Podcast Season 3 Episode 2
|Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: Schneier’s Law
In this episode: There’s yet another serious Linux vulnerability to contend with, but there are new Linux machines from Dell. Bodhi Linux is making a return and there’s a new version LibreOffice, including a version for Android. We’ve got lots of tasty Finds and a Voice of the Masses about old hardware.
What’s in the show:
- News:
- The glibc GHOST buffer overflow vulnerability is remotely triggerable and potentially a serious threat to your servers. Here’s the Super Mario World exploit being performed on a real SNES (rather than an emulator). Dell has updated and expanded its Linux-running Developer Edition range. Bodhi Linux has returned from the abyss, bringing with it a release candidate of 3.0. LibreOffice 4.4 has been released, and there’s now a beta version, of sorts, for Android.
- Finds of the Fortnight:
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- <dije> Umm… Quodlibet sucks less than Rhythmbox, Banshee etc. Does that count? And its companion tagging app, ExFalso, is teh smartness..
- <dije> Here’s a newbie-friendly one: To get Your Picture Here in the login session “greeter”, put a 96×96 pixel PNG file called .face in your home dir. Maybe that’s for a newb section in the mag; not really a “find”.
- <dije> For the keyboard-centric anti-mousing fanatic, Conkeror is a web browser based on the same XulRunner engine that Firefox uses. Very efficient. Runs some but not all Firefox plugins — basically the ones that don’t assume Firefox presentation widgets are always present. Very Emacs-y in conception and implementation, including being customizable and even reprogrammable at runtime, using standard JavaScript.
- <AdamDBrown> RFC 1149 IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers.
- Graham:
- Head tracking with OpenTracker and LinuxTrack.
PaperWorks is an open source Evernote/Google Keep note taking platform.
- Andrew:
- Valve had an in-house economist who is now Greece’s new Finance Minister.
- Ben:
- linux.conf.au 2015 has put all its talks online.
- Daala is a completely open and uniquely engineered (by Mozilla and Xiph.Org Foundations) video codec that even has its own Javascript implementation.
- Evolve OS’s beta Budgie desktop is looking rather good.
- Mike:
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- Vocalise Your Neurons:
- New Year apathy means we have no neurons. But if you’d like yours read out next time, email them to mike@linuxvoice.com.
- Voice of the Masses: What’s your oldest machine running Linux?
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (57MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (80MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (23MB)
Duration: 1:08:44
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
11 Comments
The link for PaperWorks has an odd at the end of the href breaking the link.
Thanks for letting us know. It’s fixed now.
On old hardware: as a rough guide 1W costs about £1/$1/€1 per year. So running an old PC full time could cost a few hundred per year. (Getting a Watt meter is a good investment).
RFC1149 was implemented as a test by the Bergen Linux User Group in 2001 – http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149. I think the TTL needs to be quite high…
This article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers) also lists updated versions of the RFC and some other pigeon-based data transmission tests.
You mentioned Xsnow in the podcast. It was a simple, but nice application. It really put me in the Christmas mood, and I used to have it running each December. Unfortunately, it stopped working on modern Linux desktop systems years ago.
When KDE 4 was launched it included a falling snow desktop effect, which looked much better than Xsnow (though it didn’t include any Santas or reindeers). But unfortunately it disappeared in later releases.
The boot menu and boot loading screen in openSUSE used to change into a snowy winter scene with falling penguins occasionally (randomly) in Descember, but I’m not sure if this is enabled in the later releases.
Nowadays, there’s very little Christmas stuff available for Linux. The VLC logo and icon changes into a cone with a Christmas hat around Christmas. And for Kopete, you can use the ‘Default-plus’ emoticion theme, which includes the Santa smiley: *<|:-)
For Winter-themed Linux-games, you can take a look at Pingus and Extreme Tux Racer. Pingus also includes a few Christmas-themed levels, IIRC.
Regarding what Andrew was saying about economies in video games, the young adult novel For The Win by Cory Doctorow explores this concept in a lot of detail. It’s also a really good story, I’d recommend it!
If you have problems getting wifi to run on an MBP, try sticking to BCMWL via DKMS and pin it to version 6.2.155.
I had excellent results on a 8,1 (13″, late 2011) with a BMC4331 – just don’t forget to lock the package version of BCMWL by telling pacman to ignore any subsequent updates.
The only downside is that the BCMWL source may need a bit of hand-holding when updating to newer kernel versions. But then we all know and love C, don’t we? 🙂 Otherwise we wouldn’t be using Arch in the first place I suppose…
Let me know if you need more details.
Why specifically mention “the Russian Mafia”? I find that quite offensive.
Why do you find it offensive?
I feel a little hipster for knowing about QuodLiber since 2006, and for that being my player of choice. I don’t remember why or when I drop it.
As for the dual SIM phones, they are useful when you live in a huge country like Brazil where there are different location codes. So if you have to travel a lot between cities with different codes (say, Campinas [19] and São Paulo [11]), you’d use the local chip so you don’t have pay for roaming, nor for long distance call taxes.
Great podcast guys – it makes working out so much more enjoyable 😀
One of you guys mentioned a cheap $3 Playstation camera on Amazon you could take and hack into a motion tracker. Do you guys happen to have a link to aforementioned camera? I’ve got a project idea that I think would be really fun to try out that I could definitely use that in!