New Year New Releases
We're kicking off 2021 with a bang! The KDE team has announced a new focus on Wayland and fingerprint readers. Cawbird 1.3 a native twitter client for Linux has a new release with improved video uploading and replies, and Matrix will power FOSDEM this year!
-- During The Show --
01:45 Minutes In
Email 1 - Comment on SolarWinds from Newnix
04:40 Minutes IN
Caller 1 - Carl
Problem: Intermittent camera and mic problems
Solution 1: unplug other usb devices (bandwidth issues)
Solution 2: Buy a PCIe USB 3 card
Solution 3: Buy a Thinkpad with thunderbolt and a thunderbolt dock
Solution 4: Make sure the camera is plugged into a matching USB port (3.0/2.0)
Logitech C920 webcam (https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/webcams/c920-pro-hd-webcam.html)
Logitech C930 (https://www.logitech.com/en-us/products/webcams/c930e-business-webcam.html)
Feedback on Backups
Bareos backup (https://www.bareos.org/en/)
Email 2 - LVM vs Raid from Cory
OpenMediaVault (https://www.openmediavault.org/)
Storage - FreeNAS (https://www.freenas.org/)
Unraid (https://www.unraid.net/)
BTRFS is good for low power devices, less overhead than ZFS
RAID 1 or RAID 10 are better options in most cases, and using RAID 10 + Btrfs compression will give you similar space availability to RAID 6
RAID is not a backup
19:00 Minutes In
Email 3 - Old Smartphones as Cameras from M. X. U.
Geovision Cameras (https://www.geovision.com.tw/)
Axis Cameras (https://www.axis.com/en-us)
Synology LiveCam (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.synology.livecam&hl=en_US≷=US)
From the Community
Droidcam (https://www.dev47apps.com/)
23:55 Minutes In
Pick of the Week
KDE Itinerary (https://apps.kde.org/en/itinerary) is a digital travel assistant with a priority on protecting your privacy.
Timeline view of a unified travel itinerary with automatic trip grouping.
Supports train, bus and flight bookings as well as hotel, restaurant, event and rental car reservations.
Automatic booking data extraction from various input formats, performed locally on your device.
Real-time delay and platform change information for trains.
Selection of alternative train connections on unbound tickets or on missed connections.
Local ground transportation navigation between elements of your itinerary.
26:27 Minutes In
Gadget of the Week (03:00) [12:00]
Maingear Vector 2 Gaming Laptop (https://maingear.com/vector/)
Pros
Starting at $1349
0.78” thick and 4.16 lbs
i7-1075OH
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
16GB / 1TB NVME
4 Cell Battery - 4000 mAh
1080p 144hz
Being a gaming laptop
Cons
No Thunderbolt only USB C
Can't be powered over USB C
Degraded power when unplugged
30:00 Minutes In
KDE Roadmap
KDE has plans for 2021 - and they're pretty cool (https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/kde-plans-for-2021-wayland-fingerprint)
Fingerprint support throughout the KDE Plasma experience
Login
Lock Screen
KAuth and Polkit.
Focus on Wayland - aiming for serious, concentrated Wayland work continuing through 2021
Devs plan to improve the look and feel of Plasma’s default Breeze theme — expect something “super modern and awesome”
KDE devs will replace the celebrated Kickoff app launcher with a newer, fresher replacement.
32:44 Minutes In
Cawbird 1.3 Released
Cawbird (https://ibboard.co.uk/cawbird/) is free, open source software compatible with most modern Linux distros
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/cawbird-1-3-released-for-linux-distros
Improved DM Support
Video Uploading
You can now see media shared in direct messages
Links and hashtags sent in messages are ‘clickable’
It’s possible to delete DMs, load older DMs, and send images as DMs in Cawbird
Cawbird 1.3 supports video uploads to tweets (one video per tweet)
Improved upload handling of animated and non-animated GIFs
More accessible approach to loading ‘replied to’ tweets
33:37 Minutes In
FOSDEM Online Via Matrix
EMS (https://ems.element.io/) - Offical Matrix Hosting
https://matrix.org/blog/2021/01/04/taking-fosdem-online-via-matrix
Started with Matrix over SELF / Wanted the ability to connect with people in a free and open source decentralized client, found Matrix, got sucked in.
2021 - Altispeed officially switched to EMS Matrix instance
Public Roadmap / Can buy feature deveopment / entire sales staff to handle feature requests
Jitsi - Feature we didn't think we'd use and end up using it daily now
Matrix team are in active contact with the Jitsi team making BOTH Jitsi AND Matrix better.
