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Voynich Manuscript update
by Richard Weait 09 Sep '17

09 Sep '17

Now, a claim that the Voynich Manuscript has been "decoded". Well, "read" really, not decoded. It was in shorthand, of a sort. https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript-h… William Porquet did a talk on the subject at TLUG a few years back.

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NOT: Re: From BTRFS to what?
by Alvin Starr 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

Wow. got into a bit of a snitfest with dhaval.giani over this one. Now to the completely unrelated part. I have been thinking about a project and I would like to bounce it off you. A client came to me asking about helping him setup an Etherium mining server pool. This got me thinking. In its simplest sense the process is power in ..... ETH out. The biggest cost is power then cooling to get rid of all the head from the GPU's. What if you glue a GPU with very little extra hardware to the back of a solar panel. Stick it out in the sun and let it calculate 8-10 hours a day. Put a big heat sink on the GPU and it should be able to stay cool enough just from air cooling Take a few thousand of these and set them out in a sunny place and you would have a coin generator. Once the hardware is paid for then the operational cost would be close to 0 but for some glass cleaner and rags. They would need to be networked together but it does not have to be high speed. It could be a low power mesh to an edge that connects via something as simple as cell phone data. Solar panels cost about $1/watt and there is no ongoing cost but power here costs about $0.08-0.16/KWH. On the face of it there is a 3 year payback for the power but if you add in 30% extra power to run cooling and the building costs for housing the mining pool. Am I crazy? -- Alvin Starr || land: (905)513-7688 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin(a)netvel.net ||

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Re: [GTALUG] OT: Solar Designer [Was: NOT: Re: From BTRFS to what?]
by John Moniz 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

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From BTRFS to what?
by William Park 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

I have BTRFS filesystem used for backup. I chose BTRFS because it can consolidate old leftover harddisks of various sizes into one big pool, and it can do "snapshot" which is pretty cheap way to do daily, weekly, monthly backups. Now, I read (it's an old news, though) that BTRFS is being "deprecated" by Redhat, and presumably others will follow. What do I do? What do you guys plan to do? -- William Park <opengeometry(a)yahoo.ca>

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[OFF TOPIC] Brave new Browser
by Slack Rat 05 Sep '17

05 Sep '17

Does anyone have any comments on Brendan Eich's new "Brave" browser? Now in a sort of wide beta, I'm personally impressed and am using it as my main browser. At least it's blindingly fast and sound works out of the box and many of the early version quirks have been obviated. -- Bill Henderson <billh(a)sdf.org> http://inconnu.freeshell.org/Sig/slackware.jpg

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Re: [GTALUG] From BTRFS to what?
by Stewart C. Russell 04 Sep '17

04 Sep '17

On 2017-09-04 08:30 AM, ac via talk wrote: > > hehehe, yeah... the quoted example was so not a rant.. Hmm, maybe it's a sign that communications around Linux kernel development are utterly broken if the long screed I linked to doesn't even merit “rant” status. Had Reiser really wished to have his code accepted, he would have knuckled down and worked on its deficiencies, rather than posting that "silenced all my lyfe!!!1!" yawp. Stewart

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Request for a talk (or a doc)
by Evan Leibovitch 03 Sep '17

03 Sep '17

Hello all, This is the opposite of an offer to present something. Rather, I am hoping there is enough interest such that one of GTALUG' s more learned souls might be able to present. Specifically, keyboards. I have never quite mastered how to get random Unicode characters from a keyboard on a Linux desktop. I've allways been able to switch keyboards, and I can do French (and some other) accents using dead keys. But I've never been able to duplicate the Windows trick of (for instance) ALT-0128 to get the Euro symbol. Most keyboards these days, in addition to Control keys, have a pair each Windows and Alt keys. On my KDE desktop the Windows key brings up the applications menu - fine. But if I look at /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose I see references to a <Multi_key> that would allow me to combine keystrokes to make ligatures (such as combining "R" and "=" to make the Rupee symbol. I don' t see a key marked "multi key" and I haven't found the ability to do these combined characters. In the KDE keyboard settings there is mention of mapping a <Meta> key to one of the low-row keyboard keys ... but isn't that an EMACS thing? And what is a <Hyper> key? If the answer is RTFM, I happily withdraw the request so long as someone can suggest an FM to R. My efforts to find decent docs on any of this have not gone well. So either a pointer to a good tutorial-level explanation of all this, or a brief mini-presentation at the next GTALUG meeting by someone who knows this stuff, would be highly appreciated. Thanks! -- Evan Leibovitch Toronto, Canada Em: evan at telly dot org Sk: evanleibovitch Tw: el56

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Fedora 26 Wonky Screen
by Howard Gibson 02 Sep '17

02 Sep '17

I have just installed Fedora 26 on my desktop. I logged into Gnome_3. I opened a couple of terminals and logged in as root to set my system up. I launched Firefox. All of my screen colours went completely wonky. I was doing a system update (dnf update) when all this happened. I am installing FVWM but it did not launch. Classic Gnome seems to be working okay but I am being cautious. Has anyone else experienced this? -- Howard Gibson hgibson(a)eol.ca jhowardgibson(a)gmail.com http://home.eol.ca/~hgibson

