06.20.22
Posted in Standard at 8:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The founder says “it’s easy to overstate just how bad things are. Despite the loss of the mailing list, despite the glacial pace of refinements to the protocol specification, statistics provided by the Lupa crawler suggest that since the FAQ was last updated a little over a year ago, the number of Gemini capsules has more than doubled, so too has the number of unique domains hosting Gemini content, and the number of unique IP addresses didn’t quite double but got close.”
Summary: The World Wide Web was preceded by several similar hypertext systems, some of which technically superior to it; now that the world’s Bloated Web (formerly World Wide Web) gravitates towards proprietary browsers and is basically becoming like Adobe’s Flash it makes more sense to embrace Gemini for textual material that’s safe to access
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Site News at 7:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum c872cfa21b1ca9bd5b4af2afe15401f2
Gemini Turning 3
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: With the World Wide Web going in the wrong direction we need an alternative that focuses on actual pages; Gemini is, at the moment, probably the most viable alternative to the World Wide Web
THIS past day (24 hours) was special for Gemini. Constellations aside, as well as the longest day today in the northern hemisphere, Gemini entered its fourth year. Using some metrics, Gemini doubled this past year (one year alone) and it fills a real gap. The more bloated the World Wide Web becomes, the more necessary Gemini will be.
The video above explains that we’re deeply committed to Gemini and can easily envision Techrights using Gemini Protocol (with GemText) for at least five more years. The Web isn’t going to improve (it’s a complicated monoculture whose proprietary nature will exacerbate if or when Firefox dies). All we can do is replace the Web with another protocol — one that focuses on actual pages unlike the Web, which gradually became more like a “Webapps” canvas or the ‘new Flash’. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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ChromeOS is now more powerful for managing files, with new support for archive formats like 7z, iso, and tar — with more on the way.
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Previously, Linux GUIs paled in comparison with Windows or macOS, which offered better graphics and performance. However, that has changed now, with Ubuntu offering a stunning GUI that can easily compete with the likes of Finder and Windows Explorer.
Installing apps on Linux is a bit complicated. Ideally, you should know your way around a command-line interface tool since that’s what you’ll be using most of the time. Unfortunately, that’s what limits Linux’s adoption; people view it as too technical to be useful daily. Furthermore, most applications are free or open source substitutes for popular Windows or macOS apps, which may not be as good as their original, proprietary counterparts.
Backups
Running backups on Linux is also not simple, as you need to know specific commands. However, there are some GUI tools that you can use, such as Déjà Dup. You can easily learn how to backup your data with Déjà Dup on Linux, though even that requires running some commands.
Which Operating System Is Right For You?
So, as you can see, all three operating systems are great in their own right. But, it all depends on what you’re familiar with and what you prefer to use. For example, if you like full control, Linux is probably the best choice. But if you want something easier to use, choosing between macOS and Windows is ideal.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Today we are looking at Manjaro 21.3.0. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.15, based on Arch, KDE Plasma 5.24.5, and uses about 700MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
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In this video, we are looking at Manjaro Linux 21.3.0.
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Wayland is by no means in a perfect state or even a usable state for all people but what problems but it’s getting there, however what’s actually wrong with it.
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Kernel Space
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But alternative technologies such as NVMe-connected solid state drives (SSDs) offer higher capacity than DRAM at a fraction of the cost and power. Transparently offloading colder memory to such cheaper memory technologies via kernel or hypervisor techniques offers a promising approach to curb the appetite for DRAM. The key challenge, however, involves developing a robust data center–scale solution. Such a solution must be able to deal with diverse workloads and the large performance variance of different offload devices, such as compressed memory, SSD, and NVM.
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This Meta blog post by Johannes Weiner and Dan Schatzberg describes a set of memory-management changes used there that they call “transparent memory offloading”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Adding users to a Linux computer is a basic administration task, and there are several ways to achieve this. Each method has benefits and drawbacks. We explain three different techniques for you.
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This article explains the most used ways for finding a Linux system’s public and private IP addresses using the command line.
One of the first questions many new Linux system administrators face is getting the IP address. Furthermore, this question is regularly asked when applying for positions that require Linux skills.
