Re: [Dorset] Free: iPad mini

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi Hugh,

I don't have any use for that, but it's probably worth something at CeX even if 
it's not a supported model any more, so even if no one here wants it, I'd 
hesitate before recycling it.

Hamish

On 13 May 2024 09:39:05 BST, Hugh Frater  wrote:
>Before it goes in the WEEE skip, does anyone have a use for an iPad mini,
>model a1490 (cellular)… works fine, holds a charge.
>
>Happy to deliver in the bpc area.
>
>Hugh
>
>Sent from my iPhone
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Re: [Dorset] In-person meetings

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi all,

I have taken the executive decision that Wednesdays are best, but we can 
change that later. Here's the link so all of you can note your 
availability: https://whenisgood.net/9wcd8ng. For some reason it's not 
letting me select any later Wednesdays than those shown, I'm not sure 
what's up with that.


Hamish

On 17/04/2024 16:00, Hugh Frater wrote:

I'm also flexible, I drive and don't have a particularly full schedule at
the moment.

On Wed, 17 Apr 2024 at 14:51, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset <
dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:


Bump. What dates and times and venues work for all of you? I can be pretty
flexible because I can drive and I don't have too much going on at the
moment.

Hamish

On 12 March 2024 20:52:18 GMT, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset <
dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:

On 12/03/2024 11:27, Peter Merchant wrote:

On 11/03/2024 18:09, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset wrote:

Hi all,

At the last online meeting, several of us expressed interest in doing

in-person meetings again, probably at the Broadway in Bournemouth where we
used to do them.

We were thinking of doing them on a different day so they don't clash

with the online meetings, and so that people who don't want to attend/can't
attend in-person meetings don't miss out. I don't think we decided what day
yet, so now would be a good time to chime in with your suggestions so we
can try and come to a decision.

Hamish




Well, How about sticking with Tuesday a fortnight different from the

on-line sessions, so Third Tuesday of the month?

Peter

I might be busy on the third Tuesday evening of each month, so could we

potentially do the third Wednesday evening of each month or similar?

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] In-person meetings

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Bump. What dates and times and venues work for all of you? I can be pretty 
flexible because I can drive and I don't have too much going on at the moment.

Hamish

On 12 March 2024 20:52:18 GMT, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset 
 wrote:
>On 12/03/2024 11:27, Peter Merchant wrote:
>> On 11/03/2024 18:09, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>> 
>>> At the last online meeting, several of us expressed interest in doing 
>>> in-person meetings again, probably at the Broadway in Bournemouth where we 
>>> used to do them.
>>> 
>>> We were thinking of doing them on a different day so they don't clash with 
>>> the online meetings, and so that people who don't want to attend/can't 
>>> attend in-person meetings don't miss out. I don't think we decided what day 
>>> yet, so now would be a good time to chime in with your suggestions so we 
>>> can try and come to a decision.
>>> 
>>> Hamish
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> Well, How about sticking with Tuesday a fortnight different from the on-line 
>> sessions, so Third Tuesday of the month?
>> 
>> Peter
>
>I might be busy on the third Tuesday evening of each month, so could we 
>potentially do the third Wednesday evening of each month or similar?
>
>Hamish
>
>
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Re: [Dorset] In-person meetings

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

On 12/03/2024 11:27, Peter Merchant wrote:

On 11/03/2024 18:09, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset wrote:

Hi all,

At the last online meeting, several of us expressed interest in doing 
in-person meetings again, probably at the Broadway in Bournemouth 
where we used to do them.


We were thinking of doing them on a different day so they don't clash 
with the online meetings, and so that people who don't want to 
attend/can't attend in-person meetings don't miss out. I don't think 
we decided what day yet, so now would be a good time to chime in with 
your suggestions so we can try and come to a decision.


Hamish



Well, How about sticking with Tuesday a fortnight different from the 
on-line sessions, so Third Tuesday of the month?


Peter


I might be busy on the third Tuesday evening of each month, so could we 
potentially do the third Wednesday evening of each month or similar?


Hamish


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[Dorset] In-person meetings

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi all,

At the last online meeting, several of us expressed interest in doing 
in-person meetings again, probably at the Broadway in Bournemouth where 
we used to do them.


We were thinking of doing them on a different day so they don't clash 
with the online meetings, and so that people who don't want to 
attend/can't attend in-person meetings don't miss out. I don't think we 
decided what day yet, so now would be a good time to chime in with your 
suggestions so we can try and come to a decision.


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

On 05/03/2024 05:28, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 p.m. using Jitsi.

The meeting can be joined using a web browser to open
https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug

Chrome or Chromium may fare better than Firefox.
An alternative to installing either of those is to obtain an all-in-one
bundle especially for Jitsi and enter ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.

    wget
-qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage 


    chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
    ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage


I'm just about to set off for the Midlands, so won't be able to 
attend.  See you next time.


Don't forget that someone needs to log in to open the Meeting.

--
Terry Coles


I'll join at 8:30 as usual, and will open the meeting then if no one 
else has.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] TP-Link routers

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

On 18/11/2023 16:41, Peter Merchant wrote:

On 18/11/2023 14:49, Terry Coles wrote:

On 18/11/2023 14:25, Peter Merchant wrote:
Does anybody have any experience with TP-Link routers?  I see the 
C50 and C64 are not badly priced and I really want to improve the 
response of my  wireless connection from this PC. I am currently 
using the Talktalk Sagemcom super-router and speed on a speed test 
is pretty dire.
I don't have any recent experience, But I did have a TP-Link router 
some years ago.  I wasn't overly impressed with it and ended up 
getting a Netgear Nighthawk, which was a vast improvement.  I still 
get updates for it from time to time.


I also think I might improve my wifi dongle and considering an 
Atheros Ar-9271.
Interestingly, my WiFi dongle is made by TP-Link and seems to work 
fine.  However, I only really use it very occasionally, such as when 
the Ethernet link failed the other day.


I did use a TP-Link range extender, but it kept dropping connections, 
so I now have a Netgear one that works well. But when I was a 
University lecturer Netgear gave me a bunch of kit, and they were a 
beast to set up. (20 years ago now, mind]


Peter


My experience with TP-Link routers is that they very rarely receive any 
software updates, so I can't recommend them in the name of security.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting Tonight at 8 pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

I will be a bit late again and start from 8:30, assuming the other thing is 
running this time.

Hamish

On 7 November 2023 14:13:42 GMT, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 p.m. using Jitsi.
>
>The meeting can be joined using a web browser to open
>https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug
>
>Chrome or Chromium may fare better than Firefox.
>An alternative to installing either of those is to obtain an all-in-one
>bundle especially for Jitsi and enter ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.
>
>    wget 
>-qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>
>
>I'll see you there.
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Somewhat Off Topic - Can Anyone Recommend a Decent Tablet Computer?

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Just a thought: I wonder if an E-ink tablet would be a good idea, though the 
contrast might be lacking a bit for text-on-colour sections.

Hamish

On 30 October 2023 13:14:02 GMT, Peter Merchant  
wrote:
>WE have had a few, and I have been happy with Lenovo ones. I once had a 10" 
>one, but it was eminently droppable, so I now have an 8" one. I recently 
>bought Val a new 8" one, but it has Android 12 and is a pain to use. I 
>recommend an 8" one over the 7" ones as it is significantly larger.  Looking 
>at my list, my tablet is Android 10 and my phone Android 13, and both are easy 
>to use.
>
>I suggest that we meet for coffee somewhere and you can have a play before 
>committing. I got our latest from Currys for about £89. Via Quidco!
>
>cheers,
>
>Peter
>
>On 30/10/2023 10:18, Terry Coles wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> After years of resistance, I'm going to get a tablet!  Ideally it would be 
>> one that ran Linux of course, but the main specs needed are good resolution 
>> and plenty of contrast.
>> 
>> The reason for this is my deteriorating eyesight.  Generally speaking, I'm 
>> OK with distance vision, but reading small text on coloured backgrounds is 
>> becoming increasingly difficult.  This means that my magazine subscriptions 
>> are largely wasted because I cannot read them.
>> 
>> However, I do know that I can read PDFs of the magazines on my wife's iPad 
>> and on my desktop monitor, so getting a decent tablet is probably the most 
>> convenient solution.  If possible, I don't want to spend a fortune, so 
>> Samsung Galaxy Tabs at circa £1000 are out, and in any case the performance 
>> of this type of device is probably way over the top for reading a magazine.  
>> However, I am prepared to pay for the kind of performance I need, hence this 
>> query.
>> 
>> Thanks in anticipation.
>> 
>
>
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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi all,

I will be a little late again and will join a little after 8:30 pm.

Hamish

On 3 October 2023 13:12:04 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 p.m. using Jitsi.
>
>The meeting can be joined using a web browser to open
>https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug
>
>Chrome or Chromium may fare better than Firefox.
>An alternative to installing either of those is to obtain an all-in-one
>bundle especially for Jitsi and enter ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.
>
>    wget 
>-qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>
>
>I'll see you there.
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi,

I have something else to attend as well, so I will be joining the LUG a little 
later at around 8:30.

As I preciously mentioned, someone with a Google, GitHub, or Facebook account 
will need to set up the call.

Hamish

On 5 September 2023 12:37:16 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 p.m. using Jitsi.
>
>The meeting can be joined using a web browser to open
>https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug
>
>Chrome or Chromium may fare better than Firefox.
>An alternative to installing either of those is to obtain an all-in-one
>bundle especially for Jitsi and enter ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.
>
>    wget 
>-qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>
>
>I'll see you there.
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - One Week Tonight

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

This reminds me, Jitsi now requires sign-in to start meetings, so whoever first 
arrives may have to sign in with Google, Facebook, or GitHub to start the 
meeting.

Hamish

On 29 August 2023 09:49:09 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The next Meeting will be one week tonight; Tuesday, 2023-09-05 at 20:00 using 
>Jitsi.
>
>Details are as for the previous meetings and will be reposted on the day.
>
>I'll see you then.
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Sorry, I forgot that it was on last night so didn't show up, see you all at the 
next one.

Hamish

On 1 August 2023 12:40:04 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 p.m. using Jitsi.
>
>The meeting can be joined using a web browser to open
>https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug
>
>Chrome or Chromium may fare better than Firefox.
>An alternative to installing either of those is to obtain an all-in-one
>bundle especially for Jitsi and enter ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.
>
>    wget 
>-qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>    ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>
>
>I'll see you there.
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Best Way of Installing Old Version of MySQL Client

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi Terry,

At the time, I didn't have to do anything for the pis to be compatible, because 
the mysql client provided worked with the database on the NAS box.

I believe incompatibility would start to be a problem if we updated Raspberry 
Pi OS as well, but with the current version all seems fine.

I think I'd have to recommend using a virtual machine too, that's probably the 
easiest fix for this problem.

Hamish

On 13 July 2023 10:56:03 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Thanks everyone for your suggestions.
>
>On 13/07/2023 10:07, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> A package manager understands dependencies between packages. You've
>> cherry-picked one package and not handled its dependencies.
>
>> The executable isn't self-contained. It can refer to other object files of 
>> code.
>...
>> No, with the shared libraries you have available.  But they, in turn,
>> may eventually be incompatible with the kernel if you have to go back
>> far enough.
>Thanks.  I think that I can see the light.
>>> Does this mean I cannot use it on this machine without (perhaps)
>>> running everything in a VM?
>> That would seem simplest.
>Yes; presumably running a very old distro to avoid all these issues.
>> Or Hamish mentioned recently on this list some Python MySQL client which
>> he uses.
>
>Apparently, that still calls the MySQL Client that has been installed.
>
>Hamish,
>
>When you built the software framework, what did you do to ensure compatibility 
>between the Pis and the NAS Box?
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Logging into the WMT Database

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

On 08/07/2023 08:33, Terry Coles wrote:

On 07/07/2023 19:25, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset wrote:

Hamish,
Yes, there are compatibility issues with newer versions of 
mysql/mariadb clients and the old version of mysql the server uses, 
which is why the installation spec says to use an older version of 
python-mysqlclient, amongst other things.
Yes.   I was aware of that, but was distracted by being unable to log 
in via SSH, let alone the MySQL Client.
I'm surprised the users I created aren't showing up there, but I 
can't take a look for myself as the VPN isn't working at my end.

Can you suggest where I should look?


Hmm, I'm pretty sure PhpMyAdmin has a users section where they should 
all show up. They're obviously working even if they aren't showing up, 
otherwise the system wouldn't be running and responding to changes in 
the environment.


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Logging into the WMT Database

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi Terry,

Yes, there are compatibility issues with newer versions of mysql/mariadb 
clients and the old version of mysql the server uses, which is why the 
installation spec says to use an older version of python-mysqlclient, amongst 
other things.

I'm surprised the users I created aren't showing up there, but I can't take a 
look for myself as the VPN isn't working at my end.

Hamish

On 6 July 2023 13:53:25 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>On 06/07/2023 12:45, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> This means the TCP port on the NAS's network interface has nothing
>> listening to it to accept your incoming connection request.  This may be
>> because the MySQL server isn't configured to listen on the network
>> interface, or it is listening on that interface but on another
>> non-standard TCP port.
>> 
>> Does any existing software talk to the MySQL server on that machine from
>> outside of that machine?
>All of the Pis talk to the MySQL server through Hamish's framework.
>> ...
>>> ERROR 1043 (08S01): Bad handshake
>> Is that using the mysql(1) program from a shell?  Or some other MySQL
>> client?
>
>The MySQL client that I installed from Kubuntu's repository:
>
>terry@OptiPlex:~/Useful$ mysql -V
>mysql  Ver 8.0.33-0ubuntu0.23.04.2 for Linux on x86_64 ((Ubuntu))
>
>It is much newer than the server (
>
>>> I can log in to the D-Link and thence to the PHPMyAdmin App with these
>>> credentials through a browser.
>>  From there you can probably examine the configured users and perhaps the
>> server's configuration.
>
>That's what I thought, but all I can see is that SSH is enabled for the D-Link 
>itself, but only for admin.  For the MySQL Server, I can only see a list of 
>users under the "Privileges" tab.  There appears to be only four; admin, 
>backupuser, pma and root. Additionally, there is a record for user and another 
>for password, but both appear to be empty.
>
>I can see no evidence of the credentials set up by Hamish for access from the 
>Pis and from the engineering GUI running on the NAS Box.
>
>-- 
>Terry Coles
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Interesting email security check

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via dorset]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for sharing this, it prompted me to make some improvements to my 
domain's email security.

