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Episode 215: Self-Hosting Your Platform Jan 12, 2021

Show notes

Self-hosting has always been a good idea but when your platform doesn't want to serve you, we have some self-hosted options that will. A Reddit user has Linux booting on an iPhone 7, a man was quoted $50K to run fiber to his house, so he built his own fiber ISP!

-- During The Show --

00:30 Minutes In

Email 1 - Feedback from EP 212 Bluetooth and Drawing Tablet - David

HSP/HFP designed for phones not computers
Bluetooth support on Linux is difficult due to the way blue-tooth works (uses modem commands on mobile)

Possible Solutions that bypass Linux blue-tooth stack

Links to the 1Mii USB Bluetooth Adapter for PC

This is Creative's version if you are looking for a more popular brand name.

XP-PEN came up and they have a driver for Linux. It is a little bit hokey in the sense that their configuration application needs to be running in order for it to work.
It does not always survive suspend/resume, but it is easy to launch again.
Their non-display models also have good support for left-hand versus right-hand drawing
When used as a display, there is no left-hand mode because it relies on dm to configure the display
We purchased an xp-pen innovator 16 It is a 1080p 15.6 inch matte screen with hardware buttons connected via HDMI and 2 USB ports
XP-PEN seems like a good company
Link to first photo made with the tablet

06:00 Minutes In

Email 2 - VPN Recommendation? - Ira

What is the best VPN company?

private internet access

They have a track history of NOT turning over user data, they get called into court they say we'd love to comply but we don't have the documents.

affiliate link

08:30 Minutes In

Email 3 - Matrix Support Spreading - Charliebrownau

Mind.com is supporting Matrix Protocol

link

[Mind.com](mind.com) is an alternative to Facebook and other big social networks

09:20 Minutes In

Email 4 - Censorship - Rob

What are your thoughts on Mozzila's blog post

11:15 Minutes in

Pick of the Week

MediaCMS

Fully featured open source video and media CMS
Built mostly using the modern stack Django + React and includes a REST API
No federation

14:00 Minutes In

Gadget of the Week

Dell's new thunderbolt dock

Dell WD19TB

Built in thunderbolt cable
Additional rear facing thunderbolt pass-through port
2x Display Ports
1x HDMI
2x Rear USB
1x Front Facing USB

Dell's USB C dock

Dell WD15

17:00 Minutes In

News

Guy by the name of Daniel Rodriguez managed to boot Linux with Gnome on an iPhone 7
YouTube Video
Reddit write up
Phone that was given to him by his grandparents as a junk device, He saved it from the landfill!

Prerequisites

writable directory available over nfs, including dhcp server on local network
Checkra1n 0.10.2-beta
Kernel fork for h9x/A10
Project sandcastle utilities
EITHER arm64 cross compiler or an arm64 native device. I used a rpi4 on 20.04 <-- way helpful to be able to chroot and setup, otherwise you'd have to use qemu-user
Bridge setup script/udev rules

21:00 Minutes In

Jared Mauch Built his Own ISP

Jared Mauch didn’t have good broadband—so he built his own fiber ISP

Arstechnica link

AT&T's advertised plans for his neighborhood topped out at a measly 1.5Mbps
Eventually switched to a WISP that delivered about 50Mbps
Comcast told him it would charge $50,000 to extend its cable network to his house
Mauch built his own ISP (buried the fiber for 10,000)
As of early January, Mauch has 30 homes and 10 homes to hookup
Large corporate Business are not afraid of government and government regulations
ISPs are going to learn, do it or get replaced
Starlink is becoming a thing, Amazon satellite internet is coming

27:30 Minutes In

Main Segment De-platforming / Self hosting

Violence is wrong, Full stop
Gate keeping in the broadcast industry changed when the internet became a thing
Groups and People were banned from twitter so they moved to Parler
Amazon kicked Parler off its hosting services
Google and Apple kicked the Parler app off their platforms
Mozzila blog post
Community discussion (sorry to much to summarize listen to the episode)

Honorable Mention

TeamSpeak 5 is going to be switching to the Matrix protocol for chat
Will not federate
Mumble is a better option

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Episode 214: New Year New Releases Jan 05, 2021

Show notes

New Year New Releases

We're kicking off 2021 with a bang! The KDE team has announced a new focus on Wayland and fingerprint readers. Cawbird 1.3 a native twitter client for Linux has a new release with improved video uploading and replies, and Matrix will power FOSDEM this year!

