Innbundet

A few weeks ago, in episode 25 of Linux Matters Podcast I brought up the subject of ‘Coding Joy’. This blog post is an expanded follow-up to that segment. Go and listen to that episode - or not - it’s all covered here. Not a Developer I’ve said this many times - I’ve never considered myself a ‘Developer’. It’s not so much imposter syndrome, but plain facts. I didn’t attend university to study software engineering,...

Over coffee this morning, I stumbled upon simone, a fledgling Open-Source tool for repurposing YouTube videos as blog posts. The Python tool creates a text summary of the video and extracts some contextual frames to illustrate the text. A neat idea! In my experience, software engineers are often tasked with making demonstration videos, but other engineers commonly prefer consuming the written word over watching a...

This is the seventh in an increasingly infrequent series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. London. Summer 2002 In the early 2000s I worked as a SAP Technical Consultant which involved teaching courses, advising customers, and doing SAP installations, upgrades and migrations. This story starts on a typical...

This is a deeply personal post. Feel free to skip this if you’re only here for the Linux and open-source content. It’s also a touch rambling. As for the title, no, I didn’t “get” ADHD on my birthday; obviously, that’s humourous literary hyperbole. Read on. LET age = age + 1 Like a few billion others, I managed to cling to this precious rock we call home and complete a 52nd orbit of our nearest star. What an...

Previously… Back in February, I blogged about a series of scam Bitcoin wallet apps that were published in the Canonical Snap store, including one which netted a scammer $490K of some poor rube’s coin. The snap was eventually removed, and some threads were started over on the Snapcraft forum Groundhog Day Nothing has changed it seems, because once again, ANOTHER TEN scam BitCoin wallet apps have been published in the...

popey’s snap status I maintain a few snaps in the Snap Store. This page is generated periodically so I can keep an eye on the updatedness of each one. The script isn’t perfect, and doesn’t monitor them all. It’s a whole thing I need to maintain and update. I should move this to a GitHub Action at some point. There’s also the charts page which shows how many weekly active devices each of these snaps has, which OS...

popey’s snap charts These charts show the userbase of snaps I publish in the snap store over the last 30 days. They show the usage by country, version, OS (Linux distro) and channel. The first three only show up to 25 entries for each category. There’s also the snaps page which lists all the snaps I maintain with their versions, and whether they’re in sync with upstream releases. Wed 24 Jul 03:00:01 BST 2024 azimuth...

tl;dr I have had a Mini EV for a little over two years, so I thought it was time for a retrospective. This isn’t so much a review as I’m not a car journalist. It’s more just my thoughts of owning an electric car for a couple of years. I briefly talked about the car in episode 24 of Linux Matters Podcast, if you prefer a shorter, less detailed review in audio format. Patreon supporters of Linux Matters can get the...

On Tuesday, I blogged about a series of Bitcoin scam apps published in the Canonical Snap store. Edit: This section updated on 2024-02-23 to include a Canonical response as two new forum posts from sabdfl (Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical). Two things! Three things! Zerothly, today we have a response from Canonical. There are actually two new posts from Mark. One in response to the thread asking whether crypto...

Edit: There’s a short follow-up to this post: Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: Follow up. tl;dr: A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it likely won’t be the last. This post turned out longer than I expected. So if you don’t have the time...

Here’s some links to things I use, like or made. Software Desktop Server Mobile Snaps Podcasts YouTube Retro Tech Modern Tech Politics & News US UK Culture Urban Exploration Camping & Travel Linux Documentary Hardware Repair Hate Watching This page will grow over time as I remember to put stuff here. Software Desktop Software I like to use on my laptops and desktops. Ubuntu: Linux for human beings....

Last week, I wrote about my somewhat last-minute plans to attend the 2023 Ubuntu Summit in Riga, Latvia. The event is now over, and I’m back home collating my thoughts about the weekend. The tl;dr: It was a great, well-organised and run event with interesting speakers. Here’s my “trip report”. Logistics The event was held at the Radisson Blu Latvija. Many of the Canonical staff stayed at the Raddison, while most...