Hamish

On 31 May 2023 08:52:25 BST, Peter Merchant  wrote:
>I came across this from Linked-In 
>https://emailsecuritycheck.service.ncsc.gov.uk/check
>
>It shows me how much I need to learn about security. But of course, having 
>checked it on talktalk.net, how powerless I am to do anything to improve  the 
>situation.
>
>Peter
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Discord Group name

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

As far as I know, we don't have a Discord server.

I was considering looking into Matrix, but life has gotten in the way 
repeatedly - I don't mind if someone else wants to do that instead.

Hamish

On 12 April 2023 09:39:19 BST, Ralph Corderoy  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Hugh wrote:
>> I didn’t think we had a discord server running yet?
>
>I missed the last meeting so I'm out of date, but I am not aware of a
>Discord for the LUG.
>
>Hamish, if you're researching these things then you may want to consider
>Matrix.  IIRC it has favour amongst LUG members who have used IRC in the
>past.
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
>https://matrix.org
>
>-- 
>Cheers, Ralph.
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Connectors, wires etc

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I just want to test the serial interface on an old laptop - I have been 
informed that it might be useful for ham radio (I think?) if it's working, even 
though USB and PCMCIA are not working. I'll probably use an old DOS program, 
but I can't remember the name of the program.

Hamish

On 19 March 2023 15:31:44 GMT, Peter Merchant  wrote:
>Yes, I think I have a laplink cable also.   But the program?  Or what linux 
>program can use a laplink cable?    Assuming Hamish is working in linux at 
>this point.
>
>P.
>
>
>On 19/03/2023 13:00, Hugh Frater wrote:
>> Null-modem cables are still available new, if required. We still use them
>> extensively in the offshore survey industry, which is still heavily reliant
>> on the old serial port.
>> 
>> I might have both a serial and parallel lap link cable floating about if
>> required.
>> 
>> On Sun, 19 Mar 2023 at 10:06, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> I think I have a 25-15 converter already, but yeah a Centronics cable and
>>> a null-modem serial cable would be useful. IIRC, they can also be uses for
>>> file transfer, or would I need a special parallel cable for that too?
>>> 
>>> I know there's an option for it somewhere in the settings, I'll have a
>>> look and get back to you later.
>>> 
>>> Hamish
>>> 
>>> On 19 March 2023 09:43:06 GMT, Peter Merchant 
>>> wrote:
>>>> I have both, hidden away in the garage. Is that a parallel
>>> printer(Centronics) cable that you want, or just a  25way  extension cable.
>>>> Also somewhere I should have some 25-15 way D-converters if required.
>>> (not exactly sure where they are).
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Fwd: Connectors, wires etc

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Netlink connector is interesting too, but not sure if I'd have any use for it 
at the moment. If it's in danger of being recycled I'll gladly have it though.

Hamish

On 19 March 2023 17:08:05 GMT, CA Wills  wrote:
>The reply should have gone to all not just Hamish - sorry my mistake.
>
>I have a USB-Netlink connector, never used, if it's of use to anyone.
>Does not list Linux on the box but iMac OS8.6 above is mentioned. USB to USB 
>connections.
>
>
>
>
> Forwarded Message 
>Subject:   Re: [Dorset] Connectors, wires etc
>Date:  Sun, 19 Mar 2023 17:04:34 +0000
>From:  CA Wills 
>To:Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
>
>
>
>I have a USB-Netlink connector, never used, if it's of use to anyone.
>Does not list Linux on the box but iMac OS8.6 above is mentioned. USB to USB 
>connections.
>
>On 19/03/2023 10:06, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>> I think I have a 25-15 converter already, but yeah a Centronics cable and a 
>> null-modem serial cable would be useful. IIRC, they can also be uses for 
>> file transfer, or would I need a special parallel cable for that too?
>> 
>> I know there's an option for it somewhere in the settings, I'll have a look 
>> and get back to you later.
>> 
>> Hamish
>> 
>> On 19 March 2023 09:43:06 GMT, Peter Merchant  
>> wrote:
>>> I have both, hidden away in the garage. Is that a parallel 
>>> printer(Centronics) cable that you want, or just a  25way  extension cable.
>>> Also somewhere I should have some 25-15 way D-converters if required. (not 
>>> exactly sure where they are).
>>> 
>>> This is a measure of how technology has changed in the last 15 years.
>>> 
>>> Peter
>>> 
>>> Just a note. T-bird keeps on wanting to use my yahoo address as the 'from' 
>>> address, but I changed the settings of the Yahoo one and now it won't, so I 
>>> have to select the hotmail one after it fails.  Wish I could get it to 
>>> default to Hotmail (which is the top of the list).
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 18/03/2023 22:38, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>>>> Hi Graeme,
>>>> 
>>>> I'm in the market for a parallel cable, and possibly also a null-modem 
>>>> serial cable, if you happen to have one.
>>>> 
>>>> Hamish
>>>> 
>>>> On 18 March 2023 17:08:58 GMT, Ralph Corderoy  
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Hi Graeme,
>>>>> 
>>>>>> Is there any future in keeping them or should I just take them along
>>>>>> to the recycling centre?
>>>>> The value of copper could be on the rise long term if the
>>>>> electrification of all things continues.
>>>>> 
>>>>>> (Spring cleaning under way, and the XYL is getting insistent).
>>>>> Probably best to tip it then, lest XYL becomes a SWMBO.  :-)
>>>>> 
>>>>> -- 
>>>>> Cheers, Ralph.
>>>>> 
>>>>> -- 
>>>>>Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2023-04-04 20:00
>>>>>Check to whom you are replying
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>>>>>New thread, don't hijack:mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
>>> -- 
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>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Connectors, wires etc

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I think I have a 25-15 converter already, but yeah a Centronics cable and a 
null-modem serial cable would be useful. IIRC, they can also be uses for file 
transfer, or would I need a special parallel cable for that too?

I know there's an option for it somewhere in the settings, I'll have a look and 
get back to you later.

Hamish

On 19 March 2023 09:43:06 GMT, Peter Merchant  wrote:
>I have both, hidden away in the garage. Is that a parallel printer(Centronics) 
>cable that you want, or just a  25way  extension cable.
>Also somewhere I should have some 25-15 way D-converters if required. (not 
>exactly sure where they are).
>
>This is a measure of how technology has changed in the last 15 years.
>
>Peter
>
>Just a note. T-bird keeps on wanting to use my yahoo address as the 'from' 
>address, but I changed the settings of the Yahoo one and now it won't, so I 
>have to select the hotmail one after it fails.  Wish I could get it to default 
>to Hotmail (which is the top of the list).
>
>
>On 18/03/2023 22:38, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>> Hi Graeme,
>> 
>> I'm in the market for a parallel cable, and possibly also a null-modem 
>> serial cable, if you happen to have one.
>> 
>> Hamish
>> 
>> On 18 March 2023 17:08:58 GMT, Ralph Corderoy  wrote:
>>> Hi Graeme,
>>> 
>>>> Is there any future in keeping them or should I just take them along
>>>> to the recycling centre?
>>> The value of copper could be on the rise long term if the
>>> electrification of all things continues.
>>> 
>>>> (Spring cleaning under way, and the XYL is getting insistent).
>>> Probably best to tip it then, lest XYL becomes a SWMBO.  :-)
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Cheers, Ralph.
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>>   Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2023-04-04 20:00
>>>   Check to whom you are replying
>>>   Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ...  http://dorset.lug.org.uk
>>>   New thread, don't hijack:  mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
>
>
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Connectors, wires etc

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi Graeme,

I'm in the market for a parallel cable, and possibly also a null-modem serial 
cable, if you happen to have one.

Hamish

On 18 March 2023 17:08:58 GMT, Ralph Corderoy  wrote:
>Hi Graeme,
>
>> Is there any future in keeping them or should I just take them along
>> to the recycling centre? 
>
>The value of copper could be on the rise long term if the
>electrification of all things continues.
>
>> (Spring cleaning under way, and the XYL is getting insistent).
>
>Probably best to tip it then, lest XYL becomes a SWMBO.  :-)
>
>-- 
>Cheers, Ralph.
>
>-- 
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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 p.m.

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Unfortunately I won’t be attending this one, but hope to see you all next month.
Hamish
Ralph Corderoy wrote:
Hi,
In Terry's absence, I thought I'd send the reminder...
The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 p.m.  using 
Jitsi.
The meeting can be joined using a web browser to open
https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug  
Chrome or Chromium may fare better than Firefox. 
An alternative to installing either of those is to obtain an all-in-one
bundle especially for Jitsi and enter ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.
wget -q 
https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
 

 
chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
I'm hoping to be there; it's three-to-one odds on.
-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
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Re: [Dorset] Does anyone have an old PC with PCI and/or ISA slots in need of a new home?

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Seeing as it's now Wednesday, I'm going to assume Hugh is very busy, so I'm not 
going to bother him with this.

Any idea roughly what era of CPU is in the spare systems you have, Peter?

Hamish

On 9 December 2022 16:01:02 GMT, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty  
wrote:
>That's fairly convenient for me.
>
>I think more than one PCI slot is probably good enough, but it'd be good to 
>know roughly what kind of hardware they have eg Pentium 3-4 class harder, or 
>more like Pentium 2/equivalent?
>
>Either way, we should wait until Hugh has had a look too.
>
>Thanks :)
>
>Hamish
>
>On 09/12/2022 15:57, Peter Merchant via dorset wrote:
>> I have three in the garage, two of which can go to a good home. None ISA, 
>> and I don't know offhand how many PCI slots.  I just nicked a CD drive from 
>> one of them, and noticed in my collection a couple of old CD drives 
>> (Non-SATA).
>> 
>> I live in Colehill, not far from the famous hamburger roundabout/junction.
>> 
>> Peter
>> 
>> 
>> On 09/12/2022 14:08, Hugh Frater wrote:
>>> Hamish,
>>> 
>>> I might well have something, let me have a look this weekend.
>>> 
>>> Hugh
>>> 
>>> On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 at 13:52, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> 
>>>> On our last call, someone was talking about older PCs being sat in a
>>>> garage. As it turns out, it would be useful for me to have a system with
>>>> 2+ PCI and/or ISA slots and/or an AGP slot for use with some older
>>>> hardware.
>>>> 
>>>> If anyone happens to have one they don't need, I'd be happy to pay for
>>>> it/exchange it for some other stuff I have waiting to be listed on eBay.
>>>> I could make a note of what those are here, but I'm not sure if that
>>>> would constitute list spam :)
>>>> 
>>>> Hamish
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>>    Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2023-01-03 20:00
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>>>> 
>> 
>> 
>
>
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Re: [Dorset] Kubuntu hanging

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I think it's more likely that you have a bad display cable, perhaps?

Hamish

On 14/12/2022 12:28, Peter Merchant wrote:
I seem to remember a discussion some time ago about changing screen 
firmware from NVidia to Nouveau. Is it possible that doing this would 
fix my problem?


Peter( this time using his correct email address!)

On 13/12/2022 21:50, Peter Merchant via dorset wrote:
Just now when this occurred, I switched off the monitor, and after a 
few seconds switched it back on and the screen came back to life. So 
the problem  isn't with Kubuntu, unless there is something in the 
graphics causing it. Maybe my screen is getting old.  It's random 
because it didn't occur at all yesterday, and has happened a few 
times today.


Peter


On 11/12/2022 12:55, Peter Merchant wrote:
If I leave my  Kubuntu 20.04 for awhile, I have usually left 
Thunderbird and Vivaldi up, and when I come back and try and do 
something the computer goes off into never-never  land, the screen 
goes blank, and I can hear the HD crunching, and it needs the power 
button hold down to shut it down.


I think that this has happened after a boot up, if I have left it 
for awhile and I hit T'bird and Vivaldi  one after the other to 
bring them up.


Any thoughts on where I should look to track this problem?

I am tempted to bleachbit the computer, or to replace Vivaldi with 
Opera on the offchance that Vivaldi is the cause.


Cheers,

Peter











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Re: [Dorset] Does anyone have an old PC with PCI and/or ISA slots in need of a new home?

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

That's fairly convenient for me.

I think more than one PCI slot is probably good enough, but it'd be good 
to know roughly what kind of hardware they have eg Pentium 3-4 class 
harder, or more like Pentium 2/equivalent?


Either way, we should wait until Hugh has had a look too.

Thanks :)

Hamish

On 09/12/2022 15:57, Peter Merchant via dorset wrote:
I have three in the garage, two of which can go to a good home. None 
ISA, and I don't know offhand how many PCI slots.  I just nicked a CD 
drive from one of them, and noticed in my collection a couple of old 
CD drives (Non-SATA).


I live in Colehill, not far from the famous hamburger 
roundabout/junction.


Peter


On 09/12/2022 14:08, Hugh Frater wrote:

Hamish,

I might well have something, let me have a look this weekend.

Hugh

On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 at 13:52, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 


wrote:


Hi all,

On our last call, someone was talking about older PCs being sat in a
garage. As it turns out, it would be useful for me to have a system 
with

2+ PCI and/or ISA slots and/or an AGP slot for use with some older
hardware.

If anyone happens to have one they don't need, I'd be happy to pay for
it/exchange it for some other stuff I have waiting to be listed on 
eBay.

I could make a note of what those are here, but I'm not sure if that
would constitute list spam :)

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Does anyone have an old PC with PCI and/or ISA slots in need of a new home?

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hugh,

Cool, okay :) No rush though. If you happen to have any PCI/AGP/ISA 
cards I might be interested in those too :)


Hamish

On 09/12/2022 14:08, Hugh Frater wrote:

Hamish,

I might well have something, let me have a look this weekend.

Hugh

On Fri, 9 Dec 2022 at 13:52, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
wrote:


Hi all,

On our last call, someone was talking about older PCs being sat in a
garage. As it turns out, it would be useful for me to have a system with
2+ PCI and/or ISA slots and/or an AGP slot for use with some older
hardware.

