 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your weekly GNU slash Linux news video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. If I packed any more freedom into this podcast, I would have a disheveled appearance and I would pick at my feet. On this edition of Unfettered Freedom, Blender 2.9 has been released and it is an impressive release. It makes me want to learn Blender, maybe one day. So Thunderbird, they now have OpenPGP enabled by default. We're also going to discuss a really nice free and open source alternative to something like Google Authenticator. We're going to talk about FreeOTP which is an open source two-factor authentication application. We're also going to discuss the ArchWiki's list of applications page. Now this is really fantastic for new to Linux users. The ArchWiki has a list of applications page where they break down some of the most popular applications available. Also, Hurricane Laura and the several days that I went without electricity and some of the lessons I learned going through what I did with that storm. All this and more on Episode 5 of Unfettered Freedom. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT or Distrotube on YouTube and on Library. This podcast, as well as all of the video content on the Distrotube channel, it is community sponsored and because of the community support that I received, there are no corporate sponsors or product shilling of any kind in these episodes. And I can think as I please, I can say things that need to be said. In short, I can be independent and if you'd like to support my work, I'd greatly appreciate it. Please subscribe to Distrotube over on Patreon. And our first story is going to be the big release of Blender 2.90. So Blender is a really neat 3D modeling application. It's for creating animations and really cool stuff like that. I've never really used Blender myself. I've always wanted to learn how to use Blender and every time they have another release and I keep seeing this thing improve and I see some of the amazing things people can do with Blender, the more I want to learn about it. And the other thing we should also mention about Blender is it does have the ability to edit video. You can actually use Blender as a video editor. I don't know how well it does video editing because that's not really the main purpose of Blender, but it does have that capability. So one of the things that immediately impress me is those of you watching the video version of this podcast, when you go and look at the release announcement for Blender 2.90 from Blender's website over at Blender.org, it's not just plain text on a mailing list. It's not just the same old release announcement that you typically get with open source software releases. This page is full of animations and YouTube videos demonstrating some of what you can do using the Blender software. I mean this page just is, it's amazing. It's a gorgeous website as you would expect the kind of people that use Blender no doubt would be very good at web development as well. It's just a very well put together release announcement page. Some of the new features and improvements with Blender 2.90 include things like now they have this physically based texture for simulating the colors of the sky. This feature is called Nashita. They also have improved motion blurring, improved shading to avoid that blotchy appearance that you can sometimes get. They have NVLink support now for CUDA and Optics, so of course that's for your NVIDIA cards. You really need powerful graphics cards really to do some of the 3D modeling and applications like Blender. That's one of the things that sometimes people really don't take into account with things like video editing and 3D modeling and animations and things like that is because they're so graphically intensive you actually do need a pretty decent GPU to get the best performance out of these applications. Some other notable changes in Blender 2.90 include a new interactive search menu, drag and drop reordering of modifiers and other stacks, scene statistics available as an overlay in the 3D viewport. There is a new lens distortion model and various other features. One other one that just jumps out at me is that there is now initial Wayland support. Probably not great Wayland support. Most people that do things with graphics and especially video, if you're recording video especially, Wayland is not ready at all. It's nowhere near ready, you kind of have to still use X11. We're going to be using X11 probably for another decade or two on GNU slash Linux unfortunately until Wayland has to come along a lot further. Right now I don't even think you can capture your screen, video capture your screen using Wayland. Until we can get some of that basic stuff working, X11 is going to be around forever. Blender 2.90 is free and open source software. It is available on Linux of course because Linux free and open source software of course is a first class citizen. But Blender is also available on proprietary operating systems like Windows and Mac OS. You can grab the latest versions of Blender from the Blender.org website for those of us on Linux. If you run a distribution that has system D, Blender 2.90 is available right now as a snap from the snap store. And I mentioned that Blender is one of these pieces of software that I have wanted to try out forever. I have wanted to actually learn Blender for a long time and for whatever reason I've just been putting it off and you know I really want to get into maybe doing some animations and things maybe you know for purposes of my videos I just think it would be cool what if I created you know an intro to my videos or outro to my videos some kind of animation you know using Blender I think that would be a neat little project to work on because I think me learning Blender would be a cool thing to document on the channel you know as I learn Blender I can show you guys that are also interested in learning Blender maybe how to use Blender. That might be something I get into maybe here in the near future. And our next story is the new release of Thunderbird now