At the Ubuntu Summit in Latvia, Canonical have just announced their plans for the Ubuntu Core Desktop. I recently played with a preview of it, for fun. Here’s a nearby computer running it right now. Ubuntu Core is a “a secure, application-centric IoT OS for embedded devices”. It’s been around a while now, powering IoT devices, kiosks, routers, set-top-boxes and other appliances. Ubuntu Core Desktop is an immutable,...

Ubuntu Summit This weekend the Ubuntu Summit begins in Riga, Latvia. I originally had no plans to attend until a recent change in circumstance, and a late space became available. The Ubuntu Summit is “an event focused on the Linux and Open Source ecosystem, beyond Ubuntu itself. Representatives of outstanding projects will demonstrate how their work is changing the future of technology as we know it.”. Essentially...

This is the sixth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting My first job out of college was for the auspiciously named “National Telecom” as a “Computer Operator”. Back then, this was a job, rather than something you just do day-to-day. I mean, it’s quite likely many of you have...

The other day I wrote about snapcraft metrics, a tool that enables publishers to extract application metrics from the snap store. Something I’ve noticed which I wanted to share, was how quickly automatic updates roll out to an application’s user base. So I took the metrics from an application that I published in the snap store and scrubbed the names and version numbers. I charted below the speed that devices roll...

tl;dr. The OBS Studio snap is now updated to the latest stable release, 29.1.3, after a “brief” hiatus. Another day, another updated snap, which had been languishing a bit. I wrote about updating Spot yesterday, and today, as per the title, it’s OBS Studio. As I mentioned previously, there’s a bunch of outdated snaps in the store, and I want to help fix that. Hopefully, with these blog posts, others might learn how,...

I recently lamented that there’s a bunch of broken and outdated snaps in the snap store. Well, some of them are my responsibility, so in the spirit of “be the change you want to see”, let’s get them fixed and updated. I thought I’d highlight one or two as I go through them, to highlight any important or interesting changes. Today I took a look at Spot, which is a very decent native GNOME Spotify client by Alexandre...

Agon and Agon Last month I visited the RMC Cave where we got a sneak peek at the Agon Console8 from Heber. The Agon Console8 is a consolised version of the more general-purpose Agon8 Computer. They come in a natty retro case, and features twin 9-pin joystick ports. I’d not heard about the Agon line of Open Source devices before, but they tickled something in me. I’m somewhat fascinated by computers that boot...

I was a guest host on Late Night Linux podcast, episode 249 last week, filling in for Will. We each bring along a ‘discovery’, I brought snapcraft metrics to talk about. I thought I’d write up how I use them, for listeners of the show as it’s hard to articulate this very well verbally. My snaps I have about twenty snaps in the snap store. Some, like Bombsquad and ncspot have been published for years now. Others such...

As with all recipes on this blog, they’re designed to be easily made, tasty, and not elaborate. I’ll also not put lengthy backstories for them. I was in Exeter yesterday and stumbled into Brewdog where I discovered their delicious loaded fries. So today, I had a go at making something similar. The amount I used here could be shared between four people as a chunky sharing starter. Scale it down for a main meal or...

This is the fifth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting This is another story from my time working on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. A slight difference though, this story is second hand, so take it with a pinch of salt. I was there,...

I wrote previously about debugging a broken x16emu snap. In short, something went wonky with ld. I started a thread on the snapcraft forum and Ken VanDine came to my assistance with an answer and a pull request. I grabbed that pr, and it did indeed build successfully.. $ snapcraft --use-lxd Launching instance... Executed: pull alsa-pulseaudio Executed: pull gnome/sdk Executed: pull x16-roms Executed: pull...

