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Vaccination Receipts on Linux
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 23 Sep '21

23 Sep '21

The Ontario Governement emailed us Vaccination Receipts shortly after we were vaccinated. As of Sept 22, we will need to show them some places if we want access. When I go back to that email, I find that it is defective. You cannot read the PDF from my MUA (Alpine on Linux), and I suspect that this is true for any Linux or UNIX MUA. Perhaps also for Apple MUAs. The reason is that the PDF is sent as an attachment, with the wrong type specified in the attachment's headers: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=Dose_Admin_...pdf" On POSIX systems, attachments with Content-Type "text", have CR LF sequences replaced by NL. I was able to make it work by manually editing my mailbox, changing the Content-Type header to: Content-Type: application/pdf

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apropos of DCB's lightening talk on bad diagnostics, a Windows war story
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 22 Sep '21

22 Sep '21

A poet friend's Windows notebook ceased working and Windows could not get up again. A couple of days work did not result in a working system. He was going to solve the problem by buying a new machine. I volunteered to attempt to fix his machine. I investigated the system (using a live Fedora stick). I found that his files were gone and that the disk wasn't 100% happy. I fixed it by copying /dev/zero to the whole raw drive. (There were 8 relocated sectors, not a strong sign that the disk is deteriorating quickly.) Whereas before my fix, a short drive-self-test failed, afterwards it passed. The next step was to make a bootable Win 10 installation disk. A bootable Win 10 installation disk is not as simple as a bootable Linux disk. It won't perform as a Live system. It isn't made by dding a .iso to the USB flash stick. On another Windows box, download the Media Creation Tool. Run it, asking it to create an installation stick. It downloads Windows, and uses the files to build the installation stick. This failed for me. I'm not alone. There are many postings by confused users. I found many many suggestions of work-arounds, but no convincing theory that any of them worked. At the start of this thread, you'll see the truly useless error pop-up: <https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/media-creation-tool-e…> Windows 10 Setup There was a problem running this tool We're not sure what happened, but we're unable to run this tool on your PC. If you continue experiencing problems, reference the error code when contacting customer support. Error code 0x80042405 - 0xA001B There is no evident customer support. Just fora full of ignorance. This problem (or at least this symptom) has been around for years. For no good reason, I reformatted the USB stick and ran the MCT again. And it worked. At the cost of having downloaded all of Win 10 twice. MCT is too stupid to save its work. Evan may like Windows, but my modest experiences with it are often unpleasant. Now I'm onto the pleasures of installing Win 10 on a slow machine without an SSD. This is an area where Linux is much much more streamlined.

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[probably offtopic] e-sign solutions
by Evan Leibovitch 20 Sep '21

20 Sep '21

Hi all. I have a short-term need for an e-signing facility. There are a few free ones (digisigner.com) but I'm not familiar with them, and I'm not prepared to pay Adobe $40/mo for justa doc or two. Any recommendations? Anything to avoid? Thanks! Evan Leibovitch, Toronto Canada @evanleibovitch / @el56

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[GTALUG-Announce] Meeting Tomorrow
by hi＠gtalug.org 13 Sep '21

13 Sep '21

https://gtalug.org/meeting/2021-09/ # Lightning talks and Round Table This is GTALUG's version of an un-conference, a loosely structured short talks emphasizing the informal exchange of information and ideas between participants, rather than following a conventionally structured GTALUG meetings. If you already have a topic in mind please send an email to speakers(a)gtalug.org to be added to the list of scheduled talks. We're going to use Zoom for this meeting: Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83647888809?pwd=RHVwZndZY1dZOHRlcE9ER25QUkkrZz09 Meeting ID: 836 4788 8809 Passcode: 804603 One tap mobile +16473744685,,83647888809#,,,,*804603# Canada +16475580588,,83647888809#,,,,*804603# Canada Dial by your location +1 647 374 4685 Canada +1 647 558 0588 Canada +1 778 907 2071 Canada +1 204 272 7920 Canada +1 438 809 7799 Canada +1 587 328 1099 Canada Find your local numberhttps://us02web.zoom.us/u/klYT1laDI ## Schedule * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. # 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: https://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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Linux 3D graphics stack meeting video (August 2021)
by Alex Volkov 13 Sep '21

13 Sep '21

Hello Everyone, Here's the video from our last month meeting on August 10, 2021. The Linux 3D graphics stack with Alyssa Rosenzweig -- https://youtu.be/0F0aQ2eympI Alex.

