April 2026 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

Cheaper fibre internet could be on the way as CRTC finalizes wholesale rates
by Ron 09 May '26

09 May '26

Good news & bad news on the Fibre Optic Wholesale Pricing set by CRTC. Good news: rates have been set nation-wide. Bad news: Teksavvy isn't happy with the rates, and they do seem high. Bell's flanker brand sells retail pricing lower than the wholesale pricing, for example. I'd been looking forward to this day, but I'm somewhat disappointed. It's good for furthering fibre deployments vs cable, but a bit costly. Wondering if rates will be reviewed in, say, 5 years? mobilesyrup.com Cheaper fibre internet could be on the way as CRTC finalizes wholesale rates <#> The CRTC has finalized the rates for wholesale fibre internet, which should provide more certainty for ISPs looking to offer fibre internet. 🔗 https://mobilesyrup.com/2026/04/24/crtc-finalize-wholesale-fibre-rates/ <https://mobilesyrup.com/2026/04/24/crtc-finalize-wholesale-fibre-rates/> > /“CNOC is disappointed that the Commission did not test its rates > against market costs. Incumbent flanker brands like Bell’s eBox > already sell fibre Internet at retail prices nearly 40 per cent below > what the CRTC’s final wholesale rate alone would cost an independent > provider — before an independent provider adds a single dollar of its > own costs.”/

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another Windows 11 unpleasant surprise
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 29 Apr '26

29 Apr '26

It is tax season. The season I am forced to use Windows. Tax programs seem to mandate that I move from Win 10 to Win 11. I've usually left my tax stuff on the "desktop" because it is so handy. OOPS: the Win11 desktop is in OneDrive, i.e. in the Cloud! This is a change, and a very bad one.

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GUI presentation of data?
by William Park 27 Apr '26

27 Apr '26

(double posted, so reply to your own LUG) Suppose you have text data, which could be static or changing. How would you present the data in GUI way? Like some kind of "dashboard". From top of my head, my answer would be *HTML* and *browser*. I'm curious if there are other ways or apps.

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Re: Cheaper fibre internet could be on the way as CRTC finalizes wholesale rates
by Ron 26 Apr '26

26 Apr '26

Karen Lewellen wrote on 2026-04-26 14:06: > Why would teksavy have a say? is not everything they do based on Bell? > They are a bell reseller. They're the largest and almost last remaining independent ISP, so their opinion is worth evaluating. Seems that they don't see a lot of room to offer fibre and make a modest profit, unlike cable internet. Especially if the big players can spin up subsidiaries and undercut wholesale rates while remaining profitable, similar to the sub-brands in the mobile space. Also, they resell Rogers, Telus, Bell, and Shaw before they were bought by Rogers.

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sshing in to update flatpaks is very awkward
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 24 Apr '26

24 Apr '26

To update flatpaks: $ sudo flatpak update but this won't work through SSH. You have to start DBUS first. And you cannot do it in a separate sudo because the environment will be different between the two. (The error messages are ugly.) $ ssh other-system $ sudo -i # export $(dbus-launch) # sudo flatpak update flatpak update seems a lot slower than normal package updates.

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A milestone more than 30 years in the making
by Evan Leibovitch 22 Apr '26

22 Apr '26

Last night, in April of 2026, I achieved a milestone on my Linux system. I was able to scan a document and fax it. This may not sound like much, because I consider both scanning and faxing as hurdles that Linux and even Unix systems have had. divergent serial port wiring, divergent modem commands, archaic GUIs -- it was a nightmare. In a previous life I had to make Hylafax work with a USRobotics modem attached to one of the octopus cables coming out the back of a DIgiboard installed in an SCO Xenix rig. One of the worst jobs I've ever had, I'm surprised I even remember the equipment in this much detail so long after. The decline of the tech means the loss of many players, and that means there's pretty well just one standard for fax-modem hardware connections (USB A) and one for the modem commands (still the same old AT... commands). The units cost about $25 and are reliable. As for the Linux support... I always found SANE to be a nightmare and gave up a number of times trying to make it work over the years, but this week a simple package in the AUR set it up through CUPS on my CachyOS box and now it works great with KDE's Skanpage. As for faxing the scanned document, efax worked quite nicely and was simple to use. This may sound like a lot of noise about a dying technology, and in many ways it is. But my point here is that this is the kind of thing -- support for niche or specialty hardware and use cases -- in which Linux always lagged so far behind Windows. Now that I have it working, the Linux workflow is far superior to the *Window Fax and Scan* utility that looks like it hasn't been updated since Windows98. As for why some federal and provincial government agencies still require one to submit documents by either fax or snail mail, in 2026, don't get me started...) -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Fwd: [kwlug-disc] Weird but handy shell tricks
by Ron 21 Apr '26

21 Apr '26

Yesterday's meeting was a fun deep-dive into some `bash` quirks. Mostly on how to determine if a script was sourced or run as an executable. The reason being the use of `exit` statements as "gate clauses" to detect error conditions and abort instead of nesting the desired code inside if...elif...else...fi statements. In a sourced script, `exit` will close the user's terminal. We poured over a technique I found on StackOverflow years ago that checks for an error on calling `return` in an executed script (it's illegal there) and quits the program if the error does not occur. Requires masking error messages generated when script is executable, running `set +e`, restoring the status of `set -e`, and other nonsense. Hugh suggested that scripts should never be sourced unless specific conditions are desired. Not wrong, but the desire is to prevent users' terminal from closing on them, forcing the correct invocation. Lennart came up with a clever technique, and even improved upon it by embedding it in a function. I went with that method, then modified further to simply test for *$0 == -bash*, which is always true if the script was sourced. Thanks everyone that joined the meeting and especially Lennart for his contribution. Also, some clever shell tricks shared on the KWLUG mailing list recently, highly worth a quick read: > Not sure who could benefit from this, but here's a site with some useful shell tricks: > > https://blog.hofstede.it/shell-tricks-that-actually-make-life-easier-and-sa…

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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!

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arcane knowledge about DEL vs BS keys
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 19 Apr '26

19 Apr '26

Chris Siebenmann, a long time local sysadmin, has a blog "Wandering Thoughts". I pointed to an entry yesterday. That prompted me to read some more. I found a very interesting posting about the plumbing of DEL and BS on terminal emulators: <https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/VimAndForwardDelete> (There are a lot of other interesting entries.)

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Re: [kwlug-disc] Weird but handy shell tricks (fwd)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 19 Apr '26

19 Apr '26

I wrote this to the KW LUG mailing list: > From: CrankyOldBugger <crankyoldbugger(a)gmail.com> > Not sure who could benefit from this, but here's a site with some useful > shell tricks: > > https://blog.hofstede.it/shell-tricks-that-actually-make-life-easier-and-sa… Yes, they are useful. Most are natural to an EMACS user (like me). Apparently "set -o vi" adjusts readline to respond to key sequences more familiar to vi users.

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