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Pre-Meeting Meals - Kabul Express Impression
by Scott Sullivan 13 Aug '24

13 Aug '24

The restaurant has really elevated itself since my pre-pandemic experiences. The interior is renovated, gone is the yellow hue. Replaced with soothing blue / grey combo of tiles and paint, a modest class to it. While ordering is still at the counter, sit in customers will have their food brought to the table. I don't recall if this was the case before. Food was tasty, though I found my chicken a bit on the dry side. Portions sizes were filling. Silver combo is your protein with salad and naan. Folks with a smaller stomach like mine will struggle with gold combo's addition of rice and soup. Price Range $14 - $21 + Tax Seating for 46, in clusters of 4 or 6 seats. Attendance was about 20 persons over my stay. Noise level was moderate, all conversation, no TV or music. -- Scott Sullivan

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The August GTALUG Meeting will be in person!
by Evan Leibovitch 12 Aug '24

12 Aug '24

Hi all. I apologize for the short notice since some of this hadn't been finalized till recently. However I am delighted to announce that Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) has generously agreed to host GTALUG back in our pre-COVID location. Many thanks to Dave Mason and William Zereneh at TMU for making this happen. As a first trial of the new processes and facilities, the August meeting will be held at TMU and we will test our ability to have a hybrid meeting held both online and in-person. Please be patient while we work out any logistical and technical issues this first time back in many years. *Tuesday August 13, 19:30* *ONLINE:* https://hub.gtalug.org/call/7m45sf9i *IN-PERSON:* Room 201 George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street(just north of Dundas) *TOPICS:* - Testing out the new facilities - Progress report on new online services - Member round-table *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.* *Pre-meeting:* Traditionally many GTALUG attendees have met for dinner at Kabul Express, 126 Dundas East, about an hour before the scheduled meeting. We will try this again on the 13th, but since the dining options in the area have expanded dramatically since we last met, we may decide on other locations for future meetings. See you there! -- Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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Old and New Habits...
by Peter King 11 Aug '24

11 Aug '24

I just was in an extended argument with my two daughters, about something I suspect might be a generational thing. Let me know what you think. So the discussion started with me complaining that "because" Google respects neither uppercase/lowercase nor punctuation in their email, I get lots of email addressed to people whose email is similar to mine. I myself have always thought that the problem was that Google's email address parser did not respect these differences, as they should, and so I wind up receiving email meant for someone in Great Britain with a similar name. My daughters argued vigorously that this is not a bug but a feature -- you wouldn't want people to have to pay attention to either cases or punctuation when you write your email! I replied that back when there was a net but no web of course you paid attention to these differences: we were all trained as programmers to be careful about punctuation and case. (Hell, I learned on punch cards.) Their view was that this was a dumb view and that I wasn't in fact getting email for everyone who signed up for email with some version of peter.king.1(a)gmail.com, but also peterking1(a)gmail.com, peterking.1(a)gmail.com, and so on, but only when other people -- like, say, peter.king.11(a)gmail.com -- mistyped their email addresses when signing up for some service or other (for instance leaving off the last digit). The discussion was inconclusive, to say the least, and I thought (and think!) that we should respect case and punctuation. But I certainly hadn't considered the arguments against it... Thoughts? Experiences with gmail? Reflections on generational differences in the approach to computing? -- Peter King peter.king(a)utoronto.ca Department of Philosophy 170 St. George Street #521 The University of Toronto (416)-978-3311 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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Anyone hiding an old LG phone?
by Karen Lewellen 10 Aug '24

10 Aug '24

In a closet perhaps? My lifeline which I was trying to replace so desperately is now in pieces. Technically I have no phone at all, teksavvy and I are still at the CCTS over the land line. as it stands, before the cracked case finally broke completely, LG provided some mobile out of warranty options, including a place called fixt? www.fixt.ca I did not reach them before the break. fortunately I had already set a loblaws visit, it has a mobile shop. I have an older alcatel device that I am hoping will support my PC mobile sim card...so there is something that does not make me dizzy and seizure like when I us it. Still, if there is an unloved LG flip in a box somewhere, sing out smiles. Kare

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I guess I should buy a new video card
by Lennart Sorensen 10 Aug '24

10 Aug '24

I finally decided to try and figure out which fan to replace in my linux server machine since it was being rather noisy lately. I thought it was one of the cpu fans or maybe a case fan, but after checking both cpu fans, all 4 case fans, the chipset fan and the power supply fan, I finally realized it was the video card fan. I guess that isn't one you just get a replacement for. The video card is an EVGA Nvidia 8600GT. It has date codes of 0728 on parts. I guess after 17 years of service I can't complain. I am thinking maybe I will try an AMD 7600 XT and see how that amdgpu driver in the kernel is doing these days. I haven't given AMD a chance in a very long time after all. -- Len Sorensen

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Rspberry Pi Pico 2 announced
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 09 Aug '24

09 Aug '24

<https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-pico-2-our-new-5-microcontrol…> Spoiler: it won't run Linux. It has a few upgrades from the original Pico: - twice the RAM - twice the flash memory - a little higher clock rate - a little more powerful processor (ARM Cortex M33) - instead of ARM, it can be a RISC-V processor, but not both at the same time. - some goodies in a TrustZone thingee - more and better PIOs No "W" (WiFi) model yet.

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Meeting
by bitmap 08 Aug '24

08 Aug '24

Hi, I was wondering if anything had firmed up re an IRL meeting? I usually work Tuesday evenings but might be able to get off early to attend.

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Anyone else having issues with 6.9.12-1 kernel?
by Michael Galea 07 Aug '24

07 Aug '24

This kernel has been pretty awful for me. On my desktop it barfs while trying to build nvidia support via dkms, with some sort of signing error. On my laptop, after install I get a 251Mb initrd after install, compared to the 44Mb initrd of the 6.7.12 kernel it replaced. Is anyone else that is running debian testing seeing these issues? -- Michael Galea

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Portable Monitors
by Nick Accad 07 Aug '24

07 Aug '24

Anyone got recommendations? I’m not looking for anything fancy, just something that I can use occasionally that won’t die after a dozen or so uses. I travel once a month and I’m getting too old to rely on just the laptop screen. Thanks -nick

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pcal again
by mwilson＠Vex.Net 02 Aug '24

02 Aug '24

Not actually pcal's fault. Last time we sorted out how to get pcal to refer to the month after this month. But today the command line pcal -l -m -Pletter $((`date +%m` % 12 + 1)) $(date -d"next month" +%Y) | ps2pdf - $HOME/Desktop/nextmonth.pdf threw out /home/mwilson/bin/nextmonth: line 3: 08: value too great for base (error token is "08") `date +%m` returns '08' for August, which is an illegal octal number. The fix for this is to force decimal casting, the way Ada does: pcal -l -m -Pletter $((10#`date +%m` % 12 + 1)) $(date -d"next month" +%Y) | ps2pdf - $HOME/Desktop/nextmonth.pdf I guess `$(` takes special care of pound signs. So I've learned something again.

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