Typing from the Back Porch
Commenting on the banal
November 2021 is almost over. In some ways it seems like March 2020 just got here. Back then, not that I knew it at the time, but I was finishing up a gig at a small town newspaper. Part of the reason it was wrapping up was due to COVID-19, part of it was due to a mystery illness that was probably COVID-19, and part of it was stubbornness that kept me at my desk when I couldn’t do the work.
Since then, we’ve gone through months of school sessions over the Internet, church meetings over the Internet, lots of staying at home, cautious vacations, and a relative return to normal. People where I live are angry at Joe Biden for all the negative things that came with returning to normal; they might be right about some of them, they’re likely wrong, but I don’t care anymore, so long as the way they act doesn’t directly impact me.
Now, almost at December, I’m sitting on my enclosed back porch, heater blowing on me, lamp giving off a cozy glow. So…laptop plugged in at the patio table, lamp in the middle, workbench and sound system at one end, weight bench at the other, an old dorm refrigerator on one wall holding some beverages, I guess my back porch has turned in to a mancave, at least until a major winter storm hits.
Back porch audio setup
I have an old set of Onkyo speakers that belonged to my father-in-law. I think they’re about 40 years old, probably closer to 50. A few years ago, I retired them because they’d gotten too noisy and I wanted to set up a surround sound system. But because I’m stubborn and a packrat, I kept them. They have volume knobs for midrange and treble, and I figured the awful noise they were making was due to dirty pots. Instead of cleaning them, though, I figured since they were going to the back porch, I’d open them up and see if they could be rerouted. Sure enough, all the wiring had been done with crimp-on slide connectors instead of soldering, so I was able to disconnect the dirty pots and reroute the audio straight from the crossovers to the speakers. Et viola, working garage speakers.
For the amp, I went with a Lepy LP-2020 amp, and for audio I went with a Chromecast Audio (why did you discontinue these, Google?) At the moment, I’m feeding audio into them using Mkchromecast. So I can run audio out of Strawberry Music Player, route its audio to Mkchromecast using Pipewire, and it couldn’t be much more convenient. I’m thinking of setting up MPD and Mkchromecast on my main desktop to replace Plex; MPD even has Android front-ends, so I could use it as a remote.
Giving Fedora 35 KDE a try
I decided to wipe Arch (btw) off my laptop and give Fedora 35 a try. I’ve used several different Linux distributions over the years, and one I’ve had a strained relationship with was Fedora. In the early days of SELinux, they shipped it with an overly complex setup. Back then it was easier to just set SELinux to be Permissive or disabled entirely, which totally defeated the purpose of having it.
Anyway, I digress.
I’ve seen some people say this was the best Fedora release in a while, and so far I agree! Having the AUR is such a convenience on Arch, but it’s a double-edged sword; there’s pkgbuilds that will likely never be an official part of Arch, but you also have to watch ‘em like a hawk. As an example, the Google Chrome build downloads the Ubuntu package, makes some modifications to work with Arch, and repackages it as an Arch package. If the current maintainer were to stop developing the thing, personal experience says it’s pretty easy to file a report that the pkgbuild is orphaned, take it over, and use it as a payload to install on naive users’ computers.
It’s not that big of a risk, but it’s there. Review the pkgbuilds before installing. Every time.
So I decided to give it a shot; I made sure my Borgbackup was up-to-date, wiped the partition, reinstalled, and restored home from Borgbackup. I keep running in to missing packages, but so far it’s been relatively painless. Take that, Linus Sebastian. 😉
Open source creative software?
I’ve been trying to judge a few things in my own mind.
I’ve spent years working in small town newspapers, both in-house and as a freelancer. I can tell you, there’s a lot of small operations still using Adobe Creative Suite CS6 (or older!) or old versions of QuarkXPress, because they just can’t justify the cost. I know a lot of bigger companies like the notion of it being an operational cost instead of a capital expense, but the small guys don’t like a big monthly bill just for people to use InDesign as a glorified word processor.
I can also tell you a lot of small operations have really old Macs. Like, Macs running really old versions of Mac OS. They’re not going to upgrade, because CS6 is dead.
To me, moving an operation to being fully open-source makes sense. Putting all the creatives on Linux desktops, editing and managing photos in Darktable and The GIMP, laying out pages in Scribus, building vector art in Inkscape, editing videos for the website on Kdenlive, all makes sense from an asset management and financial perspective. Unless you decided to contribute to open source projects, the cost to keep up to date is $0, and buying new equipment doesn’t obligate you to immediately upgrade all your software. Using a static web engine like Hugo is cheap, and doesn’t leave your website vulnerable to hackers. Using Syncthing instead of Dropbox means you own your own cloud.
On the other hand, Scribus isn’t InDesign. The GIMP isn’t Photoshop. Linux isn’t MacOS. It’s all different, often not as feature-complete. To take it back to the first hand, though, experience tells me most users at small operations only use a fraction of Creative Suite’s features.
If I decide yes, I might try to set up this website, or part of it, for tutorials, and also post Youtube videos on the subject.
Should I enable comments?
Obviously you can’t comment on this, and I’m sort of thinking that’s fine.