I’ve been doing some NFT research for myself, but though I would share in case one else finds some value.

30 second intro to NFTs: https://niftygateway.com/whatisanifty

In depth description of an NFT (and lots more information): https://blog.opensea.io/guides/non-fungible-tokens/#What_is_a_non-fungible_token

So the next thing to understand is that in the world of cryptocurrencies there are many different ones. Bitcoin is probably the one you have heard about but there are literally thousands:
https://coinmarketcap.com/

The second biggest cryptocurrency is called Ethereum and it is also the largest market for NFTs (via https://opensea.io/ or https://niftygateway.com/)

So I had installed the latest version of OBS Studio (26.x) from the official channels but when I went to the output mode it only listed software encoding. In the logs it mentioned FFMPEG-VAAPI but wasn’t using it as any recording was using 30%-50% CPU on a low powered laptop.

In Settings -> Output change Outmode to Advanced (from Simple) then on Streaming -> Encoder change that to FFMPEG VAAPI (Recoding should just be set to use Streaming Encoder which is the default)

https://github.com/ulid/spec

https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid

PyCaret -> https://pycaret.org/

Special thanks to Scott Muc and S+C. Please post more links in the comments and I’ll add them in

Guides / Playbooks

Leading in crisis: Setting up for remote success
https://www.thoughtworks.com/remote-work-playbook

Remote First in Tes Technology
https://engineering.tes.com/how-we-work/remote/

How to Work Remotely and Still Be the Best
http://www.toptal.com/freelance/how-to-work-remotely-and-still-be-the-best

Smart Home: 10 Tips for Working Remotely - Postlight - Digital Product Studio
https://postlight.com/trackchanges/podcast/smart-home-10-tips-for-working-remotely

A guide to distributed work
https://jakemccrary.com/blog/2017/10/31/a-guide-to-distributed-work/

remote - Digital Digressions by Stuart Sierra
https://stuartsierra.com/tag/remote

47 Insanely Practical Work From Home Tips from Our 100% Remote Team
https://www.groovehq.com/blog/work-from-home

So I had my usual problem with screen tearing on Ubuntu 19.10 but instead of my usual switching to Metacity + Compton I wanted to try using Gnome Shell. However Gnome shell doesn’t support replacing the compositor.

First step is to allow the NVidia driver to support kernel mode setting:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/zz-nvidia-modeset.conf

Adding

options nvidia-drm modeset=1

And then

sudo update-initramfs -u

Check with

sudo cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset

Then add a startup application

xrandr --output eDP-1-1 --set 'PRIME Synchronization' '1'

Finally switch from gdm3 to lightdm.

Probably the weakest element on the laptop is the Webcam which can output 720p@30fps. By default the low light performance is not that great but you can improve it considerably by trading frame rate for low light performance.

First install the Video 4 Linux utils:

sudo apt install v4l-utils

Now run the following command (the default is 0)

v4l2-ctl --set-ctrl=exposure_auto_priority=1

Now we have reduced the noise level considerably you can play with the sharpness levels 0-7 (the default is 3)

I was experiencing a loop where after suspending and resuming the laptop it would go back into suspend over and over again. To fix this just update /etc/default/grub and add button.lid_init_state=open to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash button.lid_init_state=open"

I also had to add the following to stop errors during the update

GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=true

Then update GRUB

sudo update-grub

Update:

I found that I actually needed to replace gdm3 with lightdm to fix a different issue and this also resolved the suspend problems

First install powertop and TLP . We use powertop to estimate power usage when unplugged and TLP to run as a service

sudo apt install powertop tlp

I then did a little tweaking in my /etc/rc.local

#!/bin/sh -e

# Temp disable bluetooth
modprobe -r btusb

# Autosuspend USB Razer Keyboard after 5 minutes 
echo '300000' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-8/power/autosuspend_delay_ms'
echo 'auto' > '/sys/bus/usb/devices/3-8/power/control'

# VM writeback timeout
echo '1500' > '/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs';

exit 0

Lastly switch from NVidia GTX 1650 to the Intel Iris Pro

Make sure you are running the latest firmware on the microbit

Create a new udev rule

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/80-microbit.rules

With the following content

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="0d28", ATTR{idProduct}=="0204", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"

Then if you want non-admin users to be able to use it (like your kids) run

sudo usermod -a -G plugdev non-admin-user

If you are admin you just need to unplug and replug the microbit (the udev rules run on hot-plug), if you are non-admin you will need to logout and back in to get the updated user groups