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This week Jonathan, Randal, and Aaron chat about Linux, the challenges with using system modules like the Raspberry Pi, challenges with funding development, and more! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

FLOSS-809 Jonathan: Hey folks, this week, David Ruggles joins me and we talk with Frank Delport about Py4j, a Java library for exposing GPIO and SPI, all kinds of stuff on the Raspberry Pi in Java. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 809, recorded Tuesday, November the 12th. Pi4j, stable and boring on the Raspberry Pi. It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we've got something a little different, out of the box. Maybe outside of my comfort zone. But first we have a co host. We have Mr. David Ruggles, the David Factor. Welcome, sir. Good to be here. I appreciate you kind of popping in at the last moment here saying, Oh, you don't have a co host yet. I can, I can do that. I could be that guy. I very much appreciate it. You're very welcome. Because I think, I, I, it's on me. It was my fault. It was a scheduling snafu that I made. But I think I was going to do the show solo if you hadn't popped in. So, very much appreciate that. David: It's going to be interesting. I don't remember which one it was. It was one of the recent ones I was on. It was about Mac and I ended up, oh, Brew! Brew I said I'm not a big Mac guy so many times it became a joke and, you know, now it's, and we ended up calling it the Whopper episode. So, for this one, I'm not a big Java guy, but I don't know of any funny saying about that, so. Jonathan: I am here to learn. The question may be, are you a Raspberry Pi guy? David: Not, I own a couple. And I've run some code on one, but I just, It doesn't fit into my day job, and I don't have enough time for that hobby. But I love the idea of the Raspberry Pis and that whole ecosystem, and I've done a little bit of Arduino stuff, it's kind of that same you know, software meets hardware. Bye Jonathan: bye. Yeah, that's, that's the thing about the Raspberry Pi, and so, like, before the Raspberry Pi, there was the, the Beagleboard and Beaglebone, and before that even, there was the Arduino, of course. If you go even further back, you have things like the BASIC stamp, so this idea has been around for a long time. But the idea of, well, let's take our, our computers that we're used to, that we interact with, and let's give them more ways to reach out and interact with the real world. And that's just the, that's the addictive part for me. Like that you can, you can hang real hardware. You can, you could, you could do things. And so a lot of times that's turning lights on and off. That's actually where I really got started with some of this was, you know, okay, let's put a relay inside a lamp and then switch the relay. With the way that I first started doing it was the the relay was connected to the arduino The arduino could switch the light back and forth and then the arduino just had a super simple script on it That talked to the local computer That you know so that it could tell the arduino to tell the light to go off and on and then of course You know you you make a web page with a button on it so that you can you know Pull it up from anywhere and turn your light on and off and that's just you know That's geek nirvana. Like that's that you made it when you could do that So today's guest is Frank Delport, and we're talking about Java on the Raspberry Pi, which, you know, is kind of an interesting thing. So I could, I could see this. With Java, you could do very, very quick sort of prototyping of programs. And there's so many libraries out there. And then, you know, you bring it to the Raspberry Pi, and it, it is kind of this, like, really easy to get started, really quick prototyping platform, perhaps. So I guess I can see the point of it. Are you familiar with this project at all? David: I looked at it a little bit enough to have a question about the change in versions. Okay. That's about as far as I got, so I'll wait for our guests to ask that question. Jonathan: We will definitely get to that. Let's go ahead and bring bring Frank on. Welcome to the show, sir. Frank: Hello good evening from Belgium. Jonathan: Huh. Well, good morning from Oklahoma. Frank: And thanks for inviting me. You Java lovers. Jonathan: I've, I've explained it before. My experience with Java happened. Well, one with a much earlier version of Java and two, a much earlier place in my programming career. So I am sure that some of the frustrations that I have would That I had would no longer be things because hopefully I know a little bit better what I'm doing now. And from what I understand, the Java ecosystem has sort of come along and things are a bit nicer to work with as well. Frank: Yeah, so people who are listening to this podcast and have a bad feeling about Java, if you're