Only good vibes
Posted on Wed, Aug 23, 2023
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Just a few thoughts about the origin of Linux Matters podcast.
Prior art Over the thirteen years of the Ubuntu Podcast the presenter lineup, format, duration and frequency changed here and there. In the early days, we would record a segment, have a cup of tea, and then record another one. It was a long and laborious process that took up most of a Sunday afternoon. After a little while we tweaked things and settled into our stride.
[Read More]Charting EV Car Charging
Posted on Tue, Aug 22, 2023
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
This blog post accompanies episode 10 of Linux Matters Podcast where I talked about this subject for a bit. You can listen to the episode here once it’s out. If you’re a Patron you can listen ahead of time, and with no adverts.
Hackathon In July at work, we had a short mid-week internal Hackathon. Everyone was encouraged to take part if they could. Here’s the blurb to introduce it, taken from our internal Notion.
[Read More]Why I use Ubuntu
Posted on Sun, Aug 13, 2023
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m cooking the family dinner, so I’m also listening to a podcast. I just listened to the latest episode of Linux Downtime. In it, Amolith, Gary and Joe discuss why they use the Linux distributions they do. While the food cooks, I thought I’d take 20 minutes to bang out a blog post mulling why I (still) use Ubuntu.
However, this turned more into a bit of a trip down memory lane and certainly didn’t get banged out in 20 mins.
[Read More]Monitorama PDX 2023 Retrospective
Posted on Fri, Jun 30, 2023
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Introduction This week I attended Monitorama in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was there in my role as Developer Relations Manger at Axiom. This was my first time at Monitorama, and only my second time in Portland.
I had a great time, and wanted to write up some of my thoughts and experiences. I expect a more formal company blog post will follow, but I wanted to get my personal thoughts down while they were fresh.
[Read More]Simple RSS Mastodon Bot
Posted on Mon, May 29, 2023
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Linux Matters I recently started presenting Linux Matters podcast with my friends Martin Wimpress and Mark Johnson.
In episode 4 (that link will only work once the episode is released) I briefly talked about some simple bots I setup on the Ubuntu Social Mastodon instance (which, incidentally I talked about in episode 1).
This blog post accompanies episode 4. Linux Matters is part of the Late Night Linux (LNL) family. If you support us on the LNL Patreon, you’ll often get the episode delivered early, as well as advert free.
[Read More]Year of The Broken Desktop
Posted on Thu, Jan 5, 2023
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
This morning I attempted to start work on my desktop PC and couldn’t. The screen is black, it doesn’t want to wake up the displays. I used the old REISUB trick to restart, and it boots, but there’s no output on the display. I did some investigation and this post is mainly to capture my notes and so others can see the problem and perhaps debug and fix it.
The setup is an Intel Skull Canyon NUC connected to an external GPU enclosure which contains an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060.
[Read More]Adding giscus Comments
Posted on Thu, Dec 15, 2022
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
My blog at popey.com/blog has gone through a number of iterations since I started it back in the 1990’s. First it was created using Microsoft FrontPage, and hosted on some free web space at CiX, and has morphed into a self-hosted WordPress site, Nikola static site, and now a Hugo static site.
At various times I’ve had comment systems available underneath posts. Over the years I’ve used Microsoft FrontPage extensions (which, amusingly used to crash the entire Web Host at CiX back in the day), WordPress comments, and Disqus to facilitate visitor interaction.
[Read More]Visiting The Cave
Posted on Sun, Nov 20, 2022
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
If you only want to know about my visit to The Cave and not the nonsense about my aracde boards, feel free to scroll down to “Three Wise Men”
Note: I’ve embedded some posts from Twitter (where there’s engagement with other Tweeps) and other posts from Mastodon, because, y’know.
Yesterday I had cause to visit Bristol in the west of England. I live in Farnborough, in the South East of England, so it’s a two-hour journey each way.
[Read More]Find Your Twitter Friends on Mastodon
Posted on Fri, Nov 18, 2022
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Depending on who you speak to, Twitter is (or isn’t) in turmoil, and Mastodon is (or isn’t) here to supplant (or backup (or not)) the “de facto town square”.
Whether any of that is true or not, there’s been a surge in people signing up, and trying out the Mastodon experience.
(via this tweet)
For those who aren’t familiar with all this, learn more about Mastodon over at the friendly-looking main Join Mastodon site.
[Read More]Reading My Own Blog Posts (no bots!)
Posted on Wed, Oct 12, 2022
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Download audio I had some fun when I blogged about using a bot to read my blog post. While fun, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to consume blog content. The audio is still a bit robotic, with little care for timing, ephasis and stress on words. So in my next blog post, in which I detailed how to setup Mimic 3, I actually read the blog post out loud, recorded that and attached it as an MP3.
[Read More]Setting Up Mimic 3
Posted on Wed, Oct 12, 2022
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Download audio Yesterday I blogged about using Mycroft AI’s Mimic 3, an Open Source Text-to-Speech engine I used to generate audio of a blog post.