If anyone happens to have one they don't need, I'd be happy to pay for
it/exchange it for some other stuff I have waiting to be listed on eBay.
I could make a note of what those are here, but I'm not sure if that
would constitute list spam :)

Hamish


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[Dorset] Does anyone have an old PC with PCI and/or ISA slots in need of a new home?

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi all,

On our last call, someone was talking about older PCs being sat in a 
garage. As it turns out, it would be useful for me to have a system with 
2+ PCI and/or ISA slots and/or an AGP slot for use with some older hardware.


If anyone happens to have one they don't need, I'd be happy to pay for 
it/exchange it for some other stuff I have waiting to be listed on eBay. 
I could make a note of what those are here, but I'm not sure if that 
would constitute list spam :)


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - One Week Tonight

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Gosh, that came around fast!

I'll start evaluating Matrix soon, seeing as it was coming up on 2 
months ago when I first said I was going to do that. If it goes well, I 
envision possibly having a national or even international Matrix server 
for LUGs.


Hamish

On 25/10/2022 14:47, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

The next Meeting will be one week tonight Tuesday, 2022-11-01 at 20:00 
using

Jitsi.

Details are as for the previous meetings, but they will be re-posted  
on the

day.




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[Dorset] Video Game History Foundation

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi all,

IIRC, there's at least one fellow archiving fan here, so I thought this 
might peak someone's interest: https://gamehistory.org/


It's a nonprofit dedicated to archiving video game history.

Hamish


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[Dorset] Links from 2022/09/06 online meeting, and pub meets discussion

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi all,

Here are the links from the latest meeting.

Unfortunately, I didn't save all of them, but I know of at least one 
link we had:


https://darlinghq.org/

Darling is a compatibility layer that runs macOS applications on Linux 
and WSL2 (WSL1 support is in progress). It may also work on FreeBSD 
through the Linux emulation layer, but I don't think this has been 
tested at all. Darling mostly runs commandline applications at the 
moment, but a very small number of GUIs have been confirmed to work.


I did a screenshare demonstration of Darling running in a Debian 11 VM, 
running some simple commandline programs, as well as Classic Finder 
(https://classicmacfinder.com/), neofetch 
(https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch), and HomeBrew 
(https://brew.sh/), which I used to install neofetch, once we finally 
remembered its name.


We also discussed doing in-person meets in addition to, rather than to 
replace, the online meets. These could potentially be at a pub and/or at 
someone's house depending on how we feel about it. They couldn't be at 
my house as there is nowhere to park lots of cars and not enough room 
inside or outside. Quite a few people expressed an interest in this, but 
we think they should complement, rather than replace, the online meetings.


Finally, Hugh started a discussion about replacing IRC with something 
slightly more modern as a chatroom. We discussed Discord as well as 
Matrix. While there is an in-progress self-hostable reimplementation of 
Discord available (https://github.com/fosscord/fosscord), I feel like we 
may be better off using Matrix, not that I have tried it, as we probably 
all consider it better not to create a dependency on closed-source code 
and walled gardens.


I will likely be trialling some different ideas with Hugh for chatrooms. 
One of us will probably message here again once we've figured something 
out that works well and is sufficiently FOSS.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Migrating from KMail to Thunderbird

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 08/09/2022 06:54, Terry Coles wrote:

On 07/09/2022 17:52, Peter Merchant via dorset wrote:

Just wondering if you ever overcame the Aliases problem.


Only insofar that I have now dropped KMail and I live with having to 
re-create a new Thunderbird Identity to match the original KMail 
Alias, each time I need to send a message to another recipient that I 
haven't done since the switch.


A pain, but at least it's a pain that only happens in short bursts!

I still miss some of the features of KMail, but not the bugs.


Out of interest, what were the bugs? I think I've only ever used 
Thunderbird as a desktop mail client, so I'm fairly ignorant about the 
boons and issues with other clients.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Thunderbird duplicating messages in sent folder

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

All the sent messages are duplicated in Thunderbird for me too, always have 
been AFAIR. Let me know if you figure out why, I've never really spent the time 
to find out.

Hamisb

On 7 September 2022 18:06:11 BST, Peter Merchant  
wrote:
>I have just noticed that all the messages in my sent folder are duplicated. I 
>think we discussed this problem some time ago, but cannot find it.
>
>As I cleaned out that folder recently I cannot tell when this started 
>occurring. It seems to be just in my Hotmail account.
>
>
>Any idea why?
>
>Peter
>
>
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Re: [Dorset] Fwd: A Library Under Attack

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 03/08/2022 14:25, Terry Coles wrote:

On 03/08/2022 14:17, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
Seems fair. Just to clarify, I wasn't intending to peer pressure 
anyone into donating - I just thought I should make people aware of 
this if they weren't already, in case they want to donate :)



Neither was I.  However, I feel that an organisation that resorts 
'scare tactics' to drum up donations maybe should look again at its 
strategy.

I can't disagree with that.


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Re: [Dorset] Fwd: A Library Under Attack

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 03/08/2022 14:11, Terry Coles wrote:

On 03/08/2022 12:49, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

A Library Under Attack
The right for libraries to lend books is being threatened. Donate 
today to help us continue advancing Universal Access to All Knowledge.
<https://archive.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=38bd6154386f64fcd92204a25=49f2456742=beaf25edcf> 



<https://archive.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=38bd6154386f64fcd92204a25=99644db8f0=beaf25edcf> 



Dear H,

Now more than ever, we need your help, because *the right for 
libraries to lend books is under attack*. The Internet Archive is 
defending access to knowledge and our ability to serve our 
patrons—but unfortunately, fewer than one in a thousand of our users 
choose to give. Will you support this crucial online resource 
<https://archive.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=38bd6154386f64fcd92204a25=3fc78106d5=beaf25edcf>?


I'm not entirely sure what the issue is here.  The statement '*the 
right for libraries to lend books is under attack*' is, I think, a 
trifle over-broad.  Unless I've seriously missed the point, the 
lawsuit is aimed at the 'Internet Archive' not all 'libraries'. Yes, 
the Internet Archive functions as a library, but not in the same way 
as the libraries in most towns and larger villages around the country 
and the world.
I think the problem is that this legal action could just as easily be 
applied to any library - if the Internet Archive loses, it may set a 
precedent.


Don't get me wrong; I feel that the Internet Archive is a very useful 
resource, and I don't see why the rules for an online library should 
be any different to a physical library.  However, the money men are 
around and smell a profit, so they have become a target.


I'll leave it up to you guys to decide if the Internet Archive 
warrants your support.


Seems fair. Just to clarify, I wasn't intending to peer pressure anyone 
into donating - I just thought I should make people aware of this if 
they weren't already, in case they want to donate :)


Hamish



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[Dorset] Fwd: A Library Under Attack

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi all,


I know at least some of us here use the Internet Archive, so I thought 
I'd forward this message from them in case anyone else wants to donate 
to help them.



Hamish

 Forwarded Message 
Subject:A Library Under Attack
Date:   Mon, 18 Jul 2022 16:16:43 +
From:   Internet Archive 
Reply-To:   Internet Archive 
To: H MB 



A Library Under Attack
The right for libraries to lend books is being threatened. Donate today 
to help us continue advancing Universal Access to All Knowledge.
 



 



Dear H,

Now more than ever, we need your help, because *the right for libraries 
to lend books is under attack*. The Internet Archive is defending access 
to knowledge and our ability to serve our patrons—but unfortunately, 
fewer than one in a thousand of our users choose to give. Will you 
support this crucial online resource 
?


CHIP IN $10 TODAY 
 



CHIP IN $5 MONTHLY 
 



*A radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, aims to 
criminalize library lending. *Our Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) 
program preserves traditional library lending in the digital world, 
ensuring that communities can utilize critical resources 
, 
that cultural artifacts can be shared 
, 
and that students everywhere can access books 
.


Through CDL, the Internet Archive and other libraries make and lend out 
digital scans of print books in our collections, subject to strict 
technical controls. Each book loaned via CDL has already been bought and 
paid for, so authors and publishers have already been fully compensated 
for those books. Nonetheless, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, 
and Penguin Random House sued the Archive in 2020, claiming incorrectly 
that CDL violates their copyrights. The Internet Archive has asked a 
federal judge to rule in our favor 
 
and bring the case to a close, but the lawsuit isn't over yet.


“Should we stop libraries from owning and lending books? No,” said 
Brewster Kahle 
, 
the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian. “We need libraries 
to be independent and strong, now more than ever, in a time of 
misinformation and challenges to democracy. That’s why we are defending 
the rights of libraries to serve our patrons where they are, online.”


As a library, we have always been completely free for everyone, 
everywhere, without charging for access, selling user data, or running 
ads. *Instead, we rely on the generosity of individuals like you to keep 
our systems running. We're powered by donations averaging $30.*


If you find our services useful, please consider contributing $5, $10, 
$25 or whatever you can afford 
 to 
help us continue our work. Together, we can be a beacon of light in the 
fight for Universal Access to All Knowledge.


Thank you so much for your support.

CHIP IN TODAY 
 



Facebook 
 



Twitter 
 



Instagram 
 



Website 
 




You are receiving this message because of your relationship with the 
Internet Archive.
Review our Privacy Policy 



*Our mailing address is:*
Internet Archive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118

*Want to change how you receive these emails? *
You can update your preferences 
 
to change 

Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I hope you feel more rested soon.

I am definitely going to be late, but hopefully will be able to attend 
from 9 PM if you're still there.


Hamish

On 02/08/2022 19:15, Peter Merchant via dorset wrote:

I am not going to be able to participate either tonight.  I'm dead tired.

My main challenge in computing at the moment is updating the firmware 
on my 3D printer, which I need a couple of hours straight on, and I 
never get, or am too tired to concentrate on in the evening.


Have fun,
cheers,
peter

On 02/08/2022 12:52, Terry Coles wrote:

All,

The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 pm using Jitsi.

Simply click on the following link and you will be taken to the Meeting
using your default browser:

https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug

Chrome or Chromium are probably better than Firefox for using Jitsi.  An
alternative to installing one of those two is to obtain it bundled 
especially

for Jitsi from:

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases

This should be as simple as

    wget -qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/
download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
    chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
    ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage

and then entering ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.

Hope to see you all this evening.







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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I'm very likely to be late, but I plan on attending regardless.

Apologies if there are duplicates of this message - K9-Mail on my phone doesn't 
handle multiple recipients very well.

Hamish

On 2 August 2022 12:52:37 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>All,
>
>The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 pm using Jitsi.
>
>Simply click on the following link and you will be taken to the Meeting
>using your default browser:
>
>https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug
>
>Chrome or Chromium are probably better than Firefox for using Jitsi.  An
>alternative to installing one of those two is to obtain it bundled especially
>for Jitsi from:
>
>https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases
>
>This should be as simple as
>
>wget -qhttps://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/latest/
>download/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
>
>and then entering ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.
>
>Hope to see you all this evening.
>
>-- 
>
>
>   Terry Coles
>
>
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Re: [Dorset] Links from Jitsi meeting 6/7/2022

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 06/07/2022 22:21, Andrew wrote:

On 06/07/2022 11:24, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR.

Andrew, what was the command you used to get the JPG files? I might 
update this wikipedia page with that information unless you want to. 


I found out that mpv could "play" the file as a slide-show of its 
component images. mpv can also save images, so I told it to do that:


mpv -vo image in.mov

This created 0001.jpg to 0216.jpg.

It looks like the contents of the file is 6 images (making up a 
cube?). I would call them:

Front
Right
Back
Left
Top
Bottom

Each of these is split into 6×6 segments, which adds up to 216 images. 
(eg. Front is 0001.jpg to 0036.jpg)


Now I need to figure out the correct incantation to make 
GraphicsMagick combine them all without resizing or adding borders...


Okay, that sounds... fun :)

Let me know when you've figured it out.

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Links from Jitsi meeting 6/7/2022

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 06/07/2022 11:24, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

Hi there,

Here's a list of links from last night's meeting.

https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/ - Diagramming tool.

https://medevel.com/os-18-lowcode/ - Low and No-Code platforms aimed 
at enterprises.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter-in-turn - How it is meant to be 
done, rather than how UK drivers do it.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR.

Andrew, what was the command you used to get the JPG files? I might 
update this wikipedia page with that information unless you want to.


https://opentracing.io/ and 
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/migration/opentracing/ - I can't recall 
the context for this.


https://girliemac.com/blog/2017/12/26/git-purr/ - Git commands 
explained with cats.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper, who created what 
eventually became COBOL, according to the page.


Hamish


Adding this to the list as well, as I found it today and it's super useful:

https://endoflife.date/ - Lists end of life timelines for various 
different things, FOSS and not.


Hamish


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[Dorset] Links from Jitsi meeting 6/7/2022

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

Here's a list of links from last night's meeting.

https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/ - Diagramming tool.

https://medevel.com/os-18-lowcode/ - Low and No-Code platforms aimed at 
enterprises.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cox

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter-in-turn - How it is meant to be 
done, rather than how UK drivers do it.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime_VR.

Andrew, what was the command you used to get the JPG files? I might 
update this wikipedia page with that information unless you want to.


https://opentracing.io/ and 
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/migration/opentracing/ - I can't recall 
the context for this.


https://girliemac.com/blog/2017/12/26/git-purr/ - Git commands explained 
with cats.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper, who created what eventually 
became COBOL, according to the page.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Problem with new laptop - more info

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 05/07/2022 09:33, CA Wills wrote:
Sent a reply to Terry's comment including a screen shot JPG then 
thought it should have gone to the list so here's the text of that JPG:-


08:13:07 kernel: hdaudio hdaudioC0D2: Unable to bind the codec
08:12:13 pulseaudio: Error opening PCM device hw:1: No such file or 
directory

08:12:12 lightdm: gkr-pam: unable to locate daemon control file
08:12:05 wpa_supplicant: nl80211: Failed to create a P2P Device 
interface p2p-dev-wlp0s20f3
08:12:04 kernel: tpm tpm0: [Firmware Bug]: TPM interrupt not working, 
polling instead


Confirms problems but not how to fix them! Any help please?