FOSDEM will have its own dedicated Matrix server at fosdem.org (hosted by EMS along with a ton of Jitsi’s) acting as the social backbone for the event
Official bridges will be provided to IRC and XMPP (and most other chat systems), giving as much openness and choice as possible - if folks want to participate via Freenode and XMPP they can!
FOSDEM has spent a lot of time improving widgets recently: these give the ability to embed arbitrary webapps into chatrooms - letting you add livestreams, video conferences, schedules, Q&A dashboards etc, augmenting a plain old chatroom into a much richer virtual experience that can hopefully capture the semantics and requirements of an event like FOSDE
Attendees can lurk as read-only guests in devrooms without needing to set up accounts (or they can of course use their existing Matrix/IRC/XMPP accounts)
Every devroom and track will have its own chatroom, where the audience can hang out and view the livestream of that particular devroom (using the normal FOSDEM video livestream system).
There will also be a ‘backstage’ room per track for coordination between the devroom organisers and the speakers.
The talks themselves will be prerecorded to minimise risk of disaster, but each talk will have a question & answer session at the end which will be a live Jitsi broadcast from the speaker and a host who will relay questions from the devroom.
Each talk will have a dedicated room too, where after the official talk slot the audience can pop in and chat to the speaker more informally if they’re available (by text and/or by moderated jitsi). During the talk, this room will act as the ‘stage’ for the speaker & host to watch the livestream and conduct the question & answer session.
Every stand will also have its own chatroom and optional jitsi+livestream, as will BOFs or other adhoc events, so folks can get involved both by chat and video
There’ll also be a set of official support, social etc rooms - and of course folks can always create their own!
FOSDEM Matrix bot (https://github.com/matrix-org/conference-bot), responsible for orchestrating the hundreds of required rooms, setting up the right widgets and permissions, setting up bridges to IRC & XMPP, and keeping everything in sync with the official live FOSDEM schedule.
Call for help
Folks on XMPP often complain that the Bifröst Matrix<->XMPP bridge doesn’t support MAMs - meaning that if XMPP users lose connection, they lose scrollback. We’re not going to have time to fix this ourselves in time, so this would be a great time for XMPP folks who grok xmpp.js to come get involved and help to ensure the best possible XMPP experience!
It’d be really nice to be able to render nice schedule widgets for each devroom, and embed the overall schedule in the support rooms etc. The current HTML schedules https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/day/saturday/ and https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/room/vcollab/ don’t exactly fit - if someone could write a thing which renders them at (say) 2:5 aspect ratio so they can fit nicely down the side of a chatroom then that could be awesome!
While we’ll bridge all the official rooms over to Freenode, it’d be even nicer if people could just hop straight into any room on the FOSDEM server (or beyond) via IRC - effectively exposing the whole thing as an IRC network for those who prefer IRC. We have a project to do this: matrix-ircd, but it almost certainly needs more love and polish before it could be used for something as big as this. If you like Rust and know Matrix, please jump in and get involved!
If you just want to follow along or help out, then we’ve created a general room for discussion over at #fosdem-matrix:fosdem.org. It’d be awesome to have as many useful bots & widgets as possible to help things along.
Sign up for element on Linux Delta (https://element.linuxdelta.com/#/welcome)
44:50 Minutes In
LG Smart TVs Are Sending Your Data Home
LG Smart Ad, analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences.
http://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging-usb-filenames-and.html
There is an option in the system settings called "Collection of watching info:" which is set ON by default
This setting requires the user to scroll down to see it and, unlike most other settings, contains no "balloon help" to describe what it does
It turns out that viewing information (such as file names) appears to be being sent regardless of whether this option is set to On or Off
This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel
Domains to Block
ad.lgappstv.com
yumenetworks.com
smartclip.net
smartclip.com
llnwd.net
smartshare.lgtvsdp.com
ibis.lgappstv.com
51:00 Minutes In
FinCEN Proposes New Cryptocurrency Law
The regulation, proposed by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), would require financial institutions (like Square) to collect personal information about the parties involved in cryptocurrency transactions. You can read a deep-dive on them here, but the more important requirement is for financial institutions to collect the name and physical address of both parties of any large transaction they’re involved in.
Jack Dorsey is not happy about new crypto currency law (https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/4/22213863/jack-dorsey-cryptocurrency-fincen-regulation-letter)
Dorsey argues the regulation could end up driving customers “to use non-custodial wallets or services outside the U.S. to transfer their assets more easily,” leading to FinCEN having “less visibility into the universe of cryptocurrency transactions than it has today.” Put simply, if people have to provide private information to a bank in order to make a transaction, they’ll avoid using the bank — something the CEO describes as a perverse incentive.
Deep Dive Link (https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/22/22195834/cryptocurrency-fincen-regulations-private-wallets)
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