Recent content on Alan Pope's blog
tl;dr: I wanted to test one of my snaps on riscv64. I don’t own any RISC-V hardware. I set up a QEMU VM on my ThinkPad, installed Ubuntu desktop inside it, and it actually worked. Slowly. Very slowly. But it worked. I maintain nearly 50 snaps in the Snap Store. Most of the time I test things on my ThinkPad running Ubuntu 24.04 (amd64), or my MacBook Air running Ubuntu Asahi (arm64). That…
I use Publer to post identical content across Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Same words, same time, same bloke. It’s a massive time-saver, and means I can reach people wherever they happen to hang out online without having to faff about copying and pasting between apps. I wasn’t running some grand social media experiment. I was just having a moan about Windows updates like any…
tl;dr : There’s a relentless campaign by scammers to publish malware in the Canonical Snap Store . Some gets caught by automated filters, but plenty slips through. Recently, these miscreants have changed tactics - they’re now registering expired domains belonging to legitimate snap publishers, taking over their accounts, and pushing malicious updates to previously trustworthy…
tl;dr I’m hosting a Community Spotlight Webinar today at Anchore featuring Nicolas Vuilamy from the MegaLinter project. Register here . Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with organizations that create widely-used open source tools. The popularity of these tools is evident through their impressive download statistics, strong community presence, and engagement both…
Parasocial chat On Linux Matters we have a friendly and active, public Telegram channel linked on our Contact page, along with a Discord Channel . We also have links to Mastodon , Twitter (not that we use it that much) and email. At the time of writing there are roughly this ⬇️ number of people (plus bots, sockpuppets and duplicates) in or following each Linux Matters “official”…
This is mostly an informational PSA for anyone struggling to get Windows 3.11 working in modern versions of QEMU. Yeah, I know, not exactly a massively viral target audience. Anyway, short answer, use QEMU 5.2.0 from December 2020 to run Windows 3.11 from November 1993. An innocent beginning I made a harmless jokey reply to a toot from Thom at OSNews , lamenting the lack of native Mastodon client…
tl;dr I bodged together a Python script using Spotipy (not a typo) to feed me #NewMusicDaily in a Spotify playlist . No AI/ML, all automated, “fresh” tunes every day. Tunes that I enjoy get preserved in a Keepers playlist; those I don’t like to get relegated to the Sleepers playlist. Any tracks older than eleven days are deleted from the main playlist , so I automatically get a…
This is another blog post lifted wholesale out of my weekly newsletter . I do this when I get a bit verbose to keep the newsletter brief. The newsletter is becoming a blog incubator, which I’m okay with. A reminder about that newsletter The newsletter is emailed every Friday - subscribe here , and is archived and available via RSS a few days later. I talked a bit about the process of setting…
I initially started typing this as short -[ Contrafibularities ]- segment for my free, weekly newsletter . But it got a bit long, so I broke it out into a blog post instead. About that newsletter The newsletter is emailed every Friday - subscribe here , and is archived and available via RSS a few days later. I talked a bit about the process of setting up the newsletter on episode 34 of Linux…
A few weeks ago, in episode 25 of Linux Matters Podcast I brought up the subject of ‘Coding Joy’. This blog post is an expanded follow-up to that segment. Go and listen to that episode - or not - it’s all covered here. Not a Developer I’ve said this many times - I’ve never considered myself a ‘Developer’. It’s not so much imposter syndrome , but…
Over coffee this morning, I stumbled upon simone , a fledgling Open-Source tool for repurposing YouTube videos as blog posts. The Python tool creates a text summary of the video and extracts some contextual frames to illustrate the text. A neat idea! In my experience, software engineers are often tasked with making demonstration videos, but other engineers commonly prefer consuming the written…
This is the seventh in an increasingly infrequent series of Friday Tales From Tech Support . Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. London. Summer 2002 In the early 2000s I worked as a SAP Technical Consultant which involved teaching courses, advising customers, and doing SAP installations, upgrades and migrations. This story…