See you tonight, normal time>


Well the last one about TPM suggests you may need a firmware update to 
me, if one is available. But you probably don't need a TPM so it's 
unlikely to matter, especially given it's got a fallback of polling anyway.


But yeah, looks to me like you need a newer distro/kernel. If you're 
still running Mint 20.x, there are newer kernels available - there's a 
5.13 kernel, which is what I use. Still probably too old, but might help.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Problems with new laptop

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Don't know what laptop or distro you're using, but Linux 5.4 with an 
11th gen Intel sounds like a bad combination. I suspect you need a newer 
kernel/distro.


Hamish

On 04/07/2022 21:57, CA Wills wrote:

Thought for tomorrow nights meeting perhaps?

Some minor problems with my new laptop during booting up mainly, plus 
I have no HDMI output and have no video acceleration.


This is info on laptop:

/CPU:/

//

/Topology: Quad Core model: 11th Gen Intel Core i5-1135G7 bits: 64 /

//

/type: MT MCP arch: Tiger Lake rev: 1 L2 cache: 8192 KiB /

//

/flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx /

//

/bogomips: 38707 /

//

/Speed: 1059 MHz min/max: 400/4200 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1030 2: 
827 /


//

/3: 561 4: 1102 5: 551 6: 715 7: 729 8: 980 /

//

/Graphics:/

//

/Device-1: Intel vendor: CLEVO/KAPOK driver: N/A bus ID: 00:02.0 /

//

/Display: server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: fbdev unloaded: 
modesetting,vesa /


//

/resolution: 1920x1080~77Hz /

//

/OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 12.0.0 256 bits) v: 4.5 Mesa 21.2.6 /

//

/direct render: Yes /

//

/Audio:/

//

/Device-1: Intel vendor: CLEVO/KAPOK driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel /

//

/bus ID: 00:1f.3 /

//

/Device-2: C-Media USB Advanced Audio Device type: USB /

//

/driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid bus ID: 3-6:3 /

//

/Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.4.0-121-generic /


Both Graphics & Audio drivers have not ben installed/connected, why?

I also get during bot that the 'mtp' (?) has not loaded - I can't se 
anything in the bot setup to discard it.



Several tries at locating the answer to the problems have confused me 
now. how do I proceed please?





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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - One Week Tonight

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Potential interesting topic for the meeting: A RISC-V laptop: 
https://riscv.org/blog/2022/07/deepcomputing-and-xcalibyte-open-pre-orders-for-first-native-risc-v-development-laptop-quantities-limited-xcalibyte-and-deep-computing/
 :)

Hamish

On 28 June 2022 16:50:02 BST, Terry Coles  wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The next Meeting will be one week tonight Tuesday, 2022-07-05 at 20:00 using 
>Jitsi.
>
>Details are as for the previous meetings, but they will be re-posted  on the 
>day.
>
>-- 
>
>
>
>   Terry Coles
>
>
>
>-- 
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[Dorset] WMT Software Developer needed

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi all,

This might be a bit of a long shot, but Terry and I figured it's a good 
place to start.


Once I've completed the remaining work I've agreed to do on the river 
system, I will be stepping down from developing software for WMT for the 
foreseeable future, as I need to focus on my business. I'm not sure if 
anyone here would be interested in replacing me (with a hand-over period 
of course :) ), but if any of you are, here's a brief, inexhaustive 
description of the role:


- Primary focus is helping to maintain the river system software (most 
development is finished now), which runs over the network on a set of 
Raspberry Pi computers, mostly Pi Zeros running Raspberry Pi OS.


- The software is written in Python, and utilises sockets for network 
communication (using a high-level abstraction I wrote), as well as 
MySQL/MariaDB for coordination and database storage.


- Note that the use of sockets is now fairly minimal in this system, and 
almost all of the quirks with it have been ironed out, so you will 
probably not need to deal with the complexity involved very much.


- The software is written as a framework to maximise reusability of code 
within the project, and is generally implemented using Object-Oriented 
techniques.


- We use unit tests and docstrings to help document the code, but we 
will also need to write some more high-level documentation (I will be 
helping to do this).


- Various other related projects are also underway (see 
https://gitlab.com/wmtprojectsteam for all of them) as well as a Visitor 
GUI which was planned but never implemented (it is planned to use Flask).


I don't feel like I can put any more detail in this message without it 
becoming unwieldy, but if anyone has any questions please feel free to 
email me on or off list. We will be extremely grateful if anyone can get 
involved :)


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm.

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 08/06/2022 09:20, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

On 08/06/2022 05:38, Terry Coles wrote:

On Tuesday, 7 June 2022 18:49:05 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. I wonder if using headphones might help 
when

that happens, or just in general if there's background noise. I guess
you might have tried that and found it uncomfortable, which is fair 
enough.
I don't think headphones would help because I'm almost completely 
deaf in a
quiet room.  Since the only extraneous noise would be from the 
headphones,

they might even make it worse.  :-)

Ah okay, fair enough.

The only thing in particular I wanted to tell you was that I've done my
exam now, and it went well, so I should be able to get some more WMT
stuff done this week.

How do you think the exam went?


I think it went well. It was exceptionally difficult with 6 different 
models to draw and complete (class diagrams, sequence diagrams, 
activity diagrams etc). The models were also more complex than in the 
past papers. As a result of the harder difficulty, I used all the time 
and submitted 2 minutes before the late penalty time kicked in, which 
means I was sat there for 3 hours 58 minutes doing the exam - not the 
most fun I've ever had.


It was probably harder because due to COVID it was a remote open-book 
exam instead of an in-person closed-book exam, so they adjusted the 
difficulty up. It all went fine in the end though, I think. Thanks for 
asking :)


Hamish


Forgot this one:

Droidian (Mobian for Android phones, uses Project Treble/GSI features): 
https://droidian.org/


Mobian is Debian for Mobile if anyone didn't know.

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm.

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 08/06/2022 05:38, Terry Coles wrote:

On Tuesday, 7 June 2022 18:49:05 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. I wonder if using headphones might help when
that happens, or just in general if there's background noise. I guess
you might have tried that and found it uncomfortable, which is fair enough.

I don't think headphones would help because I'm almost completely deaf in a
quiet room.  Since the only extraneous noise would be from the headphones,
they might even make it worse.  :-)

Ah okay, fair enough.

The only thing in particular I wanted to tell you was that I've done my
exam now, and it went well, so I should be able to get some more WMT
stuff done this week.

How do you think the exam went?


I think it went well. It was exceptionally difficult with 6 different 
models to draw and complete (class diagrams, sequence diagrams, activity 
diagrams etc). The models were also more complex than in the past 
papers. As a result of the harder difficulty, I used all the time and 
submitted 2 minutes before the late penalty time kicked in, which means 
I was sat there for 3 hours 58 minutes doing the exam - not the most fun 
I've ever had.


It was probably harder because due to COVID it was a remote open-book 
exam instead of an in-person closed-book exam, so they adjusted the 
difficulty up. It all went fine in the end though, I think. Thanks for 
asking :)


Hamish


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[Dorset] Links from Jitsi meeting 8/6/2022

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

Just thought I'd put some of the links shared from the Jitsi meeting in 
an email for those who couldn't come.


Hamfest 2022: https://www.frars.co.uk/hamfest/

Data reliability and integrity related (?): https://www.bimdl.com/

Open-source community cloud: https://www.operate-first.cloud/

I must admit I must have missed the discussion on what exactly bimdl.com 
is or does, can anyone clarify?


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm.

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 07/06/2022 16:13, Terry Coles wrote:

On Tuesday, 7 June 2022 13:23:39 BST Terry Coles wrote:

Hope to see you all this evening.

As it happens, I won't be online this evening.  Unfortunately I've experienced
a very rapid buildup of earwax and would spend the whole evening say 'Eh'.

I usually get this around about this time of the year, but never quite so
suddenly.  Yesterday, one ear blocked after I showered and slowly cleared
during the day.  This morning I could hear reasonably well in one ear and
fairly normally in the other.  In the last two hours, that's deteriorated to
not at all in once ear and hardly at all in the other.

Hopefully, it will al be sorted by next time.


Ah, I'm sorry to hear that. I wonder if using headphones might help when 
that happens, or just in general if there's background noise. I guess 
you might have tried that and found it uncomfortable, which is fair enough.


The only thing in particular I wanted to tell you was that I've done my 
exam now, and it went well, so I should be able to get some more WMT 
stuff done this week.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard no longer works properly

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 25/05/2022 11:16, Terry Coles wrote:

On Wednesday, 25 May 2022 11:07:36 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

It depends on the sound system that Chromium uses, which is probably
Pulseaudio. ALSA is the one that only allows one playback device at
once. This is sounding more like a Chromium bug than an KDE/Kubuntu one
to me.

Does Firefox have the same problem?

No.  I was beginning to think the same thing.  I added the same information to
my original query on the Ubuntu One site, but no-one has responded.

If an update that fixes it doesn't arrive in the next few days, I'll probably
escalate my query to a bug report.


Out of interest, is there any particular reason you use Chromium? If 
this is a deal-breaker, which I think it would be for me, I can vouch 
for Firefox's stability and compatibility.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard no longer works properly

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi Terry,

It depends on the sound system that Chromium uses, which is probably 
Pulseaudio. ALSA is the one that only allows one playback device at 
once. This is sounding more like a Chromium bug than an KDE/Kubuntu one 
to me.


Does Firefox have the same problem?

Hamish

On 24/05/2022 06:38, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

I have just spotted something which shows that the keyboard was a red herring.
When the Play / Pause button is pressed the music stops and the player goes to
Pause mode.  When the button is pressed again, the music may or may not be
heard.  The key phrase is 'be heard'.  If I have just been listening to the
audio from a video played in Chromium, the player restarts (I can see the
progress indicator increasing), but there is no sound.

It seems to me that Chromium is grabbing the audio channel and not letting it
go.  I find that a bit confusing because I thought that the linux sound system
could play music from multiple sources and certainly if I don't press the Play
/ Pause button while watching a video, I can hear both audio tracks.

Any thoughts on this?

BTW.  This shows why the fault was such a chameleon; if I hadn't been watching
video it worked and if I had it didn't.  It's just that I hadn't realised this
at the time.



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Re: [Dorset] Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard no longer works properly

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 19/05/2022 06:48, Terry Coles wrote:

On Wednesday, 18 May 2022 19:46:45 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

Huh, must be some configuration then. Maybe making a copy of /etc on
both machines and then comparing the difference between the files. I'm
not sure if there's some fancy recursive diff command to make that easy,
but Ralph might know :)

You may well be right, but as noted elsewhere, that will be a lot of work.
I'll try it to see if there is anything obvious, but otherwise the current
install is for the chop.


I thought you said it didn't work with live media on your desktop though?

I never tried it with a live instance of Kubuntu, only Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora
(which worked).  Having seen it working with Kubuntu on the laptop, then I
guess it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.  I've been doing upgrades for several
years now and the system tends to gather lots of cruft that way.

The only downside of a clean upgrade is that my /home directory has its own
partition; precisely to prevent the config files being lost.  If a clean
installation retaining the /home partition doesn't work, then I'll try
installing with everything on one partition and moving /home afterwards.  I've
done it before.  It means a lot of reconfiguring, but needs must.
If a clean install doesn't work, you could just restore your previous 
install from a backup, and then start messing with your config in /home, 
or just delete it, might save some hassle.

I hope you don't have to do a fresh install, they're really annoying.
Maybe sticking to Kubuntu LTS releases would help - I had a really
terrible experience from around 2012-2014 until I started sticking with
the LTS releases. Granted, that was a long time ago and maybe that just
reflects when I'd learnt enough to not break things when I was messing
around with the system.

Over the years I've done a clean installation quite a few times and appreciate
that it will take some time to get back to where it was in terms of Plasma
Activities and installed packages etc, so I'm reasonably confident (famous last
words).

It may even solve some of the other niggles I've had with Kubuntu over the
last few upgrades.  Nothing major, but annoying.

Makes sense.



Debian might also be more stable, if, like me, you really don't like
where Canonical's going with snaps.

I would certainly prefer not to have to deal with the plethora of snaps,
flatpaks and 'stuff' that's been creeping in over the past few years, but I like
Kubuntu, I'm used to working with it and other distros with native KDE
Desktops have other disadvantages.


Yeah, that's fair enough.

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard no longer works properly

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 19/05/2022 06:14, Bob Dunlop wrote:

Hi,

On Wed, May 18 at 07:46, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
...

Huh, must be some configuration then. Maybe making a copy of /etc on
both machines and then comparing the difference between the files. I'm
not sure if there's some fancy recursive diff command to make that easy,
but Ralph might know :)

Well "diff -r -w DIR1 DIR2" usually works well for me.  -r is the
recursive flag, -w causes diff to ignore white space differences.

However comparing two /etc directories is gonna produce a lot of
noise changes unless the distros are very closely related. Try to
work with smaller sets like the configuration sub directories.


Cheers, I'll save that for mid-late Summer when I migrate to LMDE.

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard no longer works properly

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Aaaand, one to the list, seeing as I forgot.

On 18/05/2022 16:52, Terry Coles wrote:


On Wednesday, 18 May 2022 14:21:48 BST you wrote:

Interesting. What about Linux Mint Debian Edition?

I didn't try that, see below.


What if you plug the keyboard into your laptop?
My Dell XPS13 laptop comes with multimedia keys of its own, so I 
booted it up

and tried playing some tracks in Clementine. Everything worked. However,
this was with Kubuntu 21.10 installed.

I then upgraded to 22.04 and the multimedia keys continued to work as they
should. I then plugged in the Cherry K/B and, guess what? The keys all
worked.


Huh, must be some configuration then. Maybe making a copy of /etc on 
both machines and then comparing the difference between the files. I'm 
not sure if there's some fancy recursive diff command to make that easy, 
but Ralph might know :)




This is odd because I upgraded the desktop too, so this problem 
presumably has
to do with some other software that I have installed on my desktop but 
not on

my laptop. There's a lot of that, so it may be a losing battle to track it
down. Unless any other ideas are forthcoming, I think I'm going to 
have to do

a clean installation of Kubuntu 22.04 and then add the software back, one
package at a time until it either breaks or I get a fully functional 
system.


I thought you said it didn't work with live media on your desktop though?