has OpenPGP support and that's enabled by default OpenPGP of course is encryption for your email. Now I have been a Thunderbird user for years almost since the beginning of Thunderbird. So I've been using Thunderbird for a long long time but I've never used encryption with Thunderbird I've actually never used encryption with any email because I've never found the need because I don't typically email anything that has any kind of sensitive information in it because email by its very nature is not secure because the people that invented email. I mean email was invented so long ago it was it really predates modern computing it predates the web by many many many years. So they never had security or privacy in mind when they invented email. So just know that email I don't think will ever be secure but if you want to encrypt your emails OpenPGP is a way to do it and Thunderbird had OpenPGP in several releases prior to this but it wasn't enabled by default and the big deal now is starting with version 78.2.1 OpenPGP is enabled by default. For those of you that are able to run Thunderbird 78.2.1 or later the way you get to the OpenPGP key manager is you have to go to the tools menu and you get to that by clicking on the little hamburger menu on the right side of the Thunderbird window. Now most of your Linux distributions are not going to have 78.2.1 or later in their repos just yet most distributions of course are static release distributions they typically are not shipping the latest and greatest software. On rolling release distributions you may have a hard time finding Thunderbird 78.2.1. You can always go to the Mozilla website go to the official Thunderbird website and grab the latest 32-bit or 64-bit binaries. On Arch Linux I noticed that the Thunderbird package available in the standard Arch repos is still on 68. whatever is the 68 series and the reason is they have been asked to not package anything until the 78.2 release so Arch has been stuck on 68. whatever for a while. Those of you that want the latest releases though on Arch you do have a couple of other options. There is a Thunderbird beta package in the AUR it's actually called Thunderbird dash beta dash bin that's a binary and that really gives you the very latest cutting edge features but pretty good stability it's not the nightly builds. Those of you that want the Thunderbird nightly builds though that is also available in the AUR that is located as Thunderbird dash nightly dash bin and again that's a little bit more bleeding edge and that's for people that want to look at the latest and greatest features being added and they don't mind Thunderbird breaking on them occasionally. And our next story is about this really cool free and open source two-factor authenticator application because really you should be using two-factor authentication wherever you can. Any service that asks you to enable two-factor authentication you really should do it because passwords can be cracked with enough time anybody can crack a password. So with stuff especially services that have very sensitive information about you you really should enable two-factor whenever possible. So the one downside to two-factor authentication for those of us that want to use free and open source software is the application that most people have to use to enable two-factor authentication is the Google authenticator that is like the standard application and obviously it's a Google application most of us don't want to be tied to Google anymore than we already are and it's not free and open source software and you know all of your mainstream big online services are going to ask you to enable two-factor authentication all the various Google services Facebook Twitter any big social media platform they're all going to ask for you to enable that two-factor and they typically just tell you to go get the Google authenticator and that's the way you do it well there is a free and open source alternative to the Google authenticator it's called free OTP it is free as in freedom it is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and it is developed by Red Hat now I know some people have a problem with Red Hat a lot of people in the free and open source software communities for whatever reason don't trust Red Hat because it's a billion dollar corporation and you know it's got to be evil because they make money well I trust Red Hat a lot more than I trust Google so I will use Red Hat's authenticator program before I use Google's and I've always used Google's because I didn't know there was an alternative until I came across this blog post the other day I didn't actually know this application existed and I am just thrilled by this it is available on both Android and iOS devices and to use the application it's just like any other authenticator app all you do is scan a QR code and that activates your two-factor authentication on whatever website you were trying to activate that on and then it starts to automatically generate security codes every 30 seconds for you by the way I'm an Android user and I did notice that it is also available in the fdroid store so that's great because if you're an Android user and you're looking for free OTP you because you want to get away from the Google authenticator you're probably you're also not using the Google Play Store you're probably using the fdroid store and I love the fact that free OTP is in the fdroid store for those wanting to check out the source code for free OTP the source code is available and published over on GitHub and really the bottom line is you need to use two-factor authentication we really have to these days because again just using a password they're asking for trouble most large websites most large online services are eventually going to have a data breach really to be honest things like Facebook and Twitter and all of that crap you really shouldn't be on those services because they get hacked or if they haven't been hacked they're going to get hacked and if you put sensitive information on those social media sites which you really shouldn't be doing you know you're just asking for trouble