Today I stumbled on a question in the LÖVE subreddit, asking how to have a portable development environment when you have no control over the host PC. Quick question. Is it possible to download love onto a flash drive so i can make it portable. I’m asking because I can’t download things at work on my work computer but I’m working on a love project in my spare time for a course I’m taking. I’m new to all this and...

I thought I’d “live blog” (not live) my way through fixing a snap which I noticed was broken this morning. How did I notice? I happened to look at the build page for it. Maybe my spidey sense was tingling, because I wouldn’t ordinarily have zoned in on this particular snap. I could have some kind of alert that lets me know when this happens, but I currently don’t. I might use my new-found love of GitHub Actions, but...

For the last six months, I’ve been a presenter on Linux Matters. Prior to that, I spent thirteen years presenting the now-defunct Ubuntu Podcast. Both shows have/had multiple presenters, We record every other week, and send our individual audio files to Joe. He does all the magic post-recording production including editing, audio processing and mastering. That file is then uploaded and eventually makes its way into...

NextCloud Box I just stumbled on an old NextCloud Box in my loft. It’s a quiet Sunday in the house, so I thought I’d see if it still works, and if there’s any data on it. I’m pretty sure I did use it for a while, so there must be something on it. Here’s my NextCloud Box in a cardboard box labelled “NextCloud Box”. Here’s what the NextCloud box looks like once installed. The rear doesn’t look too bad, if you don’t...

Goodbye EmuDeck I’ve had my GabeGear Steam Deck for over a year now, and I love it. When it first arrived, I considered using it to play retro games - via emulators. But a terribad experience with EmuDeck soured my opinon of retro gaming on the deck. The whole EmuDeck installation and configuration was less than straightforward, indeed somewhat cumbersome. I found it to be a loosely connected, and poorly integrated...

This is the fourth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting Today’s story is another belter from my stint on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. It’s around 1995 and I’m a happy-go-lucky, young, free and single tech support operative. Always...

Lies Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’… …yet. The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady. Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app stores, not Monty Python or Eminem). Background I have previously lamented...

My blog at popey.com/blog is hosted on a Bitfolk VPS, built from the Hugo source code in a public GitHub repo. My workflow for publishing a post goes like this: 💻 Use whatever machine I’m sat at 🔽 Clone the repo 🗒 Add a new page, edit until ready 🤠 Push directly to the main branch Early on in my use of Hugo, I was manually using hugo and rsync over SSH directly on the VPS. Given I was publishing a post very...

SOMETIMES I PRESS THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY ACCIDENT, USUALLY WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. I THEN FIND MYSELF UNABLE TO TYPE A PASSWORD OR I AM ACCUSED OF SHOUTING ONLINE. OVER COFFEE, MY FRIEND MARTIN EXPLAINED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO DISABLE THE CAPS LOCK KEY COMPLETELY IN LINUX. I’D NEVER CONSIDERED DOING THIS, MISTAKENLY THINKING THE ONLY OPTIONS WERE TO REMAP IT TO SOMETHING ELSE. IT TURNS OUT GNOME TWEAKS HAS AN...

My work computer is a ThinkPad Z13. It’s on most of the time, including overnight and during the weekend. I’m one of those horrible people who like to just wiggle their mouse, unlock, and get working. I often leave a ton of windows open, so I quite like to sit down and start working without having to wait for boot up, and subsequent app launch. So when I arrive at my desk on a Monday and discover my GPU has...

Today I dusted off a Minecraft server backup to see if it would still work, to explore and remind myself what was there. tl;dr The world still works in Minecraft, and I can even generate a nicely rendered map from it. There’s not a tremendous amount to actually see on the map. A lot of work went on underground. There’s also little nostalgia value other than for the sixty people who played on it back then. But it was...

