March 2026 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Curling This Website Was a Mistake, but you *should* do it anyway (+ Ghost TTY)
by Ron 20 Apr '26

20 Apr '26

Dave from YSAP has another great video, this time covering ANSI codes for terminals running bash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8HhyEQ2cA4 First, this site you *should* curl: curl ysap.sh Pretty output - the web page displayed using ANSI codes. This site though, this is something else, run in a new terminal: curl -NL hotdogstand.lol Then... run `reset` to fix the interesting colours. Then, fix what reset can't. What a fascinating deep-dive into ANSI control codes, as Dave always does. He leans on the GhostTTY documentation - which is better than I think I've ever seen anywhere else on ANSI codes. Anyone use GhostTTY? How do you like it? Looks like it has GPU accelerated graphics. In a terminal. Cool!

5 12

Ubuntu 26.04-beta
by William Park 29 Mar '26

29 Mar '26

I just saw "Ubuntu 26.04-beta" in DistroWatch.com

2 1

AGAIN I have to cancel my Rust presentation
by Steve Litt 28 Mar '26

28 Mar '26

Hi all, Sorry, I have to cancel my April 1 Rust presentation, for the second time in a row. My county just loves to have their meetings the same night as GoLUG meetings. So, anybody can present on or discuss anything at the April 1 GoLUG meeting. At this point I'm not going to reschedule, because I don't want to cancel a third time. SteveT Steve Litt GoLUG Publicity Coordinator

1 0

some thoughts about network hardware in my home
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 25 Mar '26

25 Mar '26

This is just in my home; mostly my home lab with too much equipment. Your usage is surely different. I decided a couple of years ago that all new switches will be 2.5G and that I will prefer computers with 2.5G (or better) NICs. 2.5G is very affordable. In fact 5G and 10G are creeping down in price. Do consider power consumption too. 8-port dumb or smart switches are cheap on a good day at AliExpress. Amazon isn't too bad either. So far, I have superstitiously avoided using smart switches since security vulnerabilities might lurk in their firmware. 5-port switches too often run out of ports. The modest extra cost of 8-port switches make many changes/additions easy. 16-port switches are quite a bit more expensive. I have one that only does 1G; I still find it useful. Many 8-port 2.5G dumb switches also have an 10G SFP+ port. I don't really have anything to plug into that. Except I found this <https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000079929937.html> It allows my to connect two 8-port switches, at 10G, without using any of the normal ports. I hope that a pair of 8-port switches connected this way will be almost as good as a 16-port switch. (As usual, with the right tricks, and patience, you can save money over the normal AliExpress price. Figuring the tricks out is often labour-intensive.)

3 3

siriusxm anyone?
by Karen Lewellen 23 Mar '26

23 Mar '26

Hi all, I want to buy a siriusxm onyx ez radio & home kit. Its a unit specifically allowing you to connect with a home stereo system. Customer care was kind enough to share the manual location. question though is best place to buy? especially to insure I get the plan I desire? Thanks, Kare

2 2

My attempt to log into the TLUG talk website
by sciguy 15 Mar '26

15 Mar '26

I don't know if this is the right venue for this email, but if someone is running the site, could you please explain to me how it is that email is being sent to me from TLUG as it has been now for some decades, and when I try to log into https://lists.gtalug.org, I am told by means of some script that it hasn't heard of me, and there is no record of sciguy(a)vex.net existing. How am I now expected to make adjustments to my account if I am receiving email, yet the server is telling me I don't exist? Paul King

3 4

Mozilla engineer thinks 15% of crashes are due to memory errors!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

<https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/116171750653898304> <https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/bit-flips-cause-up-to-15-per…> OK, there is the qualification "up to". This seems implausibly large. If it was even 1.5%, I'd want ECC on my RAM. Actually, I do want it but it has been quite expensive to get. And only a very few PCs support it now. I wonder how many machines had such crashes. A few bad machines could generate a lot of crash reports. He suggests that memtest86 could catch these errors so that implies they are somewhat repeatable. PS: see the same engineer complaining about Intel Raptor Lake CPUs: <https://mas.to/@gabrielesvelto/114813152373394985> <https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/firefox-dev-says-intel-rapt…>