feeling dates from Java 8 or around that time, Please ignore those feelings and, and take a look at, at nowadays Java. The fun thing is the Java from then still runs on the new run times, but the language has evolved a lot. The run times has evolved a lot of you can write much cleaner codes than you could do. A long time ago and yeah, debugging and the frustrations you have possibly are all gone now with better tooling and, but yeah, everything has evolved as we have so much better IDEs for all languages. We have a visual studio code for people who want to start coding for free with a very good IDE. What's that? Plugins for all languages. So yeah Java has evolved a lot and, and I hope I can inspire some people who are, who have some frustrations to retry some of these and see what, what has changed. David: In all fairness, my experience actually is even further back. It was Java 6, I think the last Java that I touched. Yeah. As soon as I get copious amounts of free time, I will revisit Java. I've committed to that. Frank: Okay. If you, if you're looking for a starting point, I also write blog posts for fuji. io, which is the website for the friends of OpenJDK, which is a community platform. And on that Side, I have a small tutorial getting started with Java 30 minutes of video with all the basic functionality of Java which could be a good starting point if, if it's really new to you or you just want to see what the current state is. Jonathan: Yeah, so let's, let's start with this question that I, I threatened that I was going to ask, and that is, why, why, who, who thought it was a good idea to put Java on the Raspberry Pi? And of course I asked this very tongue in cheek but I'm sure you, I'm sure you get it a lot. Like, why Java on the Pi? Frank: Well we go back, I think, about five years, In history, and I was doing Java development at that time for a company in Belgium, Televic Rail, who builds display systems for, for trains and communication systems for trains. And we were also using Javavix. So those are, Javavix is a graphical user tool for Java. So those were my two tools that I was used to use to, to work with, and I wanted to create a touch based touch screen based application for my son for his drum boot. So it was then nine years old. So a little application on a touch screen where he could start some lights in his drum boot and, and some flushing let strips. And I wanted to create that with Java and Javavix because those are the tools I know. I wanted to use Raspberry Pis because I had a few of them because I was I'm also doing a Coder Dojo, the coding club for kids. So we have some, some of the stuff laying around and, and, and they say, if you want to learn something new, you should focus on one thing. And for me, it was the electronics, communicating with. electronics hardware from software. So I needed to use the tools I already knew, Java, Java, Vix, and, and, and Raspberry Pis. I've used that a bit. I used Linux before. So the new thing for me was communicating with, with those devices. And that's how I started with some basic experiments, blinking a LED. The hello world in, in electronics and I found at that time that there was not that much documentation about running Java on a small PC like the Raspberry Pi. We go five years back. So there were not the Raspberry Pi five we have now, which is a full power device. So we had the Raspberry Pi three, I think at that time. So I, I needed to find out a lot of stuff and experiment, and that's when I started writing blog posts and, and people who are watching this podcast as a video, they can see my book behind me here on the side. So I ended up writing a book which landed me a new job. So it's, for me, it was a personal journey of, of combining software and hardware. And Java is my language, the language I use the most and love the most. So that's why I thought that Java on Raspberry Pi is actually a good, good idea. And during that journey, I, I bumped on Pi4j, which is a project which is already I think it started in 2012 a Java library to make it easy for Java developers to communicate with the GPIOs of the Raspberry Pi. So interact with electronic devices and, and, and, and in those, those last years, I got involved in the, into the Py4j project itself. Thank you. And that's why I'm here to share this message and this love for electronics on the Raspberry Pi. Jonathan: Yeah. And, and so, you know, with the, with the Pi it's kind of been interesting because the, the, the Linux kernel in general, the Raspberry Pi, it seems has sort of dragged some of these things into the kernel, like not necessarily GPIO access from the kernel, but exposing that to user space. Like from, from what I can tell, that, that subsystem Was created because of the Raspberry Pi and other devices like it. So how much, how much of this worked when you got involved with Py4j a few years ago? How much of this was...