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Fedora 34 with EFI boot on Raspberry Pi 4
by Stewart Russell 13 Sep '21

13 Sep '21

At last night's Raspberry Pi meetup, Chris Tyler demonstrated Fedora 34 (aarch64) on Raspberry Pi 4. It's supposed to be a fully supported distribution, although the documentation hasn't quite caught up. It looked pretty neat, and I might be tempted to try it. I've been a Debian user this entire century so far, though, so there might be some friction. Audio over HDMI isn't supported yet, which will mean some hardware juggling for me. The EFI boot hasn't made it to other distros on Raspberry Pi yet, so the installation has to be from a raw image or Fedora's arm-image-installer tool. Fedora Workstation is here: https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ and you'll be wanting the aarch64 raw image. cheers, Stewart

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Anyone know of a service to see if someone's pretending to be me?
by David Collier-Brown 12 Sep '21

12 Sep '21

My company just found a fake instance of themselves, so I wonder what folks do to detect them? I know politicians suffer impersonation a lot, but I don't know who's out there helping people and companies find and shut down the scammers. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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Anyone know of a service to see if someone's pretending to be me?
by David Collier-Brown 11 Sep '21

11 Sep '21

My company just found a fake instance of themselves, so I wonder what folks do to detect them? I know politicians suffer impersonation a lot, but I don't know who's out there helping people and companies find and shut down the scammers. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | Always do right. This will gratify System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest davecb(a)spamcop.net | -- Mark Twain

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How to cut out borders of image?
by William Park 06 Sep '21

06 Sep '21

Not really Linux related except for the fact that GIMP in Linux. I have an image that is too large. I don't want to reduce the whole image. I just want to cut out left and right borders, like you would do with scissors. How do you do that with GIMP (I assume it would be GIMP thing). In Windows, I just move the left/right edges with mouse. Searching online for GIMP answers, I get things like transparent layer, selection layer, etc. :-( --William

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old computer / new computer
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 04 Sep '21

04 Sep '21

When I started playing with computers (1967) mainframes were the thing (we called them computers). The University of Waterloo got an IBM SYSTEM/360-75, the biggest computer in Canada, in 1967 or 1968. It filled a lot of the "Big Red Room", a jewel case the size of gymnasium. Eventually, it had 1MiB of core memory and 2MiB of LCS (slow core memory). It ran most of the computing work for the whole campus, including student programs. The successor to this hardware is IBM's System Z. The latest announced processor chip has 512MiB of cache per socket. I have no idea how many sockets a large system would have. The /360 architecture only allowed for 24 bits of address -- 16M. The /370 eventually allowed for 31 bits of address. I don't know what Z's limits are. Anyway, the whole contents of the 360-75 core would occupy 1/512 of the cache of one socket of the Z. The -75 didn't even have a cache. The -85, introduced a couple of years later, did. When an Ottawa company (SDL?) got one, that became the largest computer in Canada. The fastest instructions on the 360-75 (for example, adding two registers) took .39 microseconds. On my main computer in those days, the IBM 1710 Model 2, the fastest instruction took 70ns, plus 10ns for each pair of digits processed. The -75 was a LOT faster. Now ordinary PCs are 2GHz or more and execute better than 1 instruction per cycle. Perhaps 1000 times faster than the 360-75. Bulk RAM is perhaps only 10 times faster. But cache has a large effect. Disk latencies might not be a lot better: 2,400 RPM vs 10,000 RPM but seek times, capacity, and bandwidth are. Not to mention SSDs. I cannot even estimate power requirements. And you have to add power for cooling. The price is perhaps 10,000 times lower. You can see why I'm not really impressed with x86 improvements since Haswell.

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