another hard drive, which he is currently using for the show and his plan is that this will be his studio from now on. He goes on to tell us that he has finally got his nextcloud box up and running using Martin Wimpress's tutorial, using a Raspberry Pi 2 image rather than a Raspberry Pi 3. He flew through the whole process, you could say it was a "snap". Mark rounds out his tale of Linux goodness by telling us that he and another couple of people met in Gleeson's Bar in Kilkishen to install Ubuntu MATE, much fun was had.

04:34 Wayne asks Mike what he's been up to and Mike tells us that he's installed the latest version of Xubuntu. The default window manager theme only gives you one pixel of area to grab the resize area on the corner which Mike finds crazy but hasn't gotten around to fixing yet. Mike goes on to share a business idea and asks the question if anyone is selling a preinstalled nextcloud and libre office preinstalled on a Raspberry Pi. Mark mentions the nextcloud box but also says that they're mostly sold out. The guys think a simple and accessible set up would be key.

08:47 Mike goes on to tell us that he has been looking at ReactOS and it can now compile itself, which is a landmark for ReactOS. This leads onto a discussion about version numbers where Mark mentions that he's used Inkscape to make safety posters at work which Mike thinks deserves a 1.0 release.

11:45 Mark asks Wayne what he's been up to. Wayne tells us that he recently purchased a Lenovo Thinkpad X220. Wayne tells us that he's moved his Dell Inspiron 1501s at work off of Ubuntu MATE and over to Manjaro. Wayne goes on to tell us that he's been having fun with upgrading HDDs to SSDs using Clonezilla, resizing LVMs and all that kinda cool stuff. Mike suggests using the Arch Wiki for help. He also tells us how much he loves the Thinkpad keyboards and thinks an ultrabook with a thinkpad keyboard would be really cool, which Wayne thinks is another good business idea. Mark goes on to mention the Martin Wimpress interview in Destination Linux and says in that interview Mr. Wimpress states that he doesn't like the idea of his distro being considered "lightweight", more so being known for usability and overall performance.

21:39 Mark asks Mike if he has any ideas on testing keyboards as per the question that was put to the guys last episode and apart from agreeing with xev as a solution suggests a drinking bird as seen on the Simpsons.

23:54 Mark decides to change the topic to a more serious one and that is the upcoming vote to take place in the European Parliament regarding the Copyright Directive. The guys discuss the implications of this directive and how it may harm the internet as we know it today. Mike tells us about an open letter written to the European Council requesting copyright rules that are fit for purpose and avoiding unintended and damaging side effects. Mark wonders if this has anything to do with the FSFE and Open forum Europe's open letter initiative. Mark suggests the listeners should check out the Save Your Internet website and also Julia Reda's website for further information. Mike mentions she did an AMA on reddit on the topic.

34:08 Wayne brings the conversation around to Microsoft's purchase of Github, which sparks a conversation around the same. Wayne then tells us about Gitlab, and in a recent interview on the Ask Noah Show, Jason Plum told everyone how busy Gitlab has been getting due to the takeover. The guys aren't sure why Microsoft is doing this, watch this space is the general feeling!

40:13 Under the Hood, Mark starts with his stalwarts lsblk and sudo dd if=name_of.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress (where X is based on lsblk output).

Wayne's under the hood is his discovery that he had a 4GB jack log file which he duly deleted. Another thing he came across was his partner's mouse waking up her laptop from suspend. This is what he did to solve it:

sudo su

cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo "EHC1" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

echo "EHC2" > /proc/acpi/wakeup

Mike wonders why this isn't enabled by default.

For Mike's Under the Hood he tells us about the troubleshooting he has done to try to install Linux on an old netbook. This leads to some discussion around troubleshooting in general.

49:26 Mike kindly provides us with German sayings of the podcast, two Zungenbrecher, and they go like this:

"Am Zehnten Zehnten zehn Uhr zehn zogen zehn zahme Ziegen zehn Zentner Zucker zum Zoo." or On the tenth of the tenth at ten past ten, ten tame goats pull ten packages of sugar through the zoo.

"Der dünne Diener trägt die dicke Dame durch den dicken Dreck, da dankt die dicke Dame dem dünnen Diener, dass der dünne Diener die dicke Dame durch den dicken Dreck getragen hat" or the thin servant carries the fat woman through thick mud and then the woman thanks the servant for carrying her.

Thanks for listening to the show, we hoped you enjoyed it as much as we did making it. See you for Series Four.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 11

Sun 26 May, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne heartily introduces Series 3 Episode 11, which is indeed the penultimate episode of Season 3. The guys marvel at the fact of actually making it this far, and clumsily try to big themselves up. It's a murky rainy Bristol, which Wayne enjoys, while Mark tells us that Clare has has some great weather for the last while.