-- During The Show --

01:45 Minutes In

Email 1 - Comment on SolarWinds from Newnix

04:40 Minutes IN

Caller 1 - Carl

Problem: Intermittent camera and mic problems
Solution 1: unplug other usb devices (bandwidth issues)
Solution 2: Buy a PCIe USB 3 card
Solution 3: Buy a Thinkpad with thunderbolt and a thunderbolt dock
Solution 4: Make sure the camera is plugged into a matching USB port (3.0/2.0)

Logitech C920 webcam
Logitech C930

Feedback on Backups
Bareos backup

Email 2 - LVM vs Raid from Cory

OpenMediaVault
Storage - FreeNAS
Unraid
BTRFS is good for low power devices, less overhead than ZFS
RAID 1 or RAID 10 are better options in most cases, and using RAID 10 + Btrfs compression will give you similar space availability to RAID 6
RAID is not a backup

19:00 Minutes In

Email 3 - Old Smartphones as Cameras from M. X. U.

From the Community

Droidcam

23:55 Minutes In

Pick of the Week

KDE Itinerary is a digital travel assistant with a priority on protecting your privacy.

Timeline view of a unified travel itinerary with automatic trip grouping.
Supports train, bus and flight bookings as well as hotel, restaurant, event and rental car reservations.
Automatic booking data extraction from various input formats, performed locally on your device.
Real-time delay and platform change information for trains.
Selection of alternative train connections on unbound tickets or on missed connections.
Local ground transportation navigation between elements of your itinerary.

26:27 Minutes In

Gadget of the Week (03:00) [12:00]

Maingear Vector 2 Gaming Laptop

Pros

Starting at $1349
0.78” thick and 4.16 lbs
i7-1075OH
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
16GB / 1TB NVME
4 Cell Battery - 4000 mAh
1080p 144hz
Being a gaming laptop

Cons

No Thunderbolt only USB C
Can't be powered over USB C
Degraded power when unplugged

30:00 Minutes In

KDE Roadmap

KDE has plans for 2021 - and they're pretty cool

Fingerprint support throughout the KDE Plasma experience
- Login
- Lock Screen
- KAuth and Polkit.
Focus on Wayland - aiming for serious, concentrated Wayland work continuing through 2021
Devs plan to improve the look and feel of Plasma’s default Breeze theme — expect something “super modern and awesome”
KDE devs will replace the celebrated Kickoff app launcher with a newer, fresher replacement.

32:44 Minutes In

Cawbird 1.3 Released

Cawbird is free, open source software compatible with most modern Linux distros

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/cawbird-1-3-released-for-linux-distros

Improved DM Support
Video Uploading
You can now see media shared in direct messages
Links and hashtags sent in messages are ‘clickable’
It’s possible to delete DMs, load older DMs, and send images as DMs in Cawbird
Cawbird 1.3 supports video uploads to tweets (one video per tweet)
Improved upload handling of animated and non-animated GIFs
More accessible approach to loading ‘replied to’ tweets

33:37 Minutes In

FOSDEM Online Via Matrix

EMS - Offical Matrix Hosting

https://matrix.org/blog/2021/01/04/taking-fosdem-online-via-matrix

Started with Matrix over SELF / Wanted the ability to connect with people in a free and open source decentralized client, found Matrix, got sucked in.
2021 - Altispeed officially switched to EMS Matrix instance
Public Roadmap / Can buy feature deveopment / entire sales staff to handle feature requests
Jitsi - Feature we didn't think we'd use and end up using it daily now
Matrix team are in active contact with the Jitsi team making BOTH Jitsi AND Matrix better.
FOSDEM will have its own dedicated Matrix server at fosdem.org (hosted by EMS along with a ton of Jitsi’s) acting as the social backbone for the event
Official bridges will be provided to IRC and XMPP (and most other chat systems), giving as much openness and choice as possible - if folks want to participate via Freenode and XMPP they can!
FOSDEM has spent a lot of time improving widgets recently: these give the ability to embed arbitrary webapps into chatrooms - letting you add livestreams, video conferences, schedules, Q&A dashboards etc, augmenting a plain old chatroom into a much richer virtual experience that can hopefully capture the semantics and requirements of an event like FOSDE
Attendees can lurk as read-only guests in devrooms without needing to set up accounts (or they can of course use their existing Matrix/IRC/XMPP accounts)
Every devroom and track will have its own chatroom, where the audience can hang out and view the livestream of that particular devroom (using the normal FOSDEM video livestream system).
There will also be a ‘backstage’ room per track for coordination between the devroom organisers and the speakers.
The talks themselves will be prerecorded to minimise risk of disaster, but each talk will have a question & answer session at the end which will be a live Jitsi broadcast from the speaker and a host who will relay questions from the devroom.
Each talk will have a dedicated room too, where after the official talk slot the audience can pop in and chat to the speaker more informally if they’re available (by text and/or by moderated jitsi). During the talk, this room will act as the ‘stage’ for the speaker & host to watch the livestream and conduct the question & answer session.
Every stand will also have its own chatroom and optional jitsi+livestream, as will BOFs or other adhoc events, so folks can get involved both by chat and video
There’ll also be a set of official support, social etc rooms - and of course folks can always create their own!
FOSDEM Matrix bot, responsible for orchestrating the hundreds of required rooms, setting up the right widgets and permissions, setting up bridges to IRC & XMPP, and keeping everything in sync with the official live FOSDEM schedule.

