Reboot Aversion
Posted on Thu, Feb 4, 2021
(Last modified on Tue, Aug 22, 2023)
| Alan Pope
I am not a fan of rebooting my computers. As you can see:
alan@robot:~$ for host in $(cat computers.txt); do ssh "$host" "uptime"; done 20:24:53 up 117 days, 5:06, 10 users, load average: 5.85, 6.07, 5.48 20:24:55 up 113 days, 4:56, 7 users, load average: 0.95, 0.68, 0.72 20:24:56 up 66 days, 9:05, 5 users, load average: 1.06, 0.58, 0.51 20:24:57 up 2 min, 1 user, load average: 0.60, 1.09, 0.
[Read More]Let's Go Snapping
Posted on Wed, Feb 3, 2021
(Last modified on Tue, Aug 22, 2023)
| Alan Pope
Last year ( 😄 ) I wrote an article called Snap Along With Me in which I detailed how I approached snapping a rust application called t-rec. Well, I’m back with another “Snap Along”, this time we’re snapping an application written in Golang.
During a meeting to on-board a new member of the team at work today, I went through a similar process as my last blog post. This time I chose a different application, so I thought I’d write it up here.
[Read More]Late Night Linux Extra: 14 - Transcription
Posted on Sun, Jan 31, 2021
| Alan Pope
I was recently interviewed by Joe Ressington for Late Night Linux Extra episode 14. Here’s a transcription I typed up, which may be useful. I used an automated tool to create the transcription, then tidied it up myself. If you spot anything which doesn’t match the audio, and is materially important, do feel free to propose an edit on GitHub (link at the top of the page).
Joe: This episode is about snaps, quite the controversial topic in some circles, and who better to talk about it than Alan Pope - “popey” as he’s affectionately known by almost everyone.
[Read More]Let's Call The Whole Thing Off
Posted on Fri, Jan 29, 2021
| Alan Pope
I’ve mentioned before that I ‘suffer’ from xkcd 386. I’m trying to improve, and maybe writing this post will help me. If it helps you, that’s awesome too. Let’s work on this together. 🤝
There’s a strong prevalence among some in the Linux community for people correcting others. Specifically correcting pronunciation. I have been guilty of this in the past, but I’m trying to be the change I want to be.
[Read More]Magewell HDMI Capture with ffmpeg
Posted on Wed, Jan 27, 2021
| Alan Pope
Three years ago I bought a Magewell USB HDMI capture device (affiliate link). It’s a neat, reliable and well made, if expensive device. I use it to capture the output of computers, mostly to get pixel perfect bug reports, and to make some videos for YouTube. I prefer these hardware solutions over the software screencasting counterparts, as they tend to be more reliable, and don’t consume resources on the computer being recorded.
[Read More]Snapcraft GNOME Extension Update
Posted on Tue, Jan 26, 2021
| Alan Pope
This is an early PSA aimed at developers who publish snaps in the Snap Store. They can probably skip this preamble, but for anyone else here’s some backstory in case you’re bored interested.
Preamble Snaps are confined software packages for Linux. They were originally designed / intended for IoT use cases so are optimised for size, bundling dependencies, are compressed on disk and auto update. They can also be used to package server software, like NextCloud, and desktop software like Signal Desktop.
[Read More]Raspberry Pi: Boot to BASIC
Posted on Mon, Jan 25, 2021
(Last modified on Wed, Mar 27, 2024)
| Alan Pope
10 REM TL;DR My Raspberry Pi 400 boots from this:
To this.
BBC BASIC!
This blog post is what parts I smashed together to make this work and why.
20 PRINT “HELLO” 40 years ago this Christmas, I got my first “personal computer”. It was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KiB of RAM and a tape deck for storage. Every time I powered it on, like all ‘81 owners, I was greeted with this.
[Read More]Kingdom Rush
Posted on Sat, Jan 23, 2021
(Last modified on Fri, Jan 22, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Last week I posted about my guilty collection of unplayed games in Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition. In short, I have a ton of games I’ve bought over the years and never played, even once. I set myself an internal goal to play more of the games I already have, and reign in my game purchasing.
I used the dynamic collection feature of Steam to show me the unplayed games, sorted by their steam review score.
[Read More]Building Nothing
Posted on Thu, Jan 21, 2021
| Alan Pope
Last week I wrote a blog post titled null which did rather well! Note the giant (for my blog) spike on the right of this goaccess graph.
That’s the Hackernews effect. It was super to see the conversations over in the comments there. Quite proud to get 3 blog posts and one git repo on the front page of HN in the first month of the year. Don’t expect me to keep that momentum up, but we’ll come back to that another day.
[Read More]Embarrassing Bugs
Posted on Tue, Jan 19, 2021
| Alan Pope
Well, this is embarrassing! I recently filed a bug against an open source project because I genuinely thought it was broken. It was (almost, probably, entirely) my fault. I thought I’d fess up and explain what happened. It might be useful for others.
