Re: [GTALUG] Chromebook death dates (calculator edition)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 01/06/2023 12.22, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


In that talk, [Kahan] showed that all calculators made bozo errors, many
unique to a calculator.  As a consultant to Victor, he got their
errors fixed.  I don't remember whether HP and TI listened to him.

This makes me very wary of random-brand calculators.


I understand that concern. And while I should be all "take nobody's 
word" about this, my retired friends showed me the verification work 
he'd done. There's a strong chance that the $1 wonder is a knockoff Casio.


You might enjoy this Julia Evans mini-zine on floating point: 
https://wizardzines.com/comics/floating-point/



While I was buying and not using cheap calculators, by cubicle-mate
Henry Spencer was buying and open-carrying fancy HP ones.  I got a
couple of cast-offs and they were wonderful, but still not useful.


them's fightin' words! At least to this son of an HP dealer they are. ☺ 
You may have one of my cast-off HP calculators (an HP 49).


I too have too many calculators:

* a fleet of at least three HP48s, plus Droid48 on my phone. The 48 is 
just such a good calculator. In RPN mode, no-one will ever borrow them.


* my late father's HP11c. In the early 2000s, he quipped that the set of 
batteries he'd just put in would outlive him. Sadly, he was right: Dad 
passed last December, and I had to change the batteries last week.


* a TI-83+. I got this to put DrugWars on and do some Z80 programming, 
but the serial link refuses to be useful under Linux


* a couple of Casio fx-115 variants. One of them - an fx-115MS - is a 
great device for simple electronic engineering. It handles SI magnitudes 
properly and logically. The other fx-115 I have doesn't do this.


* a Sharp "Compet" desktop calculator from 1969. It has lovely nixie 
tubes for the display. While it looks like a basic 4-function unit, it 
will do square roots somewhat slowly.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Chromebook death dates (slide rule edition)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 01/06/2023 12.32, James Knott via talk wrote:


BTW, as I mentioned the other day, I still have a slide rule from my 
high school days.  It's a Pickett Microline 120 and it still works 56 
years later! 


No batteries to give out! Even though I've never had to use them for 
school or work, I have slide rules around the house because they're very 
pleasing. My dad's Faber-Castell was his first work calculator in the 
early 1960s. Catherine's late uncle got me his fearsome Post-Hemmi 
Versalog, complete with leather holster and large manual. I recently 
picked up a new old stock simple Ricoh bamboo slide rule. This was made 
in the early 1970s and was still in its sealed plastic bag.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] motorcycle exhaust systems [was slide rules; was Re: Chromebook death dates]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 02/06/2023 17.49, Dave Collier-Brown via talk wrote:


The diffuser cone should actually be a catenoid, with a diameter and 
length based on the RPM range you're after.


There was a lovely little demo two-stroke at the National Engineering 
Laboratory in Scotland that had its diffuser shaped such that the sonic 
wave provided enough reflected back pressure that it didn't need valves. 
It was (of course) single speed and fearsomely inefficient, but it could 
run (kinda)


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Chromebook death dates

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 29/05/2023 18.15, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


So fix the testing facilities requirements.


Easier said than done. Remember that the entire HS maths curriculum in 
the US is effectively owned by TI calculators, and their lock-in allows 
them to sell a 1980s-tech 'approved' calculator for ~$100.


Compare this to the $1 scientific calculators you can get in dollar 
stores (and supermarkets near "back to school" time). These are 
perfectly adequate, but not "approved". A retired academic friend, ex 
CalTech, introduced me to these super cheap calculators. He's done a 
whole suite of accuracy benchmarks on a number of models, and they come 
out as well as the market leaders.



| ... so might only have a
| short time left before they AUE.

That sounds like a fail.  An individual consumer making a bad choice
can easily be excused.  A school board ought to do due diligence for a
significant purchase -- that is surely someones job.


Absolutely. But do remember at the beginning of lockdown, every school 
board in the world was competing to buy Chromebooks. Prices and 
availability were uncertain, and I'm sure mistakes were made.



...  I admired the
Curta Calculators advertised in Scientific American -- the only hand
held digital calculators at that time.


I've held one, once; they are quite wonderful pieces of machinery.

 Stewart
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[GTALUG] Chromebook death dates

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

TIL that Chromebooks brick themselves when they hit a hard-coded date: 
the date when Google stops providing updates:

https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/26/colorado-schools-chromebooks-churn-outdated/

The article's about Denver Public School District, who are finding a 
whole lot of their Chromebooks bought during pandemic are running out of 
life. The environmental and cost impacts are huge.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Fedora 38 is out

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 22/04/2023 14.16, Dhaval Giani wrote:


I don’t know why you think so. There is a real cost to maintaining 
software. Who is going to keep track of security issues?


For security, of course deprecation can be a good idea. But this isn't 
for security. This is merely FSF being petty.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] DECTalk TTS in source for Linux

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 24/04/2023 00.14, Karen Lewellen wrote:

actually, I am on the dectalk mailing list


Ah, thought you might be - so you're way ahead of me.

its called the dectalk USB,  sells for about $800, and can run under, 
systems for which there are drivers, windows for example.
No one has written quality dectalk drivers for Linux that use the tool 
though.


Oof, the disability tax is well in evidence there. Considering that this 
will be based on the same Epson DECTalk chip that used to appear on 
hobbyist boarsd costing $100, someone's doing not badly off that. The 
drivers have been the hard part: the EMIC-2 DECTalk board I have has the 
crudest serial connection I've ever used. It's great for tiny phrases, 
but reading long texts is painful. It also features a loud pop every 
time it finishes a reading as it turns off its amplifier.


DECTalk seems to collect stories of loss. The article on TropeTrainer — 
https://www.inverse.com/input/features/tropetrainer-thomas-buchler-torah-software 
— a Torah recital package that went silent after its developer passed 
away, is quite touching.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Cheap small computers [was Re: DECTalk TTS in source for Linux]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 24/04/2023 02.35, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

There are a lot of used Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers
available, starting at $100.
These are neat, but I was thinking of a portable device like the later 
DECTalk boxes. Still, that's a heck of a deal. I may replace my 2013 
Samsung laptop with one for the "Do I have to?" Windows moments.


 Stewart
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[GTALUG] DECTalk TTS in source for Linux

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

DECTalk - the venerable text-to-speech system (think Stephen Hawking, or 
Moonbase Alpha) -  seems to be available in source form:


https://github.com/dectalk/dectalk

There's a web demo: https://webspeak.terminal.ink/

While I've built it and run it quite successfully under Ubuntu, its 
licence is ... troubling. At best it's abandonware. At worst, there's an 
owner somewhere who hasn't found the github repo yet to shut it down. As 
such, it shouldn't be deployed without taking legal advice.


[Karen - I know that DECTalk is a subject that matters to you. While 
this is interesting news, it likely doesn't mean that new, cheap DECTalk 
boxes will be hitting the streets soon. Some of the reasons include:


* the licence: you need the permission of a possibly defunct company to 
use this software;


* porting: the software doesn't seem to be set up to listen to a serial 
port and speak whatever comes in from that port;


* availability of hardware: small Linux computers are in very short 
supply right now; and


* sound quality: the built-in audio hardware on most single-board Linux 
computers sounds atrocious. Without an add-on amplifier/equalizer, I 
think you'd be horrified at the lack of fidelity.]


cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Fedora 38 is out

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

I hear that it ships with the latest GNU grep, which removes fgrep and 
egrep. This could be considered a bad idea:

https://mastodon.social/@cks/110232377928840323

 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] how I sign PDFs

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 12/04/2023 15.54, Alex Kink via talk wrote:


By "digital signatures" you still mean cryptographic digital signatures, 
right, not scribbles on a PDF?


Both. Those squiggles you left on someone's Square app? Valid signature.

Who and in what context would accept them? I haven't tried, but I doubt 
anyone would accept my cryptographic digital signature in Ontario, since 
to begin with, they wouldn't even know what that is.


Is your PDF signed with a certificate where Acrobat Reader (say) has a 
copy of the master certificate? If so, and you're presenting the 
document electronically, it's as valid as if it were wet signed.


This is a big "in theory", though. Legally, it's valid. If the receiving 
party decides they don't understand it/accept it, wet signed on paper it 
has to be. Ask me about the project I worked on where an Ontario 
government agency promised they would accept cryptographically-signed 
PDFs, then the project officer we were assigned did a "Computer Says No 
«cough»". We had to chase round southern Ontario trying to track down 
300 contractors with box files of paperwork ...


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] UNIX of ESP32 [was Re: Canadian hosting?]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 11/04/2023 11.34, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

As you say, Linux doesn't run on an ESP32.  But there is a youtube
video of someone who has built a PDP-11 emulator with an ESP32 and
runs 2.11 BSD UNIX on it.

So cute!
Ah, Sprite_tm's project: Sprites mods - Tiny PDP11 - Intro — 
https://spritesmods.com/?art=minipdp11


It's a little hard to find the exact EP32 module used for that 
simulation. That's part of the problem: there are many different chips 
called ESP32 /something/, but many of them are incompatible. Some have 
one core, most have two. Some have the ability to take a few megabytes 
of extra external (slow-ish) RAM, many don't. Some are even RISC V in 
disguise (the new ESP32-C6 is fully RISC V) , or have a tiny RISC V 
acting as an Ultra Low Power Processor that can do basic electronic 
logic and while the main processor is asleep.



