Table of contents for July 2021 in Linux Format

Cookies – those little digital breadcrumb trails that track and identify you on the internet – are becoming ever less popular, and while that’s good news on the whole, Google is looking to replace them with FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) in its dominant Chrome web browser. The company states (http://bit.ly/LXF277FLoC) that this will enable advertisers to target their ads to people, while the “approach effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd’ and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser. “ Google claims to have run simulations that have given the company the confidence to call FLoC a “privacy-first alternative to third-party cookies” which doesn’t tie browsing activity to individuals, but to groups of ‘like-minded’ people instead. Not only that, Google also claims that “advertisers…

Lucas Chess (http://bit.ly/LXF277LucasChess ) is considered to be one of the best ways to play chess on a computer. Not only can you play the game, but you can learn new techniques and compete against other players as well. So it’s welcome news that you’ll now be able to play it on Linux. A reddit user has confirmed that it runs on Ubuntu 21.04. At the time of writing, the Linux version isn’t on the Downloads page of the Lucas Chess website, but you can grab it from the Comments section of the latest release notes (http://bit.ly/LXF277LucasChessDownload).…

Bootable flash drives are commonplace nowadays, be it live distros on a USB stick or SD cards from which to boot a Raspberry Pi. They’re usually made available as image files that you download and copy to the flash drive, but a simple copy in a file manager is not enough. The standard tool for doing this is dd. Legend has it that the name was copy and convert, but cc was taken by the C compiler so it was called dd instead. Some wags now say it’s “delete and destroy” because it’s possible to do great damage with careless use (don’t ask how I know this). Despite the mention of convert, in this context it’s used to just copy, something like $ dd if=somefile.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M The if and…

Boot time I bought a laptop last year, and have now been sent information regarding the installing of coreboot. It is, according to a search of your archives), four years since you last discussed coreboot in the magazine, so I was wondering if you might consider doing a new article on this topic. Basically, I’m not awfully sure whether I ought to install coreboot, and would like your expert viewpoint! I’m currently using Manjaro. Katherine Oliver Neil says… Coreboot is really interesting and you’re right that we should cover it again because it’s more widely accessible these days. But generally, being pragmatic, if you’re saying “I’m not awfully sure” then coreboot might not be for you. Coreboot was originally designed to replace the proprietary firmware used by PCs, so people…

Ubuntu usually uses regular releases to introduce new developments that it hopes to stabilise by the time the next long-term release (LTS) rolls around. Yet despite the usual slew of updates, version 21.04 is rather light on show-stopping features. For desktop users, the only noteworthy new feature is the switch to the Wayland display server (see page 38) by default, for supported hardware. Some other distros, such as Fedora, have been using Wayland for a while now, but Ubuntu has delayed making the switch. Now that it has, the developers note that some programs, including Firefox and OBS Studio, will use Wayland for smoother graphics and better fractional scaling. Ubuntu tried using Wayland by default back with Ubuntu 17.10, before reverting to Xorg for subsequent releases. The X.Org session remains…

Loop Hero is the rehydrated essence of a dozen misremembered, ancient games. From the moment the 16-colour title screen fades in alongside dramatic chiptunes, you feel like you’re playing some forgotten, VGA-era fantasy RPG, a game that still contains some of the mystery and difficulty of 1991, but gently modernised to 2021. This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. Loop Hero presents a novel and dead-simple gameplay format that’s strangely engrossing, considering much of your time playing it is hands-off. You send one of three hero classes (Warrior, Rogue, Necromancer) on repeated expeditions to an empty road sitting in an otherwise blank void. As your little hero auto-walks around this stone path, you populate the rest of the world yourself by playing cards like graveyards, battlefields, villages, meadows, or mountains one…

All of the programs that we’re looking at, other than Asset Forge, are open source and free. In all fairness, Asset Forge is reasonably priced ($19.95 and $39.95 for the Standard and Deluxe versions, respectively). When you make a payment, you’re sent a download link to Asset Forge’s zip file. You run the files from a directory, rather than adding the program to the system. Because Art of Illusion is a Java application, you’ll need a fully working Java Runtime Environment setup for your distribution before installing it. To get the latest version, we downloaded it from the website and ran the installation script. For Dust3D, we downloaded the AppImage of the latest version from the website. This ran as expected. The source code is also available on the website…

