Episode: 3208
Title: HPR3208: The Paul Quirk show: Wacom with Pinebook, and thoughts on the DMCA takedown
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3208/hpr3208.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 18:50:27

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3284, when the 18th of November 2020, today's show is
entitled, The Port Work Show, Wacom with Pine Book, and Thoughts on the DMCA take-down.
It is hosted by Port Work, and is about 19 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summer is, I got a Wacom tablet to use with my Pine Book, and then share my thoughts
on the recent DMCA take-down.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Good day, good listener of Hacker Public Radio, and welcome to another installment of
the Paul Kirk Show.
If you're keeping score, this is my third episode with the new name, but of course there are
several good episodes I recorded for HPR before I came up with the clever name for my show
for you to enjoy.
As I'm going to continue this on a fairly regular basis, I'm going to refer to some of my
older shows now and then, but I'll do my best to give enough information so that nobody
should need to go back to an old episode to understand a new one.
To start this show, I'd like to tell you about a couple of updates.
First, the latest updates on my Pine Book Pro, which I've named Ann, has corrected the
problem in LibreOffice, where the fonts were white on a white background.
That's been fixed now, and the fonts I'll show up in the menu white on a dark background,
which makes Ann the perfect LibreOffice machine.
I've installed FS, UAE, and Amiga emulator, and Ann, the Pine Book emulates Amiga perfectly
well.
I finally got my well-deserved Lemmings fix on Ann, though my Bluetooth mouse was misbehaving
a little bit, and I don't know if it was the mouse or the Pine Book, but I ended my frustration
by switching back to my wireless track ball, which is a superior porting device for playing
games like Lemmings anyway.
Now I've been using Ann as my daily driver for over two months now, which means I set up
end-to-end encryption for my email using the GPG command with the full-generate key option.
This worked without any problems at all.
I had some PDF documents I had to fill out and submit.
Normally, I'd use a PDF editor, like Foxit PDF Reader, which is available for Linux, and
does an excellent job.
There is no ARM version of Foxit, but part of the standard mangero installation on my Pine
Book included a program called Oculus, now that's built with a K. Oculus does a lot
of what Foxit did, but I ran into a problem when I tried to paste in the image of my signature.
What I had done in the past is I scanned in my signature as a bitmap and turned that into
a stamp in Foxit.
With the DolbyZone products, I could add this scanned signature as part of the process
of signing a PDF.
I couldn't do that with Oculus.
I tried opening up the PDFs in LibreOffice, but that just really messed up the formatting.
Then there was GIMP, which could open the PDF just fine without screwing up the formatting,
and I could just have pasted in my signature as a layer and then flattened and exported
the file.
But drawing text boxes with GIMP is less than optimal for filling out PDFs.
So I went back to Oculus and used the draw tool to try to draw in my signature using
my track ball and then my mouse, but the result looked like a 5-year-old trying to forge
my signature.
I tried using the touchpad, but that was worse.
That's when I started thinking to myself.
If I had a touchscreen computer, I could probably just draw my signature right on the screen.
That's when I took the idea one step further and thought, why not get a wake-on tablet?
After all, I do like to draw and I do enjoy doing photo editing and a wake-on drawing tablet
could certainly improve my workflow in that process.
Imagine if I could just use it to fill out and sign PDFs by hand.
After a proprietary piece of hardware like the wake-on tablet, which clearly indicates
in its product detail page that it was made to work just with Windows and Mac, with this
work with my PineBook Pro, there was no indication that it would work with Linux at all, much
less than ARM-based Linux computer, but I was feeling lucky that day.
In my bid to support both my local economy and to improve my own computing experience,
I headed off to the local computer store and bought the last wake-on into us they had
in stock.
Mine came in a color known as pistachio, but to my eye, the color isn't anywhere near what
I know pistachio to be.
Pistachio is a slightly desaturated green, while this is definitely more along the lines
of arrow blue or mint tulip, tending more towards the blue end of cyan.
You would think that a company who designs drawing tablets for artists would at least
pick the right name for the color of their product.
But then again, we are talking about one of a thousand shades that exists between green
and blue that are being picked by marketing executives.
I think if this tablet was open sourced, I'd fork it just to get the name of the tablet
color right.
Back to the task at hand.
I connected my shiny new pistachio, but not pistachio, wake-on into us tablet into my
Panbook Pro, and it worked.