I wonder if uClinux could be ported to ESP32.  But not enough to try!
It's not clear to me that it would be very useful.
Apparently it can  — 
https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/07/18/linux-5-0-esp32-processor/ - but 
it's doing it via RISC V emulation. I can't see how it would be useful 
at all, though


cheers,
 Stewart
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[GTALUG] Canadian hosting?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

I know that Akamai Cloud (formerly Linode) has dedicated root Linux 
servers in Toronto, but is there anyone else non-terrible*? There's a 
potential client who absolutely must have all data and processing hosted 
in Canada. I realize there's probably a 3x (or more) premium for 
in-country hosting.


Any suggestions/caveats greatly appreciated.

Best Wishes,
 Stewart

*: your definition is fine. I don't know enough to have an opinion
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Re: [GTALUG] ppp inside private network, but no DNS returned?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 28/02/2023 16.22, James Knott via talk wrote:

On 2023-02-28 16:21, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:
Also, these are devices that are on a network that couldn't reach 
OneDrive.


Maybe you could try sneakernet.  
They're in sealed boxes, up high, possibly near high-voltage equipment. 
You go first, I'll wait ...

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Re: [GTALUG] RHEL Free Tier vs CentOS Stream vs Alma Linux vs Rocky Linux

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 31/01/2023 16.26, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


- hurts Red Hat, but that isn't immoral


Red Hat is IBM, so I guess they're kind of undead and far beyond hurt. 
I'm sure my late father would have been far less careful what he said 
about Big Blue, since he'd worked for ICT/ICL while IBM ruled the world.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Ubuntu Pro - a new, non-optional walled garden from Canonical

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 31/01/2023 10.10, Dhaval Giani wrote:


https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro


Ah, I didn't see that link, only the "Contact us ..." bit on the main page
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Re: [GTALUG] Weird pivot from the Linux Foundation: Overture Maps Foundation

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

Looks like there's a bit more background from OSMF members here: 
Overturemaps.org - big-businesses OSMF alternative — 
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/overturemaps-org-big-businesses-osmf-alternative/6760
(note that the poster SimonPoole in that thread is OSMF's legal counsel, 
or possibly former counsel. He's part of the OSM woodwork, and is the 
SME for data licensing)


It seems that the main actors in Overture were not happy with the 
rigorous way that data had to be vetted and approved by community before 
being allowed to be imported into OSM's database. Any OSM contributor 
can appeal any change in the map, and potentially have large data 
imports removed. (That's what happened with a community approved and 
Treasury Board of Canada supported countrywide import of buildings 
across Canada, btw. A mapper in Toronto didn't like that ‘his’ building 
outlines were going to be replaced, so raised enough of a stink that the 
whole project was abandoned.)


Overture does claim to add some features that OSM (by design) lacks: 3d 
support, routing and Points of Interest. OSM does have very large 
corporate users and contributors, but corporate users didn't like the 
democratic aspect, hence the fork to Overture.


Good luck to 'em. Let's hope they fare better than http://fosm.org/, a 
fork of the OSM database from mappers who didn't agree with the Great 
OSM Licence Change of 201x


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 12/12/2022 18.34, Erica Peterson via talk wrote:

Re: discord -- perhaps, in the interest of supporting open protocols, we could 
create a Matrix space on element.io?  It is free.


This would be preferable. Discord creates a large moderation burden 
(I've had to moderate a channel during events, and it is no fun at all), 
and the whole content is hidden behind walled-garden links


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] How to keep using an old CIFS device

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 09/12/2022 13.12, Lennart Sorensen wrote:


Is smbclient an option?  It's like an ftp client except for cifs.


That's what I have to use. But it warns me that the (required) 'client 
use spnego = no' option is deprecated. So I have an undefined amount of 
time before this device is a paperweight, and am looking for options.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 01/12/2022 02.30, ac via talk wrote:


When "directors" or "boards" or "leaders" make decisions on policy it
affects operations. Always. and many times it is "politics" and ...


Note that in our case, GTALUG directors are very close to the users. 
Generally, the services we have are the ones the users were interested 
in. I've been on the board twice, I've seen all the little cogwheels 
turning ...



... then you need more automation/scripts - seriously, it cannot take that
much of your time


Part of the problem is that a whole bunch of GTALUG services are held 
together by legacy scripts. Which the maintainer has moved on from. 
Which the new operator may not understand, or even know they are there. 
We may have lost the documentation (though it's probably in the GTALUG 
github, somewhere - most likely last edited by Chris). So more 
automations will solve some problems and create new ones too. You also 
can't automate moderation in any useful way


There are no 'clock' problems: everything here is a 'cloud' (to 
appropriate Karl Popper's concept of defined, soluble problems vs 
indeterminate, insoluble ones). The board is burned out. It's good that 
folks are stepping up, but it might not be enough.


Thanks, Evan, for your thoughtful answers. Whatever system we end up 
using must have public, web-accessible archives, as anything locked 
behind a user login is not a useful resource.


 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] At the GTALUG AGM: How we handle Internet services

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 27/11/2022 21.01, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:


Along with other AGM business, we will be discussing how GTALUG goes 
forward with our online services.
I'm glad we're going to have this discussion. Chris Browne's untimely 
passing two years ago showed how heavily GTALUG relied on the work of a 
very few volunteers. And we do have a lot of online services, including:


 * the website;
 * the mailing lists and their various archives. Maintaining and
   moderating a mailing list is no trivial thing;
 * GTALUG Wiki — https://wiki.gtalug.org/start — which I don't think
   anyone's touched for over two years.

It might be worth re-evaluating what resources we need. Could we make do 
with a hosted WordPress instance and move the lists to groups.io?


As Google has provided to GTALUG its nonprofit services which include 
full access to commercial Google Workplace (formerly G Suite), the 
Board has been investigating migrating some of our online services there.
Is GTALUG Inc a qualifying non-profit? What happens when Google decides 
to stop providing this free service? Where does our data go? “If you are 
not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”*


cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Forced off DSL by Bell

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 21/11/2022 16.13, Michael Galea via talk wrote:
Hi, Bell notified me that they will soon be shutting down my copper 
telephone service, no options.  My DSL to TekSavvy will go with it. Joy.


I haven't received notice yet, but there have been Bell folks going 
round with door tags in the streets near me, and I suspect I'll hear 
soon too.


PS: I pay ~$40/Mo for landline, which looks to increase to $52 after the 
change! Robbers!


Copper service is CRTC rate regulated. Fibre isn't. The head of the CRTC 
- a former TELUS SVP - knows who his real friends are.


I'm currently fighting with voip.ms setup, as my elderly mum in Scotland 
can't get the hang of video chats. Everything about doing VOIP yourself 
seems impossibly complex or requires completely arcane obsolete 
equipment. I mean, where are the wifi ATA adaptors (that are under $500 
each)? I don't have ethernet cable everywhere, and don't want it, 
frankly, anywhere.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] CZUR scanners under Linux

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 10/11/2022 02.21, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


Apparently the scan under MacOS (and probably under Windows)
has better OCR than under Linux.  Grr.


We're probably stuck with Tesseract, which — while it's much better than 
it used to be — is now optimized for mass "good enough" recognition of 
simple pages. Omnipage dropped its Linux support years ago, and Abbyy 
Finereader's Linux support is only for ($$$) enterprise. Adobe's now the 
monster of OCR, but of course it's only built into its rented Acrobat 
Pro platform.


It's a shame that Linux users don't get the nice things that come with 
hardware that we buy. The page remapping and finger editing-out sound 
very handy.


 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] Borked Python setup, please help

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 07/11/2022 20.14, Lennart Sorensen wrote:


Well anything that follows the guidelines from python upstream would
know that python is never python3.


That's the problem: no other language has tried to do the 
rule-from-above thing. And they are guidelines, right, so they're optional?



python is python2 and python3 is python3.  Don't write python 3 code
and put !#/usr/bin/python in it.


I think you might have a lifetime to spend explaining that at just about 
every kids' code camp.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Borked Python setup, please help

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 06/11/2022 21.14, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:


I must have done something really wrong when an app I was trying to 
install a few days ago insisted on running on Python 2.


Did you accidentally install "python-is-python2"? It will break modern 
things in a hilarious manner.


There's python-is-python3 to undo the damage.

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Re: [GTALUG] DNS benchmarking

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 02/11/2022 13.32, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:

Hi all.

Can anyone recommend a modern alternative to "namebench 
"?


Looks like it got forked to this project, and the Go port was updated to 
at least replicated the original Python 2 functions:


mrwiora/NAMEinator: NAMEinator DNS Benchmark tool (namebench successor) 
— https://github.com/mrwiora/NAMEinator


Note that even it has hit some bitrot with the build instructions. 'go 
get' isn't a thing anymore, seemingly (hey, why keep something so 
obvious and useful?), so the build process is now described here:


 https://github.com/mrwiora/NAMEinator/issues/46#issuecomment-789247422

You might want to substitute

 $GOPATH/src/github.com/mwiora

for the various paths in that description.