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[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting on 12 September at 7:30pm
by hi＠gtalug.org 28 Aug '17

28 Aug '17

<http://gtalug.org/meeting/2017-09/> # xterm and Docker *xterms: State of Art 2017* with Christopher Browne Many of us "live" in xterms, and there have been some developments. This talk pokes a bit at: - The old, and what's still being developed - The new, and there ARE some interesting developments - A bit of the crazy! Want an xterm that simulates shakey old amber monitors? You got it! *Docker* with Greg Martyn TDA ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <http://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23447525> ## Schedule * 6:00 pm - Please discuss on the general mailing list (i.e. <talk(a)gtalug.org>) where you want to go for dinner. * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. * 9:00 pm - After each meeting, a group of GTALUGers move to The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socialising. # Code of Conduct We want a productive happy community that can welcome new ideas, improve every process every year, and foster collaboration between individuals with differing needs, interests and skills. We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the community. The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the Linux community will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the community officially or informally, claims affiliation or participates directly. It applies to activities online or offline. We invite anybody to participate. Our community is open. Please read more about the GTALUG Code of Conduct here: <http://gtalug.org/about/code-of-conduct/>. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the GTALUG Code of Conduct please contact the GTALUG Board @ <board(a)gtalug.org>. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Re: [GTALUG] colour management
by Russell Reiter 27 Aug '17

27 Aug '17

On August 26, 2017 11:45:17 AM EDT, "Stewart C. Russell via talk" < talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: >(subject changed from "Re: [GTALUG] Raspberry PI wifi problem") > >On 2017-08-25 03:49 PM, Russell via talk wrote: >> >> My biggest nice to have feature would be a comprehensive source of >ICC lookup tables for linux. > >If you're meaning for scanners, generic manufacturer ones are kind of >useless. Light sources age and shift, and so your generic calibration >becomes less and less useful. If you have to have one of these files, >dig about in the Windows or Mac driver package, as there's usually one >there. I just recently acquired Windows 10 with an hp mini I bought online. First personally purchased MS Windows OS ever. I jumped from DOS 6.2 to Linux for myself, leaving Windows to the business end of things. I learned M$ Windows stuff on other peoples dime. I'm kind of frugal that way. > >With an ICC target — Wolf Faust sells cheap but good ones from >http://www.targets.coloraid.de/ — it's easy to calibrate a scanner. >I've >always meant to > >a.) do a lightning talk on colour management; I'd find that interesting. I've never colour calibrated a scanner, never needed that kind of fine grained reproduction. > >b.) arrange a group buy of scanner targets. Wolf sells them *very* >cheap >if you're shipping more than one. > >I have a spare (stored in the dark, unused, technically expired but >good >enough) ITU target if anyone wants one. Wolf makes targets for the big >repro companies, so his stuff is good. He's also been writing printer >drivers since the early 1990s. > >You might also be surprised at what's living in /usr/share/color/icc >already … > >> I wouldn't have to stop cups to be able to scan with my MFU. > >Is your AIO networked, or connected via USB? cups tends to hog the USB, the problem for me, outside of the flimsy feed table which throws off alerts about itself, is that I have to manually trigger a udev event to be able to access the scanner. If I reboot and have forgotten to stop cups service and then try to scan with xsane, it cleans the print head and then the low colour tank indicator on the unit flashes, even though the tank is full. Simple Scan does nothing. If I just stop cups, and turn off and on the power, simple scan works poorly but, xsane can't find the device at all. I have to power it off by unplugging and then switch on again before xsane recognizes something. However the scan quality is very much higher. I think I have a couple of concurrent issues. One, there is something mysteriously funky about connecting USB 2.0 B male downstream to 3.0 female. Not necessarily in the hardware, Linux afaik doesn't report ink volume, MS will, so it looks like its more of a presentation layer issue. Ink volume is a kind of colour property report. I think that xsane start-scan command to the unit is being misinterpereted as clean head and report ink volume when cups service is running. The other thing is the modeswitching from printer to scanner, which I have kluged. At this point I could create a couple of system targets to stop cups before xsane starts and start cups if lpq is populated but, since this is a photo printer not in daily use, I keep the print daemon inactive. I scan much more than I print. There is a known issue with the infeed on Cannon Pixma. The fix is to remove the flimsy plate and flex it by hand to reshape it so the feed works consistantly. Rather than do that, I'll eventually replace it. This one was a Christmas gift to print photos from the holidays. The paperstops of the scan table are very precise and squared to the scan bed for one button photocopying of pictures on the bed, so no futzing with baseline registration when printing a scanned image. >whole >device over USB. xsane finds my networked Epson, but annoyingly all >drivers (perhaps the hardware itself) can only scan at 8 bpp. Well I would like a few more than 256 colours but in fact for my own day to day use that would probably be fine. I'm not a real shutterbug and I dont create a lot of personal/busines paper fallout at home. > > Stewart >--- >Talk Mailing List >talk(a)gtalug.org >https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

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