See the above, and also maybe comparing the contents of ~/.config and/or 
~/.local (and some of the other .folders) on both systems might be useful.


I hope you don't have to do a fresh install, they're really annoying. 
Maybe sticking to Kubuntu LTS releases would help - I had a really 
terrible experience from around 2012-2014 until I started sticking with 
the LTS releases. Granted, that was a long time ago and maybe that just 
reflects when I'd learnt enough to not break things when I was messing 
around with the system.


Debian might also be more stable, if, like me, you really don't like 
where Canonical's going with snaps.


Hope this helps,

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Cherry CyMotion Master Linux keyboard no longer works properly

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 18/05/2022 09:48, Terry Coles wrote:

On Wednesday, 11 May 2022 09:35:11 BST Terry Coles wrote:

Does anyone else have this keyboard or can hazard a guess as to what has
gone wrong?  I appear to be able to map some at least of the media keys,
but then they aren't remembered after a reboot.

Not a lot of response to this ;-(

Since I posted the above, I'd also posted on Launchpad (the (K)Ubuntu bug/
queries tool).  There wasn't a huge response there either; mainly outlining
the use of xev in a console to check that the buttons were working; I'd
already tried this anyway and they were.   The other suggestion was using the
Desktop Settings to assign the keys.  I'd already done this also, with no
improvement.

I then tried several things:

I spent a happy hour or so trying different live distros to see if the
behaviour changed and it certainly did! This problem is a bit like a
chameleon; it changes it's behaviour depending on what is happening. Here's a
summary of what I saw in Clementine and Rhythmbox in the various distros:

1. In Kubuntu 22.04, I got no Play/Pause button support at all, the Stop
button worked and the Next and Previous Track buttons worked OK  but only when
the player had focus.

2. In Ubuntu 22.04 (clean live installation) the Play/Pause button worked but
the Next and Previous Track buttons jumped several tracks at a time.

3. In Linux Mint 20.3 (clean live installation), the Play/Pause button worked
with Next and Previous Track buttons only working some of the time 

At the time I thought that the problem was the lack of CyMotion Master Linux
keyboard driver support, eg the driver that I installed originally or the
kernel has had something dropped.

I then bought a nice shiny new Logitech G213 keyboard.and the symptoms changed
yet again:

I still couldn't get the Play/Pause button to work, but Stop, Next Track and
Previous Track all worked fine. The Volume Up, Volume Down and Volume Mute all
worked as advertised, so this was definitely a step forward (plus the keys
light up very prettily, which can't be bad with my ageing eyes). :-)  However,
the button that I use the most still didn't work; Play/Pause.

The following day, I booted up and the Play/Pause button worked  I have no
explanation for this; there were no updates applied after the tests on the
previous afternoon and I did reboot after I plugged the new keyboard in.  I
was happy. :-)

However...  This morning when I booted up, the Play/Pause key was not working
again  ;-(

So what could be common to three distros (Kubuntu, Ubuntu and Mint) two
different keyboards, two different players (Clementine and RhythmBox) and also
be ephemeral in the way described above?

Any ideas anyone?


In terms of commonality, all the distros are Ubuntu-based, so might have 
the same issues for that reason. Linux Mint Cinnamon at least uses a 
service to watch and send the actions to the player (Firefox/VLC/etc).


Maybe try something Debian-based, like LMDE, or Fedora?

Other than that, no immediate ideas.

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Free to good home

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 19/04/2022 18:25, Tim wrote:

Free to a good home I have to following items.

HPV1910 24port Gbit managed switch rack ready with mount, has 4 slots 
for fibre module, works perfectly just a bit noisy for sitting on 
your. Needs to be reset password lost


Fujitsu E734 laptop i5 8GB Memory 120GB SSD No SCREEN, this laptop has 
spend the last 3 year running as a desktop connected to an external 
monitor, due to said missing screen, all the cable are there if you 
want to refit, but you will also need the bezel as well (large object 
fell on laptop lid), works perfectly


Collect from Kinson


Tim H


Terry,

Perhaps the switch might make a good spare for WMT seeing as we have a 
lot of switches in operation there?


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Wimborne Model Town Routing Problem

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 19/04/2022 07:27, Terry Coles wrote:

On Monday, 18 April 2022 20:26:36 BST Patrick Wigmore wrote:

If there isn't a suitable route to 192.168.0.0/24 on the VPN client
computer, then manually adding one temporarily might be a worthwhile
experiment.

Hmmm.  I've been struggling to find the correct iptables command to do that.
Should this be a direct route from 10.1.10.1 to 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.0.30 to
192.168.0.1.  Also should the protocol be NAT?  Whatever I've tried so far
doesn't seem to show up when I list the current rules, so I've been unable to
confirm or deny that this was the problem.

It seems you've got me hooked on this puzzle, Terry. I was only going
to write a few paragraphs here, to clarify my previous remarks!

Sorry about that.  :-)


Note: iptables is a firewall, and doesn't handle routing.

You probably need to add a route with "route add" but I don't know what 
options to use after that. The only one I have used is "route add 
default gw x.x.x.x" so I will let Patrick handle this - he knows more 
Linux-specific stuff than I do here.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Wimborne Model Town Routing Problem

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 18/04/2022 20:26, Patrick Wigmore wrote:

On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 10:23:19 +0100, Terry Coles wrote:

When a VPN client connects to the Web Server, in theory the web
server would see that connection coming in from a 10.1.10.0/24
address, not a 192.168.0.0/24 one. So, it is a given that the
Webserver has to be configured to accept connections from
10.1.10.0/24 clients.

So how would I do that?  I always assumed that the VPN Server
included a router that would sort all that out.  The iptables
output would indicate that it does.

I suppose there is some nuance here; the connection would come from a
10.1.10.0/24 address, routed via the 192.168.0.0/24 address of the VPN
server. So, the Webserver would see that 192.168.0. had forwarded it
some traffic that originated from 10.1.10.x.

If the VPN server were doing NAT routing/masquerading, as opposed to
plain old routing, then the connection would appear to come directly
from the VPN server's 192.168.0.0/24 address. I suppose the VPN server
*could* be doing NAT routing, but that would be a little surprising to
me, because I am not seeing how NAT routing would be beneficial in
this set-up.

But I only mentioned this in case you had configured the server to
block connections that weren't from 192.168.0.0/24 addresses, so if
you haven't done that then I can't see it being a concern.

The only other thing that comes to mind on a brief reading of your
response to me is that, if the web server isn't accessible by IP
address, then it certainly isn't going to be accessible via hostname.

So, as you say, the routing falls under suspicion.

The finer points of iptables configuration are perhaps a bit lost on
me, so while I can look at the broad-strokes of your config, and I
think it seems OK, I could easily be missing some nuances that might
send it off the rails.

I suppose one thing to check is whether, while connected to the VPN,
you have any other (conflicting) routes to 192.168.0.0/24. Or, indeed,
whether there is a route to 192.168.0.0/24 at all. E.g. run

 $ ip route show

on your VPN client computer and see where it thinks it should send
traffic destined for 192.168.0.0/24.

That raises the question of how the VPN client learns which networks
it can route to via the VPN. Presumably it does learn something, since
you can access the various non-Webserver devices in the 192.168.0.0/24
network. Unless that's happening by fluke.

If there isn't a suitable route to 192.168.0.0/24 on the VPN client
computer, then manually adding one temporarily might be a worthwhile
experiment.

It seems you've got me hooked on this puzzle, Terry. I was only going
to write a few paragraphs here, to clarify my previous remarks!

Patrick


Note: The VPN Server does not do NAT, as is evidenced by the "Last login 
from 10.1.10.x" prompt that I get after SSHing into one of the pis 
periodically.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Follow Up to my WMT Webserver Problem

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 29/03/2022 11:37, Terry Coles wrote:

After realising that the problem had nothing to do with the VPN Server, I've
done further investigation and the most likely cause of this is the check that
all Android phones have to do before they will connect to a WiFi Network.

On occasions I've caught an error from 'connectivitycheck.gstatic.com/
generate_204'.  Sometimes I'm getting 'net::ERR_CONNECTION_ABORTED' and
sometimes I get 'net::ERR_TIMED_OUT'.  I've posted a typical screenshot at:

https://hadrian-way.co.uk/Misc/Android_Screenshot_2022-03-29.jpg

The trouble is that during WiFi connection checks a message is sent to that
URL by the phone and if the response isn't received, then Android believes
that there is no Internet access and (normally) flags this up to the user with
an option to ignore before connecting.  It seems that nodogsplash somehow gets
into the middle of this sometimes and the Welcome splash screen doesn't get
displayed.

Even so, a user 'in the know' can still connect to the content by browsing to
the Home Page, so the connection is still made.  Unfortunately there will be
no Visitors to WMT who are in the know.

The trouble is that development of nodogsplash seems to be moribund, the last
commits being about 2 years ago and there have been no issues added since
October last year.  I therefore suspect that I can't get much help from that
source.

Has anyone any thoughts on this?  As mentioned elsewhere this problem isn't
new; we just had less understanding of it 2-3 years ago and it was less
prevalent.  Before that, I used to display a notice on site which gave
instructions on how to browse to the Home Page, but this was deemed to be too
complicated and nodogsplash was installed to make it easier..  I don't really
want to have to go back to the original approach if possible.


Hmm interesting. Are you not having the SSH connection issues to the 
webserver when it's at your house then? That was the issue we were 
originally debugging, and shouldn't have anything to do with either 
nodogsplash or Android if I understand things correctly.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Query about iptables

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 27/03/2022 13:16, Terry Coles wrote:

On Sunday, 27 March 2022 13:11:31 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

The VPN server doesn't have any rules defined at all, so I'm struggling
to see how it could be interfering with the Webserver.

Being pernickety, the VPN Server does have some rules, they just don't filter
anything.


What happens if you have the webserver plugged and and only plug the VPN
server into one side of the simulated network? eg just the office side
or just the guest network side?

The Webserver works.

As mentioned, I think I could add a rule or rules to the VPN Server to
selectively block traffic to and from the Webserver, but I don't want to mess
anything up.


Interesting. Although, the VPN Server isn't used to connect to the 
webserver, so that shouldn't have any effect AFAIUI.


There's not much risk messing with iptables settings because unless you 
save them, they won't persist over a reboot anyway. If in doubt, just 
image the SD card first so you can restore it if anything goes wrong :)


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Query about iptables

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 27/03/2022 13:07, Terry Coles wrote:

On Sunday, 27 March 2022 13:00:51 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

Can you confirm that the ufw command doesn't return any information?

Yes.  AIUI, ufw is simply a means to construct a firewall by manipulating
iptables rules.  I suspect that the authors of strongSwan and nodogsplash
simply wrote the rules by hand.


Yes you're absolutely right, I just wanted to be sure.

The VPN server doesn't have any rules defined at all, so I'm struggling 
to see how it could be interfering with the Webserver.


I need to look up some iptables stuff to make sense of it, but this is 
definitely perplexing.


What happens if you have the webserver plugged and and only plug the VPN 
server into one side of the simulated network? eg just the office side 
or just the guest network side?


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Query about iptables

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 27/03/2022 11:21, Terry Coles wrote:

On Sunday, 27 March 2022 10:55:55 BST Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

I find this difficult to understand - these systems should operate
independently IIRC, especially seeing as they both have their own
independent physical cables to both sides of the network.

I can't understand it either, unless the system has somehow got conflicting
routes that confuse nodogsplash.
I wonder. When I find some time I will read up on how nodogsplash works. 
In the meantime, hopefully a quick review of the firewall rules will help.



I think it might be useful if you post the rules. There are some tweaks
I'm meant to make to the firewall configuration at some point anyway, so
I might as well familiarise myself with them.

The VPN Server's rules are pretty simple, but the Webserver has a massive
ruleset:

https://hadrian-way.co.uk/Misc/VPN_Server_iptables_Rules.txt

https://hadrian-way.co.uk/Misc/Webserver_iptables_Rules.txt


NB: "sudo ufw status numbered" may also be useful if UFW was used to
configure the firewall.

There is no firewall in the sense normally understood.  The VPN Server relies
on seeing the correct User CERT to allow the traffic and the Webserver has the
rules above (I suppose that would be considered a firewall).

Neither device uses ufw.


iptables is a firewall so anything using that is definitely running a 
firewall.


Can you confirm that the ufw command doesn't return any information?

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Query about iptables

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi Terry,

I find this difficult to understand - these systems should operate 
independently IIRC, especially seeing as they both have their own 
independent physical cables to both sides of the network.


I think it might be useful if you post the rules. There are some tweaks 
I'm meant to make to the firewall configuration at some point anyway, so 
I might as well familiarise myself with them.


NB: "sudo ufw status numbered" may also be useful if UFW was used to 
configure the firewall.


Hamish

On 27/03/2022 10:48, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

Some of you may remember my earlier queries about setting up a Webserver and
more latterly a VPN Server for the Wimborne Model Town.  All this has worked
fine through last Summer.

Over the Winter Maintenance Period, I upgraded the VPN Server to the latest
Version of RPi OS and pistrong (swanStrong) and after a few issues was able to
redeploy the server in January this year.  We didn't notice any other issues
until recently, mainly because the whole network had been rendered
dysfunctional while the main Network Switch was removed for refurbishment of
the area around it's location.

Recently, we discovered a problem with the Webserver; it no longer served up
Webpages!  I brought the Webserver hardware home and connected it to a
reference model of the VPN Server and a representative site WiFi Antenna with
a couple of switches.  I've posted a diagram at:

https://hadrian-way.co.uk/Misc/VPN_Network_Configuration.pdf

What I have discovered is that the system works if I disconnect the VPN Server
from the 5-port switch at the server, but not if I disconnect the Webserver
from the 5-port Switch.  I think that is because when the user uses his device
to connect to the WiFi Antenna, nodogsplash detects this and that obviously
needs a connection to the Antenna.

I'm assuming that I should be able to fix this by dropping the connections at
the VPN Server to the Webserver or vice versa.  However, both devices have
extensive iptables rules set up which I really don't understand, so before I
write off to the authors of nodogsplash and / or pistrong can anyone shed any
light on what is happening and how to fix it?

I can post the rules from the two devices if it helps.



