Neil Darlow @neildarlow@mastodon.org.uk

Some of my fedora 35 Beta packages were downgraded today. I hope that's an indication that a release will happen tomorrow. 🤔️

I went to a Retro-computing event at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK, today.

An added bonus was some folks from Bletchley Park in attendance whom I had a chance to talk with about their computer collection.

There were a lot of 1980s/90s vintage Home and School computers there to play with. Also, a lot of the early Microcomputer kits only folks of my age would recall e.g. the MOS KIM-1.

A few emulated PDP-11 machines and lots of mini/mainframe machines which many don't know.

Another little side-project realised. A WireGuard VPN Server on a FriendlyElec NanoPi NEO3 (running ArchlinuxARM) which sits behind my ODROID-HC1 Home Server.

It was interesting to configure this using systemd-networkd and devise a working DNS resolution mechanism. It's working nicely with the official WireGuard Android app and I just need to replicate things on my fedora laptop but with selective on/off control. The NetworkManager GUI doesn't support WireGuard connections right now.

Hmm. Never expected this. My fedora Silverblue install has just received the fedora 35 flatpak runtime and updated applications built against it. I've never had an OS where the applications are updated before the base packages. Interesting.

fedora 35 Beta is out - for those interested in testing it.

New to this version is Kinoite, a KDE spin providing the same experience as Silverblue i.e. an immutable base OS with RPM layering and flatpak application installs.

Had a little trip in an ambulance last night (nothing serious, I had a trip resulting in me losing consciousness momentarily and my wife called an ambulance on me - thank you my love!).

Anyway, I'm still finding ECG pads on the morning after. 🤣️

I'm getting really tired of email admins who point their DMARC reporting address to an unmanaged account. Every morning I'm greeted by bounces saying "recipient's inbox is full". If you're going to implement DMARC then do it properly people! 🤨️

Just given my annual donation to Wikimedia.org to keep the lights on at Wikipedia. It's shameful that only 2% of users actually donate to this great online resource. It's unique and deserves to survive.

I was getting frustrated with the Ardour6 flatpak having an older version of PipeWire libraries, in its FreeDesktop runtime, than is present on my Silverblue installation. I've remedied that by installing the fedora Ardour6 package inside a Toolbox container. Ardour now uses the same version of PipeWire libraries as the host and, as a bonus, version 6.9.0 appeared in today's updates so I've lost nothing in doing this.

Oh, and I should add, my passwords are held in KeePassXC.
My GPG and SSH private keys are held on a YubiKey 5 which is also required to unlock KeePassXC.

I think I'm taking my security seriously. 😁️

I run fedora 34 Silverblue on an ASUS VivoBook 14 which features:
Working Secure Boot
Enabled Kernel Lockdown
Immutable Base OS
SELinux enabled in enforcing mode
Additionally:
I encrypt and password-protect sensitive LibreOffice documents.
I audit flatpak permissions with Flatseal and disable unnecessary ones (which is rare because the flathub.org team are getting on-top of this).

Then someone suggests that I shouldn't be running flatpaks on my system because it presents a security risk. 🤣️🤣️

Not much space left in my dock. 😀️

Migrated the desktop PC my wife uses from Linux Mint Cinnamon to fedora workstation Cinnamon. Only got caught by the need for pci=nomsi on the kernel command line due to a bug introduced on newer kernels.

The fun part was configuring the 512GB M.2 device as a cache for the 4TB hard disk drive. A bit of LVM and dm-cache fiddling achieved that and had to load a few device-mapper modules into the initramfs with a dracut configuration addition.

This 16GB RAM i5 10th-Gen. machine really flies.

Transport for London sent me a letter to advise me that my car may not meet emissions standards for London's Ultra Low Emission Zone.

I haven't driven into London since my late teens (I'm approaching 60 now) and just imagine the number of letters being sent out for owners of diesel cars Sadiq Khan deems not suitable for his ULEZ.

What a complete waste of money.

New Linux kernel updates are appearing very regularly on fedora right now. Just received 5.13.9 this morning. I really must read the changelog sometime to see what these releases bring.

Since I started using fedora Silverblue I seem to have gone all minimalist. The latest casualty is Evolution which I've replaced with Geary.

It doesn't have GPG encryption/signing or forwarding as attachment but I don't find myself using those features. I did use the latter to forward Spam to spamcop but I've even stopped doing that now.

I'd forgotten about being on here. Well, that's my excuse (you can't really be busy during a pandemic).

I've recently switched to fedora Silverblue using flatpak applications. OK, I have a few system-related RPMs overlaid on the OS.

I must say I'm really enjoying the experience. I have a new ASUS VivoBook 13 (Core i5 11th Gen. and Intel iRIS Xe graphics with 16GB RAM and 512GB/32GB Optane storage).

The optane stoage is configured as backing SSD with fast cache using lvmcache. Very snappy.

I downsized my EPIA format home server to an ODROID HC1.

Despite its modest specification, I have it running MariaDB/PostgreSQL, Lighttpd, Postfix/Dovecot and Prosody and the necessary supporting technologies for them.

It may only be 32-bit and have just 2GB of RAM but it runs things nicely in its several containers and at less than 20W power consumption.

Here's me joining a new Mastodon instance and I ask myself "I wonder if there's any podcasters on here?".

Then I take a look at @dick_turpin's profile and my question is answered. 😀