This week Jonathan and David chat with Frank Delporte about Pi4J, the friendly Java libraries for the Raspberry Pi, that expose GPIO, SPI, I2C and other IO interfaces. - https://www.pi4j.com/ You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

FLOSS-798 Jonathan: Hey folks, this week Rob joins me and we talk with Carl Richel, the head honcho over at System76. We chat about their new desktop, Cosmic, we talk Rust, we talk System76 hardware, and even a little bit about Intel and AMD. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 798, recorded Tuesday, August 27th. It is time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we have a treat today. I know I'm excited about our guests most of the time, but I'm extra excited today because we're talking with Carl Richel about System76, about Cosmic, about. All kinds of stuff. I'm sure we're gonna talk Russ. We're gonna talk Wayland. We're going to talk the new cosmic desktop, which the alpha is out. It's great. Before we get him, let's talk with our co host. And today we have, we have Rob, we have the, the cereal desktop, the, the, the distro hopper, which is why Rob is on the show today, because I, I was, I was pretty confident that I could talk him into hopping, at least in a virtual machine over to the new cosmic alpha, Rob, welcome. Hello, hello. Hey! We've been watching Cosmic for a long time now, haven't we? Rob: We have. Been all curiously interested in all the places they've been going. Jonathan: Yeah, I think so they they made it's oh, it's been like a year ago now carl will be able to tell us I'm sure exactly how long it's been but it's been like a year ago now They made their initial announcement and the things that that really caught my attention right away are one They're getting away from gnome, which i'm I I like the pop os desktop, but i'm not a huge gnome fan two they were going to rust base, which I think rust is just cool and three they're like And because we're doing Wayland and we're building it from the ground up, we're going to do HDR. And I'm like, Oh, HDR is cool too. So like from the initial announcement, they had me hooked. And I've just been kind of eagerly awaiting the whole time. Like, Oh, when's it going to be ready? When's it going to be ready? Oh, now you, you gave it a Rob: test drive, didn't you? I have I've given a test drive on a VM. I, I was really hoping to try it out on bare metal before the show, but you know, time flies and it gets away from me. Jonathan: Yes, day job and family and all kinds of other stuff going on. And then there's that other show that we keep you busy with too. So we have a lot, but it looks really good. It looks really good. And even in a VM, it does. All right, let's, let's let's go ahead and bring, bring Carl on. Obviously the guy that knows what's really going on. Carl, welcome to the show. Carl: Thanks for having Jonathan: me. Yeah, thanks for being here. This is, oh, this is going to be fun. I, we, we had Carl on back when we were still on the Twit Network. And Leo was so, so excited to be able to talk that he's like, Oh, I want to co host too. And so, you know, it was Doc and me and Leo all co hosting. Well, I mean, Doc was the main host and then Leo was kind of the main host because it's Leo. But it's, it's great to have you back. And it's great. It's great to chat about, you know. First off, what's happened since then, but I think mainly what everybody's curious about what I'm curious about. So let's talk cosmic and let's Carl: Yeah, I love to talk cosmic. So Thanks for having me on to chat about it. I was thinking about the last show We were on together too with that with Leo and I remember distinctly he has he has a one of our darted pro laptops And he, he apologized for running Linux Mint on it, I think. Oh, that's But we're just happy, we're just happy when Linux works that way. We, we're here to make Linux work on our products, whether it's Pop or Mint or, or Bootery or, or Arch. Jonathan: Yeah. So I'm actually, I do the show on an HP Dev1, which is not quite your hardware, but it's also pretty much your hardware from what I understand, but running Pop! OS on it still. And I've had a Yeah. Yeah. 99 percent great experience with it. There's something weird with the power charge circuitry, but we work around that we make it work anyways Carl: Yeah, that was a great product and a great collaboration of the folks at HP. You were really great to work with. Jonathan: Yeah Carl: They're very professional. I think Working with them on dev one Also helped us refine POP 2204, because that was coming out at that time. And so we had just more people with different perspectives looking at what we were building and, and really helped, helped sharpen that, that operating system release. Jonathan: Yeah. Okay. I didn't expect to get to this question so early, but it, it really leads into it. You did the collaboration with HP and