Call for help

Folks on XMPP often complain that the Bifröst Matrix<->XMPP bridge doesn’t support MAMs - meaning that if XMPP users lose connection, they lose scrollback. We’re not going to have time to fix this ourselves in time, so this would be a great time for XMPP folks who grok xmpp.js to come get involved and help to ensure the best possible XMPP experience!
It’d be really nice to be able to render nice schedule widgets for each devroom, and embed the overall schedule in the support rooms etc. The current HTML schedules https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/day/saturday/ and https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/room/vcollab/ don’t exactly fit - if someone could write a thing which renders them at (say) 2:5 aspect ratio so they can fit nicely down the side of a chatroom then that could be awesome!
While we’ll bridge all the official rooms over to Freenode, it’d be even nicer if people could just hop straight into any room on the FOSDEM server (or beyond) via IRC - effectively exposing the whole thing as an IRC network for those who prefer IRC. We have a project to do this: matrix-ircd, but it almost certainly needs more love and polish before it could be used for something as big as this. If you like Rust and know Matrix, please jump in and get involved!
If you just want to follow along or help out, then we’ve created a general room for discussion over at #fosdem-matrix:fosdem.org. It’d be awesome to have as many useful bots & widgets as possible to help things along.

44:50 Minutes In

LG Smart TVs Are Sending Your Data Home

LG Smart Ad, analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences.

http://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging-usb-filenames-and.html

There is an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info:" which is set ON by default
This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no "balloon help" to describe what it does
It turns out that viewing information (such as file names) appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off
This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel

Domains to Block

ad.lgappstv.com
yumenetworks.com
smartclip.net
smartclip.com
llnwd.net
smartshare.lgtvsdp.com
ibis.lgappstv.com

51:00 Minutes In

FinCEN Proposes New Cryptocurrency Law

The regulation, proposed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), would require financial institutions (like Square) to collect personal information about the parties involved in cryptocurrency transactions. You can read a deep-dive on them here, but the more important requirement is for financial institutions to collect the name and physical address of both parties of any large transaction they’re involved in.
Jack Dorsey is not happy about new crypto currency law
Dorsey argues the regulation could end up driving customers “to use non-custodial wallets or services outside the U.S. to transfer their assets more easily,” leading to FinCEN having “less visibility into the universe of cryptocurrency transactions than it has today.” Put simply, if people have to provide private information to a bank in order to make a transaction, they’ll avoid using the bank — something the CEO describes as a perverse incentive.
Deep Dive Link

-- The Extra Credit Section --

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This Episode's Podcast Dashboard

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Find all the resources for this show on the Ask Noah Dashboard

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Links:

Synology LiveCam - Apps on Google Play
KDE Tease 'Production Ready' Wayland Support, New App Menu in 2021 - OMG! Ubuntu! — will replace the celebrated Kickoff app launcher with a newer, fresher replacement.
KDE roadmap for 2021 – Adventures in Linux and KDE
Download Free Ethical Hacking Books - PythonStacks

Episode 213: Rocky Linux with Greg Kurtzer Dec 29, 2020

Show notes

Greg Kurtzer executive director of Rocky Linux a bug for bug RedHat distribution joins us this hour to tell the story of CentOS and what his vision for Rocky Linux is!

-- During The Show --

Greg Kurtzer - Executive Director of Rocky Linux, a bug for bug red hat compatible distro

Greg's history
Centos history
Rocky Linux now and future
Currently collaborating on Slack, It will be moving to Mattermost
There is a google doc for developers who want to help, please be patient lots of responses to go through
Release will be available Q2 2020
Current state of the project

36:00 minutes in

Walt Caller One

What Protections are in place to protect Rocky Linux from corporate interests

44:00 minutes in

Email 1 Unifi Access Points and NVRs

1) Unifi Access Points

47:00 minutes in
2) What security NVR solution do you recommend?

