233: It's Time Pipewire Faces The Music & Jill's Treasure Hunt

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So, with Pipewire, its possible to share game audio on Discord & other voice chat software?

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yes, pretty much. You can pipe the audio from your game to a fake microphone and tell Discord to reference that. You can also merge the 2 in a new microphone input making it so you can have both your mic and game audio sent as 1 stream to Discord. :smiley:

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+1 for DBeaver. I discovered it about a month ago and have been using it daily for work.

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So I just discovered Soundux. Will have to give it a try or just try doing it myself (depending on my mood).

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Thanks everyone for another fun and informative episode! @jill_linuxgirl I remember how much space the speakers used to take-up when I built my first desktop back in about 1995 - great idea to have good-quality built-in to keyboard! These days though, I’ve got accustomed to the relative tinny sound of budget laptops…!

I was just checking-up on Pipewire. Looks like Debian users won’t be getting it (as default) in version 11 either, so it’ll probably not be using it on most of my machines until ~2024…

DBeaver looks excellent, and well worth checking out. At the moment I’ve stuck mostly to LibreOffice’s modest coverage of databases using its HSQLDB format of old, though it’s now moved to FireBird. I’ve often wondered it it might not be better to decouple from the default format and use an alternative tool. DBeaver might be a good one to try :+1:

I was quite encouraged by your job-seeking advice everyone and will apply it when I’m next looking too :slight_smile:

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@jill_linuxgirl

I don’t recognize the brand of PS/2 to USB converter you’re using but if it’s caused you any trouble i’ve had and incredibly good experience with every model of Tripp-Lite converter and for reference i’ve had key sticking with every model of Startech adapter.

I have very little experience with AT but it looks like both AT and PS/2 offer 5V power which should be delivered with a proper converter. A difference may be the amps available over PS/2 so it’s possible there just isn’t the “juice” to run an amplifier depending on the motherboard or maybe just in general.

A fun project might be taking an AT socket and soldering a barrel jack to it’s 5V/GND pins so you have and adapter that’ll let you power on the keyboard with a regular 5V wall adapter. Then you could use it to play music from any device.

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A reply to some of Rob’s questions,

Browser leaks

Browsers give the following resolutions to Websites via JavaScript:

  1. Your monitor resolution (ex: 1920x1080)
  2. How large your browser window is (ex: 1000x1000)
  3. How large the viewport size is inside the browser (ex: 920x990, this is the one sites use to adjust to size)
  4. The combined thickness of your window decoration when comparing #2 and #3 (ex: 80x10). Changing window themes in GTK for example changes this number.
  5. X/Y of where the browser window is on your monitor

Examples:
https://www.rapidtables.com/web/tools/window-size.html
https://usefulangle.com/post/190/javascript-window-width-height
https://browserleaks.com/javascript

I’d agree sharing more than #3 is of limited purpose and really just tracking/telemetry food. Tracking via #3 could be mitigated by fixing the viewport to something like ~20px increments but this would be annoying.

That’s really just the beginning of it though… browsers can give away a lot of information like all the system fonts you have installed, effort is being made by popular browsers to mitigate these though it’s not a strong effort.

Here’s some good browser tests that let you know how unique/identifiable your browser is:

https://amiunique.org/
https://browserleaks.com/
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

A lot of this tracking depends on JavaScript and i’ve found the best approach isn’t so much a browser choice but just blocking everything that doesn’t need to be running manually using the uMatrix extension (same author of uBlock Origin). Honorable mention to NoScript but it’s a lot less flexible.

If you want an easy install-it-and-forget-it solution the EFF’s Privacy Badger extension does the lion’s share of the work by far.

Bad Links

I was impressed by Michael mentioning URL’s containing code. One of the most common is embedding websites with Javascript inside of links using a data URI.

Base64 example: EXAMPLE OF FAKE DLN LINK (your browser should block this link)

data:text/html;base64,PGh0bWw+PGhlYWQ+PHRpdGxlPkZBS0UgRExOPC90aXRsZT48c2NyaXB0PmFsZXJ0KCdXZWxjb21lIHRvIEZBS0UgRExOIDpQJyk7PC9zY3JpcHQ+PC9oZWFkPjxib2R5PkZBS0UgRExOPC9ib2R5PjwvaHRtbD4=

You can decode the base64 after the comma here to get the following:

<html><head><title>FAKE DLN</title><script>alert('Welcome to FAKE DLN :P');</script></head><body>FAKE DLN</body></html>

Or the link could just be:

data:text/html,<html><head><title>FAKE DLN</title><script>alert('Welcome to FAKE DLN :P');</script></head><body>FAKE DLN</body></html>
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@Ulfnic , thank you so much!:joy: What a marvelous idea, and you have given me food for thought!! :hugs:

Yes, I have had issues with Startech adapters at times as well :frowning: I tried several different AT to PS/2 adapters including a Belkin one and Sun Microsystems with no luck.

And you are so right on, today’s motherboards with PS/2 ports might not be able to draw enough power, especially when trying to use an AT to PS/2 convertor when lots of power is needed by an amp, not just simply keyboard functions! But, you have given me an idea! :joy: There are PS/2 PCIe cards that should let me draw enough power from the PCIe rail! And one I found will also let me plug in a Molex connector to it! I am going to get one of those PCIe PS/2 cards and see what happens!! I will let you know the results! It may simply be, like you said, that the adapters can’t convert all the power needed by the amp. Your idea of converting the AT connector to a standard 5V wall adapter is brilliant, and may be the next step!!! :joy::heart::hugs::penguin::penguin::penguin:

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@ak2020 thank you so much!! :joy::hugs:

So true, and remember how in tbe 90’s some brands of computer speakers would make the cords to short and you couldn’t position them far enough apart? That was so aggravating! :frowning:

Yes, we will have to be patient with Debian and PipWire . . .

:joy::hugs::heart::penguin::penguin::penguin:

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Let the cool kids iron out the bugs. :laughing:

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Now that could be a perfect solution, man that’d be cool.

Best of luck!

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