December 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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war story: testing a disk with a large capacity
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 04 Mar '25

04 Mar '25

Currently Best Buy is selling a 14 TB external disk for $250. Sadly, the days of exponential disk growth of capacity and reduction in price are over. So this is a good sale price. <https://forums.redflagdeals.com/seagate-14tb-external-hd-249-99-save-120-27…> I want an internal drive but externals are cheaper, so I bought this. I will have to "shuck" it (remove the case). That will void the warranty, so I wish to test it with Smart Mon Tools. After a certain amount of thrashing about, I discover that - a Seagate USB <-> SATA system has/had bugs switching between "UAS" mode and plain old USB Mass Storage mode - UAS mode is faster for disk operations, so the kernel blocks USB Mass Storage mode on Seagate external drives. - SMARTmon Tools needs USB Mass Storage to deal with this drive To get out of this corner, read: <https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SAT-with-UAS-Linux> <https://blog.karssen.org/2022/05/19/getting-smart-information-from-a-seagat…> The key thing is to: - disconnect the drive - add a "quirk" to suppress UAS for this drive: See "Temporary Settings" in the page linked above - connect the drive again. Check if it is USB Mass Storage - do SMARTmon things - disconnect the drive - unquirk NOTE: The quirk setting didn't work for me. The suggestion was: echo "0x0bc2:0x231a:u" > /sys/module/usb_storage/parameters/quirks The first hex number is the disk manufacturer (Seagate is 0bc2) The second identifies the model. In my case, it should be 2038. I got this from a line in dmesg output about the drive: usb 2-2: New USB device found, idVendor=0bc2, idProduct=2038, bcdDevice=18.01

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Finally ordered a new laptop
by Lennart Sorensen 20 Feb '25

20 Feb '25

I decided it was finally time to get a new laptop after 12 years. The old machine has lost the NVIDIA chip (forcing it to run only on the intel video works, but don't even think about running 3D games and the external monitor port does not work). Also the fingerprint scanner and color meter haven't worked in years (not that I really cared much about those two things). Also the top of the screen has a chunk of dead pixels showing white all the time. I guess it was time. So my choice that I ended up with using the cyber Monday discounts and rakuten was a Thinkpad P1 Gen 7. 21KV001CUS which is: Intel Core Ultra 9 185H NVIDIA RTX 4070 Mobile 8GB 64GB LPDDR5 CAMM2 2TB NVMe 16" 2560x1600 IPS 165Hz 5MP Camera Fingerprint scanner (Seems those are just standard) Backlit US keyboard 2x2 WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3 I think I am set for another decade or so. I will have to try putting Debian on it to see how well supported the hardware is, although it will most likely only ever end up running it in WSL for the most part. I have other systems dedicated to running Linux. Cyber-Monday deal knocked 59% of the list price (do they ever sell for list price?) and then rakuten provided 15% cash back after that. Still not cheap, but I don't buy computers very often. -- Len Sorensen

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BorgBackup -- any experience?
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 29 Dec '24

29 Dec '24

Has anyone used <https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html> Do you like it? Pros & cons?

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fastest auto-rejection I've ever seen
by David Collier-Brown 17 Dec '24

17 Dec '24

I applied for a position that fit me to a tee on Saturday, hoping to be near the front of the line. It seems I was: I got a rejection letter at 5:30 AM Monday. I suspect there were no humans involved, unless Glassdoor has an India office (they're don't list one, and they're based in California). --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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On a different subject - anyone know anyone from Canonical?
by David Collier-Brown 16 Dec '24

16 Dec '24

They have both good and bad reviews, so I'd like to actually talk (email) with someone there. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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[GTALUG-Announce] REMINDER: AGM and General Meeting
by Alan Heighway 14 Dec '24

14 Dec '24

Annual General Meeting / Lightning Talks <https://www.gtalug.org/?p=142>December 3, 2024/0 Comments <https://www.gtalug.org/?p=142#respond>/in Uncategorized <https://www.gtalug.org/?cat=1>/by Alan Heighway <https://www.gtalug.org/?author=3> with Board of DirectorsAgenda: 1. Lighting Talks 2. AGM - Treasurer's Report - Nominations for Board of Directors - Vote (If Necessary) - Establishment of the 2025 Board of Directors Date / Time: December 10th, 2024 19:30 EST Location: In Person: TMU George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, 245 Church Street (just north of Dundas), Room 201 (See note below) Online using Nextcloud: https://hub.gtalug.org/call/7m45sf9i NOTE: The doors to the building are normally locked. There will be someone from GTALUG at the doors on the southeast corner of Church and Gould to let people in. If you come late or don’t see anyone at the door please SMS at 647 657 6575 for THIS NIGHT ONLY. Do not call. *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing] --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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"free" physical objects
by Vasileios Papadiamantopoulos 08 Dec '24

08 Dec '24

Hi everyone, a few years back(before COVID) I participated in a very interesting GTALUG meeting. One of the participants talked about some "free" objects/artifacts that are circulating in our world and people can keep them for certain time. Each object has an id and the temporary "guardian" informs a portal that they have it in their possession using this id. Does anyone remembers this conversation? Does anyone know this project? Thank you for your time stopping by my message. Best, -- Vasileios Papadiamantopoulos, PhD Arch

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access to mailing list web pages broken
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 04 Dec '24

04 Dec '24

We moved most of our stuff to a new machine, but not our mail server of Mailman mailing list system: www.gtalug.org has address 138.197.153.212 gtalug.org has address 138.197.153.212 gtalug.org mail is handled by 0 penguin.gtalug.org. penguin.gtalug.org has address 69.164.222.247 But penguin thinks that it is gtalug.org and www.gtalug.org. and mailman thinks that it is running on gtalug.org or www.gtalug.org. Those are no longer true. What won't work: - links to the mailman web pages - mailing list archives - (maybe) access to our Wiki Even if you reference these by IP address rather than domain name, they won't work because the certificate validation will fail. This is wrong but it may be a while before it is fixed. Horrible work-around: add this line to /etc/hosts 69.164.222.247 gtalug.org www.gtalug.org But remove it as soon as you are done: it will block access to our new website. (Thank BC Ron for this suggestion.)

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