Posts

Over coffee this morning, I stumbled upon simone, a fledgling Open-Source tool for repurposing YouTube videos as blog posts. The Python tool creates a text summary of the video and extracts some contextual frames to illustrate the text.

A neat idea! In my experience, software engineers are often tasked with making demonstration videos, but other engineers commonly prefer consuming the written word over watching a video. I took simone for a spin, to see how well it works. Scroll down and tell me what you think!

This is the seventh in an increasingly infrequent series of Friday Tales From Tech Support. Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me.

London. Summer 2002

In the early 2000s I worked as a SAP Technical Consultant which involved teaching courses, advising customers, and doing SAP installations, upgrades and migrations.

This story starts on a typical mid-summer, warm and stuffy day in London. I arrive for the first and only time to a small, second-floor office in a side road, just off Regent Street, in the centre of town. The office was about the size and shape of Sherlock’s flat in the modern hit BBC TV show of the same name, and was clearly previously residential accomodation, lightly converted.

This is a deeply personal post. Feel free to skip this if you’re only here for the Linux and open-source content. It’s also a touch rambling. As for the title, no, I didn’t “get” ADHD on my birthday; obviously, that’s humourous literary hyperbole. Read on.

LET age = age + 1

Like a few billion others, I managed to cling to this precious rock we call home and complete a 52nd orbit of our nearest star. What an achievement!

Previously…

Back in February, I blogged about a series of scam Bitcoin wallet apps that were published in the Canonical Snap store, including one which netted a scammer $490K of some poor rube’s coin.

The snap was eventually removed, and some threads were started over on the Snapcraft forum

Groundhog Day

Nothing has changed it seems, because once again, ANOTHER TEN scam BitCoin wallet apps have been published in the Snap Store today.

tl;dr I have had a Mini EV for a little over two years, so I thought it was time for a retrospective. This isn’t so much a review as I’m not a car journalist. It’s more just my thoughts of owning an electric car for a couple of years.

I briefly talked about the car in episode 24 of Linux Matters Podcast, if you prefer a shorter, less detailed review in audio format.

On Tuesday, I blogged about a series of Bitcoin scam apps published in the Canonical Snap store.

Edit: This section updated on 2024-02-23 to include a Canonical response as two new forum posts from sabdfl (Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical).

Two things! Three things!

Zerothly, today we have a response from Canonical.

There are actually two new posts from Mark. One in response to the thread asking whether crypto apps should be banned from the Snap store, and the other an acceptance that identity verification might need to be stronger on the Snap store. Here they are in full:

Edit: There’s a short follow-up to this post: Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: Follow up.

tl;dr: A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it likely won’t be the last.

This post turned out longer than I expected. So if you don’t have the time there’s a briefer summary at the bottom under “In summary (the tl;dr)” along with my suggestions on what Canonical should do now.

Last week, I wrote about my somewhat last-minute plans to attend the 2023 Ubuntu Summit in Riga, Latvia. The event is now over, and I’m back home collating my thoughts about the weekend.

The tl;dr: It was a great, well-organised and run event with interesting speakers.

Here’s my “trip report”.

Logistics

The event was held at the Radisson Blu Latvija. Many of the Canonical staff stayed at the Raddison, while most (perhaps all) of the non-Canonical attendees were a short walk away at the Tallink Hotel.

At the Ubuntu Summit in Latvia, Canonical have just announced their plans for the Ubuntu Core Desktop. I recently played with a preview of it, for fun. Here’s a nearby computer running it right now.

Ubuntu Core is a “a secure, application-centric IoT OS for embedded devices”. It’s been around a while now, powering IoT devices, kiosks, routers, set-top-boxes and other appliances.

Ubuntu Summit

This weekend the Ubuntu Summit begins in Riga, Latvia. I originally had no plans to attend until a recent change in circumstance, and a late space became available.

The Ubuntu Summit is “an event focused on the Linux and Open Source ecosystem, beyond Ubuntu itself. Representatives of outstanding projects will demonstrate how their work is changing the future of technology as we know it.”.

Essentially it’s a conference-style event with multiple tracks hosting speakers talking about Ubuntu and Linux-adjunct topics.