I’ve just returned from an excellent day visting The Cave and the Arcade Archive with friends. I’ve visited the cave before, and wrote up my experience in Visiting The Cave last year. I decided since (nearly) a year had passed, it was time to visit again. When I mentioned online to some friends, that I was planning on going, they all booked tickets for the same day. We arrived just before 11am, met the greeters who...

This is the third in a series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. In the early 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. In It’s MY monitor, I told the story of dealing with an angry Partner. Today’s story is worse, as I’m dealing with the Personal Assistant of a Partner. Our...

I run a small Mastodon instance for Ubuntu Members and related projects. If you’re a contributing Ubuntu Member, then you can have a free account on the site. It’s been running without tremendous issues for nearly a year now. Each time a new release of Mastodon appears, I dutifully follow the guides to upgrade it. Each upgrade requires me to ensure the backups are functioning then follow the precise steps in the...

Back in 2020 I stumbled on Bandwhich, a “Terminal bandwidth utilization tool”, written in Rust. More recently, I was looking for a tool to identify which processes on a box were using bandwidth, and how much. I remembered Bandwhich and took another look. I wanted an easy way to install Bandwhich on a variety of machines, running a variety of Linux distributions across different architectures. So I built a snap of...

Lightbulb moment On Thursday, October 13th 2016, while on a train, slowly recovering from a pub-based night out, I had an idea! The idea is to take a train somewhere (unspecified) for four hours, have lunch, then take another train home. The train would be my 90mph office with scenery for those four hours in each direction, and I’d get to enjoy lunch somewhere new. I’d do a full days work with the view out the...

Earlier today I posted a poll on Mastodon. As I write this, there are fifteen hours left on the poll, and it looks like this with around a hundred votes: Most people seems to think I should wait for a month. That result may change overnight, of course, but I can’t wait! I’ve got a blog post to write, and time on my hands! So let’s upgrade now! Also, nobody seemed to spot that I got the releases round the wrong...

In a change from our regularly scheduled blogging, I present a short how-to. This is mostly for my own memory, because I’ve had to search online how to do this multiple times, and I can never remember it. Writing it down for you might aide my memory. I found myself playing some retro games on my SteamDeck today, while the tyres were being replaced on my car. After a bit of time playing Golf in a virtual GameCube, I...

Canonical is planning an ‘All Snap’ desktop next year. It will likely be available side-by-side with the traditional deb-based installation we’ve been used to since 2004. If the “All Snap” or “immutable” platform is to be a success, Canonical needs to get a grip on the broken, uninstallable, insecure, and outdated snaps provided in the snap store. This is a long post, so feel free to skip to the ‘Solutions’ section...

Second in my series of Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. In the early 1990s I worked as a Technician at a local college. I would set-up and tear down experiments for students. I’d also have to look for ‘booby-traps’ they’d set for us. But that’s another story. I would sometimes get called upon to perform technical...

Feel free to skip this blog if you’re triggered by “Old man yells at cloud” or “Grandpa tells us about his childhood” style posts. This is the second in a row after a moan about my cellphone. A more lighthearted story will follow tomorrow, I promise. I grew up (and still live near) a small village in the UK called Mytchett. It’s not famous for much other than “housing” Rudolf Hess, who was held there for a while...

I’ve owned plenty of mobile phones over the years. My current daily driver is iPhone 13 Mini, sporting a bright, funky, and cheap OIIAEE Silicone Case. Look at it. It’s gorgeous (ignore the notification badge count, please). Picture taken with the potato camera on my old OnePlus 5. As I mentioned in a previous post, my favourite phones include the flyweight Nokia 6600 (2.1"), bantamweight N82 (2.4") and...

Steam - the video game distribution and launching platform from Valve, is twenty years old today. Steam has become quite a fixture of PC gaming life in those two decades. I didn’t really pay any attention to Steam initially. I wasn’t really into PC gaming in 2003. At least partly because, coincidentally, my daughter also turns twenty today. She was born just hours ahead of Steam. A short while later, here we are,...

