Mauritius Oil

Back in October, there was a Major oil spill in Mauritius. Thanks to other news, this has largely been forgotton about.

This is the worst ecological disaster that the country has ever known.  

Before the leak was stopped, around 1000 tonnes of oil leaked from the ship and severely contaminated the precious shoreline and lagoons.

A reminder that this happened, an article from, back in October, by Ecowatch is here

Really good article, if there is a follow up to show what the long term consequences of this were I will post it.

For anyone unsure of where Mauritius is, there is a map below from Open Street Map.

View Larger Map

REFERENCES

• Greenpeace
• Greenpeace Mastodon
• Ecowatch
• Open Street Map

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Oil,#Spill,#Mauritius,#Greenpeace,#October20,Ecologial,#Wildlife,#Environment

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Arduino in Debian

Announcement from Feb 1st, Arduino software is now back in Debian. It is currently in the Testing release, so should hopefully be back in the main distribution very soon.

Read more on the Debian Blog

REFERENCES

• Arduino
• Debian
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#debian,#arduino,#electronics

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Debian 10.8

The Debian team have released the latest point update to Debian 10 (Buster) taking the release from 10.7 (from December) to 10.8.

You can update in the usual way

There is a really useful guide here from ChrlsGrmmg, on creating install media with dd.

REFERENCES

• Debian
• Debian blog page
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Debian,#Release,#Update,#108.

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20.04.2 LTS

Lubuntu 20.04.2, has been relesed, this is the lastest of the LTS (Long Term Support) updates for the system. You can find more info on the blog page.

Lubuntu is a derivative of the Ubuntu Operating system which in turn is built on Debian. Links in the list below.

Lubuntu is great for both low and high specification systems, and can help bring new life to old hardware, which given the number of people without devices could be a really effective way to help bridge the digital divide.

Organizations such as the good thing foundation help to build digital skills, sadly this does not cover fully free and open source software, let alone decentralized social media networks such as Mastodon.

There is no reason why LibreOffice can't be taught and promoted along side MS Office.

The more people to ASK for support with things like Lubuntu etc they will hopefully eventually provide the choice and associated support for alternatives.

REFERENCES

• Free Software Foundation
• Lubuntu
• Ubuntu
• Debian
• Join Mastodon
• good thing foundation
• LibreOffice

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Lubuntu,#LTS,#release,#FreeSoftware,#Ubuntu,#Debian,#LibreOffice,#Mastodon

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Ansi Weather 2

Further to my previous post on ansi weather

I wrote this, which asks for your location, and displays the weather.

echo "where do you live ?"
read location
ansiweather -l $location

In my previous post I was trying to use sed to clean up the output, this isn't needed as the -a option removes the colour coding from the output

ansiweather -a false -l Plymouth, UK >> weatherinfo.txt

Produces

Weather in Plymouth => -10 °C – Wind => 1.72 m/s NNW – Humidity => 62 % – Pressure => 1028 hPa

Which is far better.

so our new shell script is

1 #send weather info to Mastodon
  2 # current date
  3 date > weatherinfo.txt
  4 # current weather
  5 # use -a false to remove colour from output, set location, output to a file
  6 ansiweather -a false -l Plymouth, UK >> weatherinfo.txt
  7 # output to console too
  8 ansiweather -a false -l Plymouth, UK
  9 #send to Mastodon
 10 toot post < weatherinfo.txt
 11 # done
 12 echo done

So the final output to Mastodon is

There are more options in the READ.me file

Thank you to Noisytoot for helping with this.

If you now combine the 2nd script with the one I have at the top of this page you should be able to input your location, then get the local weather.

REFERENCES

• READ.me file
• man ansiweather – for the man page
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#ansiweather,#weather,#mastodon,#bash,#console,#terminal #information

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

February STSCI lecture review

This months lecture Milky Way vs Andromeda: When galaxies collide. was really interesting, and covered material about how galaxies are formed, looking for life and what may happen when in 7 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy merges with our own, home galaxy.

The lecture also talked about how galaxies were first discovered and how, only in the last 100 years have we really started to learn a lot more about them. Why the two will merge is linked to the expansion of the universe.

Earth, of course, won't exist by then. The sun, being 4 billion years old, will have expanded to a red giant. As the duration of a 'main sequence star' is about 10 billion years (cite OU Open Learn The Sun)

So the lecture also included about how we could find earth 2.0, the fact that this. may not be easy given the time it will take to reach even the nearest start.

Proxima Centauri (4.2ly) and the planet around that isn't very hospitable.

Personal comment to add to this

I would guess it also raises the question if it will take 10's of 1000s of years to reach will it be the same or have developed to be more life friendly, then on the other side of that a planet that is life friendly now, may like the Earth not be so friendly i 1000's of years time.

Looking forward to the next lecture in March.

REFERENCES

• Space Telescope Science Institute
• Lecture Link

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#galaxies,#space,#Telescope,#stsci,#Science,Physics,#Astronomy

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Hedgewars

HEDGEWARS

Further to the post on Warmux, this is a nice game but no longer maintained. A similar game called Hedgewars [1]. The characters are different (hedgehogs), better graphics but the game play is still centred around artillery and strategy.

Screenshots

REFERENCES

• Hedgewars
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,

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Warmux

Warmux is a clone of the turn based artillery game Worms, which was very popular Team17 game from the 90's. This works really well on my set up and is a fun distraction.

Menuscreen showing various options

Ingame screen

Ingame screen

Ingame screen

REFERENCES

• Fossgames page
• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Games,Strategy,#Warmux, #FreeSoftware

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LibreOffice 7.1 released

LibreOffice 7.1 [1] has been released, more improvements and features, better compatibility with MS Office documents. OMG Ubuntu [2] has a run through of the new features.

REFERENCES

1 LibreOffice 2 OMG Ubuntu 3 Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#LibreOffice,#Office,#Writer,#Calc,#Base,#Draw,#Math.

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Matrix

Matrix is a communication protocol. You can read a more detailed description here and I have found a video which an introduction below.

The Devon and Cornwall linux user group now have their IRC channel bridged to Matrix, this means that the channel #dcglug can be accessed by anyone who has either an IRC client, Matrix Client or connects to IRC via the web interface for example. This opens up the chat to far more people, which is a good thing.

DCGLUG Matrix channel : #freenode_#dcglug:matrix

REFERENCES

• Free Software Foundation

TAGS

#YearOfTheFediverse,#Matrix,#Decentralised, #communication #Communication.

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