Ian

If you haven't heard it or seen it, the second 'Prom' in this year's season featured covers of 'Northern Soul' classics and was fab.

Fascinatingly, the TV version has the songs in a different order to the radio one! So the TV has the same singer doing 'The Night' (originally by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons) in the first half and the even more wonderful 'There's a Ghost In My House' (originally by R Dean Taylor) in the second. The radio has these two one after the other in the second half.

I presume the radio one was what actually happened because the switch between songs in the TV one definitely shows signs of editing. But why do it??

Looking at Spotify, they have what I think is the 1970s UK single version of 'Ghost..' I remember and one where his vocal is much more prominent. (Possibly I mixed the links up, but if you listen it should be fairly obvious which is which.)

The other Proms I'm keeping my 'get-iplayer' copies of are the operas. Two of them only got radio coverage, but the 'Oorrible Opera one got a TV edited version.. on CBBC, so it's not with the other Proms on iPlayer!

We were at the end of our Virgin Media contract last month. There are things I do not like about Virgin, but the package we're on isn't normally expensive, includes Eurosport so I can watch cycling, and if the broadband speed went above 100MB, I'd need to get some new hardware and in practice, any broadband delays aren't down to the speed at this end.

Amongst the things I do not like are that they a) hike up the price considerably when you're at the end of your deal and b) chop it down again without arguing when you ring to say that you're considering leaving as a result. I get that it's a tax on not being able to do those calls, but it would save everyone if they just stopped messing around.

After that was sorted out, the Virgin person working from home (and doing some tumble drying in the background!) went 'Oh, you've got a TiVo and the old Superhub modem, we'll give you the new TV box and the Media Hub 3. For free.'

That sounded fine but...

It turns out that the new TV box may store more recordings (I tend to have a full disk most of the time) but it's more of a pain to use. Unless I am missing something, there's no simple way to say 'just show me what's on this channel from now'. Instead, it would like you to compare seven or eight channels now and for the next hour or two.

Sometimes, that is what you want (and the Tivo would let you compare channels now) but, here at least, I want to know what's coming up on, say, Sky Documentaries for the next day or two.

I am guessing that it's not a total coincidence that several channels more are now HD only (and so take up more disk space if you record from them) than before. The TiVo had Film 4 in SD as well as HD and, for me, SD is OK if it means I can have twice as much. (Similarly, I don't have a Blu-ray player: I can buy far more second-hand DVDs for the money that even second-hand Blu-rays cost.)

OK, I may get used to some of this, how's the modem?

The Superhub was distinctly 'meh' as a router. So for the past ages, I have just used it as a modem and had a better third party bit of kit to do the router bits. Actually, I must have started doing this even before moving here in 2011 and getting Virgin^* By the end of the time in London, it was a Linksys WRT54GS, flashed with third party firmware to enable me to do all sorts of interesting things..

.. like go 'my internet connection is more important than L16's, so if necessary, limit his speed, not mine'. Ahem.

That router turned out to be not fast enough to cope with Virgin's speeds even at the 50MB I think we were originally on - if I looked at the bandwidth graph, it would work fine for say thirty seconds, then have a lie down for ten, repeat - so I started using Mikrotik's excellent routers. They're not exactly user-friendly, but they are both cheap and good.

So the I had everything happily set up here: each bit of kit had its own fixed IP address so that various programs could talk to each other easily. The moOde music player in the kitchen is at 192.168.88.22 - so the control app on the phone can talk to it - and gets most of its music from 192.168.88.59 etc etc etc.

OK, the Hub 3 is supposed to be better, let's set up the IP addresses on it. And you can, painfully, sort of. None of this being shown what's connected by name, you have to know the MAC address of its network ports. Then what IP address you can set it to is limited and changing it from 192.168.0.x to 192.168.88.x causes another problem. (At least the Hub 3 lets you do that: looking, the Hub 4 doesn't let you move off 192.168.0.x?!)

It's also not keen on reassigning IP addresses while something is connected either, so I was doing a lot of plugging in, checking if it worked this time, unplugging when it didn't, changing the settings, repeat.

Towards the start of this, I had plugged the Mikrotik router into the PC in bedroom two so I could get the MAC addresses off its tables. (I didn't need to know them on it, but it would show them to me all together in a way that the Hub 3 wouldn't.)

It didn't take long to come to the conclusion that the solution was to just keep using the Mikrotik for nearly everything. I could switch the Hub 3 into 'modem' mode, where it doesn't do any of the networking stuff, just provides a connection to the outside internet, but it looks like even that's not as sensible as it could be and I'd already gone through the 'it could be easier, couldn't it, Google?' process of changing what the Chromecast is connected to.

So at the moment, the Mikrotik is connected to the Hub 3 acting as router, along with the TV box and the Chromecast. I get to keep the old network setup for the various other bits of kit and it seems to work..