Podcast consumption At the start of 2021, I wrote up my 2021 podcast listening list. In it, I categorised podcasts I listen to broadly as ‘Must listen’, ‘Regular listens’ and ‘Once in a while’. Back then I was using PocketCasts on Android. The full list of subscriptions can be found here. Android ➡️ iOS In June 2022, I switched from Android to iOS as I moved from OnePlus 5 to iPhone 13 Mini as my primary device....

About a year ago, I left a comment on a Nostalgia Nerd video about Viruses. It’s a good video, worth a watch, like most of their content. Here’s my silly comment. At 1.7K 👍, it’s my most upvoted comment on YouTube, ever. I do enjoy free Internet points. Some of the replies to me on YouTube were quite 🌟fun🌟. “Any chance you made a back up? I’d love to look at the source code” “Your mother must be so proud of...

At Axiom, our design team has recently come up with a “new” (to us) 🌟aesthetic🌟 for some of our online content. It shows up in posts & ads on social media and in featured images on blog posts. Here is an example. Announcing distributed tracing support└ Visualize traces in a new waterfall view.└ New dashboards to explore your services.└ No sampling, no compromise.└ All your traces, all the time.Find out more →— Axiom...

This is the first in (maybe) a series of “Tales From Tech Support”, which are true stories from my point of view. I’ll probably only post these on a Friday. In the 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. We’d often buy new equipment and unpack it at the helpdesk, throw away all the packaging, and then take the actual kit to the user for deployment. That meant in our helpdesk...

I have long said I’m not really a developer. Whenever I used to see news articles in the past quoting me as “Alan Pope, Developer at Canonical”, I would cringe quite a bit. I say to my professional developer friends that I’m not one, and they often roll their eyes at me. What makes someone a developer though? I have a GitHub account. I have developed code myself. I’ve badly written HTML, BASH shell scripts,...

One thing I’ve loved about ThinkPad laptops for many years, is the upgradability and repairability. Ever since the early days, it’s been possible to noodle around inside a ThinkPad. Sadly, some of the modern X1/Ultrabook line, and some others, are less upgradable than previous generations. My year-old ThinkPad Z13 has a few options for noodling around inside though, including storage. My Z13 shipped with Ubuntu out...

Time for a listicle! I’ve felt the need to list (almost) every mobile phone that I can remember owning and using, ever. There’s at least one missing from the list. My stupid old brain won’t let me recall the niche brand of phone I bought some years back. It’ll come to me one day. There’s a table below with some of the interesting manufacturers specs, and further down are some rambling memories from my experience of...

tl;dr I own an BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) BMW Mini. I previously wrote and talked about getting a ’takeout’ of my car charging data from BMW, and putting it into Axiom to answer some common questions from the ‘EV Curious’. I’m now getting ongoing data from the car, but I had to use 3rd party tools to do it. BMW BMW has an API for getting car data (beyond the ’takeout’ I used last time), to get the ongoing daily...

Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look. tl;dr: What changed Out I no longer have these installed. Sound Switcher Indicator This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably...

Every so often my brain reminds me of a conversation from long ago. Sometimes I’ll go for months without thinking about it, but then it’ll trigger, and I can’t stop thinking about it. It happened this week. Many years ago I taught technical courses for SAP in their London training centre. There’d often be moments during the day when the students were busy doing exercises and off-topic conversations would start....

tl;dr I’ve enabled full content text rather than summaries in the RSS feed for this blog. The irony that I am then summarising the entire post in one line here at the top, is not lost on me. History I’ve used various tools for my blog over the years. Initially in the late 1990’s it was hand-crafted HTML and some FrontPage extensions. Later I used Polarblog through the mid 2000’s then dropped that in 2006 for Drupal...

