January 2024 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

anyone have this bell item?
by Karen Lewellen 06 Mar '25

06 Mar '25

hi all, Layered times, leaving me reading more than commenting. My landlord wishes to provide, but cannot seem to successfully secure from bell, the box below. it's a basic bell cable box vip2502 https://www.bellmts.ca/support/tv/fibe-tv/installation-and-setup/arris-vip2… Anyone have this sitting in a closet? Might be wise to confirm the idea will work. This entire property, even outside, has bell fibe for home coverage including internet..But my on going issues with them have me a bit scared. Thanks, Kare Who has not given up on Over The Air, just gauging offered options.

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Feature Highlight - Wayland Compositor Hand-Off
by Scott Sullivan 24 May '24

24 May '24

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/ This is a robustness improvements that let Wayland clients (applications/programs) gracefully survive and reconnect with the Wayland Compositor after a crash / restart or even complete replacement with a different Wayland compositor. X11 Server, from what I understood in my old explorations, architecturally it would not have been possible to get there from within the limits of X11's design. As someone who daily drives KDE Plasam Wayland, I'm really looking forward to this coming down stream. I've at various time suffered the pain of loosing my whole session over crash bugs. A frustrating, but thankfully brief example was a combination of PrusaSlicer and the QT file dialog triggering a compositor crash. It really takes me back 15 years, when the same level of instability was in X11's ecosystem. But I switched to KDE's Wayland compositor because there are meaningful parts that are already surpassing the prior art, and competing with what the commercial OSes are putting out. -- Scott Sullivan

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Ongoing war story (currently losing the battle)
by Peter King 12 Feb '24

12 Feb '24

I had a Lenovo Legion T5 that went very bad on me (short story: do not buy this computer!), and while getting a replacement case/motherboard/CPU all set up, hauled out an older computer with which to get work done while the replacement gets up to speed. Well, now this older machine is acting up. For a while it would not boot unless mouse, keyboard, and monitor were all attached. It runs an AMIbios from 2009, and a bit of googling showed that back in the day that did happen as a "feature" of consumer computers (rather than servers). So each time I needed to reboot I just plugged in all that stuff, rebooted, and then unplugged it all again, and the old computer ran just fine. That worked around a dozen times. Today I set out to reboot the old computer to get some work done, plugged everything in, and ... nothing. Never even got to the BIOS screen. No luck with multiple attempts. Changed the HDMI cable, still nothing. Took off the side panel and saw that when I turn on the power to the system, the CPU fan and the case fans come on, but it doesn't look like anything else does. It could be the graphics card, or the power supply, or the CMOS battery, or something else. Any suggestions for what to try next? -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42

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war story: preliminary adventures with RDP / Remmina / Flatpak
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 02 Feb '24

02 Feb '24

We use Windows for tax programs. Linux doesn't have these programs. So we need to run Windows once in a while. Dual-booting works fine but it isn't the most convenient setup. Running Window in a VM would be great but I haven't figured out how to do that. Licencing is part of the issue. So: Remote Desktop (RDP) would seem to be a solution. The RDP server (i.e. the computer running Windows, backwards from X) has to be running Win 11 Pro. We have a computer that can do that. There are several Linux RDP clients. Remmina gets the best press. So that's what I chose. Remmina comes pre-installed on Fedora 39 (at least I don't remember installing it)/ My adventures so far are documented here: <https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/rdp-client-remmina-fails-to-connect-…> Summary: - Remmina didn't work - Gnome Connections did work (but people recommend against it as a client) - Remmina was installed as a flatpak - when I replaced it with normal packages, it worked $ flatpack remove org.remmina.Remmina $ sudo dnf install remmina If I were on Team Flatpak I'd debug why the flatpack version didn't work. My hunch is that it may be because I'm not using the systemd-resolver. More to learn. Like what these diagnostics mean: [11:08:55:918] [51240:52086] [ERROR][com.freerdp.common.settings] - [freerdp_settings_get_bool] Invalid key index 131 [11:08:55:918] [51240:52086] [ERROR][com.freerdp.common.settings] - [freerdp_settings_get_bool] Invalid key index 0 [11:08:55:114] [51240:52086] [WARN][com.freerdp.crypto] - Certificate verification failure 'self-signed certificate (18)' at stack position 0 [11:09:36:154] [51240:52086] [WARN][com.freerdp.core.rdp] - pduType PDU_TYPE_DATA not properly parsed, 562 bytes remaining unhandled. Skipping.

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An anomaly with the `date` command
by mwilson＠Vex.Net 31 Jan '24

31 Jan '24

Discovered when I ran my script to run pcal and refresh my next-month calendar, and got March. mwilson@ningabel:~$ date Tue 30 Jan 2024 04:23:27 PM EST mwilson@ningabel:~$ date -d'this month' +%m 01 mwilson@ningabel:~$ date -d'next month' +%m 03 mwilson@ningabel:~$ which date /usr/bin/date mwilson@ningabel:~$ date --version date (GNU coreutils) 9.1 Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Written by David MacKenzie. mwilson@ningabel:~$ Running Debian 12.2.0-14 patched up to last Friday. I suppose that in a couple of days next month really will be March, and the bug will be gone.