Also, it seems to require go >= 1.16.1, which is newer than Debian 
stable. I tried to build it on a Raspberry Pi and it all went very 
pear-shaped. go's build errors are not very compelling: who knew that 
the quiet response "package embed is not in GOROOT" was a total build 
failure?


The results are terse, but possibly useful to someone:

 ./NAMEinator
 starting NAMEinator - version custom
 understood the following configuration: {numberOfDomains:100
 debug:false contest:true nameserver:}
 -
 NOTE: as this is an alpha - we rely on feedback - please report bugs
 and feature requests to https://github.com/mwiora/NAMEinator/issues
 and provide this output
 OS: linux ARCH: amd64
 -
 trying to load nameservers from nameserver-globals
 trying to load domains from alexa-top-2000-domains
 LETS GO
 900 / 900 [] 100.00%
 9 p/s 1m43s

 finished - presenting results:

 1.1.1.1:
 Avg. [82.974024ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [818.257401ms]

 1.0.0.1:
 Avg. [87.01652ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [1.331284997s]

 8.8.4.4:
 Avg. [87.607785ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [716.72469ms]

 8.8.8.8:
 Avg. [91.865296ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [817.38634ms]

 208.67.222.222:
 Avg. [114.947277ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [1.384931226s]

 127.0.0.53:
 Avg. [119.101241ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [718.128141ms]

 2001:470:20::2:
 Avg. [133.263523ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [614.40377ms]

 156.154.71.1:
 Avg. [136.4174ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [614.731507ms]

 216.146.35.35:
 Avg. [172.974867ms], Min. [10ms], Max. [1.33162978s]

 Au revoir!

This on about the slowest Teksavvy DSL around.

 Stewart






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Re: [GTALUG] OK notebook at a good price: $300, refurb / open box

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-10-24 11:54, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


I mostly touch-type.  This keyboard does not confuse my fingers.


That's good to know. I once had a French bilingual MacBook, and it was 
confusing even for a non-touch typist.


For all other special characters, there's always the Compose key, 
configuration of which is usually buried deep within your system 
configs. I only use (and remember) a few of them: ½ ² ₂ — – «» µ ° “” ‘’ 
è á ï õ ŵ ç ¢ ® ☺ …


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Re: [GTALUG] OK notebook at a good price: $300, refurb / open box

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-10-23 18:21, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:




Currently only listed with Canadian French keyboards, which are great if 
you don't touch-type.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] war story: CMOS battery AKA Real Time Clock (RTC) battery in a notebook

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-10-19 19:58, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


And the coin cell assembly is not generic -- no Dollarama battery.


I've seen that heat-shrink-on-a-flying-lead type battery on some single 
board computers and even some particularly enlightened microcontroller 
boards. The Radxa boards (like the x86 Rock Pi X, and the upcoming 
"Raspberry Pi Killer" ROCK 4) use them for sure. Guess your future holds 
Dollarama, some careful soldering plus a couple of wraps of Super 88.


I guess there isn't room for the chunky half-AA size Li-SoCl2 cell that 
older machines used to use. There was one of these soldered into a 
late-80s Apple IIgs I received recently. It was still keeping the NVRAM 
and clock ticking despite being 25 years past its use-by date. Also, 
lithium–thionyl chloride batteries are now considered hazardous, so 
maybe it's best if they are left in the past.


cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] wired headset suggestions?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

As someone who also has auditory processing issues, Zoom is the absolute 
worst. It compresses speech by a massive amount and adds back very 
little comfort noise, and for me anything above whisper-quiet is like a 
jackhammer to the head. If I've been on a Zoom call with anyone here and 
I've seemed more than usually spacey, that's the reason.


I haven't found MacBooks to be very good at driving higher impedance 
headsets. They make a terrible job of driving my old Sennheisers. They 
are expecting to drive tiny earbuds, not a proper headset.


There are 3.5 mm TRRS to separate headphone/mic channel adapters. Canada 
Computers have this one for $5: 
https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=5_3933_4382_id=180313


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Linux word processing like it's 1997!

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-09-26 13:48, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

And... to round out your GUI-free desktop: Lotus 1-2-3, natively ported.
https://github.com/taviso/123elf 


Like the other one, x86 only. I'd be really impressed if it ran on ARM.

cheers
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Linux word processing like it's 1997!

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-09-25 22:59, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:


I used to use WordPerfect. Before WordPerfect there was WordStar. I did 
a search and found out there is a project called WordTsar which is 
supposed to be WordStar for the 21st century.


WordStar hung on for years. An author friend of mine was distraught when 
Microsoft Word removed the ability to use WordStar keys. It was 
surprisingly recently, too.


WordTsar looks surprisingly comprehensive. I'm a little surprised it's a 
graphical application, but the developer has their reasons.


I've run MS Word 5.5 (the DOS version that MS released for free for Y2K 
compliance reasons) and Protext under dosemu quite successfully. The 
first version of Protext I had was on a 16K EPROM for the Amstrad CPC 
(Z80) computer. It loaded instantly, and was a great tool for 
undistracted writing.


cheers,
 Stewart

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[GTALUG] Linux word processing like it's 1997!

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

In an act of bravery/recklessness/genius (pick any combination), Tavis 
Ormandy has managed to package Corel WordPerfect for Unix for modern 
(x86ish) Linux distributions: https://github.com/taviso/wpunix


I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but Liam Proven gives a fair 
rundown: Tavis Ormandy ports WordPerfect for UNIX to Linux — 
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/20/wordperfect_for_unix_for_linux/


 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] Tonight's meeting announcement?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-09-14 23:33, Colin McGregor wrote:


That was Tuesday evening. Any event, it wasn't a very good talk (for 
several reasons), so you didn't miss much.


I'm sure it was great, Colin. I'm sorry I wasn't able to attend. I 
originally sent the message Tuesday morning, but it bounced around for a 
day with a "FAILED_PRECONDITION: connect error (111): Connection 
refused" issue.


On the subject of boating and Linux, I did just see this:

RCgmbh/PiLot: dotnet core based projects for the PiLot navigation and 
logbook program for raspberry pi — https://github.com/RCgmbh/PiLot/


via the Raspberry Pi Forum: 
https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=340217


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Linux on Chromebook

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

Someone at the Raspberry Pi meetup last night mentioned the Evolve III 
Maestro 11.6" educational laptop, if anyone's looking for a *really* 
cheap laptop. I don't know of anyone selling it in Canada at a 
reasonable price, but Micro Center - a brick & mortar electronics store 
in the USA - is selling them for US $60 (~ $78). Unfortunately, the 
nearest store with stock is likely a day and half's drive away, plus 
border crossing and all that faff. User reviews on Reddit are not super 
positive.


The machine is incredibly barebones, but the fact it even works at all 
is quite impressive at this price:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/649971/evolve-iii-maestro-116-laptop-computer-dark-grey

This was in response to me introducing the frankly overpriced pi-top [4] 
Raspberry Pi 4-based "tablet": https://www.pi-top.com/products/pi-top-4

It might have a glorious touchscreen, but a tablet it ain't.

 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] couple of unrelated electronics questions?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-09-08 23:28, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:


... Active Surplus. I thought Active had relocated when the 
Queen St. store shut down but the website doesn't list them open at a 
new location.


Active Surplus has been gone since 2015. It's why The Gorilla Store (run 
by Graham, the store manager at Active) is at 609 College.


(NB: they probably won't have ancient iPod chargers, but they do have 
cool stuff)


The only two that may still be in that area are Active (the 
retail outlet of Future Electronics), and Sayal just a little south of 
Gordon Baker on the east side.


Active Electronics is gone, too. Sayal is the only one left there. 
Electrosonic (if anything left of it) operates out of New York.


 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] tpl Linux training?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-09-01 11:16, Karen Lewellen via talk wrote:


I have a memory of someone from Toronto freegeeks around?> who used  to teach Linux classes, showcasing I believe an 
option outside of windows.


Yup, Free Geek Toronto (FGT) are still around 
(https://www.freegeektoronto.org/) but I don't think educational part of 
what they do has been running for a couple of years. I believe that 
Colin McGregor - who used to be very active in GTALUG - taught some 
classes at FGT.


 Stewart

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[GTALUG] GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

Remember when everyone ditched github when MS bought them?
This from The Reg, so take with the appropriate quantity of low-sodium 
seasoning:


GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts — 
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention_policy/


"Exclusive: GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they've 
been inactive for a year and are owned by users of its free tier.


The Register has learned that such projects account for up to a quarter 
of GitLab's hosting costs, and that the auto-deletion of projects could 
save the cloudy coding collaboration service up to $1 million a year. 
The policy has therefore been suggested to help GitLab's finances remain 
sustainable.


People with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity as they 
are not authorized to discuss it with the media, told The Register the 
policy is scheduled to come into force in September 2022.


..."
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Re: [GTALUG] scanner under Windows under Linux?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-08-02 10:28, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


CZUR makes interesting page scanners: 
We actually have a couple.


This may not be a solution, or one you wee searching for, but there's a 
chance that the CZUR scanners are USB video devices. They might appear 
as a video camera to Linux. But you probably won't get the nice 
front-end that way. Worse still, I don't know of any v4l2 back-ends for 
SANE, so dealing with scans will be a lot of full-frame page images.