.. but it's not exactly an improvement.

* In London, L had one of the original cable companies - Telewest? - provide her phone in New Cross in the late 1980s. When she moved to Crofton Park around 1994, she expected to use them again.. except it turned out that when they did cabled the main road a few hundred metres away they didn't do the road parallel to it that she bought the house on. When they merged with someone and ended up being taken over by Virgin, no-one else wanted to do the expensive bit of laying the cables either, so we were stuck with copper broadband until BT - years after they said they would do so - did 'fibre to the cabinet' there. By that point, we'd moved.

I have used Ubuntu's Linux distribution since the first version was released in Autumn 2004. Building on Debian's 'testing' branch, it added a few things that were too.. dirty for the official Debian branches because of restrictions on the software. An example from a couple of years later was the way that, thanks to Mozilla's trademark on 'Firefox', Debian had its own version: Iceweasel. Ubuntu stuck to Firefox. It also had naked people on the default desktop background.

For a while, I was dual-booting it with Windows, but after a while, I barely used Windows. (The kids' PCs have never had Windows and it's made support a lot easier.) Because the online backup service I was using just did Windows and just did a couple of file systems, for a while I was using Ubuntu on NTFS.¹ When I abandoned the backup service, it was time to use a proper filesystem.

One very noticeable thing was how Ubuntu improved every six months in a way that Windows didn't. Sadly, the naked people quickly disappeared from the default desktop though, and there were other issues. The main one was as a result of the desktop environment that almost everyone using Linux used, GNOME 2, deciding - under pressure from Microsoft who started claiming it had patents on various aspects of the Windows 95-style desktop environment - to do things differently for GNOME 3. Very differently.

Ubuntu had already introduced the Unity desktop for netbooks and other computers with wide, short screens. Around 2011, they went for pushing people with better screens to have it too. I thought Unity was just about acceptable on the Eee netbook, but horrible on a better screen.

At this point, I switched to Linux Mint which as well as being even less pure than Ubuntu - you could watch DVDs without fuss on Linux Mint - had two desktops to chose between: Cinnamon, which was GNOME 3 beaten into acting more like GNOME 2, and MATE,² which was the GNOME 2 code updated a bit. I went for MATE.

And I stayed with Linux Mint for few years until its own annoyances got too much for me. The main one was they way that they broke the best way to upgrade between versions. I have used Debian on servers for many years, and it's one bit of editing and about four lines of typing to go from one version to the next. Not for Linux Mint! They had you using their own program which would sometimes mess up rather badly.

When Ubuntu adopted Ubuntu MATE as an official version in 2015, I went back to that.

Ubuntu MATE 22.04 is what's on L's PC, L30's laptop, and what would be JA's PC if she weren't using a Chromebook now. It's supported until 2025 and I'm not going to upgrade those until the next 'long term support' edition in 2024.

Because I like the small improvements in the six month editions, I upgraded to 22.10 a couple of months ago. This PC was bought in 2018, so it's had two versions a year since then: this was the tenth version.

And there were problems. My favourite screensaver stopped working. One of Ubuntu's more annoying recent-ish changes is making people use their own format for some critical programs rather than the '.deb' format that has worked for decades.³ Then through under-resourcing the snap server, some Firefox security updates were 'rationed' and it was two days before I (and others) were allowed to get them.

The main justification for snaps is that some people don't install security upgrades, so making me use them and then keeping security upgrades from me was the last straw.

So I am back on Linux Mint, MATE edition. Moving from one to the other wasn't hard, but it is true that Ubuntu MATE do MATE better than Linux Mint do.

One side-effect of doing this was that every non-default program I have installed has had to be reinstalled. This isn't hard, and it's been an opportunity to go 'Do I need that? No!' to several of them, but one casualty has been Drivel, a LiveJournal (and thus Dreamwidth) client.

It stopped being developed some years ago, and even Debian dropped it. But the files from the last version would install on Ubuntu and the wonderful Debian-based package system meant it would stay happily working with upgrades to everything else..

.. but it simply wouldn't install on the current Linux Mint. Some other packages the Drivel one depends on are either gone or won't install themselves.

So because using a client is nicer than the DW 'post' page, I am now using dreamwidth-js, which takes text formatted as Markdown - having asterisks on two sides of some text makes it display in italics etc etc - and posts to Dreamwidth via a simple command.

Annoyingly, it seems to be almost my only option, beyond running the Windows Semagic program via WINE. But it does work, and using Deepdwn as the editor is nicer than the DW one.

1. It always annoyed me that the service in question didn't use NTFS itself because of its problems, but they were quite happy to insist that its users had to use it or FAT.
2. The author's Spanish, so it's 'mat-eh' rather than 'm-ate'.
3. You can get around using 'snap' for some programs, but it's a pain.