January 2017 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

An Ordinary User’s Adventures In Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Sep '17

30 Sep '17

I helped an elderly friend set up his new PC yesterday. His previous machine, over a decade old, was running Windows XP. I had set up an Ubuntu dual-boot a few years back, and he liked playing the games. But then the Linux boot stopped working--there was a message to the effect “hd0 out of disk”, which sounded like a GRUB problem (“hd0” being a GRUB disk name, not a Linux disk name). I booted up SystemRescueCD, and found that disk space was ample. I did an fsck on the Linux volume, and found no filesystem problems. I ran a badblocks scan, and it reported several bad sectors, though oddly they only seemed to be in the Windows partition (if I interpreted the numbers correctly). Naturally I searched online, but the hits I found for that error message didn’t seem very helpful. Reinstalling GRUB didn’t help, so I concluded there were likely other hardware problems, so time for a new machine. He got an entry-level dual-core AMD box from PBTech--their own house build, in a CoolerMaster case--for well under a grand. Nothing fancy, but good enough for his needs--mainly Web browsing, e-mail, a little bit of word processing, and those games. The PBTech box came without an OS. He could have got Windows 10 for it, but considering he would be facing a learning curve coming from XP regardless, I suggested going 100% Linux for all his daily needs, to see if that would work. He could always spend the $160-odd extra on Windows later if need be. So I set it up with Linux Mint, since that seems to be everybody’s favourite :). He was already using Firefox on Windows, so moving all his Web bookmarks across was easy. The Mint install put an icon for Thunderbird on the desktop by default, so I decided to try that for e-mail. Getting his address book across from Outlook Express was fairly straightforward, once I figured out how to map the exported CSV field names correctly. The mail messages were slightly more fiddly, but I found this extension <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/> which directly loads Microsoft’s .dbx files, and that seemed to work OK. Then he wanted to play CDs. When we put in an audio CD, it came up with options to run Banshee (media player) or Brasero (disc burner). The Banshee media player wouldn’t play the CD directly, it insisted on ripping it to the hard drive first. This was not really what he wanted. I had a look round, and found KsCD, which will indeed play audio CDs without trying to rip them to audio files first. As far as I know, this is the only GUI Linux app that can do so. So, day 1 ended on a reasonably successful note. He was already noticing how much faster the new machine was. So we’ll see how it goes from here...

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Look before you paste from a website to terminal
by Peter Reutemann 11 Mar '17

11 Mar '17

'Most of the time when we see a code snippet online to do something, we often blindly copy paste it to the terminal. Even the tech savy ones just see it on the website before copy pasting. Here is why you shouldn't do this.' -- source: https://lifepluslinux.blogspot.co.nz/2017/01/look-before-you-paste-from-web… Hint: hidden commands thanks to HTML/CSS. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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25G/50G Ethernet
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Feb '17

06 Feb '17

Thought there already was a 100-gigabit-per-second Ethernet spec. But it seems that still isn’t quite practical enough (cost? range?) for common use. Nor is the 40-gigabit-per-second fallback. So here we have two more lesser specs: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/31/25g_and_50g_ethernet_spec_finalised/>.

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Gitlab Backups ... What Backups?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Feb '17

02 Feb '17

A harried sysadmin accidentally deletes nearly 300GB of data during a troublesome data replication process ... and then they discover that, out of 5 different recovery procedures they thought they had available, none work. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/>

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System76 GPGPU Server
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Feb '17

01 Feb '17

System76 announces its new Ibex Pro box <http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=System76-Ibex-Pro-GPU-Se…> which can hold up to nearly 40,000 NVidia CUDA cores <https://system76.com/servers/ibex>. Not sure how many you get for that USD9,575 base price... Seems like there is no really competitive market for GPGPU hardware--it is totally dominated by NVidia, and nobody else gets a serious look-in. So the industry-standard OpenCL API languishes, since the dominant player prefers its own proprietary alternative, and there is little pressure from users to be able to port their code to competing products.

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Google AI on raspberry pi
by rowan schischka 31 Jan '17

31 Jan '17

"Google has developed a huge range of tools for machine learning, IoT, wearables, robotics, and home automation, and it wants Raspberry Pi fans to fill out a survey <https://google.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3yMNYryaP4WsCwJ?Source=RaspPi> that will help it to understand what tools to provide." http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-is-bringing-ai-to-your-raspberry-pi/ I just took the survey and I don't get any impression of what tools they will bring to the r-pi. It was pretty simple, no email address required to participate. The questions were how old are you, what area are your projects in, and how frequently do you work on your projects. Im sure with the processing power of r-pi we'll see some sort of web API which wouldn't really need to be specific to the r-pi. It will be interesting to watch what they come up with so if you have maker projects, take the survey. -- Rowan Schischka

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Backblaze 2016 Hard Drive Report
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jan '17

31 Jan '17

<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/8tb-hgst-disks-show-…>: Traditionally, the company has stuck with consumer-oriented disks. Backblaze argues that the extra cost of "enterprise" disks doesn't make sense for its usage pattern. Other studies have shown no significant difference in reliability between “enterprise” and “consumer” disks anyway.

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USB-C Power Meter
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jan '17

31 Jan '17

With all the worries over bad USB-C cables and vendors that play fast and loose with the power spec, here <https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/01/usb-c-power-meter/> is a measurement gadget that can help to some extent. But as the article says: If you really want to test a new charger or cable before plugging it into an expensive device, your best bet is some DIYish electronics involving a breakout board and a multimeter. But there doesn't seem to be a plug-and-play version of that yet.

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The Trump-And-Dump Bot
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jan '17

30 Jan '17

This bot <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/trumps_corporate_twitter_trolling_t…> analyzes Trump’s tweets, identifies the company he is badmouthing, and does a quick short-sell to profit from the momentary dip in the company’s stock value. T3's approach involves using a Python Twitter bot and API calls to services like Indico for machine learning (sentiment analysis and entity recognition), Clearbit for company identification, Google Finance for stock pricing, and E‑Trade for executing the trade. They have been donating the profits to charity. Imagine that--an ethical use for short-selling...

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Windows Users: It Might Be Time To Stop Using Antivirus
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jan '17

27 Jan '17

The nail in the coffin, according to O'Callahan, is that software vendors rarely speak out about antivirus issues "because they need cooperation from the AV vendors." He then links to a mailing list thread in 2012, where he suggests keeping a list of the AV software that interferes with Firefox. Later in the thread, Mozilla PR swoops in and tells him to knock it off. <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/antivirus-is-bad/>

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