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Re: [Dorset] fstrim weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 10/02/2022 13:05, Graeme Gemmill wrote:

On 10/02/2022 12:00, dorset-requ...@mailman.lug.org.uk wrote:

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Today's Topics:

    1. fstrim weirdness (Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty)
    2. Re: fstrim weirdness (Neil Stone)
    3. Re: fstrim weirdness (Victor Churchill)
    4. Re: fstrim weirdness (Neil Stone)
    5. Re: fstrim weirdness (Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty)
    6. Curious anecdote about using ecryptfs (Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty)
    7. Re: fstrim weirdness (Tim Waugh)
    8. Re: fstrim weirdness (Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty)
    9. Re: fstrim weirdness (Tim Waugh)


--

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2022 17:55:56 +0000
From: Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
To: dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: [Dorset] fstrim weirdness
Message-ID: <47abd098-4851-47a6-ca9e-adef6e5e5...@hamishmb.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Hi there,

I believe a while back I was talking about TRIM here, more specifically
about it not running automatically on my systems, and I think someone
recommended I enable fstrim.service with systemd.

I finally got around to that, only to find that it was already enabled,
and apparently not doing anything. As I don't leave my systems on 24/7,
is it safe to assume that the timer isn't firing when the system is
booted up later, after the configured time for TRIM has passed?

If so, does anyone know how to configure a task like this to run when
scheduled, or alternatively when the system is next booted up in the
case that the event was missed?

I know CRON can't do this, and I assumed the point of using systemd
timers was that they could do this, but alas perhaps not. I assume there
must be a standard way to do this, because it seems like a rather big
omission, considering that other commercial operating systems Who Must
Not Be Named (TM) seem to have had this feature for a while.

Any ideas?

Hamish



Hamish, a couple of points:
1. man 5 crontab introduces some special "times" for action, 
including  @reboot, "run once after reboot"
2. On my mageia system, anacron is triggered hourly to sweep up any 
missed triggers. It usually exits with no jobs run.


Best wishes, Graeme


Hi Graeme,

anacron seems to be set up the same way on my Linux Mint 20.3 system - 
useful to know.


Essentially I thought the distro maintainers had forgotten about TRIM 
needed to be run even if the system isn't on all the time (eg like for 
most users) but I was mistaken, and didn't realise I could just check 
with journalctl (as I use systemd).


I thought something was up with TRIM due to my slow transfer speeds, but 
I was wrong and it was about my disk encryption as I posted about yesterday.


Cheers,

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] fstrim weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 10/02/2022 11:07, Tim Waugh wrote:
On Thu, 10 Feb 2022 at 11:05, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
 wrote:


The second command says it was "Passed" three days ago, but I
don't know
if that means it ran. There are no other timers in the output from
that
command.


We only asked for the fstrim timer. 'systemctl list-timers' will show 
you all the timers.


Look in the logs to see if it ran?

journalctl -u fstrim

Tim.
*/


Yeah, it has been running, my bad.

Well, we learn something new every day :)

Hamish
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Re: [Dorset] fstrim weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 10/02/2022 10:06, Tim Waugh wrote:

On Wed, 9 Feb 2022 at 17:57, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
wrote:


I finally got around to that, only to find that it was already enabled,
and apparently not doing anything. As I don't leave my systems on 24/7,
is it safe to assume that the timer isn't firing when the system is
booted up later, after the configured time for TRIM has passed?


This depends on the configuration of the timer. The 'Persistent' field
controls this (see systemd.timer(5) ).

What does this say?:
systemctl show fstrim.timer | grep Persistent

Also, find out when it last triggered:
systemctl list-timers fstrim

Tim.
*/


Hello Tim.

Persistent=yes is what I get from that command.

The second command says it was "Passed" three days ago, but I don't know 
if that means it ran. There are no other timers in the output from that 
command.


Perhaps TRIM has been working fine, given my heavy-IO workload, but when 
I do run it manually it often has done 100s of GB at a time in the past.


Hamish


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[Dorset] Curious anecdote about using ecryptfs

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

Somewhat related to my question about TRIM, I recently thought my SSDs 
were performing badly (for NVMe drives) when transferring files between 
them - it seems to be very SATA-ish speeds of around 500-600MB/s when 
transferring files between drives (one for my home partition, the other 
for the ridiculous number of VMs I need).


It turns out this was not due to TRIM, but due to eCryptFS:

When dd'ing with an 8 MB block size, both disks can write at about 
1.6GB/s - as expected.


When dd'ing to the eCryptFS part of my /home partition, I get write 
speeds of about 600MB/s and read speeds of 1.2GB/s. I get speeds of 
800MB/s when transferring from the eCrpytFS'd part of /home to my VMs 
drive, but if 1.8GB/s from the unencrypted portion.


TL;DR: on my CPU (Ryzen 3600 at stock clock speeds) the eCryptFS 
encryption speeds just so happen to limit drives to SATA-ish speeds for 
both transfers in and out of the encrypted area. I suspect the transfer 
out of the eCryptFS storage being slower than just dumping to /dev/null 
is due to the IO being very single-threaded in the kernel?


At any rate, the encryption/decryption is definitely single-threaded.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk that you neither volunteered to 
attend, and (probably) nor were especially interested to read :)


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] fstrim weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 09/02/2022 18:23, Neil Stone wrote:

See also 'anacron' to run cron tasks that were missed due to the system
being off.

Hi Victor, many years since we spoke last o/

On Wed, 9 Feb 2022 at 18:16, Victor Churchill 
wrote:


I've not used fstrim, but I assume you're putting a fstrim command into
your crontab but concerned that it won't run if the machine is shut down
before the cron time comes round.
Have you seen the cron '@reboot' facility? This will run whatever command
you give it when Linux starts.
You might want to give it a script which checks for the existence of some
flag to tell it whether it wqants to run fstrim or not, depending on
whether fstrim got run by a regular scheduled cronjob (which could set
aforesaid flag).

best regards,
웃
Victor Churchill,
Netley Abbey, Southampton



On Wed, 9 Feb 2022 at 17:57, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty 
wrote:


Hi there,

I believe a while back I was talking about TRIM here, more specifically
about it not running automatically on my systems, and I think someone
recommended I enable fstrim.service with systemd.

I finally got around to that, only to find that it was already enabled,
and apparently not doing anything. As I don't leave my systems on 24/7,
is it safe to assume that the timer isn't firing when the system is
booted up later, after the configured time for TRIM has passed?

If so, does anyone know how to configure a task like this to run when
scheduled, or alternatively when the system is next booted up in the
case that the event was missed?

I know CRON can't do this, and I assumed the point of using systemd
timers was that they could do this, but alas perhaps not. I assume there
must be a standard way to do this, because it seems like a rather big
omission, considering that other commercial operating systems Who Must
Not Be Named (TM) seem to have had this feature for a while.

Any ideas?

Hamish


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Cheers all,

I have added:

7   50  fstrim  -av

To /etc/anacrontab. Hopefully that'll do it.

This should really be in there for most distributions by default IMO.

Hamish



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[Dorset] fstrim weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

I believe a while back I was talking about TRIM here, more specifically 
about it not running automatically on my systems, and I think someone 
recommended I enable fstrim.service with systemd.


I finally got around to that, only to find that it was already enabled, 
and apparently not doing anything. As I don't leave my systems on 24/7, 
is it safe to assume that the timer isn't firing when the system is 
booted up later, after the configured time for TRIM has passed?


If so, does anyone know how to configure a task like this to run when 
scheduled, or alternatively when the system is next booted up in the 
case that the event was missed?


I know CRON can't do this, and I assumed the point of using systemd 
timers was that they could do this, but alas perhaps not. I assume there 
must be a standard way to do this, because it seems like a rather big 
omission, considering that other commercial operating systems Who Must 
Not Be Named (TM) seem to have had this feature for a while.


Any ideas?

Hamish


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[Dorset] LinkedIn group

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

Back in 2017 I sent a request to join the DLUG LinkedIn group and then 
promptly forgot about it. I noticed the other day and thought I should 
prompt whoever it is who manages it to accept - it's probably pretty 
useful for me to have some extra connections at this early stage in my 
career.


Thanks,

Hamish


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[Dorset] Strange NMI error from dmesg

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

The other day I just happened across a strange error message from dmesg 
while looking for something else. The output was:


[ 8168.931461] Uhhuh. NMI received for unknown reason 3d on CPU 0.
[ 8168.931466] Do you have a strange power saving mode enabled?
[ 8168.931468] Dazed and confused, but trying to continue

I had never heard of NMIs until now, but they appear to be related to 
hardware problems, which is unfortunate because this is on a 
liquid-damaged laptop that I cleaned and repaired. It did however only 
happy when resuming/sleeping, which is sometimes glitchy with this 
laptop anyway. I haven't seen it again since.


I'm hoping that this is a one-off weird thing, or just related to 
suspend/resume rather than an indicator that my laptop is about to take 
the trip to the big recycling centre in the sky.


Thoughts?

Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Following on from LUG meeting Tues 4th Jan

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

If someone joined from an Android device, or from Chrome, it is 
conceivable that they might be I guess. Bit creepy, but also everyone's 
banging on about kubernetes so perhaps not.


Hamish

On 05/01/2022 09:22, PeterMerchant wrote:

In my Google news I got sent this:

https://opensource.com/article/20/8/kubernetes-raspberry-pi 



Is Google listening to us?

PeterM.




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Re: [Dorset] Cannot Set the Volume Using amixer under bullseye

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 02/01/2022 10:54, Terry Coles wrote:

On Sunday, 2 January 2022 09:53:48 GMT Terry Coles wrote:

Initially it didn't work, but then I realised that pulseaudio probably
wasn't installed by default in Raspberry PI OS Lite. After installation I
got a permission error, but it worked after a reboot.

This is weird.  Installing pulseaudio allowed me to set the volume using the
'-D pulse' switch, but  I could get nothing from the speakers.  So I purged
pulseaudio and my speakers burst into life again.

The weird thing is that the command:

amixer -D pulse set Master 50%

still works.

How can that be?


Has Raspbian perhaps switched to using PipeWire for audio I wonder? 
Pipewire is meant to overcome the many issues with Pulseaudio so I 
wonder if they might have done that, and that is the cause of the old 
commands not working.


Definitely makes me think twice about upgrading the river system pis.

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] I'm Having Trouble with apscheduler and pytz Under bullseye

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 31/12/2021 09:30, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

I've posted this query on the Raspberry Pi Forums, but with no response so
far.

As many of you are aware, I've been busy making changes to the hardware of the
Music and Bells Player at the WMT.  At the same time I've taken the
opportunity to upgrade the OS to bullseye, which I suspect has some bearing on
the issue that I've just encountered.  The software to control the playing of
the bells and chimes is written in Python and although the code I wrote last
year is unchanged, the Python version has been upgraded to Version 3.9 as part
of the changes introduced by bullseye.

When I run my Bells program I get this error, which repeats every few seconds:

/home/pi/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/apscheduler/util.py:95:
PytzUsageWarning: The zone attribute is specific to pytz's interface; please
migrate to a new time zone provider. For more details on how to do so, see
https://pytz-deprecation-shim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/migration.html]

BTW, the program still plays the bells when needed.  I use apscheduler in the
program to schedule a number of events:

def chimes_schedule():  # Schedule functions to be run and start the scheduler
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='10')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='11')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='12')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='13')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='14')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='15')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='16')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='17')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='18')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='19')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='20')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='21')
 sched.add_job(hours, 'cron', hour='22')
 sched.add_job(resetnormalopening, 'cron', hour='23')
 sched.add_job(shutdown, 'cron', minute='1')
 sched.add_job(quarters, 'cron', minute='15')
 sched.add_job(quarters, 'cron', minute='30')
 sched.add_job(quarters, 'cron', minute='45')
 sched.add_job(check_minstermusic_commands, 'interval', seconds=1,
id='check_minstermusic_commands')

 sched.start()

The procedure chimes_schedule() is called once at the beginning of the
program.

On visiting the link given in the error message 
(https://pytz-deprecation-shim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/migration.html), I've 
found that the strategy to
migrate from pytz is outlined, with 'zoneinfo' being the preferred route.
However, when I tried to install zoneinfo it failed and I had to install
'backports.zoneinfo' instead.  However, I still couldn't make it work and am
not encouraged by:

Support for backports.zoneinfo in Python 3.9+ is currently minimal, since it
is expected that you would use the standard library zoneinfo module instead.

Can anyone help?

Would it be worth uninstalling Python 3.9 and installing an earlier version?


Sounds a bit complicated!

Once I've upgraded my pis to Bullseye I'll take a look.

What error(s) did you get when trying to install zoneinfo? Also which 
ways did you try (pip, setup.py install, something else?)?


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Dec 7 - Comments

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Yeah I mean it's mostly just curiosity on my part, I'm wondering cos I 
haven't really had any GPU driver problems in Linux for a very long time 
at this point.


Hamish

On 10/12/2021 09:02, PeterMerchant wrote:
Interesting thought. I'll stick the card  that didn't work with OpenGL 
in the garage computer and see if it works there.  Not too worried as 
I only need one to work.


All this is done on Kubuntu 20.04.
Peter


On 09/12/2021 19:36, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

Hmm,

I wonder if that card is faulty or something. Worth using a different 
distro on the old PC?


What distro are you using btw?

Hamish

On 09/12/2021 16:10, PeterMerchant wrote:
Following on from the discussion about my 'new' computer not liking 
OpenGL when I was trying to run the Cura 3D program, I tried Blender 
and it had exactly the same problem.


Today I went out and tried Cura on the old computer hiding in the 
garage, and it worked, so I swapped out the video cards between the 
machines and now the new computer is happy. Both cards were ASUS 
cards. The one that works dates from about 2009, and the one that 
didn't supported up to W7,, but I couldn't find a date for it.


So I am happy that is sorted.

Now if I can get the mic working. I took out the fancy sound card 
and plugged the speakers in to the motherboard, but the sound is 
very faint. I need to check the manual I think.



Peter











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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Dec 7 - Comments

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hmm,

I wonder if that card is faulty or something. Worth using a different 
distro on the old PC?


What distro are you using btw?