00:57 Wayne asks Mark what he's been up to Linuxy wise and he tells us that he's been doing a few bits and pieces. He tells us of his experience installing Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and about its memory usage, both RAM and storage, followed by a wipe and an install of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 and comparing the two. Wayne congratulates Mark on actually doing a challenge on time, while Mark agrees its not something he's known for doing, at least not on time! They discuss the implications of the comparison. Mark goes on to tell us that he installed a minimal instance of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 on a new hard drive in the same PC as his Linux Mint PC, and he discusses the hassles he's had with this, the nature of the minimal install, and how he's snapping everything else. This leads to a discussion around snaps and the usefulness of and recommendations for modern linux distros on older hardware.

16:24 Since Mark has been bigging up KDE, he takes the opportunity to mention the KDE ask me anything on reddit that occurred yesterday. Of course, he has very few details on it but does suggest it is worth a look for anyone wanting to know about the roadmap for KDE.

17:42 Mark continues to hog the airwaves with a mention of an ad he's spotted for a Razer mobile phone on the KDE ask me anything reddit page. This leads on to a discussion around the guys making Fake Ads (FADs!) for the pleasure of their audience, and Mark goes on to thank their listeners for all the donations and feedback.

19:21 Wayne prepares to wrap up the show with news that he's purchased a Lenovo X220 that wasn't all plain sailing with various problems. He tells us that the first thing he generally does with any machine that he's just bought with Windows on it is to make an image of the hdd, just in case he is giving or selling on the machine again. In Windows he uses macrium reflect, but this time he decided to use Clonezilla. He tells us about his adventures with Clonezilla. He goes on to give us a list of commands he needed to do to get the hdd booting again:

diskpart

list disk

select disk 0

list partition

select partition 1

active

exit

bootrec /fixmbr

bootrec /fixboot

bootrec /scanos

bootrec /rebuildbcd, Y

exit

27:26 Since Wayne is tired after recounting his woes with Windows, Mark tells us of a question that one of their listeners sent in, and the question goes like this:

"As you know i refurbish computers and give them back to the community.

Part of this is determining if a laptop's keyboard is working.

Do you (or perhaps a listener) know of a program/method that would allow me to test a keyboard - every key? - including function keys/numbers/Alt/Ctrl/Super/esc/page up/down, home, end, etc,etc ....

eg :

a script I can run from a command line that allows me to type a sentence ("the quick brown fox..") and all the numbers but then displays if any keys/numbers/function key were missed. Or perhaps a gui tool that graphically displays a keyboard and highlights the keys pressed?

Perhaps one of the listeners could point me in the correct starting direction ("why not use 'x' piped through 'y' and grep via..." type of answer). or use the inbuilt tool '...'"

Mark suggested xev, but all other suggestions are welcome!

29:39 Wayne tells us how he uses Copperhead OS on his Nexus 5X and tells us what he had to do to get the automatic updates working on it again. You can too if you do the following:

Go to Settings -> Apps &an;; Notifications -> See all 45 apps ->

Then go to the "..." (three dots menu - top right) -> Show system

Then CopperheadOS Updater -> App notifications -> Updates -> Switch to On

... phew!

31:21 Wayne goes on to talk about simple-help, a proprietary, self hosted, remote support software tool that's really good. He first heard about it on the Ask Noah Show.

41:50 Before the Under the Hood section, the guys tease their listeners with the fact that they will have a surprise guest next episode, Wayne tries to fit a big hard drive into a small space, and Mark tells everyone about their new T-Shirts.

45:40 Under the Hood - Mark has a quick one, xev!

Wayne's under the hood revolves around vim. He recently re-did the vimtutor, and the following stood out to him:

u - undo last edit

U - fix the whole line

Ctrl + r - redo

Ctrl + g - show the status of a file

Mark mentions Mike Saunder's vim tutor as a good one, and suggests they could talk about it more next week. The guys have a little chuckle as if there is something they know that they are not telling their audience.

48:45 Irish saying of the podcast: "Níl aon tóin tinn mar do thóin tinn féin." There's no sore ass like your own sore ass!

Thanks to everyone for their support, feedback and we hope you continue to enjoy listening to the show.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 10

Sun 13 May, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Season 3 Episode 10 from a slightly cloudy Bristol. The morning has been lovely in Kilkishen. A difference of opinion over the weather almost leads to Mark being fired.

01:22 Mark has been up to all kinds of crazy stuff over the last two weeks. One of those things is installing KXStudio. Mark mentions that they are looking for donations and suggests that people donate. Mark decided to put the distribution on a spare hard drive as the KXStudio applications use QT4 rather than QT5 on his existing Kubuntu 18.04 and also just to see what the distribution looks like. Mark decides not to take the bet that Wayne offers that he will stick with it as a distribution. The guys discuss getting serious in the podcast. Note: If Mark had checked the news section of KXStudio he would have known that an 18.04 release will soon be ready.

06:56 Mark discusses the woes of supporting a Windows 10 gaming machine. Let's just say he's not impressed. It bores Wayne too. Mark is waiting for the day when Windows 11 DE is based off of a Linux kernel.