I don't mean it worked kind of, I mean it worked exactly as I thought it would.
Hovering the pen over the tablet, I could move the mouse around the screen, as various
points on the pad corresponded with the points on my screen.
Tapping the tablet with the pen represented a mouse click.
And when I had the freehand line selected in ocular, I could draw and write anywhere with
these.
It took a few minutes to adjust and get comfortable with this new way of working.
But once I had my bearings, it became very easy just to sign my name on the line just as
I would on a piece of paper, print the document to a PDF file, and send it away.
I'd like to take a moment in this show to say just how impressed I am that this worked
as well as it did.
In the past, Linux didn't work so well with proprietary hardware that didn't explicitly
state that it was compatible with Linux.
But here we are in the year 2020 where I am using a computer and operating system that
some might consider are at the fringes of what is considered a laptop computer and is
removed even further for the mainstream by running ManGero on ARM.
I just bought a closed source proprietary product and it worked exactly as it should
have in an open source application on an open source computer running an open source
operating system.
Perhaps Wacom tablets are more popular in the Linux community than I thought, and maybe
it's me who's been living under a rock, scanning in things I've written or drawn when
I could have just easily drawn whatever I wanted directly with a Wacom tablet.
Whatever the case may be, I can state with confidence that Oculus will be my go-to
for filling out PDF forms from now on.
Since I use encrypted email using PGP to send these PDFs, I've seen no point in digitally
signing my PDFs with a cryptographic signature.
Now it soon became clear to me that using this tablet to fill out and sign PDFs in
Oculus really only scratches the surface of what this tablet could do.
So I loaded up GIMP to really unleash its potential.
First under the edit menu, I went into configure input devices where GIMP recognized my Wacom
into a pad and pen.
I changed the mode for both of these to say screen.
After that, I selected the paintbrush tool and under the dynamics menu, I could then
select pressure opacity and pressure size.
See the Wacom tablet pen provides 4,096 different levels of pressure sensitivity, and so by
selecting one of these, either the size or the opacity of the lines I draw are determined
by how much pressure I apply when using the pen on the drawing pad.
There are two buttons on the side of the pen.
The button closer to the nib allows me to grab the image I'm working on and scroll it
around the screen, which is useful if I'm working on an image or editing a photo when
I'm zoomed in.
While the button above that works like the right mouse button and will bring up the contextual
menu.
I'm going to upload a picture with this podcast show notes so you can see some of my first
scribbles I made in GIMP with this tablet.
As a bonus, this tablet can connect to my PineBook Pro through Bluetooth so it doesn't
even need to use up a valuable USB port.
Meanwhile, I updated my desktop computer to Ubuntu 2004, but now it seems to want to lock
up every so often.
I think it's time I put a proper NVMe SSD in my desktop machine anyway, so I think I'll
just install that and put a clean install of Tony O4 on it.
However, I must admit to neglecting my desktop since getting the PineBook Pro and I am considering
switching my desktop to Mangero as well.
Well, what do you think of that idea?
You can reach me on the Fediverse at Paul at cloud.peakwork.com if you'd like to have
a conversation with me about this and to discuss this further.
Keeping on to the news, as I'm sure you're all aware, GitHub removed a YouTube download
tool in response to a DMCA take-down notice.
I personally find this somewhat amusing, since my computer needs to be able to download
and store streaming content temporarily from video streaming services in order for that
to work.
Now, this is a battle that dates back to the early days of video cassette recorders
and even tape recorders.
What up boils down to is that trade organizations like the Recording Industry Association of
America wants to have absolute control over who can record what and when.
We in Canada have a similar organization called the Canadian Recording Industry which had
long been funded in part with an extra tax placed on blank video cassettes, audio cassettes,
CDRs and DVDRs over the years.
And this is known as the Private Copying Levy.
Currently, the tariffs for each unit of CDR, CDRW, CDR Audio and CDRW Audio is 29 cents.
This annoyed me back when I used CDRs to store my own content, but as what often happens
when something like a levy is introduced with the best of intentions in a country that
values individual rights, this ended up backfiring on the music industry.
You see, since Canadians are paying a levy on each blank CD, for example, it is expected
that Canadians have paid for the right to copy whatever music they want by virtue of
the existence of this very levy.
So for a brief period in 2004 and 2005, the peer to peer sharing of music files online
in Canada was explicitly legal.