There's one report of using a CZUR scanner with Linux:
http://www.johnwillis.com/2016/04/czur-scannerscanning-with-linux.html
but it was from some years ago

 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] List was down

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-08-02 10:41, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

Thanks, Stewart, for asking.


Thanks, Hugh, for fixing!

I thought that the list might've been having a nice summer off, which it 
definitely deserves.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-07-01 19:52, James Knott via talk wrote:


I wouldn't worry about what's bundled and just download 
the latest 'n greatest pfSense or OPNsense.


No, I meant the huge amount of tracking cruft that Hugh's RFD link 
carried. It goes via awin1.com, which is on two of Ublock's standard 
tracker-blocking lists.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] inexpensive mini-PC with four 2.5G ethernet interfaces

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-07-01 03:34, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


Beware: AliExpress.
I've ordered one but I cannot vouch for it.




I'd be more worried about the huge tracking rigmarole that RFD puts your 
browser through than buying from AliExpress. Here's the unencumbered link:


https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004359859004.html

 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] another inexpensive refurb computer $300

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-06-24 13:43, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


Good: not a netbook
Bad: 1366 x 768 15.6" display


Worse: dealing with The Source ...
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Re: [GTALUG] cheap netbook: Lenovo IdeaPad 1

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-06-15 14:46, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


This is probably more cost-effective than a Raspberry Pi 4 if the display
and keyboard are useful.


And at least you can get one of these. Well, you could: the Lenovo site 
is showing "unavailable"


It might be a little slower than a Raspberry Pi 4: fewer cores, slower CPU



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Re: [GTALUG] File chooser [was desktops]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-06-13 14:35, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:


| It's up there in annoyance with Gnome's modal dialogues, which limit all
| interaction with that one file chooser. You can turn them off.

How do you turn that off?


Tweaks -> Attached Modal Dialogs: Off
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Re: [GTALUG] File chooser [was desktops]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-06-12 12:18, Michael Hill via talk wrote:


Have you come across the file chooser behaviour where the search field
takes the focus instead of the filename field?


I have, and it's supremely annoying. I haven't found a solution that 
doesn't involve view source and calling rename(1) lots of times


It's up there in annoyance with Gnome's modal dialogues, which limit all 
interaction with that one file chooser. You can turn them off.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] RISC-V

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-05-10 08:12, Ivan Avery Frey via talk wrote:
"RISC-V chip designed with open source tools - eeNews Europe" 
https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/risc-v-chip-designed-with-open-source-tools/ 



Ah, neat. Wonder how long it'll be before there are competitive RISC-V 
general purpose CPUs?


The only RISC-V I have is a WEMOS D1 Mini C3 — 
https://universal-solder.ca/product/wemos-d1-mini-c3-v1-0-0-esp32-c3fh4-genuine-lolin/ 
. An impressive little thing, but still not up to running much more than 
MicroPython.


cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Removing snapd from Ubuntu

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-04-29 08:50, Val Kulkov wrote:
Stewart, would you mind sharing your experience removing snapd from 
Ubuntu? I'd love to learn how you managed to do it. I'd be happy to get 
rid of snapd, too.


I followed this guide, which I have to admit I haven't tried on a new 
21.10 or 22.04 installation:


Disabling Snaps in Ubuntu 20.10 (and 20.04 LTS) —
https://www.kevin-custer.com/blog/disabling-snaps-in-ubuntu-20-10-and-20-04-lts/

I'd approach it methodically, making sure you don't wipe out the system 
accidentally. Once snapd is removed, it stays removed as long as you 
don't install a package that's a snap in disguise.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] OT: NYT article "How To Construct a Chip Factory

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-04-08 19:46, William Park via talk wrote:

Why do cars need 2nm chips?


There's a surprising amount of processing power required in a modern 
car. Android Auto uses a tablet-class CPU, and Android Automotive (the 
lower level OS that does more than infotainment) is similar. Electric 
cars can have even more complex requirements.


cheers,

 Stewart



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Re: [GTALUG] More pointless battles [was: I'm discarding an old notebook!]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-02-15 17:24, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:

Acer Aspire 9300


AMD Turion 64 X2 - so, roughly half of a Raspberry Pi 4.

but it has a screen, keyboard, and you actually have it - unlike a 
Raspberry Pi 4

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Re: [GTALUG] RaspberryPi won't automount USB memory stick

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-01-17 08:51, Giles Orr wrote:


Install a desktop environment (as opposed
to a "window manager") if you don't have one


I may be misremembering, but installing one of the desktop packages 
doesn't necessarily bring in the automount facility. Only installing the 
Desktop image gives you that.


There are a bunch of older Raspberry Pi tutorials (and by older, I mean 
from 2019 or before) that recommend starting with Lite and then 
installing the desktop on top. You don't end up with the same functionality.


All bets are off with the new(ish) Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye. So much has 
changed (particularly if you're a camera user) that even good advice 
from a few months ago is strikingly wrong. A couple of details:


* the desktop runs a completely different system depending on what board 
you're on. Raspberry Pi 4Bs and 400s with 4 or more GB RAM get Mutter 
and other Gnome-like things. Those with 2 GB or less get the 
familiar(ish) LXQt things.


* The Raspberry Pi OS maintainers have created a legacy/LTS release to 
help buffer some of these changes. They're still a very small team and 
community needs are seldom taken into account.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] RaspberryPi won't automount USB memory stick

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-01-14 23:24, Kevin Cozens via talk wrote:


Why is Raspbian not set up to automount a memory stick


Raspberry Pi OS Lite (no desktop) doesn't automount USB devices. 
Raspberry Pi OS with Desktop does.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] X10 - Gear you don't want? Or replacement suggestions?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-01-16 12:50, Giles Orr via talk wrote:


First Question: Does anyone have any X10 gear they'd like to get rid
of?


Soo much ... please take it! I think I might have a couple of the 
working transceiver modules (RR501?) left. I bought a dozen from Active 
Surplus, but their power caps slowly died over the years.



Second Question: What's a more modern replacement for X10?


Ikea's Home Smart System, aka TRÅDFRI. Unlike most other systems, it 
doesn't phone home. It does, however, have the base station, update 
firmware on the devices, for which it has to phone home. But the system 
can't be accessed outside the home. It mostly uses ZigBee for control, 
but like every other system you'll need wifi to talk from a client.


Ikea have tweaked their protocol slightly over the years. My house runs 
from a series of entirely terrible shell scripts written by me (if you 
want a laugh: scruss/ihsctrl: a package of bash scripts to control 
selected IKEA Home smart (aka “TRÅDFRI”) devices via their network 
gateway — https://github.com/scruss/ihsctrl)


If you must go wired, https://www.digital-loggers.com make some nice 
network controlled outlets, but they're pricey. Also their stock has 
been badly affected by the chip shortage, so it may be a long wait for 
the kit.


cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Man and Info Pages

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2022-01-08 22:43, Howard Gibson via talk wrote:


... LaTeX, which has fantastic PDF support


I think we're seeing different problems. Mine was caused by a literal 
U+03A9 ("Ω") somewhere in the document. The default LaTeX toolchain for 
the particular project's Sphinx setup wasn't Unicode-aware. Only by 
changing one config line from "pdflatex" to "xelatex" did the manual 
compile.


I'm not professionally involved in typesetting any more, but the most 
recent, most capable Unicode/multilingual typesetting system I've seen 
is a version of troff. Neatroff - http://litcave.rudi.ir/ - handles 
bidirectional typesetting and Opentype ligatures for scripts that use 
different glyphs depending on their place in a word.


cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Man and Info Pages

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

info was only ever a Gnu thing, and there are as many people who'd do 
the opposite of what the FSF would say on principle. A major strike 
against info is its reliance on texinfo,  its own weird markup language. 
texinfo also has dependencies that run into the gigabytes, since 
installing texinfo will also install TeX Live, the now-vast TeX system 
for Linux.


tbh, I'm surprised that something better than man hasn't come along. But 
you can write manpages in anything (rst, markdown, LibreOffice ...) and 
have them converted to man pages via packages like pandoc — 
https://pandoc.org/ . But when you need PDF output, TeX is lurking in 
there somewhere. I recently spent time debugging why a major embedded 
project never came with a PDF manual, despite their docs being managed 
in Sphinx. It turns out that there's one instance of a Unicode omega / 
Ohm symbol in their entire document base, and their Sphinx PDF rules 
aren't Unicode-aware.


At least its better than Microsoft, whose embedded docs are essentially 
just Bing searches.


cheers,

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-12-01 21:53, Jamon Camisso via talk wrote:


Do any of the casting suggestions on that link that I sent fix it?


I haven't had a chance to try them yet, but your note about the 
transformation being reversible gives me hope that it can be fixed.


thanks,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-11-29 16:25, Jamon Camisso via talk wrote:


Another thing to try is using mysqli_set_charset("UTF8"); somewhere in 
your site's code. Substitute in different character sets until you find 
the correct one ...


Thanks, Jamon, but there isn't a valid encoding for what my database 
seems to be holding. It was UTF-8, and now it's seemingly UTF-8 decoded 
to CP1252 bytes re-encoded to UTF-8 characters again.


