January 2021 - nmglug - lists.coactcloud.com

the slow web - Gemini, Gopher & the tildeverse
by art＠pin2.io 27 Jan '21

27 Jan '21

I think I’d briefly mentioned the revival of the proto-web standard Gopher and its younger sibling Gemini in an email earlier. I got playing around with Gemini and thought I’d share my experience in advance of this week’s meeting. For folks that haven’t heard of Gopher, it’s a text-based predecessor (and briefly) competitor to the WWW. It lost out when folks saw WWW which was almost Hypercard over the internet and didn’t charge licensing fees as was the case for Gopher. Gemini is a re-imagined Gopher from some alternate cyberpunk universe with a cleaner document format and which runs over TLS. Project names borrow from the early days of the space race. It’s totally impractical, as it could have been implemented much easier with a subset of HTML or even as an alternate text/gmni MIME type on top of HTTPS. I still love it as it tickles my nostalgia centers for the earlier days of the internet. I’ll admit to having rose-colored glasses here. The modern internet is a place where you can get actual work done, but I sure miss the old times of weird personal interest pages and discussion forums. Gemini really brings me back to those days, especially since people don’t seem to quite know what to do with it yet. If you want to give it a shot, amphora and bombadillo are nice clients and there are a number of servers out there (jet force, molly brown, twins and agate are the most mature, with agate appearing to be the easiest to set up). Ironically it’s a little tricky to set up a server on account of TLS. I’ve settled for shared hosting in the meantime on flounder.online and you can find me at hektor.flounder.online There are some other hosting alternatives on the tildeverse, notably tilde.team and the Gemini-only tilde.pink For those unfamiliar with the tildeverse, it’s a stupidly simple concept that has gained surprising traction: set up a VPS running Linux, give people accounts and let them create webpages in old-timey 90s html style, like my long-gone www2.colorado.edu/~barnesak website. Cheers, -Art

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two bootable OSes on one SSD?
by Brian O'Keefe 27 Jan '21

27 Jan '21

Hello all, I hope everyone is safe and secure these days. This weekend promises to be eventful one way or another so I'm holding on to the seat with both hands! I have an Asus laptop with a 256GiB SSD. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on it and all is fine except for my own screw-ups, mostly. After I installed the OS I copied over from the 1TB drive I had been using. I only copied what I needed or used frequently, leaving the remaining data on the 1TB drive. Now I'm wondering if there is a way to partition the 1 TB drive so I have its existing bootable Ubuntu and cloning my currently used, the 20.04 OS at about 200GiB full, onto the 1TB drive in a new, bootable partition. Then I would choose which to boot if I want to use them for separate work. Also could I access the data from one partition to the other in use? I currently can either boot the 1TB disc from a USB connection or just mount it as a storage device and get the info I want from it. At the same time I could grow the 256GiB partition to 512GiB and have all the storage I need. Just a thought but intriguing and especially as I watch my remaining disc capacity on the 256GiB drive slowly shrink. Many thanks folks and I wish all the best for this year and this weekend! Brian --

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Proposed presentation for Feb 11 - Deduplicating backup & binary version control
by Art Barnes 15 Jan '21

15 Jan '21

Hi, Pleased to meet everyone. Given that most folks have a sysadmin-ish background I was thinking to do a presentation split between deduplicating backup software and version control for (large) binary files. Let me know if this works for folks. Deduplicating backup software includes the likes of Borg, Restic and the horribly named Duplicacy. This is the current state-of-the-art in backup and makes efficient use of disk space while giving more flexibility in pruning old backups compared to backup software based on differential/incremental snapshots. I was thinking to give an overview of how Borg/Restic/Duplicacy stack against each other, the concepts behind how they work, and an example of using one of them. My current personal project https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver is a deduplicating version control system that I started at the beginning of the pandemic. I deal a lot with binary files that have a lot of structure like Sqlite databases and was lacking for a good way to keep track of versions. I’m thinking to give an overview of the design behind it along with a usage example. Warning! It’s an ambitious project at alpha-level quality. Finally – throwing out an idea for a future presentation if someone wants to take it on. Gopher has been making a comeback along with its younger brother Gemini. I’m old enough to miss the old days of forum culture and quirky hobbyist websites. This along with the tildeverse scratches my nostalgia itch pretty hard. Maybe someone is familiar with setting up a Gemini server? Cheers, -Art

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Meeting tonight?
by Ted Pomeroy 14 Jan '21

14 Jan '21

Hello NMGLUGers, We are scheduled to meet tonight, virtually, and I hope a few of us will convene. I have not been working on too much and I missed the ABQLUG -the notice goes to spam for some reason. I hope all are well and that the new year brings us some new interest in spreading the word about free software and how to get others to use it. I have two people on the verge of moving to Linux over their frustrations with another system. I try to make the transition as easy as possible. See some of you tonight. Thank you, Ted P

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[ABQLUG] The January virtual meetup is now live!
by ABQLUG 05 Jan '21

05 Jan '21

The monthly virtual meetup room is now open to join. You may join here: https://live.abqlug.com/JanuaryMeetup If you have not joined before, you might need to read this first: https://www.abqlug.com/attendee/ If you are bored, why not join? We can try to answer any of your Linux questions! ~ Jared

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[ABQLUG] Monthly meetup is scheduled for today at 6PM (virtually)
by ABQLUG 05 Jan '21

05 Jan '21

Fellow NMGLUGers, The monthly Albuquerque Linux User Group (virtual) meetup is on schedule today, January 5th 2020 at 6:00 pm. Please bring _any_ questions you might have about using Linux, I didn't have enough time to schedule a topic to discuss. Here is the link you can use to join: https://live.abqlug.com/JanuaryMeetup If you're going to use a desktop/laptop, all you should need is a modern web browser to join the online meeting. If you are going to use a smartphone, you will want to install the Jitsi-meet app, and then set the Jitsi-meet server to live.abqlug.com. If you would like more information on how to attend the meetup, please visit: https://www.abqlug.com/attendee/ If you're having issues using a microphone or camera, you might have to make sure that WebRTC is enabled in your browser if you have "locked down" your browser. If WebRTC is working, you should be able to complete a Microphone and Camera test here: https://test.webrtc.org/ The meetup will likely end around 8pm or before. ~ Jared

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Any recent info about registry cryptocurrency wallets?
by LeRoy Diener 04 Jan '21

04 Jan '21

Hi NMGLUG folks, I've been looking for a couple years for a good cryptocurrency wallet, not a wallet just for bitcoin, but a wallet that supports dozens of cryptos. There are many wallets available for download from the sites of the wallet creators. Many have Linux versions. In the past, I was advised to stick mostly with apps which are in the registry to prevent problems with my OS and system. I've had an approach to have a wallet on a Windows machine, but I wold prefer to have a crypto wallet in a Linux environment, if that's a good idea. I'm wondering if anyone knows if the situation has shifted in the past year or two, if for example, any good wallets supporting many cryptos are considered safe now. Thanks in advance, LeRoy -- I am the Love of God, no matter what. LeRoy Diener 213-LEROYIZ 213-537-6949 www.leroydiener.com/

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