We’ve managed to find five extremely useful 3D tools. Ease of use was always going to be our main criteria in this Roundup, but overall capabilities had to be taken into account as well, and for this reason, we declare Bforartists the overall winner. It gives you all of the facilities of Blender, but takes the edge off the difficulty, both in day-to-day use and for people new to the subject. Bforartists takes away the initial Blender ‘shock factor’ of all of the icons and menus, many of which are duplicates. Every aspect of its use has benefits thanks to one little refinement after another. In all fairness, the breadth of capabilities comes with some unavoidable complexity, and it’s still a piece of software that requires some study time, once…

The release of any new version of Ubuntu is bound to attract potential switchers from other operating systems. The truth is, these days, installing most flavours of Linux in general – and Ubuntu in particular – is no harder than installing Windows, and in many ways it’s much easier. Crucially, it’s also free, and unlike Windows there are several ways in which you can give Ubuntu a test-drive without committing to a full-blown install. The Ubuntu installation media doubles up as a live disc, which loads a fully functioning version of Ubuntu without touching your hard drive, giving you the chance to try out its user interface and key programs in minutes. If you want to take it further, we recommend running it in a virtual machine – the box…

The headline new feature in Ubuntu 21.04 is that Wayland has been restored as the default windowing system. After one previous failed attempt to replace the ageing – if trusty – Xorg server back in Ubuntu 17.10, the folk at Canonical hope that second time’s a charm and have given themselves a year to make this attempt stick before the next LTS is released. So, what exactly does a display server do? It provides your PC with the means to run graphical environments powered by desktops like GNOME, enabling you to point and click rather than spend all your life at the command line. Think of it as a connecting layer that sits between the kernel and your chosen desktop environment. For decades, Linux has relied on the X Windows…

Wayland may be dominating the headlines, but it’s by no means the only new feature that’s arrived in Ubuntu 21.04. Several other features are linked to Wayland, of course – the PipeWire project for one, with its aim to “greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux”. It’s basically a replacement for pulseaudio and JACK, designed to work with containerised Flatpak applications but also tying in neatly with Wayland’s tighter security requirements. In practical terms, its primary function is to restore the ability to both screen-share and record your desktop with compatible applications such as OBS Studio and Discord. It’ll also improve audio support in sandboxed applications such as those installed through Flatpak. PRODUCTIVITY BOOST “A new desktop extension finally handles drag-and-drop interactions between desktop and applications” One interesting…

Continuing our Scratch projects, and after blasting off from the planet of the evil space aliens we’ve now landed on a mysterious planet with evil space bats, intent on eating our space food rations. To stop the bats from eating our food we need to SPLAT THE BATS with our space ray guns. Scratch 3 should come pre-installed on your Raspberry Pi OS image, but just in case it’s missing it can be installed from the main menu, under Preferences>Recommended Software. Scratch 3 is found in the Programming category – place a tick in the box and click Apply to install. Once installed, Scratch 3 can be found in the main menu under Programming. Launch Scratch 3. We’re going to start with a new sprite. In the bottom-right of the…

Want the best features of Plex and Emby without the cost (or closed-source components)? Then take a look at Jellyfin (https://jellyfin.org), which has come on leaps and bounds from a simple fork of the last open-source Emby release (3.5). While Jellyfin still has a similar feel to Emby, it’s carving out its own unique niche in the media server marketplace. It may be free, but that doesn’t mean you’ll miss out on features. On the contrary, Jellyfin includes features found only behind Plex and Emby’s respective paywalls: hardware GPU transcoding for one, full support for live TV (including DVR facilities) for another. It’s even keeping up with some of the newer features added to its rivals. Early in lockdown, Plex and Emby introduced features for watching the same server content in…

Blender often feels like five pieces of software in one package. While it’s amazing that it has so many facilities, it does mean that every time you think you’ve acquainted yourself with the basics, you then discover something else it can do. For this tutorial we’ve chosen Blender features that might sound intimidating (such as physics simulation or shader programming) but that are surprisingly easy to get up and running. You can take a stab at the sections individually, but you’ll probably get more out of the tutorial by following them in order. As ever, you’ll often want to start with a blank scene when working with something new (File>New>General). Unless we mention that we’ll be working with the default cube, delete it before you start work (select with left…