11:15 Wayne moves our Linux podcast on to reveal that he has installed Gimp 2.10 as a ppa. Wayne says it's also available as a flatpak, and Mark discovers it's also available as a snap. Wayne's not a fan of the new dark theme and thinks it may just be that he doesn't like change. He tells us all about the new features of Gimp 2.10.

18:09 Wayne updated his work laptop to Ubuntu MATE 18.04 and it was a breeze. Wayne tells us the Ubuntu MATE Welcome application, Software Boutique and Pulsemixer are all snaps now. You install these as follows:

snap install ubuntu-mate-welcome --classic

snap install software-boutique --classic

snap install pulsemixer

Wayne asks Mark to do a df -h on his existing Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and then the same on a new 18.04 install to see how much bigger 18.04 is compared to 16.04, and also to check the boot up time. Wayne questions whether Ubuntu MATE is a good distribution for older hardware, Mark decides not to share his opinion and Wayne installs Crunchbang plus plus on older hardware.

24:42 Wayne moves the conversation onto Arch, i3 and Firefox. Firefox pulled in another 500MB of software, which the guys marvel over. Wayne suggests Midori as a lightweight browser, while also promising to do more browsing from the terminal, using the likes of w3m and lynx. Wayne says the binary times is brilliant in a terminal browser. Mark suggests Falkon web browser as a lightweight browser, which he says he is going to try. The guys discuss software bloat.

31:40 Wayne introduces us to tube, a lightweight youtube browser. Mark tries it out and is impressed by the minimal nature and the speed of the application.

35:37 Mark starts off the Under the Hood section with:

sudo apt -f install

to install dependancies when a dpkg -i [filename].deb fails

37:30 Wayne asks us if we know that you can use Telegram as a cli app. Mark says that he knew that but didn't see the utility. Wayne tells us all the features that are available. Mark is impressed, Wayne's effort has brought him around to seeing the utility of a cli Telegram.

41:48 Wayne's second under the hood is a nice and simple little one to find out whether you are running a 32bit or 64bit OS, and it is this: getconf LONG_BIT

43:00 Before the Irish Saying of the Podcast, Mark tells us that he's redesigned the binary times t-shirt, they both agree that it looks really cool.

44:48 Irish saying of the podcast "Nach bhfuil tú ag éisteach" or You're not listening!

On that note, thanks for listening and we hoped you enjoyed it as much as we did making it!

 

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 9

Sun 29 Apr, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne introduces Series 3 Episode 9 from a slightly murky, slightly chilly Bristol while Mark greets us in his bright orange Ubuntu T-Shirt from a gloriously sunny but chilly Kilkishen

00:57 Wayne asks the question of Mark if there is anything happening in the Linux World. Well, Mark responds by saying that while bits and pieces have been going on his main driver is getting prepared for the release party in Gleeson's Pub in Kilkishen on the 28th April. Mark's expecting everyone to drop everything and come along to have some fun! He also mentions that the Dublin Linux User Group is having a meet up today in the Long Stone Pub in Dublin and he's sure there'll be some celebration there. Mark mentions the Dublin Linux User Groups Telegram channel and a nostalgic look at Kubuntu 6.06 made by one of the Dublin Linux User Group members.

03:46 Wayne tells us he picked up the full boxed set of Star Trek the Next Generation on E-Bay. He's been busy ripping the entire thing using Handbrake. The guys have a discussion on the values of Handbrake which leads onto a discussion about the values of Western Digital Hard Disk Drives.

10:12 Wayne tells us he's a little bit strange! He wants to install Arch! Mark tells us that from his perspective Ubuntu is the most important Linux distribution out there because of the fact that Ubuntu provides a usable desktop with sane presets that everyday users can pick up and use straight away.

14:34 Mark brings it back to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release with a rather rambly chat about Ubuntu's own release material, Nextcloud's big win-over of the German government and the promo videos that have been created by various creators for the release of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu MATE. Mark goes on to tell us that he installed Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi and is going to install Sonic Pi on his Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Wayne tells us that he has installed Ubuntu-MATE 18.04 on a VM and likes it but does have his pet peeves around icon spacing that he may submit a bug for. He also wants to get rid of the word "menu" from the brisk menu but doesn't know how while he also tells us that he installs synapse as a must, since the brisk menu only searches applications and not files.

30:57 Wayne tells us about a tip he has for automatically centering windows in Ubuntu-MATE and it is this:

First you need to install the dconf-editor from the terminal

sudo apt install dconf-editor

click on Applications - System Tools - dconf-editor

Click on the magnifying glass up top

and type center-new-windows

Switch this option to ON

32:20 Wayne came across a really cool project, the Cayenne project. He watched a video on youtube and while he hasn't done much with it yet both Wayne and Mark sound very interested in the idea.

35:18 Mark tells us about a project on Indiegogo, the Turris MOX, a modular and Open Source router.