This is a deeply personal post. Feel free to skip this if you’re only here for the Linux and open-source content. It’s also a touch rambling. As for the title, no, I didn’t “get” ADHD on my birthday; obviously, that’s humourous literary hyperbole. Read on. LET age = age + 1 Like a few billion others, I managed to cling to this precious rock we call home and…
Previously… Back in February, I blogged about a series of scam Bitcoin wallet apps that were published in the Canonical Snap store, including one which netted a scammer $490K of some poor rube’s coin. The snap was eventually removed , and some threads were started over on the Snapcraft forum Groundhog Day Nothing has changed it seems, because once again, ANOTHER TEN scam BitCoin…
popey’s snap status I maintain a few snaps in the Snap Store . This page is generated periodically so I can keep an eye on the updatedness of each one. The script isn’t perfect, and doesn’t monitor them all. It’s a whole thing I need to maintain and update. I should move this to a GitHub Action at some point. There’s also the charts page which shows how many weekly…
popey’s snap charts These charts show the userbase of snaps I publish in the snap store over the last 30 days. They show the usage by country, version, OS (Linux distro) and channel. The first three only show up to 25 entries for each category. There’s also the snaps page which lists all the snaps I maintain with their versions, and whether they’re in sync with upstream releases.…
tl;dr I have had a Mini EV for a little over two years, so I thought it was time for a retrospective. This isn’t so much a review as I’m not a car journalist. It’s more just my thoughts of owning an electric car for a couple of years. I briefly talked about the car in episode 24 of Linux Matters Podcast , if you prefer a shorter, less detailed review in audio format. Patreon…
On Tuesday, I blogged about a series of Bitcoin scam apps published in the Canonical Snap store. Edit : This section updated on 2024-02-23 to include a Canonical response as two new forum posts from sabdfl (Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical). Two things! Three things! Zerothly, today we have a response from Canonical. There are actually two new posts from Mark. One in response to the thread…
Edit: There’s a short follow-up to this post: Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: Follow up . tl;dr : A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it likely won’t be the last. This post turned out longer…
Here’s some links to things I use, like or made. Software Desktop Server Mobile Snaps Podcasts YouTube Retro Tech Modern Tech Politics & News US UK Culture Urban Exploration Camping & Travel Linux Documentary Hardware Repair Hate Watching This page will grow over time as I remember to put stuff here. Software Desktop Software I like to use on my laptops and desktops. Ubuntu : Linux for human…
Last week, I wrote about my somewhat last-minute plans to attend the 2023 Ubuntu Summit in Riga, Latvia. The event is now over, and I’m back home collating my thoughts about the weekend. The tl;dr: It was a great, well-organised and run event with interesting speakers. Here’s my “trip report”. Logistics The event was held at the Radisson Blu Latvija. Many of the Canonical…
At the Ubuntu Summit in Latvia, Canonical have just announced their plans for the Ubuntu Core Desktop. I recently played with a preview of it, for fun. Here’s a nearby computer running it right now. Ubuntu Core is a “a secure, application-centric IoT OS for embedded devices” . It’s been around a while now, powering IoT devices, kiosks, routers, set-top-boxes and other…
Ubuntu Summit This weekend the Ubuntu Summit begins in Riga , Latvia . I originally had no plans to attend until a recent change in circumstance , and a late space became available. The Ubuntu Summit is “an event focused on the Linux and Open Source ecosystem, beyond Ubuntu itself. Representatives of outstanding projects will demonstrate how their work is changing the future of technology as…
This is the sixth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support . Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting My first job out of college was for the auspiciously named “National Telecom” as a “Computer Operator”. Back then, this was a job, rather than something you just do day-to-day. I mean,…
The other day I wrote about snapcraft metrics , a tool that enables publishers to extract application metrics from the snap store . Something I’ve noticed which I wanted to share, was how quickly automatic updates roll out to an application’s user base. So I took the metrics from an application that I published in the snap store and scrubbed the names and version numbers. I charted…
