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Episode 2: Introduction to Open Source and Licensing

Open Source Software is key to many of innovations in technology over the last few decades. It is also a fundamental requirement to build communities around software development. In this episode I give a brief introduction and an overview of Open Source and the licenses behind it.

Please excuse the hay fever induced muffle of my voice during this recording 🙂

Links referred to in the podcast:

Open Source Initiative (OSI): https://opensource.org/
Open Source Definition (OSD): https://opensource.org/osd
tl;dr Legal: https://tldrlegal.com
Google Summer of Code: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Intro music for this Podcast is “Sunshine version 2” by Kevin MacLeod

Episode 1: Depression and Burnout

Depression and burnout are common problems, especially in the tech industry. In this episode I discuss my person experience of them in the hope that it will open a dialog.

Brandon West’s video discussed in the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtQTu4yCk-Q

Intro music for this Podcast is “Sunshine version 2” by Kevin MacLeod

My Open Source projects that still live on

I have recently created a new library called libMariaS3 for a couple of teams at MariaDB which provides a simple C API to Amazon’s S3. This was created because we needed a library which could link to GPLv2 software and Amazon’s own library is Apache 2.0 licensed which is incompatible.

It is not a perfect code base because I had a very short amount of time to get the first release out but it was a very fun project to work on. It led me to take a quick look this morning at a couple of other things I have created in the past to see where they are at today.

Solving my Intel GPU performance issues

For the last few days I had my laptop connected to an external monitor which has a 2560×1600 resolution. Whilst having a few websites open and doing a video chat the laptop completely ground to a halt with the fan going full speed.

My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad X260 with an i7 CPU and 16GB RAM, so not really a lightweight which was why this was so unexpected. After trying some random things I have solved this. So I thought I would detail it here if only so I remember in the future.

KDE Plasma Testing With Kubuntu

After my previous post on testing KDE Plasma on KDE Neon my friend and colleague Max commented with “Any thoughts on using Neon over Kubuntu”.

That did get me thinking as to whether or not Kubuntu with the backports PPA is as good and as stable to use as KDE Neon.

Another week with KDE Plasma

At the beginning of the year I gave KDE Plasma a try as the primary desktop on one of my devices. It wasn’t my primary laptop but I still used it heavily in that time. I enjoyed it but there were still some niggles that meant I wouldn’t have been happy with it being my primary desktop at the time.

A week ago I happened to come across the announcement for KDE Plasma 5.14. The thing that really caught my eye there was the “Display Configuration widget”. This led me to giving KDE & Plasma another chance, another week of testing. Again this is on my primary laptop, a highly-sepecced Lenovo ThinkPad X260.

Continue reading Another week with KDE Plasma

Making WiFi Great Again

TL;DR: Ubiquity UniFi gear is awesome!

When I moved into my current house one of the bigger technical challenges has been to get WiFi that works throughout my house reliably. Since we can only get regular phone lines here I’m on a VDSL2 internet connection which runs at 80/20mbit. The problem is this comes in via my office which is in the corner of the house. My kids bedrooms are in the opposite corner of the house so getting WiFi to reach that far becomes a technical challenge.

Continue reading Making WiFi Great Again