at that point but if you have to use sites like that at least enable two-factor authentication it won't save you from when the online service as a whole is hacked but it will at least prevent you you know the individual from being so easily hacked because I see way too many people you know get their Google accounts hacked Twitter accounts hacked and they wonder why you know how did I get my account hacked but you know what was your password you know it's something like one two three four or the word hello it's like really I wonder how they guess that the next story I want to talk about is really just a page straight out of the ArchWiki the ArchWiki has this really cool page called the list of applications and it is a lengthy page it has a very long table of contents but it's basically a list of hundreds of various applications that are available in Arch Linux but probably in pretty much every other Linux distribution as well and it just breaks it down by category and if you're new to Linux you know you just coming to Linux for the first time you just came from Windows or Mac and you're wondering what is available even if you don't run Arch Linux go read this page because it's fascinating and I mean let's just go ahead and pick a category to check out I'm going to check out web browsers because I have no idea what kind of web browsers people use on Linux because I come from Windows and I'd been using Microsoft Edge for the last few years and Internet Explorer before that none those browsers aren't available what do I have well it looks like I have about seven or eight different terminal based web browsers if I wanted to view the web on the command line there's also various graphical based web browsers as well so you have this broken down by what engine they use so if it's based on Gecko you have Firefox and Seamunkey and various Firefox spinoffs like GNU iSCAT and LibreWolf the Tor browser waterfox you have the various blink based web browsers of course we're talking about Chromium and all the Chromium spinoffs like Brave ungoold Chromium Opera Vivaldi you know all that stuff I think one of the most common questions I get people ask about desktop environments and window managers and if I go down to chapter 7.5 desktop environments actually let's go to 7.5.1 window managers and what window managers are available well they actually have so many window managers available they didn't list it on this already very lengthy page they have a link to a list of window managers page and you can see that there are oh at least 50 60 I don't know as there's a lot of window managers available for you in the arch repos so this is a really great page here the list of applications pages so if you're wondering about audio players video players terminal emulators even networking stuff system admin tools whatever it is you do with Linux this list of applications page probably has a heading for that type of application for those of you that watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube or on library I will link to this list of applications wiki page again if you run a good news slash Linux distribution it doesn't necessarily have to be arch I think you probably want to take a look at this page so the final topic that I want to discuss is the last week so those of you that have been following me on the YouTube channel know that one week ago when I published unfettered freedom episode for when I published that right before I did I also posted over on my YouTube community tab that my area was about to be hit by a hurricane and I was just warning everybody hey I don't know what's gonna happen I may be without a power for a little while I don't want you guys to worry though I'm not really near the Gulf Coast so I'm no storm surge or massive flooding or anything I shouldn't have to worry about that but with these storms typically there's massive power outages and I was letting everybody know that I might be away for a few days or even a few weeks so if you go to my YouTube community tab you know I posted a picture of the satellite image of Hurricane Lord just before it came ashore near Lake Charles Louisiana Cameron Louisiana down in the southwestern portion of the state now I live about three and a half hours from that area inland I'm actually in the northeast section of the state but this storm really initially it didn't look like it was gonna amount to much they were predicting it might be a category one or category two you know earlier in the week and then this thing blew up almost to a category five in strength right before it made landfall you know 150 mile per hour sustained winds which actually tied it for being the most powerful hurricane to ever strike the coast of Louisiana and we are not immune to hurricanes right we get a lot of these storms but Laura was really quite something special as far as the strength and typically when these storms move inland you know they lose strength rather fast and I often get these storms you know when they hit the coast as cat three cat four storms you know those really strong ones by the time they get here they're typically tropical storms and you know the winds are not as much of a concern really for us it's the rain because the area I live in is very flood prone because I have a lot of rivers nearby by use all throughout the city and if one of these tropical storms move through and then they sit there for a while and just dump rain on us for a couple of days much of the city will be underwater people will lose their houses in that case so it's really the rain we're typically worried about here in this area we typically don't have to worry about strong wind events but this thing Laura got here in such a hurry she still had quite the punch when she got here she was still a category one hurricane I think at the time may be closer to a category two hurricane there was some very powerful winds I was standing outside trying to save some of my stuff before it blew away you know it was blew a door off the carport and it ruined a wood fence we had outside it just blew it away just shattered it it was crazy the wind thousands