If WordPress were using Python (it's not), if my db held the 4 
character, 6 byte UTF-8 string, the equivalent Python code to end up in 
the mess I'm in is:


>>> bytes(bytes("côté",encoding='utf-8').decode(encoding='cp1252'), 
encoding='utf-8')

b'c\xc3\x83\xc2\xb4t\xc3\x83\xc2\xa9'

or 6 characters / 10 bytes of gibberish ('côté').

Since this happened in the last month or so, it's not really a legacy 
encoding issue. Perfectly good UTF-8 got destroyed with no input/changes 
from me.


I'd been fairly careful with backups for the first decade of running 
this blog, but the process got wearing after a while, especially since 
every update went flawlessly so the manual backup process was a waste of 
time. Wordpress offers automatic updates without forcing a backup 
checkpoint, which I think is wrong.


cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-11-27 18:04, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:


Do you have shell access?  I think you imply "yes".


Yes, I do, but not to the database server. All I have for that is socket 
access and PHPMyAdmin (blecch).



Does "fix it" mean "changed the raw data" or mangle the data somewhere
downstream of the disk files?


"fix it" meant "broke it". The MySQL DB tables seem to have been quietly 
reprocessed from one encoding to another.



Back-ups?


Would have been an excellent idea, yes.

 Stewart

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[GTALUG] a solved problem unsolved itself: WordPress, MySQL, UTF-8

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

I have been running a WordPress blog hosted on a Linux-based shared host 
since WordPress became a thing. It has worked quite well from about 2004 
up until a few weeks ago.


Sadly, *something* recently decided my database encoding was wrong. And 
that something decided to "fix" it. It certainly "fixed it", but not in 
any way I could want. It also did the same for Catherine's blog.


I know I didn't change any part of the config chain. As far as I can see:

* the MySQL database still thinks the text is encoded in UTF-8;

* Wordpress thinks the data is in UTF-8;

* the web server is serving UTF-8.

(NB: there's going to be some UTF-8 and hex chars in this message.)

A typical post which shows this problem is
https://scruss.com/blog/2016/02/27/t%c9%92k-b%c9%92ks-a-tiny-hardware-speech-synthesizertts/ 



When I should be seeing something like:

[tɒk bɒks]  5b74 c992 6b20 62c9 926b 735d

I'm seeing this in the page served up (and in the db text itself):

[tÉ’k bÉ’ks]5b74 c389 e280 996b 2062 c389 e280 996b 735d

So the phonetic character U+0252 has been mangled into U+00C9 + U+2019. 
Every UTF-8 character seems to be affected this way.


I wasn't expecting to wake up to a UTF-8 encoding problem this decade. 
There are a raft of "how to fix WP encoding issues" pages that show up 
in web searches, but the newest of them is from 2008 or so.


I'm pretty much resigned to going through 16+ years of posts fixing 
this, but can mangled UTF-8 be recovered without rekeying?


cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Booting linux from nvme disk? (derail, going offlist)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-11-20 18:39, Karen Lewellen wrote:


reaching out because there is a person overseas who might wish to buy 
one of the  dectalk USB boxes you once wrote of building here.


briefly (in case my mails to you are getting blocked: I will try an 
offlist response): I'm no longer involved in assistive tech, as the 
funding for my position ran out in March. I do, however, now run a 
mail-order electronics company. Unfortunately, the speech board is no 
longer made and the few that suppliers have in stock are expensive.


cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Booting linux from nvme disk?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-11-20 13:56, Peter King via talk wrote:


The "obvious" suggestion, given the symptoms, are that some driver needs to
be loaded right away to allow linux to recognize the nvme disk as bootable.


Also, check your BIOS version. My (fairly elderly) motherboard needed a 
BIOS update to boot from nvme.


 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Command doesn't work in script but works on command line?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-11-07 04:54, Jim Ruxton via talk wrote:

... Clicking on the script works. I still find it
strange however that this is not the case if I run the script on the 
command line. It runs regardless.


This may be very out of date information, but I remember being surprised 
that a whole lot of Linux sound stuff depended on the X11 DISPLAY 
variable being set. Maybe it's not set for you on the command line?


 Stewart

(talking of Linux sound, have folks seen Orca — 
https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/orca ? No, not the screen reader, but 
Orca "... an esoteric programming language, designed to create 
procedural sequencers in which each letter of the alphabet is an 
operation, where lowercase letters operate on bang, uppercase letters 
operate each frame." It's been described as nethack crossbred with a 
spreadsheet for making EDM.

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Re: [GTALUG] Heads up: Ubuntu 21.10 kills your desktop icons (it was .config all along)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-10-22 21:13, Stewart C. Russell wrote:


It is immensely annoying that Xubuntu can't get this right.


I've restored the Alt-Tab behaviour, incidentally, by taking the simple 
but drastic step of removing everything from ~/.config, logging out, 
logging back in, then selectively restoring the files and folders to 
.config that look like things I might need.


This doesn't help work out what caused the issue, but the issue is gone 
now. I suspect it was something from my six year old Ubuntu installation 
fighting with the new Xubuntu update.


 Stewart

(and with my day job hat on: no, I can't get you a Raspberry Pi 2 Zero 
W, even if it is the only aarch64 machine you can theoretically obtain 
for USD 15. Our sister company in the USA got 2400 of them on Thursday 
about 4 pm, and even limiting them to one per order, sold out by 9:30 am 
on Friday.)

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Re: [GTALUG] Heads up: Ubuntu 21.10 kills your desktop icons

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-10-20 11:03, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:


When a desktop going from version 2 to 3 throws away everything users
are used to, and the developers simply don't care, then it deserves any
hate it receives.


Yup. The main reason for Gnome removing desktop icons was that the code 
was buggy. They didn't ask the users whether they wanted the bugs fixed 
or the icons gone. They picked the latter. TBH, I'm still mad at Gnome 
for getting rid of the bar you could dismiss with a click and it made 
the Strar Trek door noise. I think that went in Gnome 1.2 → Gnome 2.0


I've just switched to xubuntu. I think it uses XFCE. So far (10 minutes 
in) it mostly works. It does fail on one thing, though:



Let me alt+tab between the windows.


I can't seem to do that. And I can't cycle between workspaces, either. I 
hope it's not because I'm using an Apple keyboard. It's the least 
disappointing keyboard I've tried, but Linux barely understands it.


cheers,
 Stewart
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[GTALUG] Heads up: Ubuntu 21.10 kills your desktop icons

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

GNOME have finally made good on their threat to remove all support for 
icons on the Desktop. Any files in ~/Desktop no longer produce icons on 
the screen. The GNOME Shell plugin that was the last thing that allowed 
it is no longer supported. GNOME Shell itself seems broken: what was the 
Shell Preferences browser page now bring up a 404 page from gitlab.


As someone who needs constant visual reminders of what he needs to be 
doing, this is a huge blow for me. Desktop icons are a kind of todo list 
for me. My own actual real desktop seldom has flat space on it*: right 
now it's relatively clear, with only 7 different MicroPython development 
boards on it. But in real and virtual life, my desktop is my work in 
progress. I guess GNOME's telling me my work's done now?


I'm not even sure if there are other desktops for Ubuntu any more that 
aren't KDE.


cheers,

 Stewart

*: a real picture from a month ago: 
https://twitter.com/scruss/status/1439765045257383940



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Re: [GTALUG] Firefox 93 now supports PDF XFA forms

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-10-09 7:24 a.m., o1bigtenor wrote:
> 
> Now - - - - how long until this hits firefox-esr? - - - - musing. 

Depends what ESR cycle you're on. Debian considers 78.14 their ESR
release (at least in Buster, which I haven't upgraded from yet), while
Mozilla offers 91.2 as ESR. So if we review release dates:

78.142020-07-ish
91.2 2021-08-10
93.0 2021-10-05

So maybe in 15 months, at the outside?

 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] MySQL v. MariaDB

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-10-09 10:12 a.m., Slackrat via talk wrote:
> It looks like Slackware is swtching.

Debian went years ago. The only complaints are from people trying to
install from ancient tutorials who aren't able to find the mysql-* packages.

 Stewart

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[GTALUG] Firefox 93 now supports PDF XFA forms

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

via  mastodon:
Implementing form filling and accessibility in the Firefox PDF viewer -
Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog —
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/10/implementing-form-filling-and-accessibility-in-the-firefox-pdf-viewer/


This appears to mean that Firefox on Linux can open and fill those pesky
Canadian Government forms that were created with Adobe Livecycle. These
used to appear as "/*Please wait... If this message is not eventually
replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not
be able to display this type of document*/." but now open as proper forms.

This must have been non-trivial to implement, because even Adobe
couldn't create XFA forms outside the Windows-only Livecycle.

cheers,

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] [probably offtopic] e-sign solutions

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-09-20 11:57 a.m., Jason Shaw via talk wrote:
> 
> I've used DocHub ( https://dochub.com/  ) for
> signing PDFs and it's been fine.

I just tried it, and it seems the free version doesn't electronically
sign the document at all. It's neither encrypted nor signed, so anyone
could modify it.