Hamish

On 09/12/2021 16:10, PeterMerchant wrote:
Following on from the discussion about my 'new' computer not liking 
OpenGL when I was trying to run the Cura 3D program, I tried Blender 
and it had exactly the same problem.


Today I went out and tried Cura on the old computer hiding in the 
garage, and it worked, so I swapped out the video cards between the 
machines and now the new computer is happy. Both cards were ASUS 
cards. The one that works dates from about 2009, and the one that 
didn't supported up to W7,, but I couldn't find a date for it.


So I am happy that is sorted.

Now if I can get the mic working. I took out the fancy sound card and 
plugged the speakers in to the motherboard, but the sound is very 
faint. I need to check the manual I think.



Peter





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Re: [Dorset] ROS (Robot Operating System)

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 30/11/2021 20:47, PeterMerchant wrote:

On 30/11/2021 19:19, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

On 30/11/2021 15:45, PeterMerchant wrote:
Is anybody on here doing anything with ROS? Just wondering it 
because I might try it and need help.


Peter M.


What does it run on? I'm vaguely curious and have a spare Pi 1, so if 
I can run it on that I might give it a try sometime. I don't know 
anything about it though.


Hamish



The Documentation is very poor about how you would run it on a R-Pi. 
That's one of my first problems with it.


Peter


Ah, I see.

For some reason I assumed it was real time, but it seems not. Also, it 
does say it runs on Linux, as it's more middleware than an OS itself. If 
you didn't find it already, http://wiki.ros.org/ROSberryPi looks 
potentially useful.


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] ROS (Robot Operating System)

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 30/11/2021 15:45, PeterMerchant wrote:
Is anybody on here doing anything with ROS? Just wondering it because 
I might try it and need help.


Peter M.


What does it run on? I'm vaguely curious and have a spare Pi 1, so if I 
can run it on that I might give it a try sometime. I don't know anything 
about it though.


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] USB floppy drive controller

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 16/11/2021 20:51, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

On 05/11/2021 23:54, Andrew wrote:

On 05/11/2021 19:42, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
Yeah, I'd need a case w/ a PSU or something for a 5.25" drive. That 
would be fun. Gotta love old power supplies :/


I might not do it, but it's a nice idea for future posterity - these 
drives aren't gonna get any more common. And it's better than using 
a 486 PC or something because it can read more formats. So the 
fluxengine software works with the Greaseweazle okay too then? 


Yes:
https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/greaseweazle.html

I haven't got a case for the drive to go in, that's far too posh.
Actually there are some 3D printable ones to fit a both drive and 
Greaseweazle board, but they are larger than I can print.


It might be possible to get a small 5V + 12V PSU (rather than an old 
ATX one) - the current draw isn't going to be huge. Or perhaps a 
second USB cable with a USB-PD module in 12V mode for super-modern-ness!


The Fluxengine is software, hardware and firmware - although the 
hardware is a dev board only programmable from Windows, so that's of 
no interest.

Greaseweazle is also software, hardware and firmware.

I use the Greaseweazle hardware with both Fluxengine and Greaseweazle 
software, depending on what I'm doing. Fluexngine for reading, 
Greaseweazle for everything else. 'gw clean' is useful. It moves the 
head back and forwards a few times.


All good ideas, and thanks for the information :)

Does anyone on this list happen to have a 5.25 inch floppy drive that 
they're willing to part ways with? I'm happy to pay for it as well if 
the price is reasonable.


Hamish

Re-sending as did not send correctly due to incorrect subscription.

I have successfully acquired a 5.25" drive, and some disks, as I managed 
to make an offer for only 10 of 100 someone was selling on eBay.


Now to buy one of those USB adaptors. I'll keep you updated I guess, 
unless this is boring everyone to death XD


Hamish




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[Dorset] New email address

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi there,

My new email address for this user group is d...@hamishmb.com. I have 
sent a request to join with that email address and will shortly remove 
the live.co.uk address.


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] USB floppy drive controller

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 16/11/2021 20:51, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

On 05/11/2021 23:54, Andrew wrote:

On 05/11/2021 19:42, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
Yeah, I'd need a case w/ a PSU or something for a 5.25" drive. That 
would be fun. Gotta love old power supplies :/


I might not do it, but it's a nice idea for future posterity - these 
drives aren't gonna get any more common. And it's better than using 
a 486 PC or something because it can read more formats. So the 
fluxengine software works with the Greaseweazle okay too then? 


Yes:
https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/greaseweazle.html

I haven't got a case for the drive to go in, that's far too posh.
Actually there are some 3D printable ones to fit a both drive and 
Greaseweazle board, but they are larger than I can print.


It might be possible to get a small 5V + 12V PSU (rather than an old 
ATX one) - the current draw isn't going to be huge. Or perhaps a 
second USB cable with a USB-PD module in 12V mode for super-modern-ness!


The Fluxengine is software, hardware and firmware - although the 
hardware is a dev board only programmable from Windows, so that's of 
no interest.

Greaseweazle is also software, hardware and firmware.

I use the Greaseweazle hardware with both Fluxengine and Greaseweazle 
software, depending on what I'm doing. Fluexngine for reading, 
Greaseweazle for everything else. 'gw clean' is useful. It moves the 
head back and forwards a few times.


All good ideas, and thanks for the information :)

Does anyone on this list happen to have a 5.25 inch floppy drive that 
they're willing to part ways with? I'm happy to pay for it as well if 
the price is reasonable.


Hamish



I have successfully acquired a 5.25" drive, and some disks, as I managed 
to make an offer for only 10 of 100 someone was selling on eBay. They 
did me a very good deal, so if anyone else needs some disks, get them 
from here: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/294564781498 :)


Hamish


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Re: [Dorset] USB floppy drive controller

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 05/11/2021 23:54, Andrew wrote:

On 05/11/2021 19:42, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
Yeah, I'd need a case w/ a PSU or something for a 5.25" drive. That 
would be fun. Gotta love old power supplies :/


I might not do it, but it's a nice idea for future posterity - these 
drives aren't gonna get any more common. And it's better than using a 
486 PC or something because it can read more formats. So the 
fluxengine software works with the Greaseweazle okay too then? 


Yes:
https://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/greaseweazle.html

I haven't got a case for the drive to go in, that's far too posh.
Actually there are some 3D printable ones to fit a both drive and 
Greaseweazle board, but they are larger than I can print.


It might be possible to get a small 5V + 12V PSU (rather than an old 
ATX one) - the current draw isn't going to be huge. Or perhaps a 
second USB cable with a USB-PD module in 12V mode for super-modern-ness!


The Fluxengine is software, hardware and firmware - although the 
hardware is a dev board only programmable from Windows, so that's of 
no interest.

Greaseweazle is also software, hardware and firmware.

I use the Greaseweazle hardware with both Fluxengine and Greaseweazle 
software, depending on what I'm doing. Fluexngine for reading, 
Greaseweazle for everything else. 'gw clean' is useful. It moves the 
head back and forwards a few times.


All good ideas, and thanks for the information :)

Does anyone on this list happen to have a 5.25 inch floppy drive that 
they're willing to part ways with? I'm happy to pay for it as well if 
the price is reasonable.


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] USB floppy drive controller

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 05/11/2021 18:21, Andrew wrote:

Yes, it was me. Another link for you:

https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle

It cost me a whole £21 for a Greaseweazle:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/zeroflux/m.html

Plus about 50p for a 3D-printed case for it.

I already had floppy drives, floppy cables, cleaning disks and IPA. 
I've also got cotton buds in case I wear out the cleaning disk.


I think it might be possible to get a power cable to power a 90mm 
floppy drive from the Greaseweazle, but I don't have one of them, I 
put together a PSU from some 5V plug-in PSU I had and soldered a 
floppy connector on to it which I cut off of an old PC PSU.


The 5.25"inch drives also need 12V. I think the 8"inch drives need 
24V, but I've only ever seen one of them ever.


I should probably do more data recovery, I can read so many formats of 
disk now. (But not 250 MB Zip disks, of which I have one. I have no 
idea where it came from or what's on it!)


Yeah, I'd need a case w/ a PSU or something for a 5.25" drive. That 
would be fun. Gotta love old power supplies :/


I might not do it, but it's a nice idea for future posterity - these 
drives aren't gonna get any more common. And it's better than using a 
486 PC or something because it can read more formats. So the fluxengine 
software works with the Greaseweazle okay too then?


Hamish



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[Dorset] USB floppy drive controller

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Who was it who sent me this link: 
http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/doc/disk-macintosh.html and was recovering 
data from old floppies? Was it you, Andrew?


I'm wondering how much the setup cost - I would like to set up this with 
a 5.25" disk drive for future use, especially if eventually I do manage 
to start offering data recovery services (some legal issues need 
resolving first).


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - Tonight at 8 pm

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I'll come to this one for once, it's been a while. Hope you are all well.

I have a new old retro laptop to show you :)

Hamish

On 01/06/2021 12:32, Terry Coles wrote:

All,

The next Online Meeting is tonight at 8 pm using Jitsi.

Simply click on the following link and you will be taken to the Meeting
using your default browser:

https://meet.jit.si/dorset-lug

Chrome or Chromium are probably better than Firefox for using Jitsi.  An
alternative to installing one of those two is to obtain it bundled especially
for Jitsi from:

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases

This should be as simple as

 wget -q https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/download/
v2.8.6/jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
 chmod +x jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage
 ./jitsi-meet-x86_64.AppImage

and then entering ‘dorset-lug’ as the meeting ID.

Hope to see you all this evening.




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Re: [Dorset] Android (6) and Tesco shopping app.

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 26/05/2021 08:57, PeterMerchant wrote:
My wife has a 7" Lenovo tablet bought June 2017 and yesterday the 
Tesco shopping App said that it would no longer work on this device 
due to an out of date Operating System. The OS was Android 6.  The 
tablet still works well, except for being particular about which 
charging cable we use.


So be warned if you use the Tesco shopping app.

I bought her a new Lenovo 7" tablet, but it is slightly smaller (New 
case needed - £££) and this one will not stay in landscape mode. 
That's another problem, and Lenovo don't want to know.


Peter


Peter, have you tried disabling auto-rotate? My Android phone has a 
similar problem I think.


Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] Sharing files & directories in Mint 19.2 & 20.1

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

If you search for installing Samba on Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 (bases for 
Mint 19.x and 20.x) you should find some good tutorials. Of course, 
you've probably fixed this by now I imagine.


Hamish

On 17/04/2021 10:14, Terry Coles wrote:

Clive,

I only just spotted this; it had somehow got marked as 'read' in my email
client.

On Wednesday, 14 April 2021 18:05:27 BST CA Wills wrote:

Now have the new main PC (NUC B10) working, we are able to print to
printers (Laser connected on PC by USB, Colour printer via the network
(Router Ethernet) and all looks well from the PC.
On the old PC we had Samba installed as that was very early on in my
Linux days and Terry very kindly came over and installed it.

It was a bit more complicate back then and I had to hand craft your smb.conf
file to get it to work.

Since then I've reinstalled Kubuntu on this machine several time and I can't
remember the last time I had to tweak the config.  For me, samba now 'just
works.  Of course I'm not using Mint.


Tried to share my laptop 'Documents' folder so that I can get to
the_laptop_ files from the new PC.  On laptop notice comes up saying
Samba is not installed.
Also noticed I can't now print on the Laser even when the PC is 'ON'.
With the old PC as long as it was 'ON' I could print OK.

I'm not sure that I can help with this.


As all our equipment is Linux do I need to have Samba to share equipment
and files, or is there another Linux way? A long while ago someone said
you only need Samba if you connect to Windows machines.

It is true that you don't need Samba if you are only accessing Linux computers
(which isn't quite what you said).  Most NAS Boxes use smb by default (usually
by running Samba on them, so although you may be able to enable NFS on yours
you may find it easier to stick to Samba.

Sorry I can't offer any real suggestions to solve your problem.



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Re: [Dorset] OSS Gantt Chart sw

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Thanks for the insights Terry, that's useful because this is my first 
time using Gantt charting software.


I probably don't need any of those fancy features for my project but I 
will keep it in mind.


Hamish

On 26/03/2021 17:17, Terry Coles wrote:

On Friday, 26 March 2021 15:58:41 GMT Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

I just found some cool cross-platform and excellent Gantt chart
software, which you can find at:

Being an ex Project Manager I couldn't resist downloading this.  It seems to
work and it's pretty easy to use, but I wouldn't want to try to manage a big
project with it.

Things I would seriously miss are:

* The ability to enter Task Durations in hours and not just days.
* The ability to give resources a Work Calendar so that their availability is
defined across the project and not just for 'days off'.  (By this I mean how
many hours per week they work.)
* The ability to allocate a resource to a Task based on the above work
calendar.

I'm sure there are lots of other things that maybe other PMs would like to see
but the above matches my workflow which was:

* Estimate each activity in hours and then enter the task duration in hours.
* Allocate the Resources.
* The tool then sets the elapsed time in days. weeks or months based on the
Resource Calendars.

The tool therefore provides a prediction of the end date that takes into
account the availability of all the resources as well as the work required.

Picky I know, but my Projects were not noted for overrunning.  (I did get a
'talking to' once for coming in early.  :-)  )

I know I could pay my $5 and ask for the above, but I no longer have a real
need for a Project Management Tool.



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Re: [Dorset] Network keeps dropping on System Containing Raspberry Pis

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Anything in dmesg or syslog?

I have had issues like this with Pis before, but there should be a fix 
in the latest kernel for this - maybe try installing updates or use 
rpi-update for new kernel if it persists? My issue was with more 
standard RJ45 networking, but may still apply.


Hamish

On 17/04/2021 10:54, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

Our re-engineered Minster Music and Bells system has now been redeployed and
has been working in anger (sort-of) since Monday when WMT re-opened to the
public.  There were one or two teething problems which I was able fix by
logging in to the system remotely.

However, I've been experiencing a recurrent issue with network access.  For
the third time this morning I found that I was unable to log into one or other
of the two Pis in the system and connectivity was only restored after a power
cycle.  Apart from being inconvenient, this is concerning because I'd like to
be able to shut the system down before removing the power.  Also, since I am
still not visiting the WMT due to my wife's vulnerability to COVID I have to
phone in and ask the duty manager to do it.