tl;dr. The OBS Studio snap is now updated to the latest stable release, 29.1.3, after a “brief” hiatus. Another day, another updated snap, which had been languishing a bit. I wrote about updating Spot yesterday, and today, as per the title, it’s OBS Studio . As I mentioned previously , there’s a bunch of outdated snaps in the store, and I want to help fix that. Hopefully,…
I recently lamented that there’s a bunch of broken and outdated snaps in the snap store . Well, some of them are my responsibility, so in the spirit of “be the change you want to see”, let’s get them fixed and updated. I thought I’d highlight one or two as I go through them, to highlight any important or interesting changes. Today I took a look at Spot , which is a…
Agon and Agon Last month I visited the RMC Cave where we got a sneak peek at the Agon Console8 from Heber . The Agon Console8 is a consolised version of the more general-purpose Agon8 Computer. They come in a natty retro case, and features twin 9-pin joystick ports. I’d not heard about the Agon line of Open Source devices before, but they tickled something in me. I’m somewhat…
I was a guest host on Late Night Linux podcast, episode 249 last week, filling in for Will . We each bring along a ‘discovery’, I brought snapcraft metrics to talk about. I thought I’d write up how I use them, for listeners of the show as it’s hard to articulate this very well verbally. My snaps I have about twenty snaps in the snap store . Some, like Bombsquad and ncspot…
As with all recipes on this blog, they’re designed to be easily made, tasty, and not elaborate. I’ll also not put lengthy backstories for them. I was in Exeter yesterday and stumbled into Brewdog where I discovered their delicious loaded fries. So today, I had a go at making something similar. The amount I used here could be shared between four people as a chunky sharing starter. Scale…
This is the fifth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support . Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting This is another story from my time working on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. A slight difference though, this story is second hand, so take it with a pinch of…
I wrote previously about debugging a broken x16emu snap . In short, something went wonky with ld . I started a thread on the snapcraft forum and Ken VanDine came to my assistance with an answer and a pull request . I grabbed that pr, and it did indeed build successfully.. $ snapcraft --use-lxd Launching instance... Executed: pull alsa-pulseaudio Executed: pull gnome/sdk Executed: pull x16-roms…
Today I stumbled on a question in the LÖVE subreddit , asking how to have a portable development environment when you have no control over the host PC. Quick question. Is it possible to download love onto a flash drive so i can make it portable. I’m asking because I can’t download things at work on my work computer but I’m working on a love project in my spare time for a course…
I thought I’d “live blog” (not live) my way through fixing a snap which I noticed was broken this morning. How did I notice? I happened to look at the build page for it. Maybe my spidey sense was tingling, because I wouldn’t ordinarily have zoned in on this particular snap. I could have some kind of alert that lets me know when this happens, but I currently don’t. I…
For the last six months, I’ve been a presenter on Linux Matters . Prior to that, I spent thirteen years presenting the now-defunct Ubuntu Podcast . Both shows have/had multiple presenters, We record every other week, and send our individual audio files to Joe . He does all the magic post-recording production including editing, audio processing and mastering. That file is then uploaded and…
NextCloud Box I just stumbled on an old NextCloud Box in my loft. It’s a quiet Sunday in the house, so I thought I’d see if it still works, and if there’s any data on it. I’m pretty sure I did use it for a while, so there must be something on it. Here’s my NextCloud Box in a cardboard box labelled “NextCloud Box”. Here’s what the NextCloud box looks…
Goodbye EmuDeck I’ve had my GabeGear Steam Deck for over a year now, and I love it. When it first arrived, I considered using it to play retro games - via emulators. But a terribad experience with EmuDeck soured my opinon of retro gaming on the deck. The whole EmuDeck installation and configuration was less than straightforward, indeed somewhat cumbersome. I found it to be a loosely…
