Podcast Season 3 Episode 17
| Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: C0rrectHors3BatteryStapl3!
In this episode: Linux servers are responsible for a huge DDoS botnet. HP has released its own Linux. Sarah Sharp quits the Linux kernel community, and Matthew Garrett too. Raspberry Pis are about to take a trip to the International Space Space station and ZFS is coming to Ubuntu. We’ve also got some great finds, lovely Voice of the Masses and a Brand New Section.
What’s in the show:
- News:
The XOR DDoS botnet runs on Linux. Following Microsoft’s lead, HP is releasing its own Linux Distro, OpenSwitch, built for its switches. The kernel developer behind parts of the USB 3 controller, Sarah Sharp, quits the Linux kernel community because of its lack of personal respect. In sympathy with Sarah’s post, Matthew Garrett (see this month’s issue for our for our interview with him), has decided to go it alone, even releasing his own kernel tree. Several Raspberry Pis have been handed over to the ESA in the first step of their journey to the International Space Station. And the ace filesystem, ZFS, is going to be standard in Ubuntu in due course.
- Finds of the Fortnight:
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- <TwistedLucidity> An OSS alt to Plex https://emby.media/
- <mcphail> http://kiltedcamel.com/defend-the-highlands/: tower defence, racial stereotypes and bad voice acting. What’s not to love? Surely a Find of the Fortnight?
- Mike:
- Type ‘python -m’ to launch a simple HTTP server.
- The Wikipedia page on lists of lists of lists.
- Check for changes in files with the visual diff application Meld.
- Graham:
- Zget – Zeroconf based simple file transfers across the same network (Thanks to @nlswrnr)
- A new open source email client called N1 looks wonderful.
- A comment Arthur C Clarke would be pleased with from the first issue of Spike, a boys’ weekly paper from January 22nd 1983.
- If you need a simple UART serial connection, the Raspberry Pi has one.
- Ben:
- Linux’s USB 3 drivers can affect WiFi performance.
- After many years of loyalty to Firefox, Ben is switching browsers.
- Tiny KRC86b makes it easy to build a Bluetooth speaker.
- Andrew:
- Radio 4’s History of Computing in Britain (thanks Phil!)
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- Get on your OggBox:
- Voice of the Masses: How important is open hardware?
Huge thanks to Andrew Conway for sending us his thoughts. If you’d like yours played live in our next podcast, send an Ogg Vorbis file to Mike (mike@linuxvoice.com).
If you can get to Liverpool in the North of England at the end of October, you must go to OggCamp.
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (60MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (89MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (23MB)
Duration: 1:09:10
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I have to point out: Ben seemed to think that there are 27 letters in the alphabet. An easy mistake to make, since for some odd reason muggles insist on indexing letters from 1 instead of 0!
Great pod-cast though 🙂 I just switched to chrome as well, sadly my chrome experience has been brilliant and I haven’t missed Firefox at all. Ah well, all hail Google!
Yes, my chromium experience has been abysmal with a generic ebay mouse. But I bought a Microsoft 3500-white mouse for a tenner and things greatly improved.
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Still getting the tabs opening to all the get-rich-quick schemess, though.
at least I can crash google drive by opening a picture in twitter-upload and the going into ‘Folders’; changing the name of the file [usually Gdrive crashes at this point], and then uploading the re-named file to twitter ( i.e. for bettr orientation etc. So it’s round the right way.
Haven’t listened in a while, hope my ipod -rockbox can take .ogg (Should do !)
If the version of rockbox is reasonably recent (i.e. from the last couple of years) it ought to even support the .opus files!
Mike, you should look into Diceware as an excellent implementation of dictionary-based passphrases (along with an explanation of why they work):
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
Yep History of Computing in UK works in NZ.
Computer maintainers? MAINTAINERS? You mean operators. Cor blimey. I didn’t slave over an ICL 2900 mainframe for 56 hours a day, 16 days per week, for young whipper snappers like you ‘orrid lot to call us maintainers…………. 🙂
No-script for the win! I’ve currently got 500 tabs in firefox (precisely, according to session manager) and it’s consuming ~900mb of memory. In case you’re wondering tree-style-tabs or tab-kit helps with managing that lot;)
Though startup time (from launch to usability) is quite long, but I’ve got a good window-manager so I never have to close it.
Last time I tried chromium (a very long time ago, without no-script/adblock), it’s memory usage was 4x that of firefox and it completely choked iirc around 100tabs. Though frankly that was irrelevant because there were no extensions for good tab management.
You talked about the three word password, have you seen http://what3words.com/. what3words is a unique combination of just 3 words that identifies a 3mx3m square, anywhere on the planet. Amazing! Put in your postcode and see what you get.
I have been using the Pale Moon browser, a fork of
Firefox. It looks like the old Firefox but I find it much
faster. Firefox addons work. I think it would be worth a look
for those getting fed up with FF.
I use Firefox at home on Ubuntu, it does not have a problem, only loading tabs if I go to them. I currently have nearly 250 tabs open (although typing this on a different PC as I am at work), and it does not crash, although it was not so good a few versions ago. I have script and ad blockers installed — lots of ads and scripts can cause problems with Firefox.
On the subject of available open hardware platforms, I just thought I’d mention the offerings from Bunnie Huang’s Studio Kousagi, (the Novena, et. al)
http://www.kosagi.com/
At one time it was possible to buy a complete Novena system, but apparently now one would have to buy the components and assemble them on her or his own. And, as mentioned in the podcast, even then it’s not cheap or super-powerful.