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JasperReports is an open-source Java reporting tool, a stand-alone and embeddable reporting server. JasperReports is a Java class library, Java developers who need to add reporting capabilities to their applications use this tool. It provides reporting and analytics and is capable of generating professional reports including images, charts, and graphs. Some of the major JasperReports features include:
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Etcher on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Etcher is a program to copy ISO files to USB sticks and SD cards to create bootable drives for various OS. It protects you from accidentally writing to your hard-drives, ensures every byte of data was written correctly, and much more. Etcher is available for many operating systems like Windows, Mac, and all of the major Linux platforms.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Etcher on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Today we are looking at how to install LMMS 1.3.0 Alpha 1 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Everything is considered a file in Linux. A Linux computer has thousands of files that contain different kinds of content. You may need to analyze some of these files and show the differences among certain files for your development needs. Linux provides the diff command to compare the contents of two files on your Linux computer.
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Back in November 2020 (oh my god this blog/gemlog has lived for a long time now) I wrote about how I used sshfs and autofs to automatically mount servers that I have ssh access to as local filesystems when needed.
Over the years I’ve run into some trouble with this, surprisingly. When I’ve been offline it’s sometimes taken several minutes to log in, unless I disable the autofs service. I can only assume that some process tried to check through my home directory and had to wait for autofs to time out for each remote server it tried to mount, but which process or why remains a mystery. This was not a problem I had back then, mind you. It started later; probably due to some upgrade.
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Games
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I’ve enjoyed seeing the rise and fall of mobile games – and the effects it’s had on the wider gaming landscape. As the mobile market has slowly shifted towards gacha and idle mechanics, a lot of the enjoyable precepts of “lunch break gaming” have become heavily integrated into the indie landscape.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE e.V. makes it known that two votes took place in 2022Q2 (April-June 2022): A change to the rules of online voting, and accepting the FLA 2.0.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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Manjaro has announced the latest version of its namesake Arch Linux-based distribution, version 21.3, codenamed “Ruah.” The new version features several major enhancements, including new versions of all the supported desktop environments.
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While Manjaro 21.3 rolls out new desktops, it uses the LTS, or Long-Term Support, version of the Linux kernel, according to 9to5Linux, in contrast to the upstream Arch distribution, which uses the latest kernel by default. This appears to be part of Manjaro’s attempt at a user-friendly version of Arch. This kernel should be more stable than the newer kernel.
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Debian Family
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In the devscripts package currently in Debian testing (2.22.2), wrap-and-sort has opt-in support for preserving comments in deb822 control files such as debian/control and debian/tests/control. Currently, this is an opt-in feature to provide some exposure without breaking anything.
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Without monthly ad revenue and your support, we won’t be able to keep providing you with interesting and useful articles, applications, news or new releases of SparkyLinux.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 740 for the week of June 12 – 18, 2022.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The last few weeks I saw some traffic on the Fediverse mentioning the Beaglebone Black boards. As I am very happy with my old-but-still-running Beaglebone Black boards, it seemed a nice subject for a blog post.
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Refurbishing old hardware is always an admirable way to preserve technology of the past but sprucing it up with a Raspberry Pi is arguably one of the most fun ways to breathe some life into vintage electronics. Today we’re showcasing a brilliant Raspberry Pi-powered TV simulator created by maker and developer Rodrigo Feliciano who does just that.
This Raspberry Pi TV simulator is housed inside of an old tube TV and features an interface very reminiscent of vintage television. Instead of using a remote, users change the “channel” using a dial off to the side. Each channel is pre-programmed with videos that play once the channel is “tuned in”. In between channels is a familiar static sound derived from the TV circuit complete with a video snow effect.
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The DevTerm (opens in new tab) modular computer from Clockwork Pi (opens in new tab) has a hint of a significant upgrade, after its creator posted on Twitter (opens in new tab) to show an adapter to fit a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (opens in new tab) board into the slot previously occupied by a Compute Module 3.
With a simple adapter board, we can make the #DevTerm immediately compatible with the #CM4. CM4 is so GREAT, for me it’s not much different from a desktop PC already.
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The cyberpunk aesthetic, like several other genres, often takes the form of heavy and metallic body modifications or devices that are meant to signify a more futuristic society. Inspired by the video game Deus Ex, Redditor Star_11 had the idea to create their own smartwatch primarily out of soldered brass sheets and 3D-printed plastic.
