Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday – Poking Around

Pi goes Snap! Debian disables FTP, youtube-dl gets a GUI, and mp3 is set free. All this, plus your feedback.

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan

YT GUI
https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/

I use youtube-dl all the time but this is a cool project to do the same thing outside a terminal
As the name suggests, youtube-dl lets you download videos from hundreds of different websites
There is also a non-free alternative I used to build my MTV website: 4K Download (at the time, it was the only software able to download some music videos)
Explain to me again how you not a Hobbit why people download YT videos.
- Music piracy.
- Torrents are hard for the average computer user and downloading the Youtube video let’s them play their music locally.
- I know because that’s what the computer illiterate people around me do.
If you are going to use a GUI might as well use VLC since you already have that installed.

Droid CLI
http://www.androidauthority.com/linux-cli-launcher-turns-homepage-linux-command-line-interface-767431/

How to look like a smartass with your android device
Nothing against the CLI but if I have to use a small touchscreen keyboard with no tab key, I’ll pass.
“It’s a neat way to practice your Linux commands”
- No, no it’s not and please stick to topics you know about.
This is a great tool for… what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right! Posers.
“but we don’t think the regular consumer will ever get it.”
- That’s not the target audience.
- Heck! You are not the target audience, clearly.
This is for those elitist people who want to feel superior to other people over such things.

RIP FTP
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/27/debian_to_turn_off_ftp/

The content of this app seems very questionable
There is no free plan, the app is useless without a paid subscription
- .99, 1.99, and 3.99.
- Pay someone so they can priate for you.
- ????
- Profit!
I presume the “request series” button just sends a message to the author who will torrent the series and upload the episodes on his server.
And yes, said author is also the owner of the tech news website promoting this application
DMCA takedown in 3… 2…
Redirecting me to a blank page asking me to disable my adblocker is how you get me to not look at your site.

OpenSnitch
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch

This seem to be in a very early stage compared to the Douane firewall we talked about a while back
The TODO list is just a grep command
Creates an alert for every outgoing connection applications are creating.
Great for scaring the bejesus out of people.
Do you want the nagging experience of running an Antivirus on paranoid mode? You go it!

Can’t License it No More
https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/ff/amm/prod/audiocodec/audiocodecs/mp3.html

Don’t worry, Fedora and OpenSuse will still find reasons not to include it in their repos
We covered this a few months ago but now it’s official.
People can quit screeching about podcast being distributed in *.mp3 even though they never download the *.ogg versions.
As less and less people keep local copies of their music libraries, keeping a particular format under ransom doesn’t really make sense
And I’m guessing Fraunhoffer doesn’t really want to pull a Disney with their licensing stuff.

Pulse Effects
https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects

Sure beats pulseaudio-equalizer!
Now I just wish I knew what all this audio lingo meant so I could make my music sound better
Will this allow me to lock Pulse Line-in channels?
Because if it does I owe you a throne from the skulls of your enemies.
If it does, it’s one less roadblock to getting rid of Skype.
I futzed with it for a whole of two seconds until I caught myself changing the music I was listening to to output on the speakers, physically mute the speakers and have the pulseeffects be the one outputting to my headset.
The equalizer, reverberation and compression effects work, I can tell you that much.

The security group responsible for the hack says they’re white hat and professional but it doesn’t seem very professional nor white hat to deface a website
But this will have good consequences for Unity, they will soon provide 2FA and stronger password policies
Ohnoes! Mah email address was teh haxked!
The one bit of gaming news this week isn’t exactly related to gaming.
Unless your game of choice is poking at websites until they break.

Slice of Pi

SCSI Pi
http://hackaday.com/2017/05/01/the-raspberry-pi-becomes-a-scsi-device/

It’s the SCSI version of the PATA emulator we covered a few weeks ago!
Generous use of transceivers to adapt the PI 40pin GPIO to the 50pin SCSI.
Developed by a japanese retro-computer aficionado for the Sharp x68000, a late 80’s PC which is very popular with the nostalgia computing crowd in Japan.