Ask Noah Show

New additional shortcuts

These directional keyboard shortcuts have matching touch-pad gestures:

Gnome is doing and explaining changes in the open

New Features

Fixed Issues

Got IT horror stories, let us know! We want to do an episode on them

Email [email protected]

Emailed about Noah's soft spot for Red Hat

Latest thoughts on System76 PopOS!

Home Lab/Docker Questions

Don't buy lifetime services/domain names - Not sustainable business model

register4less.com

Don't buy a domain in your real name

A records - mail.mydomain.com nextcloud.mydomain.com etc.mydomain.comment

Redirects mydomain.com/server1 mydomain.com/server2

Start with a web server, lessons learned apply everywhere

rdiff-backup - like rsync with history

Other backup utilities

Send in your backup solutions!

Lightweight Linux+KDE equivalent to Garmin's "Basecamp"

Manages collections of GPS tracks

Local Data

Charting, Graphing, Advanced sorting and querying

Live GPS via GPSD

Blackmagic Decklink Duo

SDI is the professional version of HDMI

HDMI without copy protection

Make your own cables with RG-6+quad shielded+BNC ends, use them as SDI cables.

Works with Linux, you do need to install the driver, but FLAWLESS as compared to USB devices

Much higher quality / capacity

You will need to convert HDMI to SDI

Very well packaged system

Incredible UI - Couldn't believe it was Kodi underneath

Both RF and IR functionality

Includes wall mounting plate

Doesn't stream Blu-rays over WiFi

Plays DVD rips just fine

Vero 4K

New app launcher

Breeze Twilight - Hybrid Theme

Plasma Firewall settings page (ufw and firewalld)

More effort put into Wayland support in Kwin

RedHat exists to make a profit, and they need to

RedHat spends money to support open source that they could take home/pocket

RedHat handled the release poorly and cut the release cycle short

RedHat has been a good friend of the community

The new model makes more sense, but was poorly communicated

Element/Matrix Pros:

Funkwhale

Decentralized Selfhosted Spotify

Makes music social again

Why host your own? Because of things like this

Mihai's Blog post

White Noise Machine based on a raspberry pi

Uses OMX Player

My Noise on Google Play

Noice App

Firefox Blog Post](https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-protections/)

Firefox 85 implements network partitioning

Different image cache for each site

Firefox 85 also partitions pooled connections, pre-fetch connections, pre-connect connections, speculative connections, and TLS session identifiers

Ubiquity is getting hard to maintain

Subiquity Github

Uses Curtin and Flutter

Flutter is controlled by Google, this could be a problem long term

Why a snap?

GitLab Blog Post

GitLab is phasing out the Bronze/Starter tier

Special Offers for people transitioning

GitLab Free tier gained over 450 features this year and continues to gain more

Google suspended Element in the Play Store without notifying the developers

Google said it was due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix

Reddit Post

Matrix Team responded quickly and openly to resolve the issue

Matrix Team went above and beyond and implemented community suggestions

Having multiple clients is an advantage to the Matrix Protocol

Ars Technica artical

Greg founded a new start up company called Ctrl IQ

Greg was interviewed on Ask Noah EP 213

AlmaLinux Blog Post

First RHEL 8 respin available for download

Download AlmaLinux

Vircadia Site

An Introduction to Vircadia

Vircadia™ is an open-source 3D interface and server foundation

Ecosystem of open source metaverse applications

Open Source VR/Virtual World

Far more than entertainment, lots of potential

Download Vircadia

What decentralized services could you support using a $5 Droplet or similar virtual server?

It is never be set and forget

Built in backups are good but don't rely on them

What can run on a $5 DO Droplet

Best practice to run each service on its own VPS

XMPP Slow or a battery hog

Delta Chat - chat over email back-end

Luke Smith has good video on his peertube server explaining how to setup a email server over at

PS If anyone is looking for cheap VPS providers, I recommend checking out Low End Box Community forum

Focus on skills not certs

Be willing to work for less or free

If you want to go the route of certifications

RedHat RHCSA

Linux Essentials (010-160) USD 120.00

LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 (101-500, 102-500, 201-450, 202-450) USD 200.00

All your chats in one place

Uses matrix on the back-end

Use any device with web browser as second screen for your computer (using Display Dummy Plug)

Works accross WiFi or LAN

Supports multiple screen sharing sessions to as many devices as you want

Supports changing picture quality while sharing a screen.

Picture auto quality change supported. (for performance boost while watching youtube video for example)

End-to-end encryption

Dark mode UI support!