Within this space-age bracelet is an Arduino Nano Every, which controls the connected Crystalfontz SSD1320 flexible OLED display. On it, the watch can currently show the time and date, although other information such as the level of the 280mAh battery, alarms, and timers might be added in the future. Star_11’s plan is to also take a Nano 33 IoT and replace the Nano Every for extra IoT functionality or connect to a phone via Bluetooth®.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Call me a postmarketOS shill or don’t, Modem and Modem Firmware news, and a lot more!
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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A Headless API-based CMS is a content management system that offers an API endpoint to view, manage, and create content, users, and settings instead of the classical web interface.
Many developers like API-based approach as it is easier to scale, build, manage, and allows developers to use any front-end technologies they want.
In this article, we will explore the best working functional API-based headless systems for developers and enterprise.
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Happy Friday, everyone –here’s what the Apache community has been up to over the past week…
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Programming/Development
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Python
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This new version of base64dump.py adds some extra info for the encoded strings.
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Leftovers
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A similar thrift store a few blocks down recently stopped selling VHS tapes, and I spent hours looking around for them. The place had records, it had tons of books, it even had compact cassettes. But no VHS tapes
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Hardware
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But what could be interesting about such a computer today? What was new and innovative back then is mostly outdated today: The Atari had no real multitasking, it could load up to 6 additional so-called desk accessories, but could only run one main program at a time.
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Something also had to happen to the keyboard. The keys were extremely yellowed. So I took off all the keycaps and exposed them to the sun in a solution of half water, half bleach for a day as well. They became much less yellow, but unfortunately I couldn’t get rid of the yellowing completely.
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Security
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As cloud adoption soars, containers are gaining more popularity, too. Linux Containers (LXC) lead this segment, accounting for 33.5 percent of the containerization market as of 2021. This popularity makes it a tempting option for developers, but it is important to consider its security, too.
Containers are sets of one or more processes that are isolated from the rest of the system. This allows the application to run quickly and reliably between computing environments. Containers enable infrastructures to run more productively, efficiently and cost-effectively, which is why they have become so popular.
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Log4Shell was arguably the biggest vulnerability disclosure of 2021. Security teams across the entire world spent the end of the year trying to address this bug (and several variants) in the popular Log4J logging library.
The vulnerability was caused by special formatting strings in the values being logged that allow you to include a reference. This reference, it turns out, can be loaded via JNDI, which allows remotely loading the results as a Java class.
This was such a big deal that there was no way we could let the next BSidesSF CTF go by without paying homage to it. Fun fact, this meant I “got” to build a Java webapp, which is actually something I’d never done from scratch before. Nothing quite like learning about Jetty, Log4J, and Maven just for a CTF level.
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Defence/Aggression
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When I think about violence caused by young, socially-rejected males, I often wonder how much bullying and mistreatment cause their violent behavior. That doesn’t mean excuse the behavior; I am talking about the proximate cause—or exacerbation—that contributes to the act.
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In 1994, Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 Tutsi using nail-spiked clubs, machetes and other weapons. A UN unit led by Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz is still trying to track down those responsible, but it is a race against time.
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Finance
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ACM ☛ Addressing Labor Shortages with Automation [Ed: There is no labour shortage but a shortage of shareholders and managers with empathy towards other human beings]
U..S. employment statistics hit a new milestone last year, but not a positive one. In August 2021, almost 4.3 million workers quit their jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s the highest number since the department began tracking voluntary resignations. Their reasons for leaving their jobs vary—the numbers track people who quit for a different position, as well as those who quit without having another job lined up.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The legislation includes wrecking terminology which specifically tears up almost all aspects of the Irish Protocol. It reverses three years of negotiations concluded by the EU and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in January 2020.
The move is set to provoke international economic trade sanctions against London, a full trade war between Britain and the EU, and most seriously, the potential reintroduction of militarised checkpoints in the border area.
The scale of the unilateral legislation, introduced this evening at Westminster, has come as a major shock to the Dublin government, the European Union, and business figures who had lobbied for the protocol to remain unchanged.
The text of the legislation states that it would apply “notwithstanding that it is not compatible with the Northern Ireland Protocol or any other part of the EU withdrawal agreement”, and that it cannot be bound by or referred to the European Court.
The second reading, and the first opportunity for MPs to debate the main principles of the legislation, takes place today.
