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

Scene setting

My first job out of college was for the auspiciously named “National Telecom” as a “Computer Operator”. Back then, this was a job, rather than something you just do day-to-day. I mean, it’s quite likely many of you have “operated” a “computer” in order to read this blog today. Well done, have a pay raise!

The other day I wrote about snapcraft metrics, a tool that enables publishers to extract application metrics from the snap store. Something I’ve noticed which I wanted to share, was how quickly automatic updates roll out to an application’s user base.

So I took the metrics from an application that I published in the snap store and scrubbed the names and version numbers. I charted below the speed that devices roll over from one release to the next. Here’s an image that I think clearly shows the rapid rise as a new release is published, and the rapid drop-off, of the previous version. This chart covers a month where three versions were published, a week or so apart.

tl;dr. The OBS Studio snap is now updated to the latest stable release, 29.1.3, after a “brief” hiatus.

Another day, another updated snap, which had been languishing a bit. I wrote about updating Spot yesterday, and today, as per the title, it’s OBS Studio. As I mentioned previously, there’s a bunch of outdated snaps in the store, and I want to help fix that. Hopefully, with these blog posts, others might learn how, and be motivated to either publish new applications or step up and update existing ones.

I recently lamented that there’s a bunch of broken and outdated snaps in the snap store. Well, some of them are my responsibility, so in the spirit of “be the change you want to see”, let’s get them fixed and updated.

I thought I’d highlight one or two as I go through them, to highlight any important or interesting changes. Today I took a look at Spot, which is a very decent native GNOME Spotify client by Alexandre Trendel.

Agon and Agon

Last month I visited the RMC Cave where we got a sneak peek at the Agon Console8 from Heber. The Agon Console8 is a consolised version of the more general-purpose Agon8 Computer. They come in a natty retro case, and features twin 9-pin joystick ports.

I’d not heard about the Agon line of Open Source devices before, but they tickled something in me. I’m somewhat fascinated by computers that boot directly into BASIC.

I was a guest host on Late Night Linux podcast, episode 249 last week, filling in for Will. We each bring along a ‘discovery’, I brought snapcraft metrics to talk about. I thought I’d write up how I use them, for listeners of the show as it’s hard to articulate this very well verbally.

My snaps

I have about twenty snaps in the snap store. Some, like Bombsquad and ncspot have been published for years now. Others such as Classicube were more recently built and published.

As with all recipes on this blog, they’re designed to be easily made, tasty, and not elaborate. I’ll also not put lengthy backstories for them.

I was in Exeter yesterday and stumbled into Brewdog where I discovered their delicious loaded fries. So today, I had a go at making something similar. The amount I used here could be shared between four people as a chunky sharing starter. Scale it down for a main meal or snack.

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

Scene setting

This is another story from my time working on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. A slight difference though, this story is second hand, so take it with a pinch of salt. I was there, but I wasn’t responsible for what occured, other people on the team were.

I wrote previously about debugging a broken x16emu snap. In short, something went wonky with ld. I started a thread on the snapcraft forum and Ken VanDine came to my assistance with an answer and a pull request.

I grabbed that pr, and it did indeed build successfully..

$ snapcraft --use-lxd
Launching instance...
Executed: pull alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: pull gnome/sdk
Executed: pull x16-roms
Executed: pull x16-emulator
Executed: build alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: build gnome/sdk
Executed: build x16-roms
Executed: skip pull x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: skip build x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: stage x16-roms (required to build 'x16-emulator')
Executed: skip pull alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: skip build alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: stage alsa-pulseaudio (required to build 'x16-emulator')
Executed: build x16-emulator
Executed: skip stage alsa-pulseaudio (already ran)
Executed: stage gnome/sdk
Executed: skip stage x16-roms (already ran)
Executed: stage x16-emulator
Executed: prime alsa-pulseaudio
Executed: prime gnome/sdk
Executed: prime x16-roms
Executed: prime x16-emulator
Executed parts lifecycle
Generated snap metadata
Created snap package x16emu_b16509b_amd64.snap  

Even better, it’s smaller. The build I had in the store was 6MB in size:

Today I stumbled on a question in the LÖVE subreddit, asking how to have a portable development environment when you have no control over the host PC.

Quick question. Is it possible to download love onto a flash drive so i can make it portable. I’m asking because I can’t download things at work on my work computer but I’m working on a love project in my spare time for a course I’m taking. I’m new to all this and appreciate any help.

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