By default, the lights in Blender are small. In the case of photography and rendering, small lights produce more contrast in addition to hard shadows. Some light sources in real life are small, such as a light bulb, but other light sources, such as a window, are much bigger, and walls and other reflective objects increase ambient light. If things look a bit too shadowy for the effect you’re trying to achieve, increase the size of a light using the Object Data Properties tab in the Properties browser. Taking the size up from the default of 0.1m to 5m will produce a more evenly lit rendering of a scene. Multiple lights can solve a lack of illumination in a scene. Multiple lights may increase the rendering time, but that may…

At first sight a Magic Eye picture, or an autostereogram to give it its generic moniker, looks like a patterned image that repeats several times across its width. However, if you stare at them for a while, a three-dimensional object will eventually appear to pop out of the page. Here we’re going to see how to generate your own Magic Eye images. But while it’s interesting to produce these astonishing pictures using readily available software – and we’ll show you how to do that – we’re going to start with a few rather more manual exercises. By delving into the underlying principles in this way, you’ll gain an inkling of the magic that fools our eyes. Perceiving depth When talking about 3D images we’re thinking of images that are able…

In every PyGame program there needs to be a main loop that renders the graphics used in the program and that also controls input for the game via keyboard and/or mouse depending on the PyGame application being developed. Let’s take a look at the main loop implemented in this Dwarf Project. ... As can be seen from the code, the main while loop ends on a boolean condition to identify when the program has finished completely. A variable called programEnd is used to identify this, which initially is set to a False boolean value. In this particular main while loop, you’ll notice as you look through the code in the while loop that first the input to control the game is dealt with via the keys on the keyboard. The…

As we reported in LXF273, there are efforts to bring Linux to Apple’s new line of MacBooks, Mac minis and iMacs, which are powered by the company’s M1 chip. That work is still ongoing, and according to a new blog post (http://bit.ly/LXF277M1GPU), the next step has been to develop a graphics driver. Alyssa Rosenzweig, who’s been working on the driver, explains the work she’s being doing, which includes creating a Gallium driver for the M1 chip, which comes with OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 support. Despite some challenges, such as Apple dropping a lot of legacy functionality from the M1’s GPU, the project is progressing well, and the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa (see http://bit.ly/LXF277M1GPUDriver). Apple’s way of doing things has also led Rosenzweig and others who…

OPENINDIANA 2021.04 This new release for the operating system that serves as a continuation of OpenSolaris is now out, and it comes with some important updates for applications, along with new tools and drivers. Those with Nvidia graphics cards now have multiple drivers to choose from, and Firefox and Thunderbird have been updated. Applications using Python are also in the process of being updated to newer version. For the full release announcement, head to http://bit.ly/LXF277OpenIndiana. CALCULATE LINUX 21 A new update for the Gentoo-based distro has been released, and now uses the Btrfs (filesystem) by default for fresh installs. This distro comes in various ‘flavours’ that are suited for different tasks, and the new version includes the Calculate Container Games flavour, which is designed to run Steam games in a…

Are you interested in printing small models with as much fine detail as possible? Then the Phrozen Sonic Mini 4K is a machine that may work for you. The build volume of the Sonic Mini 4K is typical for resin machines in this price range, but the high Pixels-Per-Inch density makes this a machine that stands out from the crowd. It took less than an hour to get the printer assembled and printing, which is typical for a resin printer like this one. The external power supply plugs into the back of the printer, and the cover simply sits on top of the base of the unit. Similar to FDM 3D printers, the build platform on a resin 3D printer requires calibration to create an even surface. The Sonic Mini…

Unlike the Ubuntu 21.04 release (see page 21), Fedora 34 took the plunge to become the first mainstream distro to bundle Gnome 40. The jump from v3.38 to v40 might appear gigantic, but is mostly due to the desktop environment looking to simplify its versioning nomenclature. That’s not to say the new release is bereft of new features. The first thing that’ll grab your attention as you log into Fedora 34’s default Gnome 40 desktop is that you’re now taken directly to an overhauled Activities Overview screen. Additionally, the Gnome developers have moved for a vertical layout to a horizontal one. So the Dash moves to the bottom and the Workspaces are now arranged in a horizontal strip. You can still begin typing in the Activities Overview to search for…

