YearOfTheFediverse

February 15, 2021

Devon and Cornwall Linux user group meeting

The next Devon and Cornwall Linux user group meeting will be:

Date : Saturday 20th Feb 2021 Time : From 12:00 (midday) Place : meet.jit.si

Meeting type: Casual video chat discussion.

More details from the website [1]. In the mean time please feel free to join us on : -

IRC : Freenode : #dcglug Matrix : #freenode_#dcglug:matrix.org

Or social media [2]

Details are also up on Mobilizon events platform [4].

REFERENCES

1 Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux User Group 2 DCGLUG Mastodon 3 Join DCGLUG 4 Mobilizon 5 Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 12, 2021

top and htop process viewing and management

When using a GNU Linux system it is really useful to be able to manage what running process are doing, this could be simply seeing what system resources are being used, or stopping processes from running, to changing how they run with tools such as nice / renice.

The console / terminal top, gives you a view of all the running processes and allows you to control these processes easily.

TOP

top

HTOP

If you would like a slightly different tool that allows you to move up / down the process list, you may want to loop at htop. This seems to offer the same functionality as top. Top is probably better for running so you can keep an eye on what things are doing.

htop

OTHER RELATED TOOLS

These tools offer the sort of functionality that is achieved by commands such as :

ps
nice
renice
kill
killall

But you need to look these up and read up about them on on the man page(s).

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#GNU,#Process,#Managemet,#top,#htop,#tools

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 12, 2021

Astronify testing

Back in 2020 I attended a Space Telescope Science Institute lecture on Astronify and wrote a review on this.

I an going to attempt to test the software out, so the first task is to install python-pip

May as well install this for both python and python3

apt install python-pip python-pip-whl python3-pip python3-pipdeptree

pip install astronify
Collecting astronify
  Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement astronify (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for astronify

Astronify is on pypy so it makes sense to perhaps do a apt search on this:-

I found the following package

pypi2deb

apt install pypi2deb has quite a few extra requirements so may take a while

man page for pip also points to

pip search

so tried to do a search for astronify but the package seems to crash,

pip search astronify
Exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/base_command.py", line 143, in main
    status = self.run(options, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/commands/search.py", line 48, in run
    pypi_hits = self.search(query, options)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/commands/search.py", line 65, in search
    hits = pypi.search({'name': query, 'summary': query}, 'or')
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 1243, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 1602, in __request
    verbose=self.__verbose
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/_internal/download.py", line 791, in request
    return self.parse_response(response.raw)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 1493, in parse_response
    return u.close()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/xmlrpclib.py", line 800, in close
    raise Fault(**self._stack[0])
Fault: <Fault -32500: "RuntimeError: PyPI's XMLRPC API has been temporarily disabled due to unmanageable load and will be deprecated in the near future. See https://status.python.org/ for more information.">

So at first glance this may not seem useful, the error is more useful to anyone who understands it. Next step would be to ask on some forums for help.

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Astronify,#Astronony,#STSCI,#Data,#Sonification,#ESA,#Hubble,#Research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 10, 2021

Minetest

MINETEST

Source: minetest.net

An open source voxel game engine. Play one of our many games, mod a game to your liking, make your own game, or play on a multiplayer server.

Available for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android.

I have found this to be a really nice game, I never really got in to Minecraft, but this should easily appeal to those who like minecraft and similar games. Lots of options to build on this, develop levels, mods etc.

REFERENCES

Minetest
Minetest Addons
@[email protected]">Minetest – Mastodon
Lua
#minetest-dev on Freenode IRC
Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Game,#Engine,#Minetest

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 9, 2021

Astronify follow up

Back in 2020 I attended a Space Telescope Science Institute lecture on Astronify and wrote a review on this.

I found this as a result of another post on Mastodon earlier today from Khurram Wadee. This is the sonification of the Pillars of creation, within the Eagle Nebula. This nicely illustrates how the research of the Astronify team works.

There is also a video about this nebula here which is interesting.

I have included some related links below, including a link to the Qoto Mastodon instance, and the related Discourse forum where you can discuss a range of STEM topics.

Lots of research going on, which is really exciting. If you want to learn more, the Open University offer courses within the Space Sciences.

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Astronify,#Astronony,#STSCI,#Data,#Sonification,#TheOpenUniversity,#ESA,#Hubble,#Research

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 9, 2021

Safer Internet Day 2021

Tuesday 9th Feb 2021

Safer Internet Day 2021

A few resources that have been shared on the Fediverse recently

The Digital Detox website [1] gives some useful information on how to protect your digital security, privacy and well being online.

Email self defense [2] covers encryption and how you can use techniques to both sign and encrypt email.

The Free Software Foundation : India [4] have produced a nice guide on different messaging apps. I made a post on this a while back.

Of course a good way to stay safe and private is to also use the privacy respecting search engines such as duckduckgo [5] and perhaps install browser extensions such as libreJS [6]

Supporting and following what people such the Electronic Frontier Foundation [7] as the Small Technology Foundation [8] and the Solid Project [9] also a good idea, see what is happening and how these project can give the end user, true control of their data.

Choose better software and hardware, that supports user freedom. Devices such as the PineBook / Phone [10] could really put power back in your hands.

REFERENCES

1 Data Detox Kit * Five steps to reduce your digital footprint * SmartPhone Data * Privacy Search 2 Email Self Defense 3 Free Software Foundation 4 Free Software Foundation : India 5 Duckduckgo 6 LibreJS 7 Electronic Frontier Foundation * EFF – Mastodon 8 Small Technology Foundation * Aral Balkan * Laura Kalbag 9 Solid Project 10 Pinebook / Phone

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Data,#Privacy,#Security,#Detox

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 8, 2021

Sed

In my first ansi weather post I was looking at using sed to strip colour codes from the program output. It turns out and covered in the second post that all that is needed is the -a false argument to the program.

Nevertheless, sed is still worth learning. To this end, the following resources may be useful.

Sed video tutorial

If you save this in to a text file you can follow along with the video. It is similar to the text from the video.

10 Tiny Toes
this is That
One two Three
tree twice

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#gnu,#sed,#text,#manipulation

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

February 8, 2021

Debian Testing Feb 2021

I decided to have a go at upgrading a netbook Debian 10 to Debian 11. Buster –> Bullseye.

I am following the instructions found at [3]. I have also included links to release notes for both the current and next version.

Upgrade seemed to go well. However I seem to be having networking issue, so am investigating further,

REFERENCES

1 Free Software Foundation 2 Debian 3 Upgrade how_to 4 OFTC 5 Buster release notes 6 Bullseye release notes

Release codenames (for reference)

Debian 10 – Buster
Debian 11 – Bullseye
Debian 12 – Bookworm

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Debian,#Bookworm,#Testing.

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February 7, 2021

Superbowl XL

So as well as it being day two of FOSDEM. Today is Superbowl XL, this year taking place between the KC chiefs and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Last year Superbowl champions against, led by Patrick Mahomes take on Tampa Bay, led by, one of the most successful QB's, Tom Brady. This should result in excellent match up.

REFERENCES

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License