and thousands of downed trees I've never seen anything like the damage that this did and this I mean we I've been through tornadoes I've seen what they can do but you know tornadoes impact small areas you know this thing you know I can drive hours in each direction and just see tree after tree that's laying down you know thousands and thousands of power poles laid down power lines everywhere and I spent nearly a week without power after this because my city you know I live in the northeastern section of the state the city I live in is a population about 60 70 000 people it's not a small town it's the largest city in this part of the state and the entire city was without power there right after the storm it was crazy I mean no traffic lights essential services there's no supermarkets and gas stations and then when a few came back online there was such a rush to go get essential items like gas and ice and you know things like that batteries you can find extension cords people trying to run generators and you know I got used to just sitting at home in the heat it got very hot here so in this part of the world you know especially in August it's the hottest month of the year and typically temperatures can hover around 100 degrees Fahrenheit with the heat index typically they can get up to 115 degrees with the heat index now thankfully it didn't quite get that hot the hottest days were like around 95 96 Fahrenheit outside which brought the temperature inside the house up to like 89 or 90 degrees which is still extremely hot it's like a sauna in the house very dangerous and you really had to fear for the elderly because when the entire city is without power you know how many people really know their neighbors most people don't know their neighbors and that's what worries me is most people know their next door neighbors or the person right across the street from you because you see them right you just come across them you wave to them maybe you speak to them every now and then but by three four houses down do you know that person no and what if there's you know a lady in her 80s been living by herself and she's just sitting there with no central air you know generator and nothing her house is 90 degrees and she's just laying there you know you fear for those people because in that kind of situation those folks can just go to sleep in their house in that extreme heat and never wake up you know is anybody checking on those folks unfortunately after this hurricane you know when we start evaluating some of the deaths associated with lora many of them are not going to be deaths from the storm because we're going to have people that died from the heat we're going to have a lot of people that died from carbon monoxide poisoning because of all the generators many people don't understand that you can actually run a generator indoors it's a gasoline engine just like your car engine you know car engine you know puts out carbon monoxide same thing with a generator you cannot run that in your house but we had people that did that families you know somebody comes and plugs up a generator in the house and then the entire family goes to sleep and that's it the carbon monoxide builds up and none of them ever wake up many people thankfully didn't die but when they did this it made them very sick and some of those folks are hospitalized but thankfully somebody got to them before they actually passed away from the carbon monoxide poisoning from the storm itself there were people that were killed because of trees you know trees falling on houses or vehicles and then after the storm there was just thousands and thousands of trees you know many of them in the road and we had vehicles striking trees you know you're going down a highway at you know 60 miles an hour and you come up on a tree that's laid across the road you didn't see it and you hit that that tree you know going that fast you can imagine what that would do to a vehicle and the person inside the vehicle one of the interesting things from me going all those days without power is that I got used to it after a while you know those first couple of days kind of actually every day sucked it was probably the worst week of my entire life as far as just discomfort just being in the heat but I had gotten used to not having any electrical device working there for a while and some of you guys were asking me how was I taking a picture on my phone and posting it to youtube because I would post every morning hey this is day three without power day four without power day five and I had people asking well how are you even using your phone how are you charging your phone if you don't have power I did have a car right you you have a car charger in your car right I hope most of you do if you don't you know make sure you have a phone charger in your car and it was great because where I was at in this house I didn't have any kind of phone signal I couldn't call I couldn't get on the internet couldn't do anything on my phone my phone was useless there for five plus days so what I would do is when I got up early every morning I would snap a selfie picture you know to send you guys but I couldn't actually send it from here what I would do is I'd go get in my car and I would drive for like 30 minutes in the air conditioning in the car because I just wanted air but mainly to charge my phone and then once I got away from this kind of dead area because I guess the cell towers around here were all dead too but once I drove away a few miles I could actually use my phone I could get on the internet on my phone and that's when I would post those pictures to YouTube so that's how I did that I was surprised so many people were concerned about how to charge the phone there's actually multiple ways to charge a phone you also have those charging banks that some people keep and those things last forever but I actually am kind of happy that my phone didn't work all those days you know at least while I was in the house because I would have just been sitting there playing on my phone because that's all I could do but instead I was out in the yard you know cleaning