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Monthly meeting on Tuesday March 12
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 10 Mar '24

10 Mar '24

Scraped from <https://gtalug.org/>: The Future of LUGs and the Open Source Community. It’s AI, Baby! with Marcel Gagné 12 March, 2024 at 07:30 PM Join GTALUG and our guest this month, Marcel Gagné, to discuss the current state of Linux User Groups and AI. Time: March 12th, 2024 19:30 AM Eastern Time Join us on Big Blue Button: https://blue.lpi.org/b/eva-zjc-gjy-kgl. Location

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Grrr: CRA vs evince
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 06 Mar '24

06 Mar '24

Background / Public Service Announcement: This year, the CRA has started requiring taxpayers to file returns for joint accounts (I think joint accounts for spouses are not included). These are called "bare trusts" and one needs to - register with the CRA to get a trust number (kind of like a SIN) - file a T3 tax return (but there will be no tax) - file a T3 Schedule 15 form for each beneficial owner. The deadline for filing for 2023 is the end of this month. Linux-related: The fillable form for Schedule 15 is in an Adobe-proprietary variant PDF. evince doesn't understand it but Firefox does. <https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/cra-arc/formspubs/pbg/t3sch15/t3sch15-fil…> Evince displays it as ================================================================== Please wait... If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document. You can upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader for Windows®, Mac, or Linux® by visiting http://www.adobe.com/go/reader_download. For more assistance with Adobe Reader visit http://www.adobe.com/go/acrreader. Windows is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Mac is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other ================================================================== On the other hand, the T3 tax return fillable PDF works fine with evince. <https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/cra-arc/formspubs/pbg/t3ret/t3ret-fill-23…> I think that the CRA should ensure that its forms are not in a proprietary format. Today I learned that Adobe Reader again supports Linux. I'm pretty sure it will be horrible: large, not really native to my distro, closed source.

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Unplanned use...
by Colin McGregor 04 Mar '24

04 Mar '24

Ran across an alternate use for a product that MIGHT be of some interest here. The product is the STOLTHET wood cutting board from IKEA, which you would normally use for chopping up fruit, veggies, etc.. The reason I mention this is not as a cutting board but because the top is big enough to support many types of LCD monitors and the cutting board has 2.5" tall legs, so one could store a small digital camera, small USB hubs, etc. under the monitor. Also of note, IKEA has a 1 liter storage box that fits well under the cutting board if you want to store stuff like pens/pencils/markers/etc.... Just a though on freeing up a little bit of desk space.... Colin.

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.local question
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 03 Mar '24

03 Mar '24

I used to give all my machines permanent IP addresses and added entries in my domain for them. (I have /24 globally routable IP addresses.) I then got lazy and let most be assigned dynamically. But not servers. Now I'm even more lazy. I'm starting to use .local. So machines declare their hostname and mDNS / bonjour gets to resolve name.local. Neat. Tonight I'm creating an experimental NextCloud server. Let's say it's hostname is nc. - ping nc.local works - ssh nc.local works - host nc.local works - Firefox and even links cannot see nc.local. Why is that? Firefox is set to use the default DNS, not Firefox's own. If I give Firefox the actual IP address, Apache balks because it cares about the DNS name used. But that's further than nc.local got. I guess Firefox doesn't do mDNS. Why would that be? Or am I making a wrong guess? Clearly I could give to computer a real DNS name, but I'm kind of stubborn and want to understand what's going on.

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Windows in Boxes was Re: preliminary adventures with RDP / Remmina / Flatpak
by Michael Hill 03 Mar '24

03 Mar '24

So The Day Job has required that I upgrade to Windows 11 in order to RDP because Windows 10 isn't secure. I purchased an upgrade license from my installed Windows 10, secure in the belief that one of the strategies in this Tom's Hardware article would allow me to circumvent the TPM requirement (it didn't). https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/bypass-windows-11-tpm-requirement I then launched a fresh Boxes install from the Win 11 iso using these instructions: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-win11-in-gnome-boxes.html It is now possible to choose UEFI instead of BIOS in Boxes, so the only thing I needed to add to the configuration was the TPM line. When it got to my license code, however, my upgrade code wouldn't work for a fresh install. I started a new Win 10 install to be run parallel with my currently-working copy. I used the ctrl.blog VM configuration in the hope that Windows Update would consider my new machine eligible. On Fri, Feb 2, 2024 at 3:19 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> wrote: > > | From: Michael Hill via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> > | About seven years ago I needed to start using it full time, so I > | bought a Windows 10 Pro license and an SSD. > > Yeah. It is a matter of pride/stubbornness that I don't want to buy a > second Windows license for the machine. I already involuntarily paid for > one. > > | My understanding is your ThinkPad should store the Windows license key > | that came with it in a folder in Linux. I've seen mine but I haven't > | tried using it. > > At one point, licenses were stored (partly) in the firmware. To get a fresh license code from my laptop for the second copy of Win 10, I ran: cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM The license code worked. Running Windows Update gave me 6 or 7 updates to install. After a number of restarts, not all of the updates were installed successfully and Windows 11 has not appeared as an update option. Hopefully there is more to this story but I won't burden the list with it. Mike

