A freezing start to a new year
GitHub is currently rolling out a change to make Ubuntu 24.04 the default image when running a workflow on ubuntu-latest. As some packages have been removed to save space, then its prudent to give the Practicalli GitHub workflows a test on Ubuntu 24.04.
Organising my digital music and audio books so they all fit nicely on my smart phone (using Opus audio format and VLC to play the music).
Arch Linux recommends not using pacman -Syu to update all packages and today I experience why. I can no longer login to the desktop 
EDIT: this seems to be specific to the NWG-shell configuration, as the vanilla hyprland desktop does work.
I assume this is a breaking change of hyprland that NWG-shell has not resolved. This is another reason to start again with hyprland and build my own config (although this will be a big time sink, so can wait).
Its freezing temperatures outside in London, UK at the moment, so I am trying to get outside when the sun is still shining. The paths are slippy and so are the roads, so even if I felt up to cycling outside, then it could be quite tricky.
GitHub CI Workflowλ︎
Practicalli GitHub workflows all run on the ubuntu-latest image
GitHub workflow runs-on ubuntu-latest
Changing the workflow configuration to use ubuntu-24.04 will change the image used to run the workflow, so I can test if each work flow works with the new default image.
GitHub workflow runs-on ubuntu-latest
To publish the Practialli books using Material for MkDocs the setup-python GitHub action was used to install a version of python on the ubuntu-latest image.
Reading through the software available on the ubuntu-24.04 image I noticed Python is already available. Therefor setup-python action is not required.
Removing setup-python action from the workflow did save a few seconds in the run time of the publish-book.yaml workflow. Its not a huge difference, but I do publish a change to a book, blog or journal each day so every little time saving helps (quicker to publish and less compute & networking resources needed).
Arch Linuxλ︎
Unless using a distribution like Manjaro then Arch Linux can require more maintenance than using a Debian package based distribution.
pacman -Syu command happily updated all my packages and after a reboot I cannot login to the desktop anymore. I assume this was some breaking change of hyprland that is causing the problem.
Rather than use the Nwg ISO for a quicker Hyprland install, I will start from the ArchLinux ISO and at least I will have a clearer idea of what all the configuration files do and where problems could occur as Hyprland continues to evolve.
Digital Musicλ︎
I continue to organise my digital music and audio books with a bit of 
Audacity magic where editing is required.
Audacity is an excellent linear audio editor available on all good Operating Systems. Audacity can export edited audio directly to an encoded file format, minimising the resources needed for laruge audio files. I export directly to the Opus audio format
Opus audio format is very efficient so produces high quality sounds with very small file sizes. I have a very large library of music on my smart phone which I can access without an internet connection (saving battery life).
Music is encoded at 96Kb/second and although not quite as good as Flac the Opus sounds indistinguishable even through the nicest headphones I have. Music encoded at 96Kb/second with variable bit rate are comparable to lossless formats.
Audiobooks are encoded at 24 Kb/second for mono track sources and 32 Kb/second for stereo, which is perfectly good for any spoken word content and makes the files tiny (especially compared to WAV and FLAC).
Opus recommended encoding bit rates
Archive.org is a great source for Creative Commons and other open music. This week I'm listening to The Slip by Nine Inch Nails which was added to Archive.org by Trent Razor back in 2013.
Archiving sounds
Flac audio format is lossless so should be used for archived sounds that are going to be processed over and over again, to avoid generational losses in sound qualities from encoding to a lossy format.
Thank you.