Available for Windows / Mac / Linux

Reversible connector for both USB-A and USB-C

Touch buttons

NFC

Firmware Upgrades

Supports advanced authentication, PIV (FIPS 201)

Each device comes with both a P256 and Ed25519 attestation certificate

Mobian Blog Post

Posh gnome UX for phones (Originally developed for Purism Libre 5)

Setup Process allows you to set your user password and setup full disk encryption

Pine64 Store

Opensource/No patents Single Board Computer

Source code for it is available under a BSD license

Built around a dual-core 1.5 GHz StarFive SiFive U74 processor with 2MB L2 cache

A neural engine for hardware-accelerated computing

video decoder/encoder able to handle 4K 60 FPS video decoding.

HDMI out port (30fps 1080p)

4 regular USB 3.0 ports

ethernet

audio

microSD card slot

USB Type-C port for power

Integrated Wi-Fi 2.4GHz b/g/n

Bluetooth 4.2

40-pin GPIO connector

2 MIPI-CSI connectors (camera connector)

MIPI-DSI connector (display connector)

Only the $149 8GB model (sans GPU) is available right now

You currently have to sign up for the chance to buy the BeagleV

OMG Ubuntu blog post

JingOS

JingOS Github

UX designed for tablets

JingOS is based on Ubuntu 20.04, KDE v5.75, Plasma Mobile 5.20

They will replace the framework from Plasma Mobile to JDE(Jing Desktop Environment) later this year.

Trackpad Gestures

Full Function Desktop Apps

Microsoft switched their edge browser to be based on Chrome

Current browser market share:

One company controlling this much of the browser market is bad

Google is discontinuing API access

Nothing changes for you if you don't sign in now

Google is holding firm and is misleading in their marketing announcements

Firefox, Vivaldi, Opera and others have their own sync systems

Best model is Free Trial>Paid Hosting or Self Hosted

PiwiGo checks all the boxes

Give you a custom domain

Business Plans

50G / €45

All file types

€250 / 1TB

Telegram vs Signal for messaging?

Telegram client is open source and supports Linux

Telegram server is closed source

Signal is more secure but requires a phone number

Phone numbers can reveal your real identity

Moxie Marlinspike (Matthew Rosenfeld) - really particular about 3rd party clients, makes it not very inviting

link

Not so great when your playing with alternative operating systems (SailfishOS PostmarketOS), Signal has to make a client, rather than just supporting an API

Use Element/Matrix

Setup your own server

Sign up for paid hosting EMS

Sign up for free on a community server like Linux Delta

streamyard

Open Broadcaster Software OBS

Setting up your own CDN is impractical

Setup an RTMP server with Nginx

Community based CDN Scale Engine Instant Trial

Deja Dupe

Only backs up working files not the entire OS

Incremental Backups and Multiple file versions

Similar to Mac TimeMachine

Owning your own server doesn't fix getting online

Decentralized infrastructure make taking people offline hard

Life360

Life360 is partnered with Arity (analytic company) link

CA Do not sell

No longer used or recommended

Check out OwnTracks

Uses MQTT, lightweight, and you can self host

MMORPG_Tycoon_2

It's a Single Player MMO / Building an MMO

Independent Game shop https://www.vectorstorm.com.au/

Early Access, expect bugs

Developer is very active in the community and wants feedback

Massively addicting

FLIRC IR receiver

OSMC project is a rock solid Kodi platform

OSMC Vero 4K

Guest: Brian Excelbeard

Moving to CentOS Stream brings more transparency and opportunity for involvement

IBM was not even in the room for the discussion

New programs are in the work for cloud workloads beyond today's announcement

RedHat is reducing friction for getting official RHEL by integrating other account systems

Expanding the personal free options, more than just RHEL

Making it easier for enterprise customers to get their employees enrolled in developer accounts

Have a unique use case problem? email Brian directly [email protected]

Official Announcement

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)

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

Fully featured open source video and media CMS

Built mostly using the modern stack Django + React and includes a REST API

No federation

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!

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

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

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)

TeamSpeak 5 is going to be switching to the Matrix protocol for chat

Will not federate

Mumble is a better option

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)

OpenMediaVault

Storage - FreeNAS

Unraid

BTRFS is good for low power devices, less overhead than ZFS

RAID is not a backup

Geovision Cameras

Axis Cameras

Synology LiveCam

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.

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

No Thunderbolt only USB C

Can't be powered over USB C

Degraded power when unplugged

Fingerprint support throughout the KDE Plasma experience

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Nano HD i

UAP-AC Pro

UAP-AP-HD

Use the Synology selector tool

Synology FS6400

Axis Cameras

Geovision cameras

Also take a look at motioneye and motioneyeos

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

Supported in linux

Not supported yet

The Settings Manager itself received a visual refresh of its filter box

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

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.

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.