This is the fourth in a series of Friday Tales From Tech Support . Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. Scene setting Today’s story is another belter from my stint on the helpdesk for a large accounting & consulting organisation in central London. It’s around 1995 and I’m a happy-go-lucky, young, free and…
Lies Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’… …yet. The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady . Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app…
My blog at blog.popey.com was hosted on a Bitfolk VPS, built from the Hugo source code in a public GitHub repo . My workflow for publishing a post goes like this: 💻 Use whatever machine I’m sat at 🔽 Clone the repo 🗒 Add a new page, edit until ready 🤠 Push directly to the main branch Early on in my use of Hugo, I was manually using hugo and rsync over SSH directly on the VPS. Given I was…
SOMETIMES I PRESS THE CAPS LOCK KEY BY ACCIDENT, USUALLY WHILE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME. I THEN FIND MYSELF UNABLE TO TYPE A PASSWORD OR I AM ACCUSED OF SHOUTING ONLINE. OVER COFFEE, MY FRIEND MARTIN EXPLAINED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO DISABLE THE CAPS LOCK KEY COMPLETELY IN LINUX. I’D NEVER CONSIDERED DOING THIS, MISTAKENLY THINKING THE ONLY OPTIONS WERE TO REMAP IT TO SOMETHING ELSE. IT…
My work computer is a ThinkPad Z13. It’s on most of the time, including overnight and during the weekend. I’m one of those horrible people who like to just wiggle their mouse, unlock, and get working. I often leave a ton of windows open, so I quite like to sit down and start working without having to wait for boot up, and subsequent app launch. So when I arrive at my desk on a Monday…
Today I dusted off a Minecraft server backup to see if it would still work, to explore and remind myself what was there. tl;dr The world still works in Minecraft, and I can even generate a nicely rendered map from it. There’s not a tremendous amount to actually see on the map. A lot of work went on underground . There’s also little nostalgia value other than for the sixty people who…
I’ve just returned from an excellent day visting The Cave and the Arcade Archive with friends. I’ve visited the cave before, and wrote up my experience in Visiting The Cave last year. I decided since (nearly) a year had passed, it was time to visit again. When I mentioned online to some friends, that I was planning on going, they all booked tickets for the same day. We arrived just…
This is the third in a series of Tales From Tech Support . Some stories from the past featuring broken computers and even more broken tech support operatives - mostly me. In the early 1990s, I worked as a contractor for a large, well-established accounting firm. In It’s MY monitor , I told the story of dealing with an angry Partner. Today’s story is worse, as I’m dealing with the…
I run a small Mastodon instance for Ubuntu Members and related projects . If you’re a contributing Ubuntu Member, then you can have a free account on the site. It’s been running without tremendous issues for nearly a year now. Each time a new release of Mastodon appears, I dutifully follow the guides to upgrade it. Each upgrade requires me to ensure the backups are functioning then…
Back in 2020 I stumbled on Bandwhich , a “Terminal bandwidth utilization tool”, written in Rust. More recently, I was looking for a tool to identify which processes on a box were using bandwidth, and how much. I remembered Bandwhich and took another look. I wanted an easy way to install Bandwhich on a variety of machines, running a variety of Linux distributions across different…
Lightbulb moment On Thursday, October 13th 2016, while on a train, slowly recovering from a pub-based night out, I had an idea! The idea is to take a train somewhere (unspecified) for four hours, have lunch, then take another train home. The train would be my 90mph office with scenery for those four hours in each direction, and I’d get to enjoy lunch somewhere new. I’d do a full days…
Earlier today I posted a poll on Mastodon. As I write this, there are fifteen hours left on the poll, and it looks like this with around a hundred votes: Most people seems to think I should wait for a month. That result may change overnight, of course, but I can’t wait! I’ve got a blog post to write, and time on my hands! So let’s upgrade now! Also, nobody seemed to spot that I…
In a change from our regularly scheduled blogging, I present a short how-to. This is mostly for my own memory, because I’ve had to search online how to do this multiple times, and I can never remember it. Writing it down for you might aide my memory. I found myself playing some retro games on my SteamDeck today, while the tyres were being replaced on my car. After a bit of time playing Golf…