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war story: Brother printer won't turn on
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

My LASER printer / scanner, a Brother MFC-L2729DW, would not power on. Normally something like this is due to a power supply failure, but I googled and found this: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgkHv1c01tQ> (The video is incomplete; there is another one that is linked from the first, but all the useful info is in the first.) Following his instructions, I found that I could reset the machine to work. But he said that it would fail again on a power failure or even just turning it off. Furthermore, doing this too many times breaks the printer. It turns out that settings are kept in a RAM that is powered by a supercapacitor (instead of a battery). Furthermore, that supercapacitor wears out. All you need to do to fix the printer is to replace the supercapacitor. The video claims all recent Brother printers have these supercapacitors. The video shows you how the replace the supercapacitor. You need a new supercapacitor, which he will sell you. Armed with this information, I - bought a suitable supercapacitor from digikey.ca (cheaper and faster than ordering from Australia). Actually I bought a slightly smaller one, but that seems to be OK. The original was 0.33F, 5.5V. I paid $3.48 for two, plus $8.00 shipping, plus HST. - pulled apart the printer, as per video - hacked out the old supercapacitor and soldered (badly) the new supercapacitor. (Doing the job right would have required removing the circuit board. Instead, I left the old supercapacitor's legs and soldered the new one's legs to the old ones.) - struggled to get the plastic panel back in place. It works.

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Re: [GTALUG] Ongoing war story (currently issues of user trust)
by Peter King 24 Jan '24

24 Jan '24

Can't say that I disagree with any of this. I protested when the UofT decided to amalgamate all its services on Microsoft Server (to no avail), and even more so when they made it all but impossible not to use Outlook (after using mutt happily for years and years) - on the grounds that Outlook somehow had "more modern" security, which turned out to be doublespeak for "proprietary closed-source protocols" for accessing the mailserver that they now controlled. Rewriting links and pushing their brand is the completely predicable result. I tried to warn people in IT that this was all security theatre, but they, like me, were victims of decisions made by administrative staff rather than made by informed technical experts. There you have it. Just recently I was told that the University would not allow me to ssh in to my office computer "because ssh had to be protected from the internet" (!), and instead I was supposed to use some binary blob to create a VPN into the UofT network -- and how having one point of entry into the whole system, trusted internally, "improves" security over a single ssh connection to a single computer, I could not tell you (and neither can they). But it's policy, so that ends discussion. On 1/20/24 02:51, ac via talk wrote: > <https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazo…> <snip> > Anyway, so to issues of user trust: To me, it seems that utoronto.ca > uses/pays Microsoft and outgoing emails, opens and reads all email > Even https links in already replied to chains (which are now seen as > outgoing links from the users@ utoronto.ca - are clearly - visited, > indexed, checked/scanned (probably Microsoft would say : the > websites/domains/links etc are scanned for malware, I would say that > Microsoft has previously, and in the past, simply 'blocked', 'broken' or > done other things to various websites it does not 'like') > > It does so many other things as well, one small one being > 'brand dilution' as readers and senders of emails and DM etc etc > - where names are re-written to the Microsoft or Facebook or > whatever abbreviated link brand name - > > this serves to underline the brand doing the re-writing - as the "safe" > link in the above example - COULD easily been displayed as AMAZON > (with the actual a href -> protection.outlook.com/ as in example: > <a href='https:outlook.com'>https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Famazon.co…</a> > > Which would then just display the original link, but with an outlook > landing. > > BUT - Microsoft 'chooses' to display : > protection.outlook.com?var=very.long.&data=ascii.long.long.long.long.long.long.long.long.long.long.long > > Apparently because users@ utoronto.ca (and microsoft users) send > out malware links and this is a way that Microsoft chooses to try to > protect recipients and their users from malware/abuse - instead of > their users or recipients relying on other software, like browsers, > local anti virus, local script blockers, etc (taking the control away) -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-946-3170 ofc Toronto, ON M5R 2M8 CANADA http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/ ========================================================================= GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC 36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42) gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42

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HowTo: mail with mutt, davmail, exchange, and XOAUTH2
by John Sellens 22 Jan '24

