LWDW 256: Psst!

KDE prepares for Plasma powered fingerprints! Linus blames Intel for killing ECC memory, mounting browser tabs as a filesystem, and Raspberry Pi tally lights. All this and so much more on this week’s LWDW.


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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:33 Faulty Blackmagic products
10:46 KDE updates
14:01 Linus on ECC
19:30 Kernel 5.11rc2 & AMD
24:15 Spotify in Rust.
30:20 Command line Wiki
33:45 Tab file system.
39:15 Raspberry Pi tally lights
44:30 Emails


My Decklink Adventure

  • I’ve been sitting on this for six months trying to give BM the benefit of doubt. 
  • I have run out of benefits. 
  • Second comment on YT was someone with the same problem. 
  • I don’t typically do videos like this but someone needs to call them out on their nonsense. 
  • If anyone gets the chance, share the video. 
  • At best it spurs them into action and at worst it will prevent someone else from making the same mistake. 
  • Also, rate my clickbait thumbnail. 

 

KDE 2021

  • I love the new “Milky Way” wallpaper for KDE Plasma 5.21.
  • Native fingerprint login/password, something that’s been working in GNOME of all things since at least 2018.
    • Might have been earlier, but 2018 is when I tried it on the X230 and it worked really well.
  • They fixed the Blueteeth devices getting listed in the bluedevil applet even if they weren’t paired.
  • Reverted the slight screwup of not allowing the panel to be resized if it was on the left of the screen.
  • What I’d like fixed are the occasional memory leaks with kwin_x11
  • Because that’s still happening!
  • QT is about to suffer some growing pains

 

Linus on ECC

  • Linus is right, and there is a reason why Error-correcting Code memory is used in servers and workstations.
  • For stability, mission critical applications and where data corruption can’t be tolerated.
  • And ECC memory should be used in consumer desktops, despite it being a bit slower than standard DRAM.
  • Back in the day ECC was mainstream, but Intel being Intel phased it out on non Xeon platforms. 
  • Google’s conclusion from 2009 was straightforward.
  • “We found the incidence of memory errors and the range of error rates across different DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) to be much higher than previously reported… Memory errors are not rare events.”
  • AMD support is unofficial and Intel is still limited to Xeon so manufacturers don’t have much of an incentive to crank the stuff out. 
  • I’m not going to say I’ve never had bad memory but, something…. I forget. 
  • With Ryzen and the general enthusiast market being more willing to fiddle with memory speed and timings, a lot of those tiny errors are exponentially increased.
  • I’d love to get some 3866MT/s ECC memory , but it just doesn’t seem to exist.
  • And if it did, it’d be pretty damn expensive.
  • ECC for the desktop makes sense if you are overclocking but that’s about it. 
  • The system I’m on only counts as a desktop if you squint, and I never considered ECC because it’s stock. 

 

5.11rc2 Ft. AMD

  • And we mentioned that this was in the works, it includes support for the Guitar Hero controllers and the OUYA Game Console.
  • Another huge dump of AMD GPU descriptor header files.
  • Proper SD Express card support is very nice to see!
  • Now I just need the Pis and laptops of the world to support SDUC UHS-III properly.

 

Rusty Spots

  • Love it or hate it a lot of people use Spotify. 
  • Most of the clients I have come across are, you guessed it. Electron. 
  • This little guy is 99.9% Rust. 
  • It’s in early development and looking for contributors. 
  • It’s missing support for podcasts ATM. 
  • Didn’t want to build on Debian Bullseye.
  • It’s nice to have other Spotify apps on Linux other than the official one.
  • Also, Psst uses librespot as its core.
  • Librespot is the Open Source Spotify client library for Rust.
  • And for those of you who prefer a Spotify player that consumes even less memory, there are two new Spotify apps that run in CLI that are also written in Rust:
  • If you really must have an open source client for your proprietary music platform.
  • Heck, most people who want to use Spotify are using Spotify.
  • Be it the .deb or the snap.
  • Unless this blocks ads, then I would very much like this to be a thing yesterday.

 

The ultimate “Well Actually”

  • Cool, you can get Wikipedia summaries from the command line with this little app without touching a web browser!
  • Examples:
    • $ wikit Star Trek
    • $ wikit Wicket Ewok, from Star Wars ;-)
    • $ wikit linux –link, to print a link to the whole article after the Linux query
  • Contribute to Wikipedia if you can, to keep it going, so brilliant projects like this will survive.
  • Wikit wikit –wild -k wild -v West. 
  • Jungle is massive.

 

Librephotos

  • LibrePhotos has all of the convenience of Google Photos without sacrificing your privacy.
  • It has AI for face recognition, can generate albums, and has object detection in photos just like Google Photos.
  • And it is a great way to backup all your photos and videos that are stored in the Google cloud.
  • And screenshots in the Git! YAY!

 

tabfs all the things!

  • TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer, and maps each of your tabs to a folder.
  • So now you can browse all the files in a folder and use your existing tools to manipulate them.
  • Such as listing the titles of all the tabs you have open in command line using cat.
  • Or being able to save text of all your tabs to one file.
  • This is a brilliant way to organize many websites in one category in one place.
  • For example, all the text from web pages we use in our LWDW show notes!
  • Batch saving files, scripts and images for later retrieval from web pages is extremely handy and quick compared to saving web pages one at a time. 
  • I know I could get up to something malicious with this but I can’t seem to figure out what. 
  • I can see the use case, and having control of the tabs in your browser like you would a file in a folder is neat.
  • But to me it doesn’t make much sense when I can CTRL+U to see the source and CTRL+W to close them.

Slice of Pi

Tally Pi

  • The few times I worked with multiple proper cameras, they had tiny red LEDs as tally lights.
  • I guess this makes it so you don’t need to squint to figure out if you’re looking at the right camera.
    • Correct.
  • This is handy for preventing the look away while talking to camera effect. 
  • It’s not really needed outside of live since modern NLEs support multicam editing.  

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