38:25 Under the Hood, and Mark tells us about a handy command line tool that helped him to convert pngs he had made with Inkscape to jpgs, and that is, remarkably, convert [imagename].png [imagename].jpg

41:20 Wayne has a little thing that he came across during the week, and that is you can jump between tty sessions by pressing the alt left and alt right.

43:16 Irish saying of the podcast: Tá brón orm as a leithscéal, or sorry for being sorry!

We hope you enjoyed the show, any feedback or donations appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 8

Sun 15 Apr, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Series 3 Episode 8 from a lovely and sunny Spring morning in Bristol. Mark remarks that it is over-cast in Kilkishen but hopes that Spring may be on the way, one day...

01:34 Mark tells us that he has been crazy, crazy, crazy busy at work! He goes on to tell us that in an attempt to improve his audio quality he has purchased a Focusrite 2i2 Studio 2nd Gen. Set up problems on his alienware PC lead him to go back to using his Linux Mint 18.3 box, so kudos to the Linux Mint team. This leads to a general discussion around general purpose computing and how amazing it is when you get it to work! Mark finally recommends the focusrite studio.

07:24 Wayne asks Mark if there's any other linuxy stuff going on in his life and Mark admits to purchasing a Raspberry Pi 3 model B+ which he received Thursday but he hasn't done anything with it yet.

07:59 Using this information as a segway to some news, Wayne goes on to tell us about the Rock64 Media Board Computer, a pretty amazing bit of kit with some pretty impressive specs starting at $24. The fact that you can use Yocto brings Mark's mind back to an article he read in Linux Magazine about building a Yocto-based Knoppix for the Raspberry Pi. Apologies to Klaus Knopper for mis-remembering his name. Mark goes on to tell us about some of the boot time woes he's been having with a Dell laptop.

16:42 Wayne tells us about some issues he's been having at work with Remmina installed as a snap. He resolved these issues with the following commands:

sudo snap connect remmina:avahi-observe :avahi-observe

sudo snap connect remmina:cups-control :cups-control

sudo snap connect remmina:password-manager-service :password-manager-service

sudo snap connect remmina:mount-observe :mount-observe

18:33 Wayne got a weird error on his Ubuntu MATE 17.10 machine at work and it was when he tried to change his password he got the following error messages:

/var/cache/cracklib/cracklib_dict.pwd: No such file or directory

BAD PASSWORD: The password fails the dictionary check - error loading dictionary

which was fixed with the following:

sudo apt-get install cracklib-runtime

Wayne found this out from an article on Ask Ubuntu.

23:38 Mark brings the conversation around to an article on OMGUbuntu related to Canonical's Live Kernel Patching service. This leads to a conversation around the pros and cons of the service and Wayne's explanation of his work-life balance. Mark tells us that in Kubuntu 18.04 you can install the snap backend via discover but then you have to do the rest via command line rather than the gui method that's available in Ubuntu.

29:10 Wayne asks Mark how far are we from the release of Ubuntu 18.04 and Mark says that it is due Thursday the 26th April, which for Mark brings to mind the Dublin Linux Users Group's amazing meetup in Amazon where some Amazon staffers and Dublin Linux Group community members will talk about AWS and any other topics on the night. Sounds like fun though Mark won't be able to make it himself. He goes on to mention Dublin Linux Users Group's web page as a good place to check out for free software alternatives as well as Google alternatives. The guys discuss various search engines.

33:46 Since it's something that's being discussed in other podcasts, Wayne chats briefly about Firefox Containers and promises to report back on results.

36:06 Mark confesses to not listening to podcasts recently, instead he's been listening to Naomi Klein's This changes everything and The Great Courses The Science of Energy and Resources Explained. He's looking forward to listening to podcasts again soon.

37:11 Under the Hood - Mark continues the theme from last week by suggesting listeners try the 8-day data detox. This leads to a conversation around data detoxification.

Wayne's under the hood is how to fix locked files in NextCloud 13. You do this like so:

cd /var/www/nextcloud/config

vi config.php

-- find the line that says 'maintenance' => false; and change it to 'maintenace' => true;

Now restart the server . Once back at the command line:

sudo mysql -u root -p

input database root password and server password , then connect nextcloud (nextcloud is the name of the database from config.php file)

DELETE FROM oc_file_locks WHERE 1;

when finished, type \q

vi /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php

change 'maintenance' => false; save and quit

Reboot the server, you're done!

Irish saying of the podcast "Tá tú mall inniu" or "You're late today".

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 7
Special guest - Mike Saunders

Sat 31 Mar, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne kicks off episode 7 of season 3 with our usual weather report, followed by Mark and then followed by our special guest today, Mike Saunders! Gloomy Grey pervades the weather in Bristol and Germany, while it's a nice crisp clear morning in Clare!