Your levels of enjoyment and productivity spent creating objects in 3D is directly related to the usability of the graphical interface. Prepare to take the fun-factor down a notch if the program’s user interface is awkward. In addition, every 3D program requires at least some learning period, so an intuitive GUI is a massive plus. That said, personal preference has to be taken into account. For example, Art of Illusion resembles an older style of 3D application with an old-fashioned way of working, but some will prefer that. It’s also a bit easier to guess how it works from first glance than certain industry standard 3D applications. However, more modern applications are perhaps faster, in long-term use, once you’ve learned how to use them. So, the main criteria for what…

Bforartists is much the same as Blender, the premier open source modelling and rendering application, when it comes to rendering. It has more than one rendering engine, as standard, and can even work with many additional renderers, both free and commercial (such as Pixar’s RenderMan). Using the built-in Cycles renderer, it can take advantage of GPU acceleration. The results are potentially of professional movie quality. Art of Illusion has a built-in renderer that uses ray tracing, similar to Blender’s Cycles engine. It’s software based, but it’s surprisingly fast. There are some impressive examples on the Art of Illusion website, but ultimately, it’s not on the same level to which Blender can achieve. Dust3D has no in-built support for rendering. However, the absence of a score here shouldn’t count against it…

If you’d like to give Ubuntu a more thorough test drive without committing an entire PC (or setting up a dual-boot system) to it, then the next logical step is to run it inside a virtual machine (VM). The obvious tool for the job is VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org). You’ll also need a copy of the Ubuntu 21.04 install media in ISO format, which you can obtain from www.ubuntu.com/download. In VirtualBox, choose Machine>New. Type Ubuntu 21.04 into the Name field and you’ll see it automatically assigns its type (Linux) and version (Ubuntu 64-bit). Check the default Machine Folder and change the drive if necessary, to one that has at least 32GB spare if you plan to run the VM for an extended period. Click Next and allocate it a minimum of 2,048MB…

Backwards compatibility is always a good thing when migrating away from a fundamental part of your operating system, which is where XWayland comes in. Legacy programs will only support the X windowing system, and XWayland provides Wayland with an X Server to facilitate them. The good news is that XWayland is installed alongside Wayland by default, so it’s just there, ready to provide you with X Server support when you need it – which covers most games. Better still, you only need know that XWayland exists – there’s no configuration involved. You needn’t worry about performance, either. Benchmarks indicate that performance in Wayland is virtually identical (except with Nvidia drivers, hence the block). To find out if an open window is using Wayland or XWayland, launch xeyes from the Terminal.…

If you’re running Ubuntu 20.10 on your PC, then keep an eye out for the prompt to update to Ubuntu 21.04. If you miss it, just open Software Updater and it should be offered to you. At time of writing, the upgrade option was being held back because of a potential issue that prevents PCs running older EFIs from booting. This problem should be resolved by the time you read this, but if not, open Terminal and then issue the following command: $ dmesg|grep “EFI v” So long as the version number is greater than 1.10 you shouldn’t be affected by the bug. If you’re impatient to upgrade, force the upgrade with the following command: $ sudo do-release-upgrade -d If you’re running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on the desktop, then you’re…

Even if you’ve never used Prestel or a similar Viewdata system, you’ll probably remember Teletext that was transmitted as part of the analogue TV signal, and which was visually identical to Prestel. In the UK, the main services were the BBC’s Ceefax, and Oracle that was broadcast by independent TV companies, and which continued until the transition to digital TV which occurred between 2007 and 2012. Despite the identical appearance, there was a fundamental difference between Teletext and Viewdata. The latter was a two-way system, enabling users to request pages, while in the days before TVs could be connected to the Internet, this wasn’t possible with Teletext. Instead, all pages were transmitted sequentially. This provided acceptable performance because of the higher data rate of about 7kbps, the far fewer pages…

So there was us happily thinking things were getting back to normal, enjoying a beer on the terrace that latterly had become our base of Friday operations. We sipped our ales and couldn’t help feeling a sense of accomplishment. In spite of adverse circumstances, in particular the closure of the LXF Towers deli, we had kept making the magazine and soon things would be back to normal. And then, the phone rang. It was UKFast. To what did we owe this pleasure? Well, says they, “we’ve been looking at our legacy contracts, and it seems you’ve been getting free hosting from us since, er, 2008”. Indeed, in the early days of LXF, before Future knew about things like the internet, UKFast generously gave us not one, but two dedicated servers.…

