Bad Voltage

Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which none of us like each other’s books, this is actually a real actual show, and also:

00:03:00 The Nextcloud project has been formed by people leaving the Owncloud company and forking the product. What’s this all about? What does it mean for {Own,Next}cloud, and for self-hosted file syncing?

00:25:30 Bryan reviews the Dell XPS 13 developer laptop, 2016 edition

00:40:42 Money and open source projects. As more projects start putting together ways to get money from donations or Patreon or funding, what should they do with that money? How do you decide how to parcel it out fairly?

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We rock the Unplugged format again. For reasons of complex logistics and global travel, we’ve not been able to get together for Bad Voltage, so we asked you, our listeners, for feedback on what questions you’d like us to answer, and then we’ve picked some and answered them! Thank you to everyone who suggested what they’d like to hear, and we hope you like hearing some of the things that come into the BV mailbag!

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This is not a show. Think of this as “Bad Voltage Unplugged”. Various parts of the team went off to CLS and OSCON, and then there were various disasters, and so we didn’t have a show. So, instead, we’ve got this: Jeremy, Jono, and Stuart chatting about things — OSCON, and things that aren’t OSCON — to tide you over. Hope you enjoy this rather bare-bones Bad Voltage…

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which we are all Satoshi Nakamoto, quoting the dictionary at people does not help because it never ever helps, and:

0o:02:00 Is activism actually effective? A continuation of a previous discussion; does activism actually work? Although a more fundamental question seems to be: what _is_ it?

00:52:38 Google Hangouts allows you to send pictures in your conversations, and it works with existing XMPP/Jabber clients such as Pidgin or Psi as well as its own web-based front end. But it won’t do both at the same time; there’s an XMPP-ish way to send images, but Google aren’t using it. Is this Google’s job to fix, or Pidgin’s? And what should open projects do when confronted with this choice: stand tall for open standards, or provide their users with the best experience?

00:31:28 Jeremy reviews the Withings Aura Smart Sleep System, an Internet of Things Thing which acts as sleep monitor and alarm clock

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which we have now basically become a show about guitars, there is a great deal of argument and fighting about whether companies screw us because they’re incompetent or because they’re evil, and also:

00:02:20 Nest decide

to remotely shut down purchasers’ Revolv home hubs with minimal notice. The internet

gets very cross. Nest begrudingly decide to give refunds. Is this a harbinger of bad

things to come, where devices we buy require an online service for no reason and stop

working because the company get bored? Or is this just the price we pay for having

new stuff which can be controlled from anywhere and update on the fly? Where’s the

consortium awarding “this doesn’t shut down if the company does” brand marks?

00:31:55 Jono reviews the MOD Duo stompbox, a

multi-effect guitar pedal funded on Kickstarter and based on Linux and open source

software

00:45:19 To answer our questions about the MOD Duo, we talk to company founder

Gianfranco Ceccolini about the software and hardware inside the box and their views

on openness

01:02:15 How do we attract the next generation of open source enthusiasts?

Do we need to, or are we beyond that now? What’s stopping this happening?

Also, Bryan is speaking at LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, USA on April 23rd/24th 2016, and Stuart is at Fosstalk in London, UK on August 6th with other Linux podcasters, if you want to buy them drinks or expensive laptops or something!

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which there is a great deal of disagreement about Microsoft’s motives and Canonical’s motives and our motives, and some of us mock other podcasters because we hate the community, and also:

00:02:01 Microsoft and Canonical release the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” at MS’s Build developer conference to provide the Ubuntu command line on Windows. What’s that all about, then? Bash in cmd.exe? This sounds like a good idea, right? What does it mean?

00:32:17 Jono reviews the iRig Pro “all-in-one audio/MIDI interface for Apple products that fits in your pocket”

The OpenShot project have just released the latest version of their video editor in AppImage format; a single downloadable file which runs on every Linux OS and doesn’t need to be unpacked or installed. With tools like this and Gnome’s xdg-app in the wings, whither the old Linux model of “distributions” and packaging every app half a dozen times? Can this discussion get beyond complaints about static linking or the difficulty of releasing Linux software?

Also, Bryan is speaking at LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, USA on April 23rd/24th 2016, and Stuart is at Fosstalk in London, UK on August 6th with other Linux podcasters, if you want to buy them drinks or expensive laptops or something!

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which it is always sunny in California, we have the worst analogy ever, and:

00:01:56 Trouble at the Wikimedia foundation? The executive director and a bunch of others have stepped down; it’s not clear whether their “Knowledge Engine” was a plan to make a rival to Google’s search, or just to improve Wikipedia’s own searching capabilities; and the accusations of them being secretive and avoiding their goals of transparent access to information are flying thick and fast. What’s going on here?

00:19:25 Jeremy reviews the WS-1001 Wifi Observer weather station from Ambient Weather

00:33:31 Josh Strobl talks to us about the Solus project, a Linux-based OS designed for the desktop

00:49:51 Password managers: they seem a good idea for your personal security, but they’re all difficult to use or require you to store your data on their computers. Are there good ones? Is using a password manager a good idea for us?

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which we knock over our equipment, workstations can have a terabyte of RAM in, and:

00:02:16 What’s going on with the United States;s upcoming presidential elections? Do the prospective candidates have decent policies on technology? Since the US’s political leadership affects pretty much anybody, we examine how we feel about the upcoming elections, what it might mean for the world of technology, and who we’d be voting for

00:37:20 Review: the Fitbit Charge HR and Fitbit Aria wristband and scales, whether fitness equipment with batteries in is a good idea, and what the deal is with having to store your health in their cloud

00:53:28 Interview: we speak to CEO of Pogolinux, Erik Logan, about their hardware, where they see server vendors in the age of the cloud, and their brutally powerful workstations

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which we ask, to distro or not to distro? We are also apparently twonkles, we don’t fit inside the case, and:

00:02:03 KDE Neon is a new distribution from some of the KDE team designed to show off the latest and greatest KDE, based on Ubuntu. Or maybe it’s just a technology showcase and not intended to be your actual main OS. It seems to not be very clear exactly what KDE Neon is for, either within or without the KDE project; what might this all be about?

00:23:28 Jono reviews the Bluesmart suitcase: a piece of luggage with Bluetooth and a battery and more technology than the USS Enterprise

00:34:10 Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Conservancy talk about what the SFC is and enforcing GPL compliance in a world of violating Internet of Things devices

01:00:00 Rachel Roumeliotis from O’Reilly and organiser of OSCON follows up on a previous discussion about tech conferences and talks about how OSCON is changing to stay fresh

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Jono Bacon, Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge bring you Bad Voltage, in which Bryan wants to be Benjamin Disraeli, it’s not worth spending twenty minutes to get free money, and:

00:02:00 Brave is a new web browser focused around privacy and micropayments by blocking ads and trackers. We discuss what it’s like to run and what we think of it!

00:20:54 Jeremy reviews the Moto 360 Gen 2 smartwatch, and we discuss it being pretty and actually good at its job

00:37:53 Project Ara is a Google initiative to build a modular smartphone. Are we convinced by it as a concept? Would we buy one?

00:54:35 Conference review: SCaLE and linux.conf.au

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