01:55 Mike tells us a bit about himself, including Mike OS, the Document Foundation and Social Media. This leads to a discussion around the pros and cons of Social Media and privacy issues.

08:31 Wayne congratulates Mike on creating Mike OS. Mike thinks it's fairly easy to make an OS! :)

10:23 Mike tells us about his daily drivers, A Macbook Pro with Xubuntu on it and a libreboot Lenovo Thinkpad 220 running Xubuntu as well. Wayne tells us he's on Ubuntu Mate and the guys struggle to remember what happened to the thinkpad classic.

12:32 The conversation moves onto Crunchbang, Bunsen Labs and Crunchbang PlusPlus

14:16 The conversation moves onto Libre Office 6 and the new features this brings.

16:21 Wayne asks about Collabora's relationship with Libre Office and the Document Foundation. Mike tells us and goes on to explain that the Libre Office community does not want to reinvent the wheel by recreating all the good work being done by others in the free and open source world in terms of email clients and hosting. Do one thing and do it well! ;)

18:21 Mark asks Mike about how Libre Office schedules its releases and how distributions package them.

21:43 Wayne asks Mike about the size of the user base of Libre Office and Mike estimates it at 100 million. He goes on to promote Libre Office as a great software suite to be involved in, as your changes will have beneficial effects for many millions of people. Mike finishes the segment talking about the benefits of open standards compared to proprietary formats when considering the possibilities of data leakage.

27:09 Wayne goes off topic and asks Mike about Windows Subsystem for Linux. While none of the guys use it, they discuss the possible advantages and disadvantages of Microsoft creating it.

31:23 The conversation moves onto the Raspberry Pi. Discussions range around the Raspberry Pi3 B Plus, memory limitations and what people's Pis are being used for. When the conversation turns to Pi-Hole and ads, Mark mentions readthedocs.org as a hosting service for open source documentation that serves Ethical Ads. Wayne also mentions that he uses Privacy Badger to block facebook and social media tracking. Facebook has Mike's profile so wrong they're trying to sell him Malayasian Cars

39:27 Under the Hood: Mike tells us about the Pine-Book 64, a new $99 laptop that he saw at FOSDEM, running (he thought) KDE Neon.

Wayne tells us about a problem he had in Firefox. When Firefox wouldn't start, Wayne had to fix his Firefox profile, using this command: Firefox -P. He found this from this website.

Mark tells us about an article he came across on the EFF regarding Facebook API Profile sharing. Mike goes on to tell us about TOSBack, the terms-of-service tracker.

47:45 A German Saying of the Podcast is kindly given to us by Mike: "Wir vom Podcast wünschen euch ein schönes Ostern. Macht weiter mit Linux, Open Source and natürlich LibreOffice", or The Podcasters wish you a happy Easter. Carry on using Linux, Open Source and naturally LibreOffice.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 6

Sat 17 Mar, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 A very festive Irish greeting introduces the show this week, with suitable translations for our non-Gael-goer listeners by Wayne. It's cold in Bristol and it's cold in Kilkishen, the beast from the east is flexing its muscles once more it seems and snow is on the way.

02:00 Mark tells us he's been busy at work! What a suprise! He also tells us that a new radio they have at work is basically a linux box with a software defined radio, but that's all the details he has. And there's nothing in the shownotes explaining it further! :-)

03:56 At least Wayne's been busy in the open source world so he'll be able to carry the show! First bit of news by him is that there's a new Raspberry Pi out, this time the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Updated features include a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2/BLE, faster Ethernet, and Power-over-Ethernet support (with separate PoE HAT). All for the same price as before! More information can be found on youtube here and here.

10:34 Wayne has more newsworthy-ish news in that the humble bundle has a diy electronics books bundle and it's available for the next 11 days, so check it out!

12:31 Wayne wants to talk a little bit about people and change. The moral of the story is don't move the shutdown button!

21:22 Mark brings it back to news with two interesting articles on insights.ubuntu.com: Your first robot and MAAS for the home around which the guys have a discussion.

28:03 Wayne did something really cool that he's really chuffed about! This is how he did it:

He copied all his media files, music, training videos onto a 160G drive, plugged the drive into his server, made an image of the drive with the following commands:

lsblk - list all block devices

dd if=/dev/sdc of=~/nextcloud-media.img bs=4M

This made an image of the drive. He also attached the img file / drive to that same vm. He then attached gparted to a cdrom in one of his vms. He set the image size using this command:

sudo qemu-img resize nextcloud-media.img 100G

He then went into his Nextcloud VM and attached the img file to the VM. He went to Nextcloud and added a local mounted location as an External Storage device in NC.

Nice..

34:17 Wayne has been doing some remote support for a small business. He's using the Libre Office suite in this support and is developing a SQL database using Base and relying on the Frugal Computer Guy's tutorials and Codecademy's SQL course for help in this. Mark mentions gnucash as a possible alternative for accounting software and Wayne wonders if he should go down that road instead of reinventing the wheel.