A security breach can come not only from the internet, but also USB devices. Furthermore, USB devices can also be used to remove your data. If you want to protect your machines from unknown USB devices, USBGuard is just the tool for you. You’ll find the utility in the software repositories of popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora, and can even install it on Arch, where USBGuard is available in the AUR. It only has a few small dependencies such as libsodium, which is a software library for encryption, decryption, signatures and password hashing. You’ll find a list of all the dependencies on the project’s website, along with instructions on compiling USBGuard from source, if it isn’t packaged for your distribution. Secured USB access USBGuard enables users to create…

1 Switch to the Shading workspace Start a new scene and click the default cube. Set the Viewport Shading mode to Material Preview. Click the Shading tab at the top of the viewport to switch to the shader editor. Stretch the dividing line in the middle of the screen upwards to make the node editor bigger, and zoom in with the mouse wheel. 2 Connect the nodes Add a Noise Texture node (Add>Texture>Noise Texture) and a Displacement node (Add>Vector> Displacement). Connect the Fac output (this outputs values between 0 and 1) of the Noise Texture node to the Height input of the Displacement node. Then connect the Displacement output of that node to the Displacement input of the Material node. 3 Add colour and experiment Depending on the effect that…

1 Quick access area This panel contains several pages for quickly adding a new station and selecting a web version of the catalogue of radio stations. 2 Browse the catalogue Find something that takes your fancy and hit the Play button to turn the station on. 3 ‘Now playing...’ See what’s being played now, adjust the volume and even download the song to the ~/Music folder. 4 The fantastic ‘mini-mode’ This mini-player is the perfect showcase of GTK4’s UI flexibility features. Reduce the main Shortwave window to access it. 5 Search and configure Here you can access the Shortwave Preferences window. The dedicated Search button can help you to quickly find a particular radio station.…

The University of Minnesota has been banned from contributing to the Linux kernel after two researchers from the institution were discovered deliberately submitting patches with flaws. Qiushi Wu and Kangjie Lu’s paper (http://bit.ly/LXF277Paper) reveals how they submitted patches to the kernel to fix issues, but in fact introduced problems – which the researchers called ‘hypocrite commits’. They claimed this would show how malicious users could slip dangerous code into the kernel, in a similar way to how white hat hackers identify security holes in software. Of course, white hat hackers are invited to find security holes by the people behind the software, and are often given rewards for doing so. Wu and Lu neither asked nor told anyone in the community what they were doing. Their actions have led to…

Too confused In response to Jack Kendrick, in issue 275 “Pyconfusion”, this attitude is something that bugs me, especially with Windows users who bash Linux, just because you have to sometimes use some grey matter to use it. I see it all the time on forums and Facebook groups. My answer to them is RTFM (Read The Fine Manual) or the modern-day equivalent: Google, say “install pygrame”. Linux is an Operating System (OS). Python is a programming language. You can install Python on Windows and you install pygame (which stands for Python Game as .py – the extension for a python file) the same way on both Linux and Windows. My advice to Mr Kenrick is that he starts off with Scratch or Google’s blocky (see page 44, “A Parent’s…

This is one of the only new CPUs that should interest gamers from Intel’s 11th Gen desktop CPUs, and is probably the go-to chip for anyone looking to build a mainstream desktop PC today. Y’know, if you can find a graphics card to go with it… The Core i5 10600K’s all-core clock of 4.6GHz and the 4.9GHz single-core clock speed are both one step higher than the Comet Lake i5. It’s also got that PCIe 4.0 support baked into the CPU itself, though sadly not throughout the new Z590 chipset. We’ve not had the greatest experience with PCIe 4.0 performance from the Rocket Lake chips so far, either from the top-end Core i9 or this i5 11600K. That doesn’t change the fact that Intel’s 500-series motherboards don’t themselves support it…

Escuelas Linux (derived from Escuela, which stands for school in Spanish) is an educational distro that’s designed for all kinds of educational settings, and includes apps that’ll suit everyone from preschoolers to high school students. Surprisingly, Escuelas is perhaps the oldest educational Linux distro that’s been chugging along for over two decades now. Don’t beat yourself too much if you haven’t heard of it. The distro only started supporting English language with the current 6.x branch. According to its developer, Escuelas is well-known in Spanish-language countries, and is used by tens of thousands of students and teachers. The distro is based on the lightweight Bodhi Linux, which gives it the stable Ubuntu base as well as a minimal yet aesthetically pleasing Enlightenment-based Moksha desktop environment. Coupled with the fact that…