up the mess out in the yard I even mowed one day I actually push mowed my yard and the heat knowing I couldn't come inside and relax in any kind of air conditioner but it was like I don't know how long this is going to last is it gonna last another day am I gonna be without power another week another two weeks you know the yard's got to get mowed so I just worked around the yard and cleaned up the house a little bit things that maybe I would have done anyway but many of them I wouldn't have done because I had other things to do right when the world is normal well I can go play on the internet I can go do my YouTube stuff I can go to the gym and work out I couldn't do any of that during this episode and when the power finally came back on and I could be normal again I could do my normal routine it was weird because it's like I had gotten so used to not having to do YouTube every day or go to the gym every day or do this every day you know it was almost like I was a different person when the power came back on and that was why when the power came back on you know the I spent a few hours cleaning things out you know I had a deep freeze that I lost all our food I had throw everything out and that first day I decided I needed to make a video just to make sure I got back in the swing of things and there was only one video I thought I needed to make because it made the most sense I mean what's the one thing that kind of defines me arch Linux I made a arch installation video on the first day back just because I thought maybe if I did that things would start seeming normal again and you know what it did help one interesting part of this week though was you know after five days without power I was really getting tired of the heat sweating and just constantly pouring sweat you know the heat down here is unbearable mainly because of the humidity and after five days somebody had told me that hey Home Depot just got in a shipment of generators a large shipment of generators because there's so many people without power and they've got enough generators for anybody that wants one if you want to go buy one and generators are not cheap you know typically they're going to cost you at least eight hundred dollars you know more than a thousand for some of the better ones so I went down to Home Depot I was like okay I'm tired of sitting in the heat I do have a window unit for an air conditioner you know I can't run central air and heat off of a generator because it draws too much power but I did have a window unit and that's perfect because you know I should just sit in the room with the window unit and cool off a little bit and I thought it would be worth it if I went and spent a thousand dollars on a generator it would be worth it just to have that window unit up and running so I went to Home Depot bought a generator and I was coming back home and I had the porch lights on outside I'd flip them on that way I would know if the lights were back on when I came back and the porch lights were still out so I knew power was not back on so I was like okay well I'm glad I purchased the generator so I back up so I could unload this generator and as I was coming in the door of the house I hear the noise the noise of the power coming back on so luckily that thousand dollar generator I bought I didn't even need to unload it I just left it in the car I returned it the next day you know still new in the package and I thought about keeping it because of the future storms that may or may not happen but it's such an expensive piece of equipment and I just didn't think that it was worth it for me to keep it if I had small children or something like that or I lived in an area where massive power outages for days or weeks at a time were common I might have but this was a very unusual event and this was really like a once in a lifetime kind of storm one thing I did do though in preparation for the future is the National Guard was passing out water and MREs to everybody because you know the entire city's out of power you're talking about like in this parish a hundred thousand people you know everybody was out of power so the National Guard comes in they're giving out food and water or whatever you need you just wait in line line of cars you get there you tell them how many people are in your family and they give you whatever they gave me like five cases of water and four cases of MREs because I asked them hey could I have some for my neighbors you know it's like while I'm here can I pick up some for next door neighbor guy across the street whatever and the National Guard doesn't care they give you as much as you want and sure we'll load you up however much you can carry so I've got like five cases of water four cases of MREs gave it all away except for one case of MREs and I never opened it because I didn't need to I didn't feel like eating an MRE I've eaten some of them before they're not great but I am going to put back that one case of MREs that I still have just in case just for the next storm because these MREs of course last year so I will store that away just in case I need it in the future and that is it for this edition of Unfettered Freedom this was episode five I try to release Unfettered Freedom on a weekly basis I try to release every Thursday again I am your host Derek Taylor also known as DT over on YouTube library and Patreon if you guys want to help support my work please consider doing so you'll find DistroTube over on Patreon before I go I do need to thank the producers of this episode I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinian, Mitchell, Devon, Fran, Akami Channel, Chuck, Claudio, Donnie, Dylan, George, Caleb, Devils, Lewis, Paul, Scott, and Willie these guys they are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys episode five of Unfettered Freedom wouldn't have been possible those of you watching the video version of the podcast all these names you're seeing on the screen right now these are all my supporters over on Patreon because again this channel is supported by you guys the community again look for DistroTube over on Patreon all right guys peace