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By: Victor Forberger

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Victor Forberger

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Ubuntu handbook has instructions on how to get Airplay up and running on a Linux box.

With these instructions, here is what I did for my desktop.

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC662 rev3 Analog [ALC662 rev3 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0:…
Continue Reading Setting up Airplay on Xubuntu

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I have upgraded my desktop but not my laptop.

Note: Xneo is an alias for neofetch –ascii_distro xubuntu.

In general, the switch to mostly snaps could be smoother, and I still need…
Continue Reading Upgrading to Xubuntu Noble — 24.04 from 22.02 — and a review

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Given the breadth of hardware and operating system wrinkles at play with Linux, it is all too common to see recurring and minor errors pop up about some setting or hardware snafu that really does not matter.

For my desktop computer, I was seeing log files of 2 to 4 gigs in size. Here is how I tracked this problem, discovered the cause, and found a solution (at least for the ballooning log…
Continue Reading Frequent and recurring errors in log files

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With the new speedometer 3.0 speed tests, I ran some tests with various browsers on my System76 2018 Galago Pro laptop.

Current specs are (via the inxi terminal command):

System:
Host: Hrothgar Kernel: 6.6.10-76060610-generic x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 Distro: Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: System76 product: Galago Pro v: galp3
serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: System76 model: Galago Pro v: galp3 serial: <superuser…
Continue Reading Browser speed tests

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Video acceleration in Firefox (all recent versions of the past year and more) has been a problem on my desktop computer with its radeon graphics card. See my setup. Various websites would have videos appear as glitches and even lead to the xfdesktop freezing/crashing and needing to be killed (xfdesktop will automatically restart after being killed).

Thanks to UbuntuHandbook for its advice at Enable Hardware Video Acceleration (VA-API) For Firefox in Ubuntu …
Continue Reading Video acceleration in Firefox for radeon graphics card

Note: Creepio, an AI, is a featured player among Auralnauts.

The current infatuation with Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially at the state bar which is pushing CLEs about how lawyers need to get on the AI bandwagon, is generally an un-serious infatuation with a marketing concept.

AI and LLM – language learning models, on which much of recent AI is based – has nothing to do with accuracy. So, for a legal practice or any kind of professional activity…
Continue Reading Limits of AI and LLM for Attorneys

With twitter deteriorating by the day, there is a need for social media options. And, one of those options is Mastodon and the Fediverse. Unlike other social media where a person signs up for an account at a central repository (think Facebook, twitter, or LinkedIn), there is no single repository or instance of Mastodon. Rather, Mastodon’s only real organization is set of communication protocols called ActivityPub so that posts from one instance can migrate to…
Continue Reading Explaining Mastodon for Wisconsin Lawyers

Artificial intelligence is all the rage nowadays, and Barton Gellman indicated how whisper.cpp presented fantastic accuracy.

So, I gave the app a run, and it is impressive. Unfortunately, directions for usage could be a bit better. Here are some helpful tips.

First, some directions for installing.

  • Clone the git repository.$ git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
  • Move into the newly created cloned whisper.$ cd whisper.cpp
  • Compile the software.$ make [My systems are pretty vanilla, and there were no hitches with the

    • …
    Continue Reading Trying out whisper for transcribing audio

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    In recent versions of Vivaldi, the menu has started appearing on the right side of the window.

    I am a stickler for usability, and so I want a menu showing. I also follow the original human interface design guidelines of trying to have window controls on the upper-left corner of windows/screens.

    Any insights into how to fix this display bug in order to get the menu back on the left side of the window?

    This bug…
    Continue Reading Menu on wrong side of the screen in Vivaldi

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    With the ongoing unemployment crisis, I have not had much time at all to do anything computer-related in a while.

    But, Dedoimedo has a fabulous post about how to make FireFox more user-friendly in the current v91 user-interface. Here is what I managed to accomplish in 20-30 minutes.

    Download the userChrome.css file I created yourself to save some copying and pasting, if you want.
    Continue Reading Adapting FireFox

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    Dedoimedo has an excellent commentary of the state of the Linux desktop.

    He notes that usability has plateaued in many ways. I agree. The basic functionality and speed I had with Xubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) was stellar. Now running Xubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) on both newer and faster desktop and laptop computers, I have had problems with graphics cards, samba networking is a bust that I work around, and connecting my iPhone for file transfers…
    Continue Reading Not all is hunky dory with Linux, but it is doing as well as others

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    Insync has undergone a major re-write of the underlying sync frameworks from version 1.5.x to 3.0.x.
    Integration with file managers like thunar is a work-in-progress with this new version. More troubling is a major change in sync behavior with the series 3 version. While the new version has many more syncing options, there is a significant change that is NOT adequately explained.
    Previously, all files in the sync folder were synced across google drive and the computers connected…
    Continue Reading Issues with the new Insync3

    Here are some comparative geekbench scores between a 2011 MacBook Pro, a thinkcentre desktop, and a 2018 Galago Pro from System76:
    Single-Core scores
    MacBook Pro desktop Galago Pro
    2935 2186 4209

    Multiple-Core scores
    MacBook Pro desktop Galago Pro
    6282 3493 11636

    The MacBook Pro is a 13-inch Early 2011 model with 8 MB of memory and an Intel Core i7-2620M running at 2.7 GHz and an SSD replacing the original hard drive.
    The desktop is a…
    Continue Reading Geekbench scores

    Ghostscript is the open source command-line access to everything postscript and PDF. Because ghostscript can do nearly everything with these files, however, it is not the easiest to use. The options can and are overwhelming to casual users who may need ghostscript for occasional and very specific purposes.
    Luckily, a host of utilities have been created around ghostscript. For example:
    $ ps2
    ps2ascii ps2epsi ps2pdf12 ps2pdf14 ps2pk ps2ps2
    ps2eps ps2pdf ps2pdf13 ps2pdfwr ps2ps ps2txt
    $ pdf
    pdf2djvu pdfatfi pdffonts…
    Continue Reading shrinkpdf: making PDF files smaller

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    Because I have an encrypted home folder on an ext4 formatted volume, Dropbox stopped working.

    Luckily, Alan Pope has a solution at his popey blog.
    He essentially has created a shell script for you to download and run (after shutting down DropBox on your computer and backing up all of the files).
    After downloading the script (I simply copied and pasted it inside a text editor and then saved it as a file called move_DropBox.sh), make sure to…
    Continue Reading A fix for the DropBox file system warning

    All of a sudden on 18.04 of Xubuntu, my ability to convert image files to PDF has stopped working.
    Normally, I could do the following at the terminal:
    $ convert image*.jpg NEW.pdf
    to convert a series of image files into one PDF file. Now I get an error. For instance:
    $ convert MarsSunset.jpg new.pdf
    convert-im6.q16: not authorized ‘new.pdf’ @ error/constitute.c/WriteImage/1037.
    After a few weeks of these errors (and resorting to GIMP to convert the image files by opening and…
    Continue Reading Fix for ImageMagick convert errors with pdf files