The applications we’re looking at are a mixture of general-and single-purpose 3D tools. Take Goxel for example: it does one thing very well, but if you don’t have a use for blocky, voxel-based models, it’s not much use at all. So, as good as it is, it’s not a terribly flexible 3D tool. In the same vein, Dust3D concerns itself with a closely connected group of tasks for creating meshes that resemble living things such as animals and people and rigging them (adding a skeleton for realistic movement). That said, the examples that are included with the package show it has some, albeit limited, potential for making shapes such as a bicycle. Asset Forge is designed to make simple models such as vehicles that can then be used in other…

When considering ease of use, bear in mind that it might be unfair to judge a 3D application too harshly if it has a steep learning curve but a lot of features just waiting to be mastered. By the same token, an application might be easy to get to grips with, but that’s not much use if it can’t achieve the tasks that you have in mind. Bforartists does a decent job of streamlining the Blender experience. The extra use of colour is welcome, and it also makes the user interface more readily navigable. There are also a lot more icons, and many pop up only when needed, which helps to cut down on unnecessary screen clutter. However, at its heart it is still Blender; so, if you want to…

1 Use Ubuntu live media The simplest way to partition your drive is using the Ubuntu live media itself. After clicking Try Ubuntu, click the icon at the top of the Launcher on the left to open the Dash – this is the tool used to search Ubuntu. You should see GParted in the list (type gparted to bring it up if not) – click it to launch the tool. 2 Select target drive GParted will open with the current boot drive (typically dev/sda or dev/nvme0n1 in the case of NVMe drives) selected in the top right corner. This should be the drive Windows is installed on if you’re looking to share the drive with Ubuntu. Use its size and the partition list beneath to verify it’s the correct one.…

1 Configure nvidia-graphicsdrivers.conf Type sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/nvidiagraphics-drivers.conf and hit Enter. A blank file or existing config file may open. Simply add the following line, save and then exit: options nvidia_drm modeset=1 2 Check /etc/gdm3/custom. conf Now type sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom. conf and hit Enter. Verify the line WaylandEnable=False has been commented out like so: #WaylandEnable=False Save and exit again. 3 Comment out rules Type sudo nano /usr/lib/udev/ rules.d/61-gdm.rules and hit Enter. Make sure all lines are commented out using # as shown above. Save and exit, then reboot When you log in, you should see a settings cogwheel on the main screen – verify it’s set to Gnome to boot into Wayland.…

CONNECTING WITH PRESTEL “Although some home computer users accessed Prestel on their BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum or similar, most people used a Prestel adapter.” Thirty years ago the CERN European particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland released the first web browser. For the first time, the World Wide Web, which had been developed at CERN a couple of years earlier in 1989 by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, was available to other research institutions and the general public. It’s no overstatement to say that the world has never been the same since. How that milestone has influenced industry, commerce, popular culture and so much more is well-known. What is less well-appreciated is the technology that this momentous achievement helped bring to a close. That earlier technology – the UK’s Prestel…

Prestel was powered by GEC 4000 minicomputers that were initially located in St Alphage House, central London. It was the first National Operations Centre (NOC). It’s infrastructure consisted of UpDate Centres (UDC) where businesses could update their pages, and Information Retrieval Centres (IRC) that mirrored this data to (regional) end users. IRCs were linked via permanent lines using the X25 protocol at 2.4kbps. These were eventually upgraded to four-wire 4.8kbps links. By 1980 London hosted five IRCs with seven more around the UK, together with multiplexors offering virtual IRCs for smaller areas, including even a US-based Boston IRC. Each GEC 4000 had 384KB memory, six 760MB HDDs and 100 user ports. The GEC 4082 model increased the memory to 512KB, doubled the ports to 200 and introduced additional hard disk…

Mu is a coding environment aimed at those new to coding. It looks great, is simple to use and most of all it isn’t scary. When we start to learn coding, we don’t need the big bloaty IDEs that sport useful, if daunting features. We want to write code and learn new skills, and Mu is the ideal place to start. Recently updated to version 1.1, Mu now supports the Raspberry Pi Pico and so we installed Mu 1.1 on to a spare Raspberry Pi 4, and on to our Ubuntu machine for a test drive. Mu uses “modes” to work with different types of boards. For example, we can work with the Raspberry Pi Pico and MicroPython, Adafruit’s CircuitPython or many other MicroPython boards including those sold by LEGO.…