As I mentioned yesterday, I recently upgraded my Ubuntu machines, including my main desktop. It’s a funky Skull Canyon NUC with a weird hybrid Intel / AMD GPU setup and an external nVidia card in an enclosure.
[Read More]Upgrading Ubuntu
Posted on Mon, Jan 18, 2021
| Alan Pope
I tend to run Ubuntu on my computers as the primary operating system. Given I work for Canonical, this isn’t especially surprising. However I have run Ubuntu on pretty much everything since 2005 or so - long before I started working at Canonical (in 2011). Mostly I will upgrade as each new release comes out, only doing a clean install once in a while.
I ran GNOME 2 for all the years from 2004 through to Unity being released, then switched to that.
[Read More]Distrowatch is Not a Measure of Popularity
Posted on Fri, Jan 15, 2021
| Alan Pope
Here’s a fun blog post where I get possibly irrationally annoyed by people who use a web page incorrectly. Let me get this off my chest and then move on to better topics tomorrow.
Distrowatch is a popular website among Linux enthusiasts. The main page consists of reverse-chronological news articles of interest to Linux users. Often this consists of new stable and development release announcements, reviews and weekly roundups.
In addition, there are boxes surrounding the content highlighting the latest Linux distributions, podcasts, software packages and some advertising.
[Read More]null
Posted on Wed, Jan 13, 2021
(Last modified on Wed, Feb 21, 2024)
| Alan Pope
I quite like to break things. While I’m not a QA or security professional, I have developed a knack for doing “stupid” things with software which causes it to malfunction. Some developer friends of mine have lamented that they didn’t show me software before they released it. Because I sometimes find annoying bugs immediately after they release.
Here’s some fun examples of pushing the boundaries of software, sometimes by doing things a little “out there”, beyond what the developer expected or tested.
[Read More]Digital Hoarding: Ubuntu Mirror
Posted on Tue, Jan 12, 2021
| Alan Pope
I have a bunch of Ubuntu machines on my local network at home. They all periodically need to check for updates then download & install them. Rather than have them all reach out to the official mirrors externally to my network, I decided to run my own mirror internally. This post is just a set of notes for anyone else who might be looking to do something similar.
I also do a lot of software building, and re-building, which pulls all kinds of random libraries, compilers and other packages from the archive.
[Read More]Digital Hoarding: Gaming Edition
Posted on Mon, Jan 11, 2021
| Alan Pope
Another in a series of “I have identified a problem here!”. I appear have quite a few video games. More than I can probably play in my time left on Earth. Let’s set aside all the retro games I have for a moment, and consider only the ones that run on my primary computer, a PC. To be clear, I’m only talking about ’native’ games.
Aside: I hate the word ’native’ in this context, because what’s native?
[Read More]Hush Keyboards with Hushboard
Posted on Thu, Jan 7, 2021
(Last modified on Mon, Jan 11, 2021)
| Alan Pope
Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a Zoom / Skype / Jitsi call. Neat.
They don’t make a Linux version, and I couldn’t see anything similar, so I did what I usually do in this instance, throw the idea towards my friendly local coder, Stuart Langridge.
[Read More]My GNOME Tweaks
Posted on Wed, Jan 6, 2021
| Alan Pope
One of the neat things about GNOME Shell is that it’s pretty tweakable - to some degree - to customise it to a user’s preferences. I know some people use GNOME Shell stock experience. I don’t. I have previously written about some of my must-have extensions and add-ons. This supplements that with what I do to further tweak my (currently) Ubuntu 20.10 system to my liking.
Note: These are the settings I configure on my computer that I use all day every day.
[Read More]Check for Outdated Snaps
Posted on Sun, Jan 3, 2021
| Alan Pope
I don’t consider myself a ‘Developer’ but I maintain a bunch of snaps in the Snap Store, and threw together a shell script which I’m sharing here in case it’s useful to other publishers. The goal of the script is to go through each snap and check to see if there’s a newer version of it upstream than currently published in the store. As such it’s not meant for end-users, but for people like me who publish multiple snaps from different places, and want to keep on top of them.
[Read More]Snap Along With Me
Posted on Wed, Dec 30, 2020
| Alan Pope
Every so often I find myself with an idle hour and decide to use that time to package some new software for Linux. A common activity among nerds, I’m sure ;). This blog post is a write up of what I did, and why, which may be useful to others with time on their hands.
I keep meaning to live stream when I do, but on this occasion I had a bad hair day was also listening to and engaging with a podcast, so it wasn’t practical.
[Read More]Contributing without Code
Posted on Tue, Dec 29, 2020
| Alan Pope
In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy userbase.
Each day I’d dial-up to download messages, then read & respond offline. Later in the day I’d re-connect to send my responses and download more messages.
[Read More]