Michelle O’Neill, the vice president of Sinn Féin, described the legislation as “utterly reckless”.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Today, the 20th of June 2022, is the third anniversary of the Gemini project! Or at least, the third anniversary of the public announcing of the project under that name – arguably the very first seeds were planted just a little earlier, but it’s hard to put a concrete date on anything earlier than this, so for official celebration purposes, today is the day. Somewhat astonishingly, we have now outlived our namesake! Gemini 1 was launched as an uncrewed test in April 1964, and the final flight, Gemini 12, splashed down in November 1966, less than three years later.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In his own words…
Summary: EPO President António Campinos violates the Code of Conduct of the Office he claims to be leading; he’s in no position to call for civility
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As shown above, EPO staff is eager to make it loud and clear that the status quo at the EPO isn’t acceptable and the president is unfit to run the Office
The Local Staff Committee Munich (LSC Munich) held a meeting and the above outcome, based on a large poll, is quite revealing. That meeting’s presentation slides are circulating among staff this week, so we’ve sanitised metedata and made copies here [1, 2, 3, 4]. Of particular emphasis was the part about staff wanting the EPO to release evidence of António Campinos violating the Code of Conduct of the Office. To quote: “On 18 May, close to 700 colleagues in Munich followed the live transmission of the 2nd General Assembly of 2022 by the Local Staff Committee Munich (LSC Munich). [...] During the meeting, a poll took place: 96% request Mr Campinos to publish the recording of the GCC meeting of 26 April 2022 and 45% are prepared to continue the Work-to-Rule actions and 34% favoured a demonstration in front of the Isar building in June.” █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 4:54 pm by Guest Editorial Team
Via official Project Gemini news feed
Today, the 20th of June 2022, is the third anniversary of the Gemini project! Or at least, the third anniversary of the public announcing of the project under that name – arguably the very first seeds were planted just a little earlier, but it’s hard to put a concrete date on anything earlier than this, so for official celebration purposes, today is the day. Somewhat astonishingly, we have now outlived our namesake! Gemini 1 was launched as an uncrewed test in April 1964, and the final flight, Gemini 12, splashed down in November 1966, less than three years later.
It would be difficult to deny that the third year of the project’s life has been the least eventful by a large margin, if we restrict our attention to the official and the visible. I kind of wonder if anybody will believe me anymore when I say things like this, but I really do still care, and want things to get better, and feel bad about how poorly I was able to handle the explosive surge of attention which marked Gemini’s second year. It’s true.
But I also think it’s easy to overstate just how bad things are. Despite the loss of the mailing list, despite the glacial pace of refinements to the protocol specification, statistics provided by the Lupa crawler suggest that since the FAQ was last updated a little over a year ago, the number of Gemini capsules has more than doubled, so too has the number of unique domains hosting Gemini content, and the number of unique IP addresses didn’t quite double but got close. Despite the shortcomings of communication and leadership, people are still finding out about Gemini, they are still finding it compelling enough in its current state to want to try it out, and they are finding enough software and documentation and community assistance out there to set up capsules.
I’m not clutching at straws here. Slow, organic, grass-roots growth of Geminispace is absolutely the most important thing for the project, and I consider the fact that it is happening without strong official outreach or coordination to be a genuine sign of health. Thank you to everybody who has done things, small or large, to help keep Gemini healthy.
Let’s keep those capsules flying! █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:53 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this video, I am going to show how to install Kaisen Linux 2.1.
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Applications
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Back in oktober last year, when I started looking at the LinuxCNC system, I proposed to change the documentation build system make life easier for translators. The original system consisted of independently written documentation files for each language, with no automated way to track changes done in other translations and no help for the translators to know how much was left to translated. By using the po4a system to generate POT and PO files from the English documentation, this can be improved. A small team of LinuxCNC contributors got together and today our labour finally payed off. Since a few hours ago, it is now possible to translate the LinuxCNC documentation on Weblate, alongside the program itself.
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All archiving tools are not made equal, and this is precisely why there are so many of them to chose from. One of the most continually popular options is 7-Zip, and this powerful free compression utility has now hit version 22.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This tutorial will explain with examples how to draw charts with LibreOffice Calc. You will need some data prepared beforehand. We will create very basic charts in form of Bar Charts to visualize student scores of their subjects of Math, English, Science and Social. This should gives a basic understanding of making charts. Let’s try it now.
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Learn the commands to install Opera Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Linux using the terminal and official repository.
