GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 19, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Watts Martin ☛ “Trim Silence”: Threat or menace?

    My impression of many of those conversational shows was that even though they were relatively lightly edited, they were still edited tightly enough to take out awkward pauses. But listening to a few shows that I otherwise love without the Smart Speed or Trim Silence function at work, though, makes me question that belief. Are their creators are, consciously or not, assuming that everyone’s listening with Trim Silence enabled?

    This could be a style choice, to be sure, the idea that the conversation’s going to sound more natural if you keep in the two or three seconds while a host gathers their thoughts between sentences or phrases. In a sense, it does. But I don’t think it’s the kind of “natural” you actually want in a podcast any more than you want it in a scripted show, where any long silence is deliberately written into the script. When I listen to these podcasts as recorded, I think: this could have used a little more editing.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • BSD

    • Undeadly ☛ bsd.rd breakdown

      The contents and format of the bsd.rd ramdisk kernel is shown, so you can understand and customize it for your own needs.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ Predict, compare, and reduce costs with our S3 cost calculator

      Previously I have written about how useful public cloud storage can be when starting a new project without knowing how much data you will need to store.  However, as datasets grow  over time, the costs of public cloud storage can become overwhelming.  This is where an on premise, or co-located, self-hosted storage system becomes advantageous: it provides the greatest range of benefits, including cost, performance, security, and data sovereignty.  In this article we will briefly cover the storage use cases that might be suitable for storing on your own storage system, and what the cost savings could look like.