Use the Synology selector tool
Synology FS6400
Axis Cameras
Geovision cameras
Also take a look at motioneye and motioneyeos

More of a DIY approach but free and flexible

51:00 minutes in

Pick of the Week

Snapdrop: local file sharing in your browser. Inspired by Apple's Airdrop.

Underneath the hood

Vanilla HTML5 / ES6 / CSS3 frontend
WebRTC / WebSockets
NodeJS backend
Progressive Web App

51:45 minutes in

Gadget of the Week Playstation 5 Controller

DualSense™ Wireless PS5 Controller

The DualSense wireless controller for PS5 offers immersive haptic feedback2, dynamic adaptive triggers2 and a built-in microphone, all integrated into an iconic design.
Feel physically responsive feedback to your in-game actions with dual actuators which replace traditional rumble motors. In your hands, these dynamic vibrations can simulate the feeling of everything from environments to the recoil of different weapons
Experience varying levels of force and tension as you interact with your in-game gear and environments. From pulling back an increasingly tight bowstring to hitting the brakes on a speeding car, feel physically connected to your on-screen actions.
Available from Sony for $69.99
Linux driver support

[From Roderick Colenbrander](roderick.colenbrander@sony.com)

Supported in linux
*DualSense in both Bluetooth and USB modes
*LEDs
*Touchpad
*Motion Sensors
*Rumble
Not supported yet
*Adaptive Triggers
*VCM based Haptics

These features require a large amount of data and complex data structures. It is not clear how to
expose these. The current Evdev and FF frameworks are too limiting. We hope
to have a dialog on how to expose these over time in a generic way.

Companies are starting to get it - make a good controller, make the code open so everyone can use it, people will buy your controller.

54:00 minutes in

XFCE 4.16 has been Released!

https://www.xfce.org/about/tour416

The Settings Manager itself received a visual refresh of its filter box
*which can now be hidden permanently
*Search capabilities of the filter box were improved by searching the descriptive 'Comments' part of each dialog's launcher
Default Applications is a new dialog represents a merger between the previously available 'Mime Settings' and the 'Preferred Applications' dialogs.
Added fractional scaling based on the RandR extension of X11
Added more default keyboard shortcuts out of the box (Examples: for window tiling or to open Thunar)
xfce4-panel
The panel received quite a few noteworthy updates
*Animation for autohide and intellihide
*New 'Status Tray' plugin that combines both legacy Systray item support with modern StatusNotifier item support
*Dark mode support
*Launchers showing additional actions on right-click
*Window buttons offering to Launch a new instance
XFCE Power Managment was cleaned up
The settings dialog of the power manager was cleaned up and shows either 'on battery' or 'plugged in' settings as opposed to both in a huge table.

[DarkTable](darktable.org) - 3.4 Encore!

https://www.darktable.org/2020/12/darktable-3-4/

Best professional photography tools out there
This is the second major release of 2020
5,500 commits in 2020!
Many of the computationally-intensive image processing algorithms have been updated to be faster and more scaleable when running on the CPU.
Improved operations to a number of the tools
Releasing the first version of the new user manual, now split into a separate project named “dtdocs”. We have completely reorganised and rewritten the manual into a more maintainable structure using Markdown. This project has involved new content as well as a significant overhaul of the text, making it much easier to read for native English speakers
In addition, filmic RGB version 4 now works with OpenCL and highlight reconstruction is now significantly faster with OpenCL-enabled hardware.
New Module: Color Calibration
Tone Equalizer Improvements
Export Print Sizes
Map View Changes
The global color picker module UI has been overhauled
It is now possible to automatically hide the header buttons on processing modules in the darkroom
Hovering your mouse over the header of a processing module now displays a tool tip providing detailed in-app documentation.

Many users have requested customization of module groups, and now that feature is here! Processing modules in the darkroom can now be assigned to user-defined module groups. This replaces the previous “favorites” group and the “more modules” module with a tool that allows you to create your own module groups and presets based on your work flow.

-- The Extra Credit Section --

For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from our podcast dashboard!

This Episode's Podcast Dashboard

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Episode 212: Software for the Holidays Dec 27, 2020

Show notes

Gnome 40 has a major redesign, a new version of Kdenlive is out adding some much desired pro features, Matrix has some exciting announcments and we discuss the Solar Winds backdoor and give you some alternatives. If this is the time of the year you want to tinker with new projects we have a few in store!