Back in July, Martin introduced us to ZeroTier on the Linux Matters podcast, episode 8. He detailed why he’s using the tool and how. Worth a listen. Per their website, ZeroTier “lets you build modern, secure multi-point virtualized networks of almost any type. From robust peer-to-peer networking to multi-cloud mesh infrastructure, we enable global connectivity with the simplicity of a local network.” Interesting...

A re-enactment of an event yesterday evening. I was just leaving an online game when I noticed a conversation among the Late Night Linux Telegram group about printing. One person quipped that people don’t print much anymore. Someone else suggested that they print more these days than they used to. My brain saw this and thought “Huh, I wonder how many pages my printer has completed in its lifetime. I imagine that’s...

Yesterday, I wrote a little about the applications I’ve seen crash on my Ubuntu Linux laptop over the last six months. Some people questioned why I use Microsoft Edge as my primary web browser on Ubuntu. I thought I’d write up why, and how a couple of the built-in features are appealing to me. tl;dr it’s multiple profiles, stability, speed, tab sleep, and vertical tabs. Multiple personality disorder I have tried to...

tl;dr: I downloaded the application crash data for my work Laptop. To probably nobody’s surprise, Zoom is the most crashy thing in the last six months on my laptop. New laptop When I joined Axiom at the end of 2022, I was given some budget to buy a work laptop. My friend and co-presenter of Linux Matters Podcast, Martin Wimpress was looking for a new company laptop around the same time. He wrote up his thoughts on...

(yet) tl;dr In a recent thread on Mastodon, it was revealed that Ubuntu 23.04 users can’t install the Steam deb package from the Ubuntu archive without jumping through some technical hoops. It turns out this was a mistake, a bug was filed, and future builds shouldn’t have this problem. It’s not immediately apparent whether the (currently ‘broken’) ISO images for Ubuntu 23.04 will be rebuilt (unlikely) or if this...

Rainbow love I’ve previously written about how the Sinclair line of computers kickstarted a life-long love of computing. I still sometimes go back and play classic Spectrum games on my Nintendo DS. I’ve also bought brand-new games for the platform in recent times. I love that people still code for these ancient devices. Modern vintage classic In April 2017, I backed the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next Kickstarter...

I’ve worked from home since November 2011, when I started working for Canonical. I’ve had enough though, and have chosen to go back to working in an office on a regular basis. No, I don’t have investments in city-centre office spaces, and I’m not a Zoom paid shill. I just think it’s better for me, and here’s why. Commuter hell Before 2011, all my roles were all on-site, commuting between six and sixty miles a day,...

Back in 2021, I reviewed the Eufy RoboVac 30C (affiliate link) vacuum cleaner. I’d owned the device for three months by then. Enough time for it to chew up some socks, cables and shoelaces. In between all that, it did some vacuuming! So I thought I’d re-visit the blog, and figure out if it’s still a decent device, three years after initially buying it. We named him Harvey. Harvey the cleaner, after the character...

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...

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. ...

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...

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. I have...

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)...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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. Here’s what I did,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. Which isn’t a tremendous amount for...

“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...

The GNOME team have announced GNOME 40. Along with this there’s a GNOME OS image to play with. You can grab that from here with the release notes. The release announcement firmly (in bold) suggests “Do not use any other version including the distro version. Only GNOME Boxes 3.38.0 from flathub is known to work.”. Personally I’ve never managed to have much success with GNOME Boxes, so I thought I’d test using...

Yesterday I wrote about my attempt to upgrade one of my HP Microservers, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Well, today I had another go. Here’s what happened. I followed the recommendation from yesterday, to compress the initrd.img using xz compression rather than the previous default gzip. Previously the upgrade failed because it needed 140M disk space in /boot. With the change to the compression...

I have a few old and crusty HP MicroServers in the loft at home. I started out with one when HP did a cashback offer, making them very affordable. Over time I’ve acquired a couple more. One, named colossus is running rsnapshot to provide backups of my other machines. Another, called shirka is a Plex Media Server and the last, robby is a general purpose box running various jobs and reports. All run Ubuntu Server as...