there's, there's another company out there that I think might be really interesting to do a collaboration with. And that's framework. And I'm, I'm just curious, like, do you, do you have opinions on framework? You consider them a competitor and have you ever thought about that? Like, I wonder if we could do something similar with the framework laptop. Carl: Oh, I've been, having been in the hardware business for now. Almost 19 years. I know I know how challenging it is and I, I think it's really admirable how well they've done getting into the market and doing a lot of creative work around right to repair. We have, we have that. But very much in common since day six and, and, and framework both care a lot about their about a user's right to repair, but their ownership over their products. So so I think I congratulate them on, on doing something that I know very well, how hard it is to do, and they've done a fantastic job. So, so good for them. Jonathan: Yeah. I, I, I kind of, I can envision a future where it's like either, you know, system 76 makes. One of the embedded main boards that people can put into a framework laptop or framework sells a system 76 version or maybe even makes cosmic, you know, maybe as simple as making cosmic a ship option that you can buy one of our laptops, you can put system 76 cosmic on it. And everybody wins. Like it just, it, there, there seems like there's gotta be, there's gotta be some way that the cross pollination and that can happen. Carl: I think that would be possible. There's, I'm very interested in modular mobile devices. So perhaps at a level, A little bit further than where framework currently goes, but very similar in that we have a main board that can be used across a number of different devices. And you essentially connect daughter boards to that main board for your port layouts, and that might be used for a desktop or a laptop or any other kind of device. I think it takes a lot of creative engineering to kind of compete at a very high level and do that with really good thermals in a mobile platform. But I mean, doing hard things is the kind of stuff we're interested in. Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So let's, let's shift gears a little bit. Let's talk Cosmic. What was, what was the point where you guys realized, okay, we need to, you have, you have Pop! OS, which is a very, very heavily, heavily customized. Ubuntu, and it's a very heavily customized GNOME. And at some point you guys made the decision that GNOME is just not cutting it anymore. I'm curious what, what that looked like. What was, what was the point where this, this harebrained scheme as it were, popped up where it's like, we need to, we need to start from scratch on this. Yeah, why? Yes. Carl: Yeah. Why? Okay. Well, it's a long, it's a long story, so I guess I have to decide where to even start, but at the best place is probably with why we decided to make the changes we wanted to make to gnome in the first place. We were. All of our engineers that were working on the Pop OS were using i3 at the time. When they were using i3, I got became interested in it. And so I started using Sway. Then we were getting calls in our tech support department. I said, Hey, does I3 and Sway run on, on Pop OS or how do I set up I3 on Pop OS? And this was not just a one or two requests. This was extremely common. It was, it was coming in regularly. Then I went to a, A firmware conference at Google for Open Firmware, which we do a lot of work in that area. And so we were giving a talk at the conference and everyone at the conference was using a tiling window. It became clear to us at that point that what we were providing at PopOS out of the box was not what our customers needed. So in response to that, we decided to build the extensions we built into Gnome, which, which added auto tiling added a different UX in general with a launcher and application library and a doc. And we were adapting for some things we're writing new, new software for others. We were adapting extensions like dash to doc to provide the user experience that we wanted. Then we found our users were craving and our customers were craving. So it all started with just the desire to. Respond to what our customers want and build something that they wanted. The next. Step was to try to make that more official. And we wanted to prove what we were doing and know, and then see if we can make more official. We, we had a, a UX architects or a UX architect. Maria was on the design team. I had gone to a number of quad X and. And over time, it just became clear that our vision for the desktop, and we pitched the idea that you could take, we could kind of separate the idea that the UX is what we And in reality, it's a whole bunch of different pieces that you put together to create a holistic experience. And we thought that Noam could perhaps take the, take the perspective that SimCity 6 cou...