One thing I didn’t mention, which might be useful, is how to setup Mimic 3. It’s pretty straightforward, so here we go.
The Mimic 3 developers have some releases over on their mimic3 GitHub repo, which include deb packages. If you want the easy way, maybe use those, but I wanted to try the latest and greatest, so I grabbed the latest master branch.
[Read More]Blog To Speech - In My Voice
Posted on Tue, Oct 11, 2022
(Last modified on Mon, Aug 28, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Recently my Internet friend Terrence Eden crafted a blog post titled Blog To Speech which you might want to also read. It serves as an inspiration for this post.
In short, there’s a trend in blogging (and on some news sites) to add an audio transcription of the page you’re reading, usually at the top of the article. Mostly this is done semi-automatically using a bot to read in an “AI generated” voice such as Amazon Polly.
[Read More]Team Building via Chess
Posted on Fri, Jul 16, 2021
| Alan Pope
One of the things I really love about working at Influx Data is the strong social focus for employees. We’re all remote workers, and the teams have strategies to enable us to connect better. One of those ways is via Chess Tournaments!
I haven’t played chess for 20 years or more, and was never really any good at it. I know the basic moves, and can sustain a game, but I’m not a chess strategy guru, and don’t know all the best plays.
[Read More]LXD - Container Manager
Posted on Thu, Jul 8, 2021
| Alan Pope
Preamble I recently started working for InfluxData as a Developer Advocate on Telegraf, an open source server agent to collect metrics. Telegraf builds from source to ship as a single Go binary. The latest - 1.19.1 was released just yesterday.
Part of my job involves helping users by reproducing reported issues, and assisting developers by testing their pull requests. It’s fun stuff, I love it. Telegraf has an extensive set of plugins which supports gathering, aggregating & processing metrics, and sending the results to other systems.
[Read More]My Least Used Favourite App
Posted on Mon, Jul 5, 2021
| Alan Pope
I have so many applications on my Android Phone, I’ve lost count. Too many chat apps, multiple web browsers, tons of games, and other garbage.
However, there’s one app, which is one of my favourites while probably being the least used application. It doesn’t technically benefit me at all, but is useful to others, when I use it.
The app in question is “Be My Eyes”. It’s available for Android and iOS, and is very easy to setup.
[Read More]Adrift
Posted on Mon, Jun 14, 2021
| Alan Pope
Over the weekend I participated in FOSS Talk Live. Before The Event this would have been an in-person shindig at a pub in London. A bunch of (mostly) UK-based podcasters get together and record live versions of their shows in front of a “studio audience”. It’s mostly an opportunity for a bunch of us middle-aged farts who speak into microphones to get together, have a few beers and chat.
Due to The Event, this year it was a virtual affair, done online via YouTube.
[Read More]Disabling snap Autorefresh
Posted on Wed, May 26, 2021
(Last modified on Sat, May 29, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Preamble Until recently, I worked for Canonical on the Snap Advocacy Team. Some of the things in this blog post may have changed or been fixed since I left. It’s quite a long post, but I feel it’s neccessary to explain fully the status-quo. This isn’t intended to be a “hit piece” on my previous employer, but merely information sharing for those looking to control their own systems.
I’ve previously provided feedback in my previous role as Snap Advocate, to enable them to better control updates.
[Read More]New Pastures
Posted on Mon, May 17, 2021
| Alan Pope
I tweeted back at the start of April that I’m moving on from Canonical/Ubuntu.
Well, I left on April 30th, have had two weeks of ‘funemployment’, and today I start my new gig.
I’m now Developer Advocate for Telegraf at InfluxData, and I couldn’t be more excited! 🎉
Telegraf is an Open Source “agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics.”. I’ll be working with the Telegraf team and wider community of contributors.
[Read More]Diamond Rio PMP300
Posted on Tue, Mar 30, 2021
(Last modified on Mon, Apr 5, 2021)
| Alan Pope
My loft is a treasure trove of old crap. For some reason I keep a bunch of aged useless junk up there. That includes the very first MP3 player I owned.
Behold, the Diamond Rio PMP 300. Well, the box, in all its ’90s artwork glory.
Here’s the player. It’s powered by a single AA battery for somewhere around 8 hours of playback. It’s got 32MB (yes, MegaBytes) of on-board storage.
[Read More]Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week
Posted on Thu, Mar 25, 2021
| Alan Pope
“Hirsute Hippo” is the project code-name for what will become Ubuntu 21.04 when it releases on April 22nd 2021.
On April 1st, the Beta of Ubuntu Hirsute will be released, but we’re no fools! This is a great time to do some testing!
So, starting on April 1st, we’re doing another Ubuntu Testing Week.
As always, everyone is welcome to test Ubuntu at any point in the year. But during the beta is a good time to focus on testing.
[Read More]