LWDW: Goodbye Linux Journal

Linux Journal reaches EOL, System76 disables Intel’s Management Engine, Edge comes to Android and TeamViewer 13 goes native. All this plus your emails.

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Brad Smithee (new patreon)
AdmiralJT (USB ground-loop breakers from our Wishzone)

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Colour key – Venn Pedro Jordan

News

RIP Linux Journal
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication

It’s sad to see a non-clickbait publication go out of existence.
I think they relied on some type of subscription model.
You can grab the archive for 25 bucks
This sorta speaks to a larger issue of quality journalism dying. The sad fact is that nobody wants to pay for news. They’d rather get ads and clickbait
I honestly can’t remember what the last thing it was I read on Linux Journal.
I’m almost positive it was a story we talked about on this very show but I can’t remember.

Mozilla release their voice nuggets
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/29/announcing-the-initial-release-of-mozillas-open-source-speech-recognition-model-and-voice-dataset/

has an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings
the world’s second largest publicly available voice dataset
pre-built packages for Python, NodeJS and a command-line binary
400,000 recordings, representing 500 hours of speech.
Once again, mozilla is attempting to play the smart long game
Making it opens source and available will allow a lot of clever people to get a huge jump start on voice recognition enabled apps.
They’re still accepting english contributions and will be opening up other languages in 2018
Around 6% error rate in word recognition for something that’s only just started, that’s not bad.

When even Google fails
https://fossbytes.com/tldr-pages-linux-man-pages-alternative/

a collection of simplified and community-driven man pages.
Cliff notes for man pages.
If you have access to a terminal you have access to Lynx, thus Google.
I see nodejs as a dependency and I run
I think this is an attempt at addressing a very real issue though. Man documentation is not that well organized and incredibly variable in quality
There really should be a larger mandate to include more practical examples in man pages
This would’ve made RTFM less painful to deal with in 2005.

Yeah they will
https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Existing-AM4-Motherboards-Will-Support-Upcoming-Raven-Ridge-Desktop-APUs-BIOS-Upda

I thought the VGA port on the back of my B350 was just for show.
- Sometimes they cram a GPU on the chipset too
Still waiting on those ryzen APU laptops. Gonna yank me one of them
In the meantime, in Intel land, you need different sockets (and therefore motherboards) to use processors of the same generation.

System 76 does the right thing
http://blog.system76.com/post/168050597573/system76-me-firmware-updates-plan

Know thy audience.
DELL is also making this option available.
I wonder if other companies will take up a similar tack
- Also wonder if they’ll be providing an option to nix the amd PSP as well in newer ryzen based systems
- Other companies have started to do this. Dell being the most prominent.

Will you install it?
https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/30/microsofts-edge-browser-is-now-available-for-android-and-ios/

$3.50 says MS will have Edge on Linux by the end of 2018.
Anyone want to take that Pepsi challenge?
I think it’ll start making it’s way onto consumer android phones soon as a default browser.
- Thanks patent extortion

I made a thing
https://linuxgamecast.com/2017/12/l-g-c-how-to-rename-pulseaudio-devices/

One person may find this usefull in the future and they will be ecstatic.
This is 100% a YU no built into pavucontrol.
This is a poorly documented feature.

Swag 17.12
https://swagarch.github.io/#about

Arch for people who don’t want to read good?
Naturally there is an ARCH distro called Swag.

Remember remember
https://github.com/yauhen-l/remember-last-position-totem-plugin

It’s a neat little plugin, but let’s be real. Nobody uses totem. They just install VLC, which has this already.
I use totem for previewing our videos and taking screenshots.
Willing to bet a lot of people use it because built in.
I tend to watch most of my Linux *.iso’s through Plex because it does this across all devices.

Plasma Mobile [tech] Preview on QEMU/KVM container of business (Steve0)
http://blog.bshah.in/2017/11/23/emulate-plasma-mobile/

Get a headstart on developing your mobile enabled KDE apps
Could be useful if a KDE phone ever came to fruition

No good will come of this
https://www.contextis.com/blog/dont-feed-them-after-midnight-reverse-engineering-the-furby-connect

Apparently the new furbies are part of the internet of shit!
So when can we hack them to just play black sabbath?

European Parliament has approved budget for VLC bug bounty program
https://hackerone.com/vlc

I’m team all gubments should only use open source so, good.
- ^
Lower bounties are sub 750, but a top tier critical bug could net you 2000 euro. Pretty sweet
I’m glad more and more companies are adopting a bug bounty programme.
Looking at you, Apple.

Teamviewer native
https://community.teamviewer.com/t5/Linux/Update-TeamViewer-13/td-p/24537

Never used it but if it’s native (non electron) I would be interested in giving a look.
They’ve ditched wine and gone full QT
There’s outgoing remote control support for wayland, but you gotta be running X if you want to take over a system
Kids, if you ever think that it’s a good idea to install Ubuntu on your parents’ computers, make sure you get intimately familiar with this app
- Or you set tigervnc up and forward port whatever you set it to on the router.
Which actually brings the biggest selling point teamviewer’s ever had. No need to forward any ports.
But it’s also the reason when their central servers got hacked, everyone was at risk because even if you were not actively using it, it would still broadcast the connection code and pin to the server.
They changed that behavior but I trust it even less now.
And as I say this: https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/teamviewer-hacking-tool.html?m=1

Slice of Pi

ICU
https://hackaday.com/2017/11/29/rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light-with-a-raspi-night-vision-camera/

DIY sex tapes
- The footage totally does have that “One night in Paris” look to it.

Cliiiiick
https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/30/google-diy-ai-camera-kit-raspberry-pi/

Comes with a Intel Movidius MA2450 IPU and software to drive it that can recognize either faces, up to 1000 objects, or differentiate between people and animals
Could potentially be combined with the former story for additional shenanigans

Vivaldi Pi
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/12/vivaldi-browser-arm-raspberry-pi

Is the Pi 3 usable with a GUI?\
- Is it usable with webkit and a GUI is the real question
I remember setting up X on the Pi 1 and had a yeah, no moment.

Feedback

Boxes
https://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?tdarNZ1