Opera has been considered one of the fastest Internet browsers in the world for some time now. In the new version, Opera tries to defend its reputation and introduces additional comfort and safety features. Although a huge browser market has been acquired by Chrome and Firefox, Opera has its own loyal users because of its interface and features.
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LinuxTechLab ☛ Important tips About Linux – LinuxTechLab [Ed: "It may be less common than Microsoft's products," it says, but Linux is a lot more widely used, including in Android.]
It may be less common than Microsoft’s products, but many people use Linux systems nowadays. Some benefits include that they are cost-effective, easy to use, and don’t contain virus protection. It doesn’t matter if you choose Windows or Linux because both operating systems would work fine. Regardless, one is not better than the other, so compare them before settling on anything.
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Saturday, I wrote in Pipes, deadlocks, and strace annoyingly fixing them about an issue where a certain pipeline seems to have a deadlock. I described tracing it into kernel code. Indeed, it appears to be kernel bug 212295, which has had a patch for over a year that has never been merged.
After continuing to dig into the issue, I eventually reported it as a bug in ZFS. One of the ZFS people connected this to an older issue my searching hadn’t uncovered.
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Apparently I had set the default display brightness to 0%
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See the commands of the UFW firewall on Ubuntu Linux to list the open ports that are allowed or denied to be accessed from outside the network.
UFW stands for uncomplicated firewall. The goal of UFW is to provide an uncomplicated command line-based frontend for the very powerful, but not exactly easy-to-configure IPtables. UFW supports both IPv4 and IPv6.
It is quite easy to install because it is included in the package sources – at least if you are using an Ubuntu or Debian distribution. Also, those who are not familiar with the command line can use the graphical user interface known as GUFW, also available to install using the default repository of Ubuntu. It makes us easily manage inbound and outbound traffic using firewall rules.
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When a new programming language is introduced to great fanfare, some developers take a quick look and then return to the comfort of their preferred programming language. But Rust has not been dismissed as easily as most other languages.
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Amazon Elastic Compute Engine (EC2) is a web-based service from Amazon which allow users to rent virtual compute services on which to run their own compute services.
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services. Terraform codifies cloud APIs into declarative configuration files.
In this tutorial, I will work you through the stages of deploying an Ec2 instance using Terraform. We will deploy an Ubuntu server and in turn enable an Nginx on it.
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When you need to create a table quickly, for whatever numeric data in it, you can always use RANDBETWEEN formula in LibreOffice Calc. We prepare this tutorial for Creating Charts next time. Now, let’s learn how to below.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Laravel With Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Laravel is a popular open-source PHP framework for developers looking to build modern web applications based on PHP. It aims to help developers build complex and straightforward applications by making frequently used application tasks (like caching and authentication) easier.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Laravel PHP framework With Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.
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Your PC will automatically shut down if the CPU temperature reaches dangerous levels (usually 90°C+). But even if you don’t exceed this threshold, exposing your CPU to high temperatures can still cause damage in the long term.
So, if you regularly perform CPU-intensive tasks for extended periods, it’s a good idea to monitor the CPU temperature.
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A while ago, we reviewed “Taskwarrior”, a command line task manager to manage your to-do tasks right from the Terminal window. Today I stumbled upon yet another simple command line Todo manager called “Please”. Yes, the name is Please!.
Please is an opensource, CLI application written in Python programming language. Using Please, we can manage our personal tasks and to-do list without leaving the terminal.
Whenever you open a terminal window, Please will show you the current date and time, an inspirational quote and the list of personal to-do tasks in the Terminal.
Please is very lightweight and convenient CLI task manager for those who use terminal extensively in their daily life.
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More than a decade ago, the world was introduced to the wonders of cryptocurrencies and the financial landscape has never been the same. First, there was Bitcoin, then came Litecoin, followed by Ripple and then Titcoin, and the list kept going on and on, and now it seems like with each passing day we are getting a new cryptocurrency on a new blockchain. With so many cryptocurrencies, each holding a different value, crypto trading has become a popular practice amongst traders and tech enthusiasts alike. Now cryptocurrencies aren’t listed on regular exchanges, there are dedicated crypto exchanges for them. Binance is one of the most popular crypto exchanges in the market right now. If you are an avid user as well as an Ubuntu 22.04 user, you are in luck as you can now download the desktop version for your convenience. Let’s look at the steps you need to perform in order to successfully install it yourself.
