Software

It’s just a month into the new year and we have our first controversy in the Linux community for 2021. In a recent update to Raspberry Pi OS, the official operating system for the diminuative computers, a new repository was added to the default install. This change means new and existing Raspberry Pi devices, running the officially maintained and blessed Operating System will check in with an additional software repository when updated, which will offer more software to the consumer.

I am not a fan of rebooting my computers. As you can see:

alan@robot:~$ for host in $(cat computers.txt); do ssh "$host" "uptime"; done
 20:24:53 up 117 days,  5:06, 10 users,  load average: 5.85, 6.07, 5.48
 20:24:55 up 113 days,  4:56,  7 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.68, 0.72
 20:24:56 up 66 days,  9:05,  5 users,  load average: 1.06, 0.58, 0.51
 20:24:57 up 2 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.60, 1.09, 0.51
 20:24:58 up 4 days,  7:05,  3 users,  load average: 1.83, 1.22, 0.77
 20:24:58 up 18 days, 21:31,  9 users,  load average: 1.86, 1.86, 2.00
 20:25:35 up 374 days,  1:18,  6 users,  load average: 1.01, 1.01, 1.11

One is a desktop, two are laptops and the others are headless servers. The servers tend to be left up mostly because I don’t see any need to reboot them. However I’m also a little scared to, in case they don’t come back and I end up having to faff about to fix them.

Last year ( 😄 ) I wrote an article called Snap Along With Me in which I detailed how I approached snapping a rust application called t-rec. Well, I’m back with another “Snap Along”, this time we’re snapping an application written in Golang.

During a meeting to on-board a new member of the team at work today, I went through a similar process as my last blog post. This time I chose a different application, so I thought I’d write it up here. I’ve previously explained how I browse the various GitHub Trending pages for each language. Today was no different, we browsed the trending rust projects then moved on to trending Go projects.

I originally titled this post “Don’t be afraid of the command line”, but decided “Black Oblong of Monospace Mystery” was more fun. Is the command line really scary? It doesn’t feel like that to me, but I grew up with an interface which looks like this on first boot.

Not exactly friendly, but I was 9 at the time, and this was normal. Typing things using the keyboard was pretty much a daily activity. I used books like this one, to learn how to program and understand the computer better.

Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolled by my screen. Unclack is a small MacOS utility which silences the microphone of the user when they’re typing. The purpose is to prevent the noise of typing being passed through to other participants when on a Zoom / Skype / Jitsi call. Neat.

They don’t make a Linux version, and I couldn’t see anything similar, so I did what I usually do in this instance, throw the idea towards my friendly local coder, Stuart Langridge. He was, as ever, initially bemused and then dismissive.

One of the neat things about GNOME Shell is that it’s pretty tweakable - to some degree - to customise it to a user’s preferences. I know some people use GNOME Shell stock experience. I don’t. I have previously written about some of my must-have extensions and add-ons. This supplements that with what I do to further tweak my (currently) Ubuntu 20.10 system to my liking.

Note: These are the settings I configure on my computer that I use all day every day. If you don’t like these settings, I frankly don’t care mind, you’re not using my PC. 😎

Bit of a rant, sorry. I’m trying to download my data from Twitter. I login via the web page, find the place to do this, note its says I’ll get an “archive of your data we think is most important to you”. Uh-huh, you think. Then click the button.

It takes a day to build that archive, and you’re not allowed to ask for it again for 30 days. Next day I get a notification so I can download it.

I don’t consider myself a ‘Developer’ but I maintain a bunch of snaps in the Snap Store, and threw together a shell script which I’m sharing here in case it’s useful to other publishers. The goal of the script is to go through each snap and check to see if there’s a newer version of it upstream than currently published in the store. As such it’s not meant for end-users, but for people like me who publish multiple snaps from different places, and want to keep on top of them.

With a keen interest in all things “retro”, I’ve previously bought copies of Fusion Magazine, which I’ve enjoyed. Shortly after I blogged yesterday about The Best Portable Spectrum, I received a marketing email from Fusion Retro Books. With impeccable timing, they’re promoting a new Spectrum game, called Neadeital by Matt Birch.

They had me at the screenshot. I was a big fan of Tir Na Nog, Dun Durach (and Heavy on the Magick) as a kid. Neadeital is clearly inspired by those classic titles.

Every so often I find myself with an idle hour and decide to use that time to package some new software for Linux. A common activity among nerds, I’m sure ;). This blog post is a write up of what I did, and why, which may be useful to others with time on their hands.

I keep meaning to live stream when I do, but on this occasion I had a bad hair day was also listening to and engaging with a podcast, so it wasn’t practical. In leiu of that, while the information is fresh in my head - the morning after - I thought I’d write down some notes here.