The network architecture is a bit unusual in that we didn't want the expense
of an extra Network Switch and USB/Ethernet Adaptor.  To solve the former I
configured one Pi as a Router and to solve the latter I used USB Networking,
which the Pi supports.  Here is a quick and dirty diagram:

 WMT  Music  Bells
  Network---Pi---Pi

   ^^  ^
   ||  |
AccessedAccessedAccessed
 via via  via
VPN  Ethernet   USB0

USB Networking was described to me at:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?
f=36=295221=1785228#p1781380

(There is something in the Raspberry Pi docs, but since the Raspberry Pi
Foundation redesigned their website, I can't find it.)

Can anyone suggest a reason for these dropouts?



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Re: [Dorset] Next Meeting - One Week Tonight

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Yay, I forgot it was this time already :)

I have a lot of things to ramble about this time so it shall be good :)

Hamish

On 30/03/2021 17:00, Terry Coles wrote:

Hi,

Well we *might* be seeing a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel.  Not
this month though.

The next Meeting will be one week tonight 2021-04-06 at 2000 using
Jitsi.  Details are as for the previous meetings, but they will be re-posted
on the day.



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[Dorset] OSS Gantt Chart sw

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I just found some cool cross-platform and excellent Gantt chart 
software, which you can find at:


https://www.ganttproject.biz/download/gp30

:)

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] stdout and stderr redirection weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Thanks, this all worked fine and I figured out the issue - I needed to 
use Python's -u option to disable buffering.


The NAS box now logs everything to syslog so hopefully the next time 
python crashes I'll know why.


Hamish

On 18/02/2021 17:29, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:

Thanks, this all sounds like it'll be a very good idea.

syslog is attractive, but I'm not sure this even has syslog. Or maybe I
need to turn it on, I remember hearing something about it anyway. I'll
figure it out and get back to you.

At the moment I'm adding indexes to the database so it'll have to be a
bit later on - this looks like it will take a few hours.

Hamish

On 18/02/2021 16:20, Keith Edmunds wrote:

OK, this is what I would do. Check whether logger (typically
/usr/bin/loggger) is installed on the system. If it is, create a script
that runs at boot as follows:

#!/bin/ash [if /bin/bash is available, I'd use that]

/usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy "SHELL=$SHELL"
/usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy "me=$(whoami)"
echo "test" > /tmp/me.log
/usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy "Status after file write: $?"

What that does:

  - /usr/bin/logger makes entries in syslog, so no need to worry about
writing files

  - "-t xyzzy" will tag each syslog entry with "xyzzy". Of course you can
use any string, but that allows you to 'grep xyzzy /var/log/messages'
(or wherever syslog writes)

  - we check the shell (is it really ash?)

  - we check who we are (are we really root?)

  - we try writing to a file and report the status of doing so

Just looking at your original post, the other thing I'd change is the
relative file reference. Rather than writing to ../stdout.log, just write
to /tmp/stdout.log. Better still:

python3 ./main.py --id "NAS" 2>&1 | tee /usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy

...and have it sent to syslog.

hth



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Re: [Dorset] connecting a HP printer to my wi-fi network

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

We have a HP Envy 4502, which has the ability to set up the WiFi 
connection on the built-in display.


Perhaps yours can do something similar?

The HP drivers and HPlip GUI are very good by the way and work 
excellently for network printing and scanning on Linux.


Hamish

On 26/02/2021 11:55, John Palmer wrote:

I have (perhaps unwisely) bought a Hewlett multifunction printer
MFP179fnw. How on earth do I connect it to my home wifi network ?
At present it's a nice stand-alone photocopier, but that's the least
useful part !
   
HP's documenation is very bare, but says that while I can print from

Linux once it's connected, to set up the connection I need to be using
one of a number of systems of which Android is one.  I have an Android
mobile and have installed HP's app, but I'm blowed if I can find the
tool or instructions that I need.

I am trying to get some help from the 'HP user community' but thought I
should try the Linux community as well.  I have been very quiet on this
group for many years !

Best wishes,


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Re: [Dorset] Wireless dropping out

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi Clive,

I guess you mean Mint 20.2? You should do Mint upgrades this way, as
suggested by the Mint team: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3946, and then
update to Mint 20.1/20.2. Unless of course you're doing a fresh install :)

Hamish

On 22/02/2021 18:36, CA Wills wrote:
> As I last said I'd report outcome of this weekends trials:-
>
> Everything worked fine over the weekend on the Huawei HG633 router, so
> laptop wireless OK.
>
> Late this afternoon re-installed the Sagecom Super Router (after
> router reset) and after checking with other wireless kit it worked but
> still my laptop did not connect!  Looked as if it was trying to
> connect to next door (Next door is on channel 6!!) but wireless
> details were incorrect obviously! Looking around the settings the
> router was set on Channel _11_, changed to channel 1 and all fine.
>
> Don't understand why it tried channel 11 as it has never been set
> before and the tablet had connected OK.
>
> Will leave it all 'as is' and see if any changes take place in the
> next week or so.  Still not sure what caused the problem, which I
> don't like but will stick with it.
> Thanks again for all the suggestions and help. hope this is 'it' for a
> few weeks and no changes to anything now until  the OS Mint update
> comes in April when I hope to upgrade to Mint 20.04 with a live disc.
> See you next week on Jitsi.
>
>
> Happy Bunny
>
>
> On 20/02/2021 14:38, PeterMerchant wrote:
>> On 20/02/2021 13:01, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>>> I haven't been following this, but have you checked for a firmware
>>> update for the router that might fix the issue?
>>>
>>> Hamish
>>>
>>> On 20/02/2021 12:56, CA Wills wrote:
>>>> Started a new email on this subject due to delays in replying. We have
>>>> been relaying our patio during the week between rain showers, so have
>>>> not had a clear time slot to 'play'.
>>>>
>>>> Update today.  1200hrs.
>>>>
>>>> Removed all connections from the TT Super(?) Router and replaced using
>>>> the very old previous Huawei HG633 router.
>>>>
>>>> After reconnecting to old HG633 router and checking I had wireless set
>>>> up, it showed that Lily's Tablet had connected automatically via
>>>> wireless.
>>>>
>>>> Then set up my laptop (wireless) and it connected OK; moved into the
>>>> Living room and still connected; proved that the _laptop_ wireless is
>>>> OK.  Checked speed and appears no loss in speed.
>>>>
>>>> Conclusion is that something on the 'new' router has upset 'my' link.
>>>> As we need the wireless connection for tomorrow morning, I'm staying
>>>> with the 'old' router till after lunch.
>>>>
>>>> Next stage is to reconnect the 'new' router after setting it back to
>>>> default, will then check if wireless is OK again.  Hoping that may
>>>> clear whatever upset my wireless.
>>>>
>>>> If all goes well then end of problem.  If I still can't connect the
>>>> laptop but all else is OK will get onto TT, report the problem and ask
>>>> for a replacement router (can but hope!).  As Peter reported a while
>>>> back he had a similar problem with one item being rejected connection,
>>>> I believe that was also with a TT router.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for all the suggestions and help, will email when done
>>>> reconnecting tomorrow.
>>>>
>>>>
>> My problem was with the TT Sagemcom 'super'-router, and the one wired
>> computer not connecting. This was after I think TT had upgraded the
>> firmware and reset it to factory defaults.
>>
>> Peter
>>
>>


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Re: [Dorset] Wireless dropping out

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

I haven't been following this, but have you checked for a firmware
update for the router that might fix the issue?

Hamish

On 20/02/2021 12:56, CA Wills wrote:
> Started a new email on this subject due to delays in replying. We have
> been relaying our patio during the week between rain showers, so have
> not had a clear time slot to 'play'.
>
> Update today.  1200hrs.
>
> Removed all connections from the TT Super(?) Router and replaced using
> the very old previous Huawei HG633 router.
>
> After reconnecting to old HG633 router and checking I had wireless set
> up, it showed that Lily's Tablet had connected automatically via
> wireless.
>
> Then set up my laptop (wireless) and it connected OK; moved into the
> Living room and still connected; proved that the _laptop_ wireless is
> OK.  Checked speed and appears no loss in speed.
>
> Conclusion is that something on the 'new' router has upset 'my' link. 
> As we need the wireless connection for tomorrow morning, I'm staying
> with the 'old' router till after lunch.
>
> Next stage is to reconnect the 'new' router after setting it back to
> default, will then check if wireless is OK again.  Hoping that may
> clear whatever upset my wireless.
>
> If all goes well then end of problem.  If I still can't connect the
> laptop but all else is OK will get onto TT, report the problem and ask
> for a replacement router (can but hope!).  As Peter reported a while
> back he had a similar problem with one item being rejected connection,
> I believe that was also with a TT router.
>
> Thanks for all the suggestions and help, will email when done
> reconnecting tomorrow.
>


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Re: [Dorset] stdout and stderr redirection weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Thanks, this all sounds like it'll be a very good idea.

syslog is attractive, but I'm not sure this even has syslog. Or maybe I
need to turn it on, I remember hearing something about it anyway. I'll
figure it out and get back to you.

At the moment I'm adding indexes to the database so it'll have to be a
bit later on - this looks like it will take a few hours.

Hamish

On 18/02/2021 16:20, Keith Edmunds wrote:
> OK, this is what I would do. Check whether logger (typically
> /usr/bin/loggger) is installed on the system. If it is, create a script
> that runs at boot as follows:
>
> #!/bin/ash [if /bin/bash is available, I'd use that]
>
> /usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy "SHELL=$SHELL"
> /usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy "me=$(whoami)"
> echo "test" > /tmp/me.log
> /usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy "Status after file write: $?"
>
> What that does:
>
>  - /usr/bin/logger makes entries in syslog, so no need to worry about
>writing files
>
>  - "-t xyzzy" will tag each syslog entry with "xyzzy". Of course you can
>use any string, but that allows you to 'grep xyzzy /var/log/messages'
>(or wherever syslog writes)
>
>  - we check the shell (is it really ash?)
>
>  - we check who we are (are we really root?)
>
>  - we try writing to a file and report the status of doing so
>
> Just looking at your original post, the other thing I'd change is the
> relative file reference. Rather than writing to ../stdout.log, just write
> to /tmp/stdout.log. Better still:
>
> python3 ./main.py --id "NAS" 2>&1 | tee /usr/bin/logger -t xyzzy
>
> ...and have it sent to syslog.
>
> hth


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Re: [Dorset] stdout and stderr redirection weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

On 18/02/2021 15:34, Keith Edmunds wrote:
>> I'm finding that during startup piping and redirecting output doesn't
>> work. This is using the ash shell from busybox.
> By "during startup" do you mean system startup or your process startup?

During system startup (that's the only way to get it running
automatically). It piggybacks of the startup scripts for the webserver.

Hamish



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[Dorset] stdout and stderr redirection weirdness

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi all,

I have yet another query relating to the NAS box. I suspect this issue
is once again due to the weird setup and ancient software.

I'm finding that during startup piping and redirecting output doesn't
work. This is using the ash shell from busybox. I have the following in
my script:

python3 ./main.py --id "NAS" 2>&1 | tee ../stdout.log

I have also tried simple redirects with > ../stdout.log, and | cat >
../stdout.log

The file is created but always remains empty regardless of what I do. It
does work when I SSH in and run commands though. Any ideas what might be
causing this? I've never encountered this behaviour before.

Thanks,

Hamish



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Re: [Dorset] On Second Entry to MP3 Player Function Program Stops Responding to External Commands

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Yep, I saw it.

I'm just finishing off my assignment, but should be able to look at
several WMT things this afternoon with luck.

Hamish

On 18/02/2021 10:08, Terry Coles wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 February 2021 09:48:20 GMT Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty wrote:
>> Can't recall if you've tried this, but what if you replace the call to
>> mpg123 with a call to echo or similar, just to narrow down whether it
>> might be mpg123 that's causing the issue.
>>
>> If it only crashes with mpg123, perhaps there are some verbose or debug
>> flags you can use for mpg123 to reveal more information?
> I only just got this, despite the datestamp being 7 minutes earlier than my 
> post.
>
> Have you seen my latest?
>


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Re: [Dorset] On Second Entry to MP3 Player Function Program Stops Responding to External Commands

[Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty]

Hi Terry,

Can't recall if you've tried this, but what if you replace the call to
mpg123 with a call to echo or similar, just to narrow down whether it
might be mpg123 that's causing the issue.

If it only crashes with mpg123, perhaps there are some verbose or debug
flags you can use for mpg123 to reveal more information?

Hamish

On 17/02/2021 13:32, Terry Coles wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 February 2021 15:25:28 GMT Terry Coles wrote:
>> So I'm kind of back where I started.
> This morning I tried a variety of things to solve this; still to no avail.
>
> I've attached two more code fragments to this message; these are copied from 
> the latest version of the software on the Pis.  The file 
> Minster_Bells_Software_Fragment.txt shows what I have on the Bells Pi to play 
> Change Rings on demand.  Minster_Music_Software_Fragment2.txt shows the music 
> player version of this; which exhibits this problem.
>
> In order to get to the bottom of this I have:
>
> 1.  Reduced the number of MP3 files in the Playlist directory to 1.
>
> 2.  Re-written the code so that the line that uses glob to parse the files in 
> the directory is replaced with the actual path and filename to the first file.
>
> 3.  Re-written the code to remove the while loop, to simplify things.
>
> 4.  Commented out the lines that invoked the mpg123 player and terminated it 
> in the mp3_player_stop() function.
>
> Items 1 to 3 made no difference whatsoever to the behaviour; I still got the 
> freezing when I tried to restart the player/
>
> With Item 4 the messages from the Webserver were responded to reliably but of 
> course no music was played.
>
> It would appear therefore that once the mpg123 player has been invoked and 
> then terminated, invoking it a second time makes the overall program 
> unresponsive.  This I cannot understand because the "Music Playing" message 
> is 
> being printed, so presumably the lock up occurs at the line containing:
>
>   mp3_wait = mp3_player.wait()
>
> I realise that the program will halt at that point until the mpg123 player 
> terminates, but the commands coming in are in new threads so they should 
> still 
> be responded to.  (They have once.)
>
> In any case, the Bells Pi code uses the same approach, so how come that works 
> and the Music code doesn't?
>
>


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