In recent long term support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu, Canonical has been adding more and more packages that are installed using snapd.

Snapd is a package manager that relies on static linking of dependencies, contrary to over two decades of Linux managing dependencies via dynamic linking, with Debian being the pioneer of this approach.

A few months ago, Ubuntu started pushing ads for their Ubuntu Pro service to the command line interface apt command. When you run the apt command from the terminal, you see this message:

Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Then about a week ago, more messages were pushed about the ESM service saying that more packages that can be upgraded if you subscribe to that service.

The AirThings Wave Plus is a multi-sensor that can show CO2, Volatile Organic Compounds, Radon, Temperature, Humidity, and Pressure. The sensor is meant to be used through a phone app.

However, since it uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a phone app this is not the only way to use this sensor.

The following is a list of talks and presentation that I have done on various topics.

They are sorted by the most recent first.

Almost two decades ago, I wrote about home grown terrorism in the USA. The context was the continued barrage of media focus on 'Islamic terrorism', and ignoring domestic home grown threats.

You can see how many naive and/or biased Americans have commented on the above article at the time ...

Fast forward by almost two decades, and you see that things are starting to change ...

Ivermectin has been promoted by certain factions as a miracle drug (yes, those exact words were used) against COVID-19.

But like Hydroxychloroquine, which was equally promoted before Ivermectin, neither have any effect on COVID-19.

So what is the evidence for or against Ivermectin? This article lists whatever evidence at the time of this writing.

If you already use Home Assistant, using the InfluxDB integration, coupled with Grafana will allow you to create very useful data visualizations that offers insight into your home over time. This includes things like: what are the humidity level fluctuations? What is the temperature indoors compared to outdoors? And much more ...

Many weather sensors just report a cumulative rainfall amount to their display unit. That is, when installed the sensor will start with 0 millimeters, and then as rain falls, it will just keep adding to that number, until the sensor loses power, or is reset.

Since it took me a long time to reach a working solution, I am posting this information to save people looking for the same hours and hours of fruitless searching, and frustrating experimentation.

For over a decade, I was running my home server on a trusty AMD Athlon II X4 PC, without any issues.

After upgrading to a newer motherboard the retired one was left unpowered for several months. Then when powering it up, Linux would not boot on it no matter what I tried.

Various distros were attempted, including Xubuntu desktop, and Finnix (highly recommended for testing and troubleshooting from the command line). The symptoms were the same: the PC reads the media, then the screen flickers and goes black with nothing on it.