To my knowledge, there is still no clear law against the personal non-profit use of
copyrighted material in Canada, though I am not a lawyer and therefore suggest you do
your own research before deciding to set up your own peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted
material.
Some of my colleagues, fear how such a takedown decision might affect us here in Canada,
pointing out that we tend to follow the United States when it comes to laws.
And then I remind them that we are using the metric system while the US is still using
the imperial system of feet and inches.
This means that while Canadian industries try to coordinate with industries in the US,
this really only means that being able to do metric conversion calculations is an important
additional skill to have for anyone working in the trades.
So we use the American wire gauge for wire sizes and we will call a 2x4x8 piece of lumber,
a 2x4x8 with the understanding that this will be 2 inches by 4 inches by 8 feet long.
And even things like our electrical code is changed every 3 years to keep it up to date,
but also to harmonize it with American electrical codes.
But we have a charter of rights and freedoms that has important differences from the American
Bill of Rights, which actually serves to provide Canadian citizens with far greater individual
protection.
This was illustrated with a couple of president-setting rulings on who gets to spend how much
to gain political influence.
For example, many were shocked by the US Supreme Court's 2010 decision in citizen united
versus FEC, where limits on what corporations and unions spend on TV commercials seeking
to influence political campaigns were overturned.
What is less known is that 6 years prior, so that's in the year 2004, the Supreme Court
of Canada found in Harper versus Canada that while third party spending limits during
political campaigns does in fringe on the right to freedom of expression, that infringement
is justified in order to prevent the affluent from dominating political discourse, leading
to the rich being allowed to buy dominance that would undermine our charter protected
right to the guarantee of meaningful participation for all elections.
Of course, this doesn't stop the influence of American media from spreading across the
border and confusing some of my fellow Canadians about their rights.
To be fair, I'm not suggesting that Canada is the perfect country, far from it.
We have a lot of room for improvement.
However, when it comes to something like the music industry taking down a YouTube download
tool, I really don't believe our equivalent to the RIAA, which is the CRIAA, would have
the same power here.
Now to be clear, I am very much in favor of supporting our musicians.
What I'm not in favor of are these fat cat industry middlemen that make take more than
their fair share, painting fans of music as potential criminals in perpetuating the US
versus them mentality.
I do not believe the purveyors of fear who would have us believe that so-called illegal
file trading is to blame for a dramatic reduction in career opportunities for Canadian artists
and the availability of new Canadian music are really that interested in protecting our
culture.
To me, this translates to fear career opportunities for opportunistic middlemen whose only talent
is to instill fear and profit off of levies.
Our own stomping Tom Connors was famous for boycotting the industry backed Juno awards
in protests of Junos given to expatriate Canadians, demonstrating that the organizations
that claim to represent the Canadian music industry have only their own interests in mind.
The last concert I saw before COVID-19 shut everything down included the spoons in
5440, both great Canadian bands I grew up with.
Pulled out concerts here in my home city of Oshawa, Ontario, both doing very well and
still performing in the year 2020 in spite of all the music of theirs that was supposedly
illegally recorded onto blank cassette tapes and CDs by people just like me.
I doubt that either of these bands saw much if any of that levy.
If you ask me, I'd say that in the year 2020, the Canadian music scene makes some of the
best music in the world.
One of my favorites today is the Dead South, in spite of the allegations made against
Danny Kenyon, but hey, that's an entirely different topic.
I believe Canada has some real world-class musical talent with a vibrant industry that
generates significantly better music than the pre-manufactured crap big corporate record
labels are crappin' out.
Of course, that's just my opinion.
So since we're talking about music, I think it's that time of the show to enjoy some classical
music from the creative commons.
In this episode, I'm going to play a song for you from the Goldberg Variations.
The Goldberg Variations are a set of 30 variations by Johann Sebastian Bach that were first
published in 1741.
This work is considered to be an important example of the variation form and was named after
Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who might have been the first performer.
What you're about to hear is a second song in this collection, as performed by the talented
Bach, who was the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be
the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer to be the first performer
Well, that's all I have for you for this episode of the Paul Quirk show.
I created this entire podcast on my Pine Book Pro.
I do admit that this show is a little shorter, but hopefully next time I'll have more things to talk about with you.
Until then, please remember to drive safe and have fun.
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