FLOSS-787 Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 787, recorded Wednesday, June 12th. Video Ninja, it's a little bit hacky. Hey, this week, Kathryn Druckmann joins me and we talk with Steve Seguin, the creator and maintainer of Video Ninja, Raspberry Ninja, Versus Cam, and the new Social Stream Ninja, it's all about WebRTC and comment aggregation for doing live streaming, it's a lot of fun, you don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Hey folks, it is time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett. And today as the co host, we have the lovely Catherine. Welcome Catherine. Katherine: Hey, thank you. I'm glad you pinged me. Thanks for having me again. Yes, Jonathan: yes, yes. I'm glad to have you back. The last time we were going to have you on to co host, you sent me a last minute email and said, Oh, by the way. Yes, Katherine: that is true. I live in Texas. I lost power two times within a two week period. One was about a little over 48 hours, and this last time was about 28 hours. Again, it could have been worse. It was worse for quite a few other people, but It was kind of rough and difficult to get things done when you don't know if you have power or not, and then you don't. Jonathan: 48 hours, that is, that is long enough to really sort of make you think about things. Like if power is just off for an hour or two, like it's fine, just try not to open the refrigerator and everything, everything goes, life goes on. But you get over a 24 hour period and suddenly you start thinking about, What do I do if power's off for a week? Can I survive this? Yeah, yeah, Katherine: you have to start, yeah, yeah. Jonathan: What changes do I need to make in my life? What could I do to be more prepared for this? Like, at least for me, when I go through something like that, I immediately start thinking, okay, how can I be better prepared for this next time? Yeah. Katherine: Prepper mode, yeah, yeah, for sure. I need more solar panels. And then, I also had a hotel booked, like, and then my power came back on, so. There you go. So I was able to cancel it, but yeah. Jonathan: Yep, yep, yep. Katherine: Yeah, that was fun. Jonathan: All right. Well, we have a, we have a guest today. We're going to talk with Steve, I believe it's Sanguine? Sagan. Steve: That sounds good. Jonathan: Hey, there's Steve. Steve Sagan. And he is the guy behind Video Ninja, which you may remember as OBS Ninja. We'll talk about the name change. And then there's some other newer projects that he's got going on. I want to ask first, Catherine, how familiar are you with this? You said in the pre show that you you use some of these tools for some other things for, for day job? Katherine: Yeah. Yeah. I, well, so I've, I've used things. I mean, yeah, yeah. I can totally talk about it. Yeah. I know it's something secret. Yeah. I, but I, I, you know, I like to use open source tools where public, where possible. But yeah, I, you know, I, I would, I'm not a I'm not a person who has a lot of experience with streaming video and that type of content, but I have done a little bit of it. And when I have done it, I have used OBS or, Video or things like that and I you know I'm really excited about this because I would like to do more with these tools And so this is a really exciting opportunity for me to have a conversation about it. Jonathan: Yes, absolutely So something something that we've been asked about a couple of times is how does the technical side of doing the show work? And some some know we stream the live video to discord, which is a lot of fun That word fun gets a lot of mileage there because a lot of times it's a, it's pain. So one of the, one of the things that we're going to do today that I think is we're going to talk with Steve, I'm going to give kind of a walkthrough of the technical setup for the show. And then I'm hoping Steve is going to point out some places where we could do it better. And but let's not, let's not faff about anymore. Let's not. Piddle wasting more time. We got started a little late. So just squeeze every minute possible out of the hour. Let's go ahead and bring him on Steve. Steve Sagan. Sagan. Steve: That's fine. Yeah. Jonathan: All right. Steve Sagan. Welcome sir, to the show. Steve: Thank you for having me. Jonathan: And so your claim to fame, at least in this context is it's mainly video ninja, right? Like that's what, that's what most people know, know your work for. Right. Steve: Yeah, at this point Video Ninja, a little over four years ago, at the start of the pandemic was a pretty popular tool. It still is. And it is, yeah, it's just only grown since then. Jonathan: Now, when you, when you first started it, it was called OBS Ninja, right? Steve: Yep. It was OBS