22 Jan '24

Peter King and Dave Collier-Brown expressed interested in using mutt (or other IMAP client) with exchange, and I thought this might be of general interest. So a new thread. I've been using mutt and davmail to do Office365 (exchange style) mail for almost two years, and it has been working great for me. I archive my mail into mbox files on my local machine, but there should be nothing preventing saving to IMAP folders (other than more typing). I mentioned this in a list message in April last year I use this to access work M365 and Seneca College M365, which both require multi factor authentication. On my ubuntu desktop/laptop I install the packages davmail and openjfx, and my ~/.davmail.properties includes (among others) davmail.mode=O365Interactive davmail.url=https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx davmail.smtpPort=1025 at startup/login I run ( davmail -server > /dev/null 2>&1 & ) and my .muttrc has things like set imap_user="jsellens(a)example.com" set spoolfile=imap://localhost:1143/INBOX set smtp_url = "smtp://jsellens@example.com@localhost:1025/" set smtp_authenticators = "login" set ssl_force_tls = no Start up mutt, get prompted for password, get popup window asking for two factor (e.g. google authenticator, or duo push), comply, and there's my mail. And davmail is willing to cache credentials, so I don't always have to two factor. Note that this does not require IMAP access to M365 - it uses the "normal" exchange protocols, just like Outlook would. Feel free to let me know if you run into problems, and I'll try to help. Hope that's helpful! John

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Re: [GTALUG] Ongoing war story (currently issues of user trust)
by David Collier-Brown 20 Jan '24

20 Jan '24

On 2024-01-20 02:51, ac via talk wrote: > On Fri, 19 Jan 2024 22:44:01 -0500 > Alvin Starr via talk<talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: >> I have a client who buys systems fromhttps://www.servergiant.net/ >> I have also bought systems from them. >> The prices will not be as cheap as a minipc from amazon but you can >> get a decent HP or Dell tower system. >> > <snip snip> >>> On 1/19/24 17:53, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote: >>>> | From: Peter King via talk<talk(a)gtalug.org> > <snip snip> >>>> <https://can01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazo…> > look at these two "links" above, see whence they came, what they > were and what actually happened :) > > to me, it is interesting that there are so very many things (and > increasing at an alarming pace every and each passing day) Yes: we suffer from that at work, because we use some MS services. > Apparently because users@ utoronto.ca (and microsoft users) send > out malware links and this is a way that Microsoft chooses to try to > protect recipients and their users from malware/abuse - instead of > their users or recipients relying on other software, like browsers, > local anti virus, local script blockers, etc (taking the control away) We also use a company to send us "practice" phishing emails. /*Every single one of those*/ I've received were marked as spam when I submitted them to spamcop.net. Spamcop is the service I use for my home emails. --dave

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Re: [GTALUG] "AI" on getting correct technical answers
by o1bigtenor 17 Jan '24

17 Jan '24

On Sun, Jan 14, 2024 at 3:06 AM ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > snip > > And, it's just a generic LLM. I've heard experienced developers > > saying surprisingly positive things about GitHub's Copilot for quite > > a while now. > > As for the SQL issue - all search queries on Qwant / DDG / Google > > lead to "how to join tables in SQL"; utterly useless. I know that > > reasonably well. > > And, who hasn't had a search lead them to StackOverflow where the > > highest rated answer is strongly condemned further in the comments as > > being wrong / out of date / insecure, etc.? > > > Actually, this is an interesting point. > > Google search seems to prioritise answers from humans and human sources. > > I searched on Microsoft the other day and was surprised to see that I > could supply .js snippets (which I did not code and was too lazy to > read through) and receive a correct answer direct from "search" > > So, us humans will be replaced as 'coders" - Machines will be writing > the code which powers machines. Not only is that something for us to > understand fully, but we also have to comprehend where we are all > choosing to go. > > It is like watching episodes of "the Traitors" and seeing how the > majority votes out a faithful. > > there is just nothing to do but be along for the ride :) > > > Lots of incorrect answers supplied by humans. > > > indeed, if only there was some way to 'sort' or use advanced search to > set dates... (to exclude popular answers from 2009) or do more settings > on search options... oh, wait.... - and then there are no search > results... when is "search" not "search" and just becomes "answer" - > interesting! - it is like a mobile phone - it is hardly even a mobile > phone any longer, why do so many people still call it a 'phone' or a > mobile phone... > > I think though that I will still be using Google for search, although > when looking at it all from my perspective we are all already screwed, > unless we can vote out all of the tratitors. (which seems increasingly > unlikely) > Re: search engines - - - - to me they are totally frustrating. If I'm asking for a search where I want terms 'a + b + c + d + e' well - I'm looking for where ALL 5 terms show up. Not where any one term is or any two (etc etc). So if one is looking for very generic kind of items - - well search is useful - - - if you're looking for the specific - - - - search - - - well - - its quite useless! As I've been pondering the AI stuff (tried to sign up for chatgpt but as I'm unable to use a cellphone at my location that's a no for even signup (and no way to reach the idiots - - - - sorry I guess I should use people but I wonder - - to let them know that I can't because its only after registration that connection is allowed - - - total circular logic that is!) what I've come up with is from looking at the past. Truly innovative and unique ideas/things are rarely enough even designed or developed by a 'team' (that's changing in advanced materials these days though) most often its an individual that finds something that the thundering herd has either ignored or doesn't know about. Somehow to date AI is more about the thundering herd (and a technique that when fully utilized will allow major chip makers (and some small group of other hardware vendors) to really cache in the bucks ('Follow the money' is the adage!). Am wondering if that is the reason for AI's proliferation? What say you? TIA

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