With up to 8GB of RAM, USB 3.0, a quad-core CPU and dual-band WiFi5, the Raspberry Pi 4 is the first iteration that can deliver a consistent, reliable desktop experience. But to fulfil that potential, you need a desktop case with space for additional storage, full access to the USB ports, and a reliable cooling solution. Among the various solutions available is the $55 DeskPi Pro from SeeedStudio (www.seeedstudio.com). It has everything you need to turn your Pi into a desktop system and delivers a great experience, but setup can be tricky. We’re on the case! You can’t search through a list of Raspberry Pi accessories online without tripping over a bunch of cases. These range from the official white and red case to LEGO-compatible boxes, transparent cases, layers of…

Amazon might not be your first choice, and to be honest it wasn’t ours either. But since we were in a beggars-choosers mutex we got on with it. To Amazon’s credit its series of cloud-based services is incredibly easy to set up, you’re very unlikely to encounter serious downtime and, if you’re careful with resource usage, it can be totally free. We were on a corporate hosting plan so this didn’t apply to us, but hobby usage is unlikely to push you out of the free tier. The pricing structure is quite baffling, as are the number of different types of EC2 offerings available. We opted for m5.large, a two-virtual core instance with 8GB of memory. You can have up to 20GB of SSD storage (or magnetic if you really…

1 Slide-out menu Click here to quickly jump between libraries – including Jellyfin’s Collections, which can be manually curated or created automatically via a plugin. 2 Admin tools The Dashboard is where you go to monitor and administer the Jellyfin server. 3 Sharing options Click here to set up SyncPlay to watch with friends and family, cast to another device or search your library. 4 Playback controls Click here to play the movie, watch the trailer, plus other tasks – for example, adding it to a playlist or editing its metadata. 5 Access multiple versions Rip different versions – say extended versus theatrical release – of the same film and choose which one to watch. 6 Choose audio and subtitle  tracks If your movie contains multiple audio tracks – as…

You don’t have to limit yourself to working with the basic meshes that Blender provides. If you’re not ready to create your own complex models, try importing meshes. For example, if you find a nice model that you want to work with in .obj format (a common format for individual models), import it using File>Import>Wavefront (.obj). Bear in mind that a more complex model will increase your rendering time and possibly slow down operations within the editor viewport. It may also become difficult for Blender to choose the right collision shape for the object. Keep things shiny! When you are working with standard meshes, you can always spruce them up with the bevel modifier (see the Modifier Properties), subdividing and sculpting or by applying nice-looking materials.…

Your NAS server needs a suitable operating system to run, and because it’s designed to be run headless, we’re going to install Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS. The Server version doesn’t come with unnecessary system overheads such as a desktop, because everything is done from the command line. Don’t worry, though: after it’s been set up, we’ll install a special add-on (Cockpit) that enables you to easily administer your server remotely from any web browser on your local network. We chose the LTS version of Ubuntu Server to reduce the number of major OS upgrades that we’ll need to apply during the server’s lifetime. Start the install process Head over to www.ubuntu.com/download and click the Ubuntu Server link, followed by Option 2 – Manual server installation. You should find the latest…

Wales has a history of making computers, going back to the early days of the Raspberry Pi in 2012. Sony’s technology centre in Pencoed is where the Pi has been made since the first revision of the board (the first batches of Raspberry Pi were made elsewhere, but after that it was all Sony). Yet before the Raspberry Pi there was another Welsh computer: the Dragon 32 made by Dragon Data Ltd from 1982 to 1984. After a short life Dragon Data Ltd collapsed in 1984 and from then production of the Dragon 200, a Dragon 64 in a new case, went to Eurohard SA, which itself went bust in 1987. The remaining stock of Dragon machines were given away to subscribers of a Spanish electronics magazine. But in these…

T this month’s coding tutorial will concentrate on Stumpy .This is a Python 3 library for working with time series data, which also uses the matrix profile. The matrix profile together with MPdist are research subjects that are being applied to real world problems. Although it’s good to know how they work, you don’t need to know the theory to use them. If some of the topics in this tutorial look too theoretical, feel free to skip them! This tutorial also includes a quick introduction to Anaconda, which comes in very handy for setting up the Python environment when working with Stumpy. Anaconda management Because Stumpy has close ties with the Python version being used, we’re going to use Anaconda to create the ideal development environment and gain complete control…