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Air Canada claims its chatbot is liable, not AC!
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 27 Feb '24

27 Feb '24

<https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit-…> There's surely more to this story. A customer sued AC for the consequences of bad advice AC's chatbot gave. In an argument that appeared to flabbergast a small claims adjudicator in British Columbia, the airline attempted to distance itself from its own chatbot's bad advice by claiming the online tool was "a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions."

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War Story: adding RAM to a laptop can increase the speed
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 21 Feb '24

21 Feb '24

I bought a very inexpensive laptop from costco.ca. Dead deal: <https://forums.redflagdeals.com/costco-ca-hot-299-99-hp-15-6-touchscreen-la…> Unlike most laptops these days, it has two sockets for RAM. Only one was occupied. It had an 8 GiB stick of RAM. - two stick should perform better: allow dual-channel memory access - many consider 8 GiB too little RAM these days. I'm not sure that's true but more cannot hurt I bought another 8 GiB stick with the same specs from Amazon for $25.99 and installed it. <https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08P3KJRM5> I ran passmark benchmarking software before and after the upgrade <https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V11/display.php?id=202729010710> <https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V11/display.php?id=202835509345> The Passmark Rating (whatever that is) went up about 20%. You can see that the laptop still has modest performance. I'm glad the HP included one 8 GiB stick instead of two 4 GiB sticks. That made it cheap for me to upgrade (add one stick instead of replacing two) but it made the off-the-shelf performance worse.

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Gooood aftermorning everyone!
by Eric Renfro 15 Feb '24

15 Feb '24

Hello GTA LUG! I'm Eric, newish to Canada, Permanent Resident now for alllmost a year, but living in Canada going on 2 almost 2 years now. I'm from Florida prior so, yeah. Hadn't seen snow in something like 20 years, and now seeing two whole seasons of it! haha I've been using Linux since back in the stone ages of SLS, just over 30 years now. I'm on IRC, Discord, and Matrix regularly. Kind of preferring the real time communications over the email list method, because email just isn't the same as it was back in the days of BBS's, which I ran one, up until just late last year, Decker's Heaven. So, hey hey! Hi hi! I missed this month's meeting unfortunately, but I plan to go to future ones. Eric

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meeting idea: AI Explorers' Reports
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 15 Feb '24

15 Feb '24

AI is an exploding field. Lots of stuff is new to us. Many of us are trying things. I think that it would be interesting if those of us that have experimented would chat in a meeting about their experiences. For example: - what were you trying to do? - how is it working out? - what approaches are you thinking might be interesting or productive? - what approaches have you tried and how did they fail? - did you have fun? I would love to hear explorers tales.

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I asked Google's Gemini to compare iGPUs
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 14 Feb '24

14 Feb '24

In the last message, I described how ChatGPT 3.5 confidently gave a wrong answer to my prompt "compare igpu in i3-1005G1 and i3-1215U". Now I'm trying free Google Gemini. New this month! It's answer is much better. But that makes its serious mistakes more difficult to catch. First of all, I blame Intel. It really doesn't describe the differences in iGPUs when showing the difference between the processors: <https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=196588,…> Gemini incorrectly says the i3-1005g1 supports DirectX 12.1 whereas Intel says 12. Gemini says the i3-1005g1 supports OpenGL 4.5 whereas Intel says 4.6. Gemini says that the i3-1215u's iGPU has 80 Execution Units whereas Intel says 64. I'll stop here. Gemini has wasted my time. If I were less careful, it would have mislead me. This is the comparison that I trust the most (but it could be wrong too) <https://www.notebookcheck.net/i3-1215U-vs-i3-1005G1_14098_11413.247596.0.ht…>

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