It’s time to replace the Ubuntu Wiki. In fact it was probably time to replace it a few years ago, but we are where we are. It should be a reliable and useful resource for the Ubuntu community. It’s failing at that. We have failed here. Aside: There are actually multiple wikis in use in the Ubuntu project. The primary one is wiki.ubuntu.com, which has been in use since forever (in Ubuntu terms). It’s the main topic...

The last event I went to before The Event was Linux Application Summit (LAS) in Barcelona, Spain back in November 2019! Time flies. LAS is a community organised event, sponsored and supported by the GNOME and KDE projects. The conference is “designed to accelerate the growth of the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together everyone involved in creating a great Linux application user experience.”. In November...

I recently reviewed Split Second (Split Second Book 1) (affiliate link) by Douglas E. Richards. I’d not read any Douglas E. Richards books before, so it was very helpful to me for readers of my humble blog to recommend that and further titles from other authors. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (affiliate link) by Dennis E. Taylor was highly recommended, and delivered. We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was published back in...

In August 2019, I tweeted about how I’d been running KDE Neon for eighteen months, since February 2018, and how I was switching back to GNOME Shell on my primary laptop. In that thread I also suggested I might switch back! Today I've in-place upgraded from that 18.04 KDE Neon install to @ubuntu 19.04 with @gnome. I still love KDE of course, and will likely switch back at some point, or may install it on another...

Last month I mentioned that myself, Mark and Martin have decided to come back for Season 14 of the Ubuntu Podcast. Well, we’re back today with S14E01, titled “Navy Chefs Remit”. Over the thirteen years, the episode titles have had a theme in each season. We don’t reveal the theme, but let our listeners figure that out, for fun. Sometimes it has a bearing on the content of the episode, but often not. Season One used...

It’s late in the day and I didn’t have an idea for a blog post. To the rescue comes my good friend Stuart Langridge with this request for advice… Reading about poached eggs for breakfast, and there appear to be many holy wars over whether the water should be spinning in a whirlpool, whether there should be vinegar, whether to put the eggs in ramekins first. Are these things superstitions or real? Your advice is...

I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome. A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB. Then I opened Google Chrome. So the joke goes....

I’ve said many times, I don’t consider myself a software developer. Much like I don’t consider myself a professional chef. I can write code, just as I can cook. What I make isn’t ground breaking, but it won’t poison anyone either, and I enjoy doing it. Coding for me started on the ZX81 in BASIC then on to the Spectrum and other 8-bit microcomputers. I dabbled with Z80 and 6502 assembly language. At college I did...

This post is more an aide-mémoire for myself, but may be useful to others. I recently wrote a little story about bugs, the crash reporter and errors website in Ubuntu. Sometimes a user will want to look for their crash reports, and in fact that question came up today on the Ubuntu Discourse. Back when we shipped Unity desktop as the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, there was a simple button to take a user to...

Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 enters User Interface Freeze on March 18th! That’s less than a fortnight away! However, with two weekends and plenty of evenings between now and then, its a great time to start testing the Yaru theme we ship in Ubuntu by default. The Yaru team have been busy and provided this short list of some of the main changes since the last release. Default dark...

This post, previously titled “Thirty Years On” appeared on another incarnation of my blog 10 years ago. I am being lazy nostalgic and re-posting it today as it’s the 40th birthday of my first computer, the diminutive Sinclair ZX81. On Christmas day 1981 I awoke with the usual excitement of any 9 year old boy. I clearly remember going downstairs and being told not to go into the lounge because my Dad was busy setting...

I run Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 - on a bunch of systems. It’s a trade-off though, getting the latest crack each and every day. Being at the bleeding edge of new packages landing means I can experience brand new shiny bugs on my systems. Bugs like 1915579 which rendered my system unbootable. Nobody wants to see this on boot: I had updated yesterday and clearly something went...