I wish there were cheaper ways of getting X.509 certificates that linked
back to a root cert in Adobe Reader. A decade back, I was using the P12
certificate issued by the ARRL (yes, I'm a radio nerd) to
cryptographically sign PDFs. That certificate wasn't much better than
self-signing: people could tell the document hadn't been modified, but
they couldn't verify that I was who I said I was. They could if they
installed the ARRL's certificate, but no-one did that.

Heck, with a P12 certificate, my Brother AIO can generate signed and
encrypted PDF scans ...

chers,
 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] Linux growth (was: Vaccination Receipts on Linux)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-09-20 6:45 a.m., Dave Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
> 
> The rise of chromebooks in school is probably the harbinger of a move of
> quasi-embedded linux from phones to the desktop.

And, more to Karen Lewellen's point, Chrome OS has to provide better
accessibility than standard Linux distros as it's used and specified in
many school districts and backed by a commercial entity that can be
sued. It's deeply unfortunate, but accessibility only moves forward
through the threat of legal action. The US Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA) has teeth, but who can be sued for Linux?

 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Vaccination Receipts on Linux

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-09-17 4:24 p.m., James Knott via talk wrote:
> 
> I just downloaded the receipts.  They have a watermark and are also
> digitally signed, whereas the mailed ones have neither.

I downloaded mine a little after you did. Mine aren't signed,
watermarked or encrypted. Slightly hilariously, it looks like they were
supposed to be signed, but they contain the node-signpdf package's
default X.509 P12 address:

/ContactInfo (emailfromp1...@gmail.com)

I wouldn't say it's trivial (except in the pure mathematics sense) to
modify one of these receipts and falsify the information, but the tools
to do so are in every Linux distro.

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] Vaccination Receipts on Linux

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-09-17 3:20 p.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> When I go back to that email, I find that it is defective.  You cannot 
> read the PDF from my MUA (Alpine on Linux)

"I don't recognize that version of Outlook or Gmail, sir"

> The reason is that the PDF is sent as an attachment, with the wrong type 
> specified in the attachment's headers:

Mine, from April via a SalesForce instance, don't have that:

Content-Type: application/pdf; name="Dose_Admin_pdf"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Dose_Adminpdf"

Very strange.

 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Fedora 34 with EFI boot on Raspberry Pi 4

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-09-10 10:39 a.m., Howard Gibson via talk wrote:
> 
>Let the distribution wars begin!

Let's not. Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?

From my user point of view, it makes almost no difference what Linux I'm
running on. It might as well be a Linux called Mac OS X if it gets the
job done: it feels the same to me.

What I like:

* reliability

* easy upgrading

* lots of software that's fairly recent that's also easy to install

* security I don't have to think about.

What I don't like:

* tedious gatekeeping over what to include over licences resulting in
unmaintained, ancient packages in the distro

* unnecessary questions during package upgrades. No, I don't know what
/etc/frammitz.conf does, and I'm unlikely to care when it changes

* unreliable, untested technology like Wayland that breaks user stuff
that I need. I'd give a distro a pass if they provide all the sharing
stuff I rely on under X under Wayland and make it work identically. In
other words, I don't want to care about what technology it's using.

* having more than one package management system (snapd, I'm looking at you)

* KDE

cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] war story: horrible colours on Seiki TV under Fedora 34

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-08-10 9:57 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> I don't really like to black-box nature of the profile presentation 
> through the Gnome GUI. There should be some tool to examine and nudge a 
> profile in useful ways. I'm tired of spelunking to find the right software 
> tools for all these miscellaneous tasks.

Yes, there should. But there isn't one that I know of.

Linux suffers from having two competing colour management systems. And
each of them does one thing fairly well, but neither does all the things
reasonably well. As far as I can see, lcms/lcms2 is the older system.
It's almost all command-line based. It had an interactive monitor
profile tool (lprof) but the developer abandoned it around 2002 and it
hasn't seen any updates in 15 years.

Argyll is the newer colour management system. It has some graphical
tools, but none to nudge colour profiles.

There are a bunch of complexities that might be affecting you:

* Linux seems to be able to extract calibration information from the
monitor EDID. The Asus monitor I'm using, despite me having a manual
calibration for it, claims that the ICC profile was something it
downloaded from the monitor. It may be that the downloaded ICC has
applied any settings you've poked into the front panel, and Linux is
gamely trying to correct for them twice.

* Nvidia has its own colour calibration deal going on, apparently. It
will quietly override any other system settings. (Some apps also have
their own colour management: Firefox used to, but I think they fixed that)

* The huge amount of effort in colour calibration is for process colour
matching in printing. People get paid to get that right, and it can cost
a lot of money to get it wrong. Monitors (under Linux, at least) are
definitely second-tier. Don't get me started on scanner calibration ...

> I wonder if Windows has a colour profile for this monitor.  If so, can I 
> turn it into something that Linux can use?  Perhaps a .icc file is exactly 
> that.

Yup. Windows ICM files = Linux ICC files. But a monitor with a few
years' use on it will have shifted colour quite dramatically from a new
one. I mean, it's not going to be the all-yellow you're seeing, but it
may be difficult to get nice colours from it if you apply a factory
calibration.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] war story: horrible colours on Seiki TV under Fedora 34

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-08-09 8:52 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> I don't have the tools or the time to calibrate my monitor.

I'd be happy to lend you my ColorHug. Takes about 15 minutes. You will
be amazed at how less blue everything looks, because vendors always set
monitors for maximum brightness and coolness to wow people on the shop
floor.

cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] long war story: growing the ESP (/boot/efi)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-07-14 11:47 a.m., Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> 
> Consumer grade flash often only has 1 write cycles.  Especially if
> it isn't expected to be updated very much.  Different price point.

Can confirm from annoying experience that these QSPI flash chips really
don't have many write cycles. The ARM Cortex-M4 micro-controller boards
I'm very fond of use the same flash chips as PC BIOSes do: typically
tiny WinBond 8-pin things.

In a moment of great inattention (even by my standards) I hooked an 800
kHZ 'smart' LED strip to the same channel as the board's flash storage.
What was being clocked to the LEDs wasn't quite valid flash storage
commands, but it did a number on the chip in under a minute. The poor
thing was nowhere to be found on the bus after that.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] [ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-07-06 5:07 p.m., Znoteer via talk wrote:
> 
> Don't personally know much about Audacity.  Just thought I would pass this 
> along.
> 
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/no-open-source-audacity-audio-editor-is-not-spyware/

Except your IP address *is* considered to be personally identifying
information under GDPR, so Muse will have to jump through hoops for
collection, deletion and reporting.

In other news, the maintainer of an Audacity fork apparently got
*stabbed* over this:
https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99
(CW: somehow members of the odious 4chan board managed to scrape
together enough neurons to operate github accounts, so it goes without
saying: Don't follow the deeper links!)

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] [ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-07-06 10:38 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> I wonder if this change will get Audacity dropped from some distros.
> Naively, I'd think that at least Debian and Fedora would have qualms.

Debian has no problem about removing tracking code from packages. But
what sort of timeline that will happen in, I don't know.

> Of course the first job is to come up with a new name.  Shorter is good.  

I've got a soft spot for Chutzpah, but that's really what Muse should
call theirs.

I'm trying to remember the sound editor I used to used before Audacity
(even pre-1.0). I seem to remember it being adequate, but it suffered
from UX so crude that even the first clunky versions of Audacity seemed
like a lot more fun.

cheers,
 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] [ Audacity Becomes Spyware (fwd)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-07-06 7:10 a.m., David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
> That was a pre-announcement, which they withdrew.

They said they were going to withdraw, but they doubled down:
https://www.audacityteam.org/about/desktop-privacy-notice/

Their new terms and conditions includes:

* collection of usage data (including OS version, user country (based on
IP address; it's not clear if they retain IP address), CPU, non-fatal
error codes, crash reports and data necessary for law enforcement,
litigation and authorities’ requests) stored and processed in Russia;

* no use by those under 13 (since presumably the above data collection
has no way to opt out, so can't be in compliance with any minor
protection laws)

Both are a bit worrying, but I've seen Audacity used by middle school
science and music classes. This will likely have to stop and another app
found.

Audacity is GPL 2. It could be forked. Muse, the new owners (again,
something I'm not clear on), have a habit of monetizing the apps they
are involved with. MuseScore, while a rather decent music engraving
system, has now become a nagware pain since Muse bought it. It does work
if you're not "signed in" to Muse, but there are some features that are
locked out unless you're logged in, and the best of their scores library
(mostly community contributed or public domain) is a payware feature.

cheers,
 Stewart

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[GTALUG] Foone's Silverado Linux discovery - "Go away, go away now, go away fast"

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

Popular hardware hacker Foone Turing has found that the Chevy Silverado
they're renting runs a dubious version of Linux in the entertainment
console, yet it seems to have some control over some in-car systems and
talks via the car's wifi (of course). Ongoing slightly sweary thread
starts here:

foone (@Foone) : I'm renting a recent Chevy Silverado pickup truck
and it has a big screen for connecting navigation and controlling
bluetooth music and such, and it's apparently linux based. You know
how it I know? It has the license files for EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE
included, IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
10:21 PM · Jun 18, 2021
— https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1406074736803676163

Definite 'Code Red' from Cabin Pressure material for me ...

cheers,

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] ftp helper app, and how to screenshot on Ubuntu 21.04? (Mostly, Wayland is Not Fit for Purpose)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

Thanks for all the responses. I've mostly got things working, but Hugh's
comment about Wayland being “[c]ompatible for X applications.  Not
users” rings true. It's a horrid thing to dump on users, suddenly
finding that Ctrl-X,C,V no longer work, and familiar apps fail silently.