41:41 Under the Hood - Wayne talks about a video detailing vi mode in bash.

Mark tells us about an interesting blog post that he read that is no longer available online! Always good to do your research and verify your links before committing them to a podcast! :-)

45:29 Irish saying of the podcast: T&aacute s&eacute an-fhuar, ach t&aacute s&eacute tirim

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 5

Sat 3 Mar, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne introduces Series 3 Episode 5 of the ice cold binary times. Don't worry listeners if you're having trouble understanding Mark due to his poor audio, he's also speaking Irish!

01:42 Mark tells us about his trials and tribulations with recent nvidia updates on his Kubuntu 18.04 set up. Mark also mentions that Ubuntu 18.04 went into feature freeze on 1st March, and the first betas should be released on the 8th March.

07:12 Mark's dying to hear what Wayne has been at since he's been keeping it top secret. Wayne's back on the Raspberry Pi train! Wayne tells us about ways to manage the manage the memory split between CPU and GPU, and he does this by running the raspi-config utility (you do this by entering sudo raspi-config at the command line), choosing option "7. Advanced Options", then choosing "A3 Memory Split" and then slide the amount of memory in MBs you wish to allocate to the GPU, in Wayne's case he uses 16. More information on the raspi-config utility can be found here.

You can also update the firmware on your Raspberry Pi to keep your Raspberry Pi up to date. You can also choose not to, Wayne's gut is telling him that he should. You do this by typing the following: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y and sudo apt install -y rpi-update and sudo rpi-update.

11:47 Wayne tells us he vehemently dislikes ads and tells us about Pi-Hole, a "black hole for internet advertisements". He goes on to tell us about PiVPN, a project to provide a simple openvpn setup for the Raspberry Pi. Mark goes on to mention the host file available from Dan Pollack's website and the guys expand on their attitudes around advertising. Wayne also mentions dnscrypt, which he wasn't able to get working.

23:37 Mark mentions the Dublin Linux User Group's new telegram group and their existing social media presence in Meetup and Facebook (as well as discord and refers back to their interview with Squid and how he is using proprietary platforms to promote open source software and culture. The guys then talk about their take on social media.

27:16 Wayne brings it back to Linux with some chat on Ubuntu MATE and the renaming ability in Caja leaves Wayne desiring simple file renaming as found in Windows. Mark decides to ramble on about the differences between MATE and Cinnamon and wonders whether the two projects would be better off merging development resources though he's not so sure how practical that would be. This leads to a discussion on MATE panels and changing them via the MATE tweak tool.

35:08 Mark moves the conversation on with a question put to Wayne, asking him about his opinions on KDE Neon. Wayne has only installed it on a VM, he quite likes it, but thinks there are too many options and is not sure if he would change it to be his daily desktop. Time will tell as Wayne is a slow burn.

38:37 Mark contemplates installing Chakra Linux OS on his laptop rather than Kubuntu 18.04, and tells us of some of the recent changes Chakra have made in their distribution.

41:26 Wayne introduces Under the Hood, and Mark kicks it off with two, the first being:

ubuntu-drivers -devices, a command to see what devices on your machine may benefit from proprietary drivers.

Mark feels like Linus Torvalds in his attitude to NVidia and wishes they could be more open in their attitude to open source software. He's hoping to go with AMD more in the coming years as they are turning towards open source tools.

Mark's second Under the Hood tip is ubuntu-bug [package] and he mentions an Ubuntu Community website as a good place to start to report bugs.

45:20 Wayne's under the hood is a command line tool to read metadata from image files. Install using sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl and in use type exiftool [name_of_image]

46:22 Irish saying of the podcast - Mark goes off on a mad one with loadsa Gaeilge! Any way you want to describe the weather:

Tá sé fuar - it is cold

Tá sé an-fhuar - it is very cold

Tá sé te - it is hot or warm (we don't really do hot in Ireland!)

Tá sé fliuch - it is wet

Tá sé tirim - it is dry

Tá sé dorcha - it is dark

Tá sé geal - it is bright

We hoped you enjoyed the podcast!

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 4

Sat 17 Feb, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 The guys are so happy to be welcoming you to Series 3 Episode 4 they can hardly contain their joy! The weather is great too! Woohoo! Wayne has loads of Linuxy stuff to talk about and Mark thinks it's nice to have things to talk about in a podcast. Wayne informs us of some of the limitations of self hosting and Mark informs us all that they are where they want to be in terms of podcasting.

03:51 In Mark's news, he tells us that he wrote a game using Javascript and the "CoderDojo Nano Create with Code Make your Own Game" book. He changed it so that an image of his son has to jump over birthday cakes until he reaches the end and it says "Happy Birthday".

07:56 Mark tells us he's been playing with the ubports-installer without much success and has Ubuntu Touch on a BQ Aquaris 4.5 and BQ M10 FHD. Mark and Wayne talk about the pros and cons of Ubuntu Touch. At the end of the conversation Mark suggests trying the installer first, otherwise use the instructions found on the devices page over on ubports.com.