2 1

Self-hosted email leaks home IP address
by Ron 10 Mar '26

10 Mar '26

Anyone running Postfix to self-host email and notice that their home IP address is leaked in the first "Received: from" header? If you haven't noticed, send yourself a message and check if it's happening. If you have noticed, do you care? What have you done to prevent it? If you don't self-host, are you still leaking your home IP? Gmail seems to remove this first header, so in some sense more privacy via Gmail than self-hosting. I've got a temp work-around via header_checks: `apt install postfix-pcre` main.cf: -------- header_checks = /etc/postfix/header_checks.pcre /etc/postfix/header_checks.pcre: -------------------------------- ## WORKS for some messages, not all (this one has ?? delimters - telnet?): /^(Received: from ).*$[0-9\.\-]+cable.teksavvy.com.*$(.*by .*) from .* (.*)$/AU REPLACE ${1}***ISP name hidden*** ${2} ${3} /^(Received: from ).*$[0-9\.\-]+cable.teksavvy.com.*$(.*by .*)$/AU REPLACE ${1}***ISP name hidden*** ${2} NOTE: for testing header_checks.pcre, postmap does *not* create a DB and will throw an error if trying to do that like one does with a hash map. Just test by copying an offending header to a script and run it with: postmap -vq "Received: from ..." And the output (of mine) should show: REPLACE Received: from ***ISP name hidden*** ??by mail.bclug.ca (Postfix) with SMTP id 09F5081D15??for <cc(a)bclug.ca>; Sat, 7 Mar 2026 20:39:30 -0500 (EST) from=<canto_telnet(a)maow.net> to=<cc(a)bclug.ca> proto=SMTP helo=<bclug.ca> NOTE: Thunderbird can be configured to set the elho to ehlo.thunderbird.net, which Android client does by default, I believe. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-smtp-ehlo In the config editor, add or change this key: mail.smtpserver.default.hello_argument to value: ehlo.thunderbird.net

2 1

REMINDER: Monthly General Meeting
by Alan Heighway 08 Mar '26

08 Mar '26

GTALug Monthly Meeting <https://www.gtalug.org/?p=399> Topic: TBD Description: TBD Speaker: TBD Agenda: 1. Discussion 2. Adjournment Date / Time: March 10th, 2026 19:30 EST Location: Online using Nextcloud: https://hub.gtalug.org/call/7m45sf9i NOTE: *A*lan *H*eighway <http://heighway.ca/> heighway.ca 416-712-5247 VA3WAH / VA3YKZ [image: Please consider the environment before printing]

1 0

Fedora 43 and X11
by Howard Gibson 06 Mar '26

06 Mar '26

I have just installed Fedora 43 on my old laptop. Fedora 43 no longer provides X11. On the GDM login window, there is no longer a way to select window managers so that I can launch the FVWM I have been running since 1995, I think. X11 support will be phased out of future Fedora distributions. Apparently X11 is buggy, and no one wants to maintain it. I have spent the last thirty years making FVWM behave exactly the way I want it to. Now, I have to figure out Gnome_4, which I do not particularly like. Maybe I should look at KDE again. There appears to be no way to set up GDM to launch alternate X11 window managers. In the distant past, I have used SDDM to work around GDM's antics, but if X11 is being phased out completely... What happens to X11 applications? I am using LaTeX to prepare documents, and I use Xfig to do graphics. Xfig files can be converted to PostScript, PDF, and PNG from shell scripts and makefiles, so it supports web pages as well as LaTeX. I am using Xreader to read PDF files. I used to use Xpdf. Are there any other X11 applications people insist on running? -- Howard Gibson hgibson(a)eol.ca http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson

4 4