June 8 2021 get_iplayer, Home Assistant, MariaDB, desktop options

Brian asked about people’s experience of get_iplayer and John said that you needed to keep up with the latest version, which Brian had, but John had had no problems with it except when he had not updated it recently.

Brian then expanded on how he had added Node_RED to Home Assistant demonstrating how he could add a gauge by pulling elements from the left hand column. However, he had had difficulty getting Home Assistant to connect to the Internet.

David said that he was running Docker on an Odroid C4 with nginx so that he could communicate from https on the Internet to nginx and then nginx to Home Assistant. However, he thought it would be difficult to set this up on an AWS cloud.

David commented, from his experience of Apache and nginx that the configuration in nginx is a lot more internally consistent; though there is extensive documentation for Apache, it is heavy going whereas nginx is a lot more intuitive; also there are lots of examples of nginx configurations available, for example, for proxies; the downside is that a lot of them are copy and paste examples by people who do not understand what they are copying and pasting.

Brian said that, when he was in the UK, he used Smarty mobile for Internet access and thought he had to use a proxy but had found that that was not the case with Three. The explanation might be that Smarty used carrier grade NAT but Three did not.

Bernard shared another hedgehog video, this one of a hedgehog deliberately rolling over and then carrying on.

John summarised in a presentation what he had found out about setting up a new installation of MariaDB. There are still four default users but they are different from previously; so you cannot copy a previous installation over. You have to log in from Linux root, set up authentication for MariaDB root, get rid of the anonymous user if necessary and create an ordinary user. Once you have set up MariaDB root authentication and entered flush privileges; you can view mysql.user which displays a read only list of current users and their privileges.

After that you can import databases from another installation.

They also recommend setting up a separate admin_backup user for using mysqldump rather than using MariaDB root. However, as David pointed out, this is only relevant if you have a simple MariaDB database. For anything complicated, you are going to need lots of privileges and so you might as well use MariaDB root.

Darren mentioned that he has an online exam tomorrow as part of his course on how to use an IDE; the exam is on diagramming techniques, in particular, using the right diagramming techniques.

David shared a problem he had encountered with 3D printing when magnets get stuck in epoxy that is not then used; he had not found a way to extract them in order to reuse them. He then showed off his upgraded 3D printer.

John W had decided he wanted to abandon Xfce and it was suggested he try openSUSE Gnome; openSUSE offers KDE or LXQt based on Qt, Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, Mate and LXDE based on Gtk and Enlightenment.

David wondered what the advantages of KDE were and John said that its language handling is really good; it is very easy to change from working in one language to working in another which is about the only thing he now uses it for as he mostly uses LXQt.

We ended the session discussing the implications of the impending NHS data transfer and the option to opt out with David sharing the impact of trying to opt out the last time. There may be a problem of people in GP practices not knowing how to do the opt out properly.

It was agreed that it is impossible to guarantee that patient records will not be identifiable and that any agreements into which the NHS enters should bring sizeable remuneration to the NHS.

Further details are available from the medConfidential charity.

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