16:23 Wayne tells us that he has installed version 13 of Nextcloud. Wayne and Mark have a conversation about Nextcloud and all the new features in Nextcloud 13. Mark is truly impressed with how good it is and is excited enough to want to set it all up, when time allows...

26:27 Wayne moves the conversation onto hardware issues and a handy tip for finding memory hogs in Firefox: open a new tab and type in about:performance into the address bar. This will show you your open tabs and any tabs that may be causing issues. Using this tip keeps Wayne calm. Mark mentions that one of his open tabs is regarding the one million downloads of Libre Office 6.0 in fourteen days and thinks we're living in a golden age of free and open source software.

30:18 Wayne tells us his last little story with a tale regarding him upgrading all his work machines to Ubuntu MATE 17.10. He noticed a little bit of extra strain on his machine. Mark tells us he still uses Ubuntu MATE 17.10 and Kubuntu 18.04 on his laptops, and Wayne mentions the recent upsurge in KDE Neon podcast chat. Mark says Plasma 5.12 is great but also says unfortunately he wouldn't recommend it to new users due to Discover. He also tells us he is planning on putting Kubuntu 18.04 on his Alienware and thinks that could be interesting due to the Nvidia graphics.

39:21 Wayne thinks they're probably at the Under the Hood Section and Mark agrees. Wayne has two good things to talk about which is great because Mark has nothing to talk about!

Wayne's first under the hood is all about file access, modify and change times, as well as a new birth time. stat and find -cmin -5.

46:09 Irish saying of the podcast is "gabh mo leithsceal" or excuse me

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 3

Fri 3 Feb, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne welcomes us to the third episode of Season Three! Bristol is crowdy and cloudy and a little bit cold, while Kilkishen is nice and Springy!

01:51 Mark tells us that he's been busy commissioning new voice systems and decommissioning old pabxs. It's a bit sad but not so bad. He wonders why his comm rooms are so tidy and he can't manage the same with the office! All the same, Mark tells us he's making progress on his office tidy up and ponders what books the library decided to take. With all this going on he's not had much time for linuxy stuff.

06:03 Wayne feels the same way and is slightly irked by this. He's been looking to get into freeipa but hit some problems so he's backing away from this at the moment. Meanwhile work is looking for him to get on top of his Windows Server knowledge so he's knee deep in Windows Server stuff at the moment. Wayne seems to admire the ease of use of Windows Server...

09:19 Wayne gets onto his linux talk! He experienced a pretty drastic bug using Virtual Box that he resolved by uninstaling and reinstalling Virtual Box. He also updated Ubuntu 16.04 to 17.10 using the following technique:

Open 'Software & Updates' using the Unity Dash

Select the 'Updates' tab

Find the section titled 'Notify me of a new Ubuntu version'

Change this from 'For long-term support versions' to 'For any new version'

Click 'Close'

You will then be prompted to upgrade to a new version

Mark queries Wayne as to whether either Xorg or Wayland is used by default in an upgraded 17.10 and goes on to say that Xorg will be the default for 18.04. Mark goes on to ask Wayne the benfits of using Virtual Box over Virtual Machine Manager. Wayne's answers prompt Mark to reminisce once more about the PABXs he's been retiring, this time saying how long he was able to get out of learning a set of commands. Wayne applauds this.

24:30 News for us (which is actually pretty recent news for once)! Wayne tells us of the announcment of the release of Libre Office 6. Mark hadn't heard this news and notes from the Libre Office website that it was announced on the 31st January. Wayne also gives us a tip on how to remove links from web addresses in Libre Office documents and that is as follows:

go to Tools - Autocorrect Options then 'Options' taband uncheck 'URL recognition'. Mark and Wayne agree that they prefer to use Libre Office over Microsoft Office.

30:40 Wayne prompts Mark to thank one of our listeners for his generous gift of memory for a laptop that Mark has. Mark duly goes on to thank Paul while also noting that since he installed the RAM his boot time has come way down. He also notes that his Linux Mint desktop starts the fastest of all his machines which is suprising as it should not be the quickest so he's putting it down to Linux Mint. Wayne mentions Joe Collins is an advocate for Linux Mint while Mark mentions Steven Vaughan Nichols as a fan of Linux Mint and also mentions that he is a guest speaker in a new podcast called command line heroes.

34:54 Mark mentions that FOSDEM is now on. Wayne goes on to say that OggCamp is scheduled for August in Sheffield. Wayne says he'd love to go so Mark says he'll go too. Mark also mentions the Freenode conference as one to go to.