Ninja. That name was picked around 2017. But it kind of infringes on the OBS studio name and also, um, confuses some users thinking that it's affiliated with OBS. Right. And so changing it to, to video made it more generic cause it doesn't work with just OBS. It works with, with video. virtually any tool for any purpose. So yeah, the name changed to Video, and some people ask, you know, it's, it's V D O as in, and it's a joke on video. If anyone's curious. Jonathan: Yeah, so, it's, there, there is, there are two, there are two ways to pronounce that V D O, you can spell it out, like a noob, like I do, or apparently, the cool way to say it is you just say the word video, and it's a pun, and it's done intentionally. It is Steve: a pun, I, I try to emphasize the D a little bit, so it's a little more to the name, but yeah, it's a, it's a pun. Jonathan: There was something that happened with OBS where some other tool was using the OBS name, like without any permission at all. I think it was a proprietary tool. I don't remember all the details of this, but the OBS crew came out and said, please don't do that. And it was about that same time that OBS Ninja just sort of, yeah, just sort of quietly. So by the way, guys, we're going to, we're going to rebrand and we're going to, we're going to become Video Ninja now. Steve: And that was, I think Streamlabs OBS was probably the biggest offender at that time. That's Jonathan: right. That's what it was. Steve: So yeah it was time to dodge Jonathan: change. So give us the, you know, the rundown, like what, why did you pick the OBS name to start with? What is Video Ninja intended to let people do? What's the, what's sort of the, what, what problem does it Steve: solve? Well, back around 2017 I was playing video. I'm doing a lot of WebRTC work, you know, VideoNinja uses WebRTC technology, which allows you to do peer to peer in the browser. And OBS has a browser source element, which lets you put webpages into your video stream. And I noticed that WebRTC was working within that browser source. And it wasn't working flawlessly by any means, but it was working. And I saw that open up. massive potential because it's a lot easier just to put a URL in than configure servers with Nginx and other aspects. So the tool is really focused on being a production tool for OBS initially. And so that, that's where the name came from. It was meant to be more of a a fun, flexible tool for OBS. I forgot the rest of the question. Jonathan: What are some of the other problems that Video Ninja lets you solve? Steve: Well, it's a highly flexible tool these days. So, some people are using it to do podcasts without OBS at all. For example, you can record within the browser. You can record directly to your Google Drive. It lets you bring in streams from mobile devices without having to download anything. If you have an older device an older Android, it will still work generally with, let's say, Chrome on that Android. It also facilitates peer to peer video, let's say, over your local LAN. A lot of people are used to using cloud services, but if you have a bunch of cameras in your house and you don't want them going to the Internet and back you can keep all that traffic locally securely private within your own personal LAN, yeah. It does transcription, translation video effects. Really? Jonathan: Yeah. I did not know. I did not know I did any transcription stuff. That's cool. I'll have to look into that. Steve: So, when you're using something like Chrome or Edge, it has a built in API that you do transcription. So you can add closed captioning to all the guests and each guest can have their own label if you choose to. Jonathan: Nice. Steve: Yeah, there's quite a few other use cases in this actually, I feel. Jonathan: So, speaking of other use cases I, One of the open source projects i'm a part of they have an apple, you know, like a an iphone app They wanted to get me as part of testing of that. And so they sent me the the cheapest ipad that you can buy on android but still It's apple hardware. It's fairly nice and it's so now I suddenly have this big portable screen and It occurred to me that this would be a great teleprompter. So I, I bought a teleprompter kit that sits underneath my camera now. And so I can put the iPad up there and you know, it shows in the, the, the half mirrored glass and I have a nifty I have to nifty teleprompter, but then I, I, I had to solve this problem of, okay, what app do I want to use to be able to hook up my teleprompter to my iPad? My laptop here to actually be able to record and, you know, scroll through my text as I record. And I found a website that works great as a teleprompter, but I couldn't get the, the remote aspect of it working. And it's like, I kno...