Posts

Back in 2021, I reviewed the Eufy RoboVac 30C (affiliate link) vacuum cleaner. I’d owned the device for three months by then. Enough time for it to chew up some socks, cables and shoelaces. In between all that, it did some vacuuming!

So I thought I’d re-visit the blog, and figure out if it’s still a decent device, three years after initially buying it.

We named him Harvey.

Harvey the cleaner, after the character played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.

Just a few thoughts about the origin of Linux Matters podcast.

Prior art

Over the thirteen years of the Ubuntu Podcast the presenter lineup, format, duration and frequency changed here and there. In the early days, we would record a segment, have a cup of tea, and then record another one. It was a long and laborious process that took up most of a Sunday afternoon. After a little while we tweaked things and settled into our stride. Once we did, it helped us focus, and get episodes prepared and recorded with less stress.

This blog post accompanies episode 10 of Linux Matters Podcast where I talked about this subject for a bit. You can listen to the episode here once it’s out. If you’re a Patron you can listen ahead of time, and with no adverts.

Hackathon

In July at work, we had a short mid-week internal Hackathon. Everyone was encouraged to take part if they could. Here’s the blurb to introduce it, taken from our internal Notion.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m cooking the family dinner, so I’m also listening to a podcast. I just listened to the latest episode of Linux Downtime. In it, Amolith, Gary and Joe discuss why they use the Linux distributions they do. While the food cooks, I thought I’d take 20 minutes to bang out a blog post mulling why I (still) use Ubuntu.

However, this turned more into a bit of a trip down memory lane and certainly didn’t get banged out in 20 mins. Sorry about that. Probably scroll to the bottom for the actual answers.

Introduction

This week I attended Monitorama in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was there in my role as Developer Relations Manger at Axiom. This was my first time at Monitorama, and only my second time in Portland.

I had a great time, and wanted to write up some of my thoughts and experiences. I expect a more formal company blog post will follow, but I wanted to get my personal thoughts down while they were fresh.

Linux Matters

I recently started presenting Linux Matters podcast with my friends Martin Wimpress and Mark Johnson.

In episode 4 (that link will only work once the episode is released) I briefly talked about some simple bots I setup on the Ubuntu Social Mastodon instance (which, incidentally I talked about in episode 1).

This blog post accompanies episode 4. Linux Matters is part of the Late Night Linux (LNL) family. If you support us on the LNL Patreon, you’ll often get the episode delivered early, as well as advert free. Thanks, if you already do.

This morning I attempted to start work on my desktop PC and couldn’t. The screen is black, it doesn’t want to wake up the displays. I used the old REISUB trick to restart, and it boots, but there’s no output on the display. I did some investigation and this post is mainly to capture my notes and so others can see the problem and perhaps debug and fix it.

The setup is an Intel Skull Canyon NUC connected to an external GPU enclosure which contains an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. I’ve previously blogged about this weird machine, get more details there. I have since upgraded the GPU since that post, however.

My blog at blog.popey.com has gone through a number of iterations since I started it back in the 1990’s. First it was created using Microsoft FrontPage, and hosted on some free web space at CiX, and has morphed into a self-hosted WordPress site, Nikola static site, and now a Hugo static site.

At various times I’ve had comment systems available underneath posts. Over the years I’ve used Microsoft FrontPage extensions (which, amusingly used to crash the entire Web Host at CiX back in the day), WordPress comments, and Disqus to facilitate visitor interaction. I’ve never really been happy with any of them, so I abandoned them all, their content lost to the mists of time - and possibly the Wayback Machine.

If you only want to know about my visit to The Cave and not the nonsense about my aracde boards, feel free to scroll down to “Three Wise Men”

Note: I’ve embedded some posts from Twitter (where there’s engagement with other Tweeps) and other posts from Mastodon, because, y’know.

Yesterday I had cause to visit Bristol in the west of England. I live in Farnborough, in the South East of England, so it’s a two-hour journey each way. Ok, it’s about one and a half hours, but I need to factor in a recharge point because I’m an insufferable EV owner who crowbars it into the conversation at every opportunity. Anyway, moving on.

Depending on who you speak to, Twitter is (or isn’t) in turmoil, and Mastodon is (or isn’t) here to supplant (or backup (or not)) the “de facto town square”.

Whether any of that is true or not, there’s been a surge in people signing up, and trying out the Mastodon experience.

(via this tweet)

For those who aren’t familiar with all this, learn more about Mastodon over at the friendly-looking main Join Mastodon site.