Life gets in the way of my nerding. I’d apologize but I don’t exactly see me as being accountable since this is not exactly a source of income for me. So, I’ll do these as much and as often as I can.
The 9th Noodling strolling in unfashionably late to a party
Smoking a Thanksgiving Turkey
Bought a turkey to smoke for Thanksgiving. I had to buy a 5 gallon bucket to brine the thing in. Using a basic brine of brown sugar and salt. I realized that I don’t have a large enough smoker to hold the turkey whole so my solution is to cut it in half so that I can put it on two of the racks.
What I learned
- My smoker thermometer is probably wrong
- I would have been wise to swap the halves of the bird sometime through the smoking process
- I used to much wood so it was a bit too smokey tasting
- Those turkey bones made for some great post-Thanksgiving soup
- Next turkey should be a bit smaller or just do a couple chickens instead
- What would be really great is to have a smoker that has some sensors like temperature, humidity, particulate matter and a couple probes to put in various places in the meat so that I can get better data on the cooking process
Linux Powered Christmas Lights
I have wanted to some kind of computer controlled Christmas lights since I first saw this light display on YouTube to the tune from the Trans-Siberian Orchastra, “Wizards of Winter.” Since then, this has been something I wanted to do. This was the year that I finally did it and this is what I used.
- BeagleBone Black rev C
- Kulp Lights F8-B “Cape” that controls the pixel lights
- 8 local ports for strings of lights
- Each string can have approximately 700 pixels
- Multiple expansion options
- Pixel2Things AC board to power the traditional AC strings of lights and the blow up Santa and Painfully bright White Christmas tree
- 12v 30Amp Power supply
- ABS Electrical Junction box enclosure
- 10 Pair of Ray Wu connectors to build extension cables and to wire into the F8-B
- 200 ft of 18 AWG 3 conductor cable to build extension cables
- 500 ft of 18 AWG 2 conductor cable for power injection, although, I didn’t end up needing it.
- 8, two conductor extension cords from the hardware store for the Pixel2Things AC devices, the traditional department store lights and the blow up Santa
- 1, 40 ft, 3 conductor extension cord for powering the control box and for extra wire as needed
Light Setup
- Currently running 1148 pixels totaling 3444 light channels
- xlights software AppImage which works very well in openSUSE. Using it not tied to music but just as an animation.
The Plan
Turning some of my “Christmas Lights” into all the holidays lights.
Next year I will be building some props, candy canes, arches and Christmas trees, add a low powered FM transmitter to do light shows to music but not so much that my neighbors will want to burn my house down
BDLL Follow Up
Working through evaluating the Ubuntu 19.10 releases. I’m impressed with the Ubuntu Proper release. It is a great project that has so many high quality derivatives.
Ubuntu Proper (GNOME)
I am going to just say that Ubuntu has my favorite expression of GNOME. The Competitive advantage of Ubuntu GNOME is the clean experience and the additional features that just make sense for a typical desktop user
Ubuntu MATE
A solid experience and it just doesn’t disappoint. You can choose between the different desktop paradigms of Windows Like, Mac Like, and Unity Like. It’s such a smart Desktop and frankly I think this should be the Ubuntu Proper experience, but that is my opinion.
Lubuntu
The LXQt desktop with the best out of box polish. There are some other things I would polish out on it, specifically, to drop openbox as the window manager and use Kwin but that is easily done for any user. In fact, I did a little write up on it.
Kubuntu
A great Plasma desktop experience and although it has some really great defaults, I still prefer some of the other integration better on openSUSE. Specifically that Firefox uses the Plasma file dialog box instead of the clunky GTK version. Since the default layout is not a big deal to me as that is easily changed and I have been doing so since the KDE 3 days, there isn’t a great reason to choose Kubuntu over an openSUSE Plasma. However, I will say, it is my favorite of the Ubuntu flavors. They just happen to do Plasma justice and for someone new to Linux that wants a premium Linux experience, this would be a candidate to send them there.
Xubuntu
Xfce based Ubuntu. I didn’t actually try it but since I know what I am getting with Ubuntu and I know what I am getting with Xfce, you just can’t go wrong with it. For those that like the Xfce experience and want to try their hand in the Ubuntu world, this is a good place to go.
openSUSE Corner
Tumbleweed Snapshot Releases
- Mesa 19.2.4 bug fixes from 19.2.3
- Linux kernel 5.3.12
- Tumbleweed gets a new OpenSSH Version
- KDE Plasma 5.17.3 buxfix update fixed Mouse KCM acceleration profile on X11. I did notice that there were mouse issues shortly after that announcement with GNOME’s mouse issues.
- kcalendarcore package update with KDE Frameworks 5.63.0
- YaST Packages updated
- Firefox 70
- Libvirt 5.9.0
- ALSA 1.2.1.1 dropped patches and fixed regressions for the UCM parcer
- Update of ModemManger 1.12.0, a D-BUS-activated daemon that controls mobile broadband devices and connections. That update had several improvements and changes to include adding support for Mobile Station Based Assisted-GPS in addition to Mobile Station Assisted-GPS.
- firewalld 0.7.2 added 15 new service definitions and provided a new option, FlushAllOnReload in firewalld.conf
There was also an email from the Tumbleweed release manager, Dominique Leuenberger that a build fail notification for the python-numba package in openSUSE Factory has not been addressed for the past four weeks and unless somebody steps up and submits fixes, the python-numba will be removed.
Tumbleweed Snapshot Reviewer give 20191203 a stable score of 95; 20121206 Stable 98; 20121207 Stable 99
openSUSE Board Elections
Two seats are open for election on the openSUSE Board.
References
KulpLights.com
Pixel2things.com
xlights
Wizards of Winter Christmas Light Display 2004
Tumbleweed Snapshots from news.opensuse.org
openSUSE Board election 2019-2020 – Call for Nominations, Applications
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