36:50 Under the Hood! Wayne talks about removing old kernels in CentOS. You can do this as follows (run as root)

rpm -q kernel (lists installed kernels)

yum install yum-utils

package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=2

Mark looks up how to do this in Ubuntu and came up with this:

Run command to check out current kernel and DON'T REMOVE it:

uname -r

List all kernels excluding the current booted:

dpkg -l | tail -n +6 | grep -E 'linux-image-[0-9]+' | grep -Fv $(uname -r)

There will be three possible status types in the listed kernel images:

rc: means it has already been removed.

ii: means installed, eligible for removal.

iU: DON'T REMOVE. It means not installed, but queued for install in apt.

To remove old kernel images with "ii" status, type:

sudo dpkg --purge linux-image-4.4.0-18-generic

Riveting listening!!!

44:17 Irish saying of the podcast: Más é do thoil é

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 2

Fri 26 Jan, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne welcomes us to the second episode of Season Three! It's dark coz the guys are recording early so there's not much of a weather report I'm afraid. Dark is about as good as it gets!

01:11 Despite Mark being busy with work he's responded to Kubuntu's call for testing by installing Plasma 5.12 LTS beta on his Kubuntu Bionic Beaver LTS Beta test machine. All good so far, not a single bug to report, all looking really good for a solid release! Mark also tells us that he's been playing with chakra linux, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu MATE 16.04 (to test the redmond panel) on virtual machines using virtual machine manager.

04:14 Wayne tells us that he's installed Ubuntu MATE 17.10 on one of the work machines in the second site. He was prompted to do this through frustrations with Windows. Mark prompts Wayne to swap out his Windows servers with Linux.

10:00 Wayne tells us how he solved a network problem by disconnecting a rogue access point.

14:04 Wayne tells us how he changed the greeter screen on Ubuntu MATE 17.10 using these instructions.

16:35 The guys have a conversation around using free and open source software and the sacrifices that might entail and using proprietary software and the sacrifices that might entail.

22:30 Wayne tells us that he has purchased Mike Saunder's Haynes Coding Manual. He's quite enjoying it so far and recommends anyone interested in learning Python to give it a go.

25:36 Wayne talks about options for using DNS. Wayne recommends DNS-Watch while Mark mentions unblock-us and streamjack. Mark asks Wayne about any hints and tips he might have for using Startpage and bemoans the results he's getting with it.

35:50 Mark tells us that the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is looking for contributors.

37:47 Under the Hood: Wayne has purchased yet another Raspberry Pi zero. He updates the firmware on his Raspberry pis using the following command:

sudo rpi-update

If it comes up with command not found, run sudo apt install rpi-update, then run sudo rpi-update

Mark mentions that hackspace is now available from the Raspberry Pi foundation

Marks Under the Hood is a quick one to find out what kind display server you're using. Do the following:

type loginctl. This will tell you your session number.

then type loginctl show -session [insert session number] -p -Type. This will tell you whether you are using Wayland or X.

43:18 Irish saying of the podcast: Ní dhéanfadh an saol capall rása d'asal

 

 

 

 

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The Binary Times - Series 3 Episode 1

Mon 8 Jan, 2018

Timeline companion

00:24 Wayne welcomes us to the first episode of Season Three! Yes indeed, Season 3 kicks off on a cold and brisk Sunday morning in Bristol and Kilkishen. The guys tell us about their Christmas revels.

03:46 Mark tells us that he's installed and loving Kubuntu 18.04 before the conversation moves on to the dreaded Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

12.01 Wayne tells us of some interesting ways he's been trying to interest his son in Linux. Wayne sneaks in an early Under the Hood with sl (Steam Locomotive) while telling us of his son's deviousness on the command line.

19:28 Mark tells us that he's going to try and minimalize his life...

25:30 Waybe brings it back to Linux talk with some chat about his tablets, flight mode and enabling wireless. This brings some suprise and confusion to Mark, who checks and confirms the premise on his ubuntu touch tablet and yes, you can enable flight mode and wireless at the same time.

32:27 Wayne tells us he's set up two factor authentication on his next cloud box in conjunction with andOTP as his android client.

37:41 Mark mentions eelo in relation to Wayne's quest to rid himself of google services on android. Mark goes on to regail the efforts of the ubports team and Librem phone for providing free and open source alternatives repecting your privacy in the mobile space.

42:20 The guys give us their New Year's predictions: Wayne can't predict his next hot drink while Mark knows it will be a nice hot cuppa tea.

43:08 Wayne kicks off Under the Hood with this beauty:

tail -f [filename] provides live monitoring of the last ten lines of the specified file.

44:11 Mark's under the hood is for mounting ISO files. First you need to create the directory where the ISO file structure will reside:

sudo mkdir /media/iso

Then you mount the ISO in the target directory as a file system (the -o loop part):

sudo mount -o loop path/to/iso/file/YOUR_ISO_FILE.ISO /media/iso

Irish saying of the podcast: since Mark wants to thank all the listeners for their feedback, he suggests using gur raibh míle maith agat or thanks a million (translated loosely, more correctly "may you have a thousand good things"). Thanks for listening, we hope you enjoyed the show.