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I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome.

A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB.

Then I opened Google Chrome.

I’ve said many times, I don’t consider myself a software developer. Much like I don’t consider myself a professional chef. I can write code, just as I can cook. What I make isn’t ground breaking, but it won’t poison anyone either, and I enjoy doing it.

Coding for me started on the ZX81 in BASIC then on to the Spectrum and other 8-bit microcomputers. I dabbled with Z80 and 6502 assembly language. At college I did COBOL, InfoBASIC and more Z80. When I eventually got a PC in 1990 I taught myself Pascal, via a free compiler for MS-DOS I got on a floppy disk in the post.

This post is more an aide-mémoire for myself, but may be useful to others.

I recently wrote a little story about bugs, the crash reporter and errors website in Ubuntu. Sometimes a user will want to look for their crash reports, and in fact that question came up today on the Ubuntu Discourse.

Back when we shipped Unity desktop as the default desktop environment in Ubuntu, there was a simple button to take a user to their previously uploaded crash reports. There was also an easy, graphical way to disable crash reporting.

Ubuntu Hirsute - the development release which will become 21.04 enters User Interface Freeze on March 18th! That’s less than a fortnight away!

However, with two weekends and plenty of evenings between now and then, its a great time to start testing the Yaru theme we ship in Ubuntu by default. The Yaru team have been busy and provided this short list of some of the main changes since the last release.

This post, previously titled “Thirty Years On” appeared on another incarnation of my blog 10 years ago. I am being lazy nostalgic and re-posting it today as it’s the 40th birthday of my first computer, the diminutive Sinclair ZX81.

On Christmas day 1981 I awoke with the usual excitement of any 9 year old boy. I clearly remember going downstairs and being told not to go into the lounge because my Dad was busy setting up my main Christmas present. In those days we’d get a main present and some other smaller presents. My parents weren’t well off, we lived in a typical 3 bedroom semi in Southern England and got by as best we could.

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

I had updated yesterday and clearly something went wrong. A colleague filed a bug as they’d seen the same thing recently. For them it was their primary machine so they nuked it from orbit. As I experienced the bug on my laptop, a secondary machine, I was fine with leaving it alone, in case I could get some debug information from it, or repair it. I confirmed the bug and went to bed, as it was getting late.

For a few years we’ve been performing a live version of an Ubuntu Podcast at FOSS Talk Live. This is a lively, nerdy, in-person Linux Podcast event at the Harrison Pub in London. A few shows are performed in front of a live slightly drunk studio pub audience. We are but one troup of performers though, over the course of the evening.

The whole thing is organised by Joe Ressington and attended by our friends and/or/xor listeners. Joe has just announced over on episode 114 of Late Night Linux that we’re all doing it again! Go and listen to that show for a small amount of detail.

This is a bit of a dayjob post, but as I maintain a bunch of snaps in my own time, I figured it’s not out of place here.

Typically when I (or indeed any developer) uses snapcraft to build a snap, a snapcraft.yaml drives the process. I’ll integrate some kind of CI or build system, and start publishing to the Snap Store. Usually, once created, the yaml doesn’t need much in the way of changes. Back when we first started building snaps, we were using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems. At runtime the snap would leverage the base of core. The core snap is a super minimal Ubuntu 16.04 LTS runtime environment.

Ubuntu - the Linux distribution - has been around for 17 years. Over that time many projects and initiatives have been started, some successful, others less so. Not everything we try can work out, but as a group, we should feel empowered to try.

The Ubuntu community isn’t quite the same as it was back in 2004-2010, and nobody I know argues that it is. People who were keen and active contributors may have had circumstantial changes which meant they moved on. Some took on new responsibilities, work, or started family. Some, sadly, have passed away.

Last month I ‘discovered’ Rocketbooks. Well, now I’m in deep! I’ve picked up a bunch of coloured pens, a large folio cover for the full size Rocketbook, and now, I’ve grabbed some more!

Wait! Surely the point of Rocketbooks is that they’re re-usable, so you don’t need to buy many of them. Yeah, true. However, as they’re not super expensive, I can actually leave one at my work desk upstairs for business-related things, and another downstairs in the kitchen.