The main (and most annoying, because it was blocking a password manager
and bank logins I had to do in a hurry) culprit was Firefox. In order
for copy and paste to work, it seems you have to set

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Very oddly, xclip still works. It probably shouldn't. I'm glad it does,
as I've based pbcopy/pbpaste clones (they're a mac thing) on top of it
and they get heavy, heavy usage.

For screenshotting, Gnome Screenshot seems to be what I have to use.
Can't seem to find something for the command line:

* ImageMagick's import (thanks for the suggestion, Mario) doesn't work
with Wayland: "unable to read X window image `root': Resource
temporarily unavailable"

* Wayland's own command line screenshot tool 'grim' doesn't work either:
"wl_registry@2: error 0: invalid version for global wl_output (4): have
2, wanted 3
 ... compositor doesn't support wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1". This is
coming on for Windows Quality Software usefulness.

I'm also making heavier use of Firefox's Take Screenshot browser action:
hit Ctrl + Shift + S on (almost) any page, and you can save the visible
area, the whole page, or even a block element and it'll copy or save as
you wish.

Having a huge block with desktop sharing: VNC doesn't seem to have
access to the screen at all any more. A pain, because VNC is how I
access most of my remote machines. "ssh -X" is lumpy and painfully slow
under Wayland.

I'm having seemingly random Gnome apps needing

GDK_BACKEND=x11

or else they'll core dump. But this doesn't happen too often.

I realize a small amount of change is necessary in every upgrade: hey,
I'm still on team "Mouse-over to focus is best, fight me" from my Sun
days, but that was something we lost more than a decade ago. But for me,
this is an equivalent UX change of "alias emacs=vi", and I thought Linux
didn't do open user hostility any more.

cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] ftp helper app, and how to screenshot on Ubuntu 21.04?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

also it seems this upgrade has borked xclip, which is a can't-live-without

Did anyone think Wayland was a good idea? A desktop without a working
clipboard?? And by working, I mean "the way it always did before"

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] ftp helper app, and how to screenshot on Ubuntu 21.04?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-06-04 6:28 p.m., Alex Volkov wrote:
> 
> Krusader for example,

Thanks, Alex - I should've said: no KDE. I don't, I can't, I won't.

And how about that application name, eh? Probbo or what?

 Stewart


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[GTALUG] ftp helper app, and how to screenshot on Ubuntu 21.04?

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

Hi - so browsers don't support ftp:// links any more
, and
I was wondering what people used as a drop-in app? I'd prefer if it
weren't Filezilla, as that thing was a bug-ridden mess of spyware last
time I looked at it. Most of the very old computer documentation I use
lives on FTP sites, and this change came out of nowhere.

Also, my go-to screenshot thingy /*scrot*/ no longer works on Ubuntu
21.04: it gives me this:

X Error of failed request:  BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window
parameter)   Major opcode of failed request:  14 (X_GetGeometry)  
Resource id in failed request:  0x0   Serial number of failed request: 
8   Current serial number in output stream:  8

My keyboard doesn't have a PrtSc key so I can't use any of the built-in
screenshot tools. Is this a Wayland thing? I thought Wayland was
supposed to be compatible with X?

cheers,

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] IX is hiring

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-06-02 11:57 a.m., David Collier-Brown via talk wrote:
> 
> See https://www.indexexchange.com/careers, and snoop about us on Linkedin

Note that if you use uBlock Origin, this URL is blocked by Peter Lowe’s
Ad and tracking server list .

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for a can shield for an UNO or compatible

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-05-14 2:54 p.m., Dave Cramer via talk wrote:
>
> The GPS is very expensive.

YesL it's an ancient SiRF Star IV. There are newer, cheaper and more
accurate models, but it was the first GPS to appear regularly in hobby
projects at a then-reasonable price. Whether they use the same
connector, though ...

 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Looking for a can shield for an UNO or compatible

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-05-14 10:29 a.m., Dave Cramer via talk wrote:
> Is there a local source for something like MakerFocus CAN-Bus Shield
> V1.2 
> ?

Yes, Elmwood Electronics has the SparkFun CAN-BUS Shield in stock —
https://elmwoodelectronics.ca/products/13262

He's currently out of stock of the 9-pin to OBD-II cable it uses, though:
https://elmwoodelectronics.ca/products/10087

> Bonus points if it had GPS

It has! Or at least, an EM506 header. Which might be getting a bit aged
for current GPS support.

Craig, who owns Elmwood, is a huge car-hacking nerd. It's probably worth
asking him what's the best product to do «specific CAN-BUS-related
thing». Arduino's somewhat limited compared to newer platforms, but if
it's what you've got ...
(he might also have a solution for the out-of-stock cable, too)

Craig used to sell Carloop products - https://store.carloop.io/ - but I
don't see them on his site any more. They plugged straight into your
OBD-II port and had wifi/GPS/cell data options.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] USB "gadget" on Raspberry Pi 4; Tiny Pilot KVM

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-05-10 3:29 p.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> 
> (There's a different splitter that might be aimed at the Pi Zero)

Ah, I see this is from 8086 Consultancy, who are known for their
compellingly weird products. Like this, for instance: Cluster HAT —
https://www.buyapi.ca/product/cluster-hat-v2-4/

What it does is add 4 Raspberry Pi Zeroes (W/WH, etc) as a cluster on
top of another Raspberry Pi. The cluster networking is done via USB
gadget mode. Useful? Uh ... maybe. It's certainly smaller than any Vax
cluster ever was.

 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Raspberry Pi 4 Starter Kit - Ubiquiti Unifi controller software

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-05-09 10:51 a.m., James Knott via talk wrote:
> I've been considering (because I have way too much time on my hands
> these days) getting a Raspberry Pi to run my Unifi access point
> controller software on.  I would be doing this with Ubuntu or Raspian
> Linux.  I currently run the controller on my desktop system (openSUSE). 
> I assume a kit like this would be suitable.
> 
> https://www.canakit.com/raspberry-pi-4-starter-kit.html

Short answer: yes, maybe. You probably want a 4 GB system, as at least
it can act as a lightweight desktop(-ish) system if the controller
project doesn't work out. Also, read the bit about Imager below, as it
makes setting up a Raspberry Pi trivial.

-

Longer answer: It should do. Check availability, though; Elmwood seems
to be short of Raspberry Pi 4 kits, so they may be back-ordered from
Canakit too. Buyapi (in Nepean) and Canakit are Canadian official
resellers, so are supposed to get priority on stock. Practically,
they'll run out like everyone else from time to time.

Choice of OS could be critical: Raspberry Pi OS (the OS formerly known
as Raspbian) is a 32-bit Debian-derived distro. Ubuntu is 64-bit.
Raspberry Pi OS has devices and drivers tweaked to work with the
Raspberry Pi's hardware, as well as support from the Raspberry Pi
Foundation. Ubuntu may not have all the best and brightest drivers, and
Raspberry Pi-specific support may be lacking.

For installation, you'll probably want to replace whatever comes on the
supplied SD card with a known latest release. Many Raspberry Pi SD cards
still come installed with a slightly annoying (but super quick for
vendors to install) distro wrapper called NOOBS. Raspberry Pi Imager is
probably the quickest way to install an OS on the card:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/software/

You might want to install Raspberry Pi OS Lite, which doesn't run a desktop.

Imager has a 'secret' setup screen (Ctrl + Shift + X) that allows you to
pre-configure bits of your system, such as user password, ssh keys and
wifi access (if you need it). Details:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-imager-update-to-v1-6/

Regarding running the Unifi controller, it looks like it's a bit of a
hack to get it running. Both tutorials I found recommend adding
Ubiquiti's Debian repo to the system. On a Raspberry Pi, this can result
in anything from "zero problems" to "everything stops working, forever".
It all depends what the repo pulls in and assumes about the system.

Both tutorials aren't perfect, but are a start:

1) https://pimylifeup.com/rasberry-pi-unifi/

2)
https://lazyadmin.nl/home-network/installing-unifi-controller-on-a-raspberry-pi-in-5-min/

In particular, both recommend unnecessary messing with the system
entropy source. If you install rng-tools (sudo apt install rng-tools)
without messing with the config file, it will automatically pull in the
hardware entropy source. It looks like both of these followed old
advice. 'Old', in the Raspberry Pi world, is anything older than 18
months or so. So much changes with the Raspberry Pi hardware and
software that old advice can sometimes be detrimental.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Linus Torvalds Responds to Linux Banning University of Minnesota

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-25 1:46 p.m., Aruna Hewapathirane via talk wrote:
> 
> Zero Tolerance allows one to live. They need to be shot !

Please don't make death threats on the mailing list. They are people who
are researchers who made some ill-advised decisions, nothing more.

The most worrying aspect for me is that the academic supervisor got the
study exempted from an IRB review. IRBs review any research that
involves human subjects and are supposed to filter out research that
could be unethical or exploitative. Now that this affair is all public,
UMN has called a halt to this reseearch and their IRB has deemed that
the work should have been reviewed by them all along.

I don't believe the rumours that the supervisor never submitted the
research proposal to the IRB. I'm more concerned about how the
supervisor may have attempted to get around the IRB for this (now) very
obvious piece of social engineering.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Follow-on from Evan's talk: WSLg (graphics!)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-21 7:45 p.m., Evan Leibovitch wrote:
>
> If anyone recalls my talk, one of the reasons I went to Windows and
> WSL was to get AWAY from Pulse Audio! :-)

I do remember your talk. But this Pulse Audio server will likely work,
because you can't mess with it in any meaningful way.

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[GTALUG] Follow-on from Evan's talk: WSLg (graphics!)

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

I see that MS's WSL preview release that came out today now has graphics
support via Wayland. It's got some clever stuff behind it, and is
explained here:

WSLg Architecture | Windows Command Line —
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wslg-architecture/

Accelerated graphics and a built-in Pulse Audio server. Rather nicely done.

cheers,

 Stewart


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Re: [GTALUG] TIL: rtcwake / wakealarm

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-12 9:28 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> I always thought that shutting down a Pi really left it on.  That's one 
> reason some people like Pi power supplies with a switch.  To what 
> extent is that true?

It does: it just leaves the processor halted. So the other peripheral
chips are still drawing power.

> How much power is saved?  I delayed sending this message, hoping to add 
> information about this but I'm just not getting to the experiments.

Not much, but then, a Raspberry Pi doesn't draw much even running flat
out. There are fancy Raspberry Pi add-ons that provide a proper
logic-controlled shutdown and poweroff, but they typically cost about
the same as a Raspberry Pi, or about two year's energy cost for running
a Raspberry Pi 4B flat out.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] TIL: rtcwake / wakealarm

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-11 2:28 p.m., Giles Orr via talk wrote:
> 
> # rtcwake --date +5min --mode mem
> 
> I chose "--mode mem" because this machine has often and successfully
> been suspended to RAM.

Hi Giles - thanks for the report. I stayed away from using rtcwake,
partly because of the report of it not working for the Raspberry Pi
user. What I did - on my main Ubuntu laptop - at around 19:47 as root:

  echo  0 > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm
  echo `date +%s -d'19:50'` > /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

I then used my normal shutdown procedure. I did not suspend in any way.

At a couple of seconds before the requested 19:50 bootup time, my laptop
powered up normally.

> Presumably it would work fine on a Raspberry Pi as it came from a Pi
> forum and they're a fairly homogeneous form of hardware.

The hardware of the Raspberry Pi may be, but since none of them have an
RTC built in, they have very different RTC options. Any chip you use you
have to configure via I²C. Some of the chips that work as RTCs don't
have alarm/wake-up capabilities. The DS3231 used in the original example
is a bit of a step-up from most PC's RTCs.

(There is a Raspberry Pi with a built-in RTC - the Raspberry Pi Pico
micro controller board. It's rather hard to give it external battery
power, though, so it's not very useful.)

cheers,
 Stewart


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[GTALUG] TIL: rtcwake / wakealarm

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

This may be old news to many of you, but today I learned you can have
the computer's real time clock boot your machine at a specific time. The
more proper way seems to be to use the 'rtcwake' command, but you can
also do it by writing the timestamp of the startup time to
/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

Some more details of the /sys method -
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63=309093=1849326=ca7a14f7d160f929378be4691b1aed9e#p1849291

cheers,

 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Google wins over Oracle in Java API copyright suit

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-09 1:58 p.m., David Mason via talk wrote:
> 
> The key part of what Lennart wrote is “if done right”. How could you
> imagine that the functional program would return the results out of
> order?

Well, this particular DSSSL thing did occasionally put lists out of
order, and didn't have a good way of peeking at items before or after in
the list. You sometimes need to do that in setting books.

> XSLT … is not a general purpose language and I would not want to
> program such problems with it!!!

The input data was in XML, so XSLT was the perfect language (supposedly)
for the task. I think the agency responsible for generating the data
spent quite a bit of money making it as hard to use as possible - it was
data that was required by law to be published, but Difficult Questions
might be asked of the agency if it were ever closely analyzed. So they
wrapped it up in quite the worst XML format I've ever seen.

I realize that these are domain-specific examples, but my experience of
functional languages was of unnecessary complexity and putting rules in
the way of getting results.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Google wins over Oracle in Java API copyright suit

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

(oops, don't you hate it with the mail client silently assumes you only
want to reply to the sender?)

On Fri, 9 Apr 2021 at 11:51, Lennart Sorensen
mailto:lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca>> wrote:


But using a loop means you are telling the system how to do things,
rather than telling it what you want done and letting it (usually) do
a better job at the how.


I'd agree if I were doing something like wanting the sum of the values
of a list. /list.sum()/ is going to be many times more efficient than an
accumulator loop on a system that's got any level of vectorization.
Chris Tyler's talk on AARCH64 optimization in gcc a few years back
showed that the code isn't anything like my mental model (somewhere
around a Z80, with faulty memory management) expected.
 

After all with a loop you are controlling the
execution order of the processing.  If done right you usually shouldn't
need to care.


But in document processing, you really really /really/ want the output
to come out in the same order as the input. Which is why functional
languages seemed a strange choice for document transformation. The
absence of side-effects can be handy in document processing, but being
in the right order is usually what publishing houses get paid the big
bucks to do.

I've had to process utility time series power generation data in XSLT.
That was horrid. Order matters a lot there, too.

But yes functional languages require a different philosophy.  Functional
languages are not for people that want to micromanage the computer.


Call me old-fashioned, but I want my computers to do what I tell them. I
don't want exceptions, I want results or error messages to explain why.
I know there are many processes running that do things I'll never
understand, but they must prove themselves useful to me or get out of my
way.

cheers,
 Stewart

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Re: [GTALUG] Google wins over Oracle in Java API copyright suit

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-07 11:21 a.m., D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
> 
> When I was an undergrad at University of Waterloo, we were required to
> use FORTRAN (WatFiv).  I hated it.  I liked the notation of Algol
> better and Algol-W (W for Wirth) was a good implementation for student
> uses.  I even created a bit of a rebellion, but it was put down.

That would have been a hard sell, considering that WatFiv was a
locally-developed project designed specifically for university use. It
produced good-enough code but very quickly, while IBM's compiler would
produce great code but bog down the machine because it was quite slow.

Algol-W seems like it was pretty fast too. I was surprised to find that
there's a (somewhat) maintained Algol-W compiler for Linux:

https://tiddly-pom.com/~glyn/

It's partly written in ocaml, and is really an Algol-W to C filter. It
seems to have some minor issues building with ocaml > 4.05, but you can
force it to work with

OCAMLPARAM="safe-string=0,_" make

The few times I need the speed of a compiled language, I'll still reach
for Fortran. C just wants to crash when I'm near it, and having to
remember to start arrays at zero just doesn't work for me.

The only functional languages I've ever used (if openscad doesn't count)
were DSSSL (Scheme with an embedded CSS engine for document processing
in SGML) and XSLT (Scheme [except it's in XML syntax] with an embedded
CSS engine for document processing in XML). Both were utterly dismal and
I only used 'em because I was paid to. Not being able to use loops but
having to write functions that called themselves recursively seemed a
huge amount of faffing about and possibly constituted cruelty to
programmers.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Surveillance Capitalism [was another thread]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-04 1:18 a.m., Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:
> 
> As for erosion: consider that this sector that MS dominates is an
> ever-shrinking piece of the IT pie. PC gaming has to compete with
> dedicated consoles and the looming VR. 

Microsoft does extremely well with its XBox product line, don't forget.
Not merely do they have a line of the premiere gaming hardware, they are
also considered a AAA game development shop. They've come a long way
from MS Olympic Decathlon on the TRS-80.

One thing that Microsoft does that it's very open about is accessibility
research and development. Many of the standards it contributes to are
truly open. Its line of accessibility hardware for the XBox - which can
also be used as a general-purpose BT/USB programmable adaptive input
device which any system that supports it - is priced not much above
cost. Which for the accessibility device market is unheard of: they've
been used to charging ~$100 for a single input switch. The disability
tax is real, and Microsoft are challenging that.

Needless to say, Linux's support for accessible/adaptive input is pretty
terrible. Sure, many distros enable BRLTTY on boot, but Braille isn't
universally useful. The state of screen readers and alternative input
technologies (switch/menu scanning or eye-gaze tracking) is barely there
on Linux.

cheers,
 Stewart
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Re: [GTALUG] Surveillance Capitalism [was another thread]

[Stewart C. Russell via talk]

On 2021-04-02 5:27 p.m., Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
> 
> You know what, thats exactly what innuendo is, saying "all these
> women" without even a link to a personal quote from them, not a one.

CSAIL at MIT has had a long history of being a boys-only club. The best
documented example I can find is the “Barriers to Equality in Academia:
Women in Computer Science at M.I.T.” report from 1983 (!):

http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~dcurtis/Barriers%20Report%20EECS.pdf

This would have been published right about the time RMS started the GNU
Project and lessened his formal connection with MIT. The report does not
make particularly happy reading.

cheers,
 Stewart
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