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Since Debian 10, the Debian Linux distribution uses systemd to control starting and stopping of services, and Systemd also controls the whole boot and shutdown process of the operating system. The consequence of switching from init.d to Systemd is that some commands to stop or restart Debian like ‘shutdown -h now’ or ‘reboot’ do not work anymore as they used to. In this short article, I’ll show you how to stop and restart a Systemd-based Linux like Debian 11.
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In this guide, we will show you how to install nagios 4.4.7 on Fedora36 and CentOS 9 systems.
Nagios Core, formerly known as Nagios, is a free and open-source computer-software application that monitors systems, networks and infrastructure. Nagios offers monitoring and alerting services for servers, switches, applications and services. It alerts users when things go wrong and alerts them a second time when the problem has been resolved.
Nagios is known for being the best server monitoring software on the market. Server monitoring is made easy in Nagios because of the flexibility to monitor your servers with both agent-based and agentless monitoring. With over 5000 different addons available to monitor your servers, the community at the Nagios Exchange have left no stone unturned.
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Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that is used to display the route that network packages take from sender t receiver as well as the time it takes for the network packages to travel from one network node to the other. This command is used to test the IP route of the destination server or host in order to resolve network issues. It mainly provides the connectivity status but also points the issue precisely as well as its occurrence which makes the system administrators trace out the issue more quickly and fix it.
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Games
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Video game emulation has always been a never-ending hobby for many (and an absolute passion for some), and throughout the years we’ve seen some neat and creative ways to achieve near-perfect console emulation through the use of software, hardware, and oftentimes a combination of both. As such, retro system maker “Anbernic” (a brand known to many in emulation communities and forums) has announced a new portable handheld system in the form of the Anbernic RG353P, which the manufacturer claims can emulate several older game consoles like the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, and additionally can dual-boot either into Android and Linux.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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This new ISO contains a critical fix and software updates. For details, see the changelog below.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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“We now have the ability to click a button and double our scale. It now takes us a few minutes to load new applications whereas before it took at least a day. That’s 99.8% faster!” IT Delivery Team Lead, Allan Gray.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Canonical, the company behind top Linux distro Ubuntu, has announced a new variant of the open source operating system, optimized for IoT and edge devices.
Dubbed Ubuntu Core 22, the new operating system is pitched as helping manufacturers meet the challenges of ensuring security and remote management at scale as IoT ecosystems grow larger and more complex.
Ubuntu has already powered some pretty colourful IoT use cases including Xiaomi’s recently released robotic canine, CyberDog.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! This week we are happy to bring you an assortment of new products including the beta version of our new LoRaSerial Kit. This RF enable LoRa IoT Kit will be a strong accessory for our RTK Surveyor product line. Just make sure to keep an eye on it, because we plan to revise this kit soon and put it in an enclosed case! That being said, our actually headliner today is the new SparkFun Thing Plus Dual-Port Logging Shield! This handy shield is both Thing+ and Feather-compatible and will definitely assist you with most, if not all, of your data logging needs. Also releasing this week, we have an SMA magnetic mount that should be perfect for a Swarm Satellite antenna! Lastly, we have a whole reel of WS2812 LEDs (yes, that’s 1,000 LEDs!) that join our addressable LED offering. Without further ado, let’s jump in and take a closer look at all of this week’s new products!
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Think Silicon NEOX GPU family with models optimized for graphics (NEOX|G) or artificial intelligence (NEOX|A) is based on the RISC-V RV64C ISA instruction set with adaptive NoC, and offers up to 64 cores delivering up to 409.6 GFLOPS at 800MHz with support for FP16, FP32 and optionally FP64 and SIMD instructions.
The NEOX GPUs can be integrated into microcontrollers, crossover processors, and even more powerful application processors, and target AI, IoT/Edge, and media processing in consumer and industrial devices.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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CMS, or Contest Management System, is a distributed system for running and (to some extent) organizing a programming contest.
CMS has been designed to be general and to handle many types of contests, tasks, scoring, etc. Nonetheless, CMS has been explicitly built to be used in the 2012 International Olympiad in Informatics, held in September 2012 in Italy.
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Of course it will: first, it’s in Austin, self-proclaimed capital of weird since 2003. Second, it’s a large in-person event after so many years of pandemic, during a massive heat wave, an economic crash, wildfires, drought and floods and a war.
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I guess it is time to bring some light on the various free software and open culture activities and projects I have worked on or been involved in the last year and a half.
First, lets mention the book releases I managed to publish. The Cory Doctorow book “Hvordan knuse overvåkningskapitalismen” argue that it is not the magic machine learning of the big technology companies that causes the surveillance capitalism to thrive, it is the lack of trust busting to enforce existing anti-monopoly laws. I also published a family of dictionaries for machinists, one sorted on the English words, one sorted on the Norwegian and the last sorted on the North Sámi words. A bit on the back burner but not forgotten is the Debian Administrators Handbook, where a new edition is being worked on. I have not spent as much time as I want to help bring it to completion, but hope I will get more spare time to look at it before the end of the year.
With my Debian had I have spent time on several projects, both updating existing packages, helping to bring in new packages and working with upstream projects to try to get them ready to go into Debian. The list is rather long, and I will only mention my own isenkram, openmotor, vlc bittorrent plugin, xprintidle, norwegian letter style for latex, bs1770gain, and recordmydesktop. In addition to these I have sponsored several packages into Debian, like audmes.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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I mentioned in a previous post that Igalia organized the Web Engines Hackfest 2022 last week. As usual, fonts were one of the topic discussed. Dominik Röttsches presented COLRv1 color vector fonts in Chrome and OSS (transcript) and we also settled a breakout session on Tuesday morning. Because one issue raised was the availability of OpenType MATH fonts on operating systems, I believe it’s worth giving an update on the latest status…
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Programming/Development
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I just sent myself a test message via Powerbase (a hosted CiviCRM project for community organizers) and it didn’t arrive. Wait, nope, there it is in my junk folder with a spam score of 6!
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Good day! In a recent dispatch we talked about the fundamental garbage collection algorithms, also introducing the Immix mark-region collector. Immix mostly leaves objects in place but can move objects if it thinks it would be profitable. But when would it decide that this is a good idea? Are there cases in which it is necessary?
I promised to answer those questions in a followup article, but I didn’t say which followup 
Before I get there, I want to talk about paged spaces.
[...]
Here is where I need to make an embarrassing admission. In my role as co-maintainer of the Guile programming language implementation, I have long noodled around with benchmarks, comparing Guile to Chez, Chicken, and other implementations. It’s good fun. However, I only realized recently that I had a magic knob that I could turn to win more benchmarks: simply make the heap bigger. Make it start bigger, make it grow faster, whatever it takes. For a program that does its work in some fixed amount of total allocation, a bigger heap will require fewer collections, and therefore generally take less time. (Some amount of collection may be good for performance as it improves locality, but this is a marginal factor.)
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This summer I’m contributing to Nautilus as part of GSoC, focusing on improving the discoverability of the new document feature. In this post I will describe how the project was split between me and Utkarsh, briefly go over the schedule established for my work, and briefly mention my current research in GNOME Boxes.
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Perl / Raku
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With the conference season coming, and missing the in-person events, Wendy van Dijk was inspired by yours truly to rewrite the lyrics to a Raku hymn (/r/rakulang comments). Here’s hoping someone will actually perform that real soon
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Python
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Although it’s pushed well past the 30-year mark since its release, Python remains one of the most relevant high-level programming languages in existence. Many developers will opt to use this language to make applications that can easily be maintained and require minimal hand-holding to work in a number of operating systems and distributions of Linux.
One of the greatest benefits of Python is its ability to snake (pun completely intended) around a lot of conventions found in other languages with little effort on behalf of the programmer, letting you compose incredibly simple little “quips” to get the job done. Here are a few examples!
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Leftovers
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Science
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Some see soft robots helping declining populations of pollinators do their jobs, or sifting through wreckage in the wake of a building collapse, or even performing simple, practical tasks in tight spaces; others see them traveling the oceans or traversing the insides of our bodies to scope out medical red flags.
Some, like Robert Katzschmann, an assistant professor of robotics at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, see the need to tread a little more lightly and a lot more quietly in our world, which is one of the reasons he’s building soft robots: to help us better integrate with nature.
A study by Research and Markets predicts the market for soft robotics will reach $2.16 billion by 2024 as the versatility of soft robots takes center stage. Metallic robots made of rigid metals and plastics, that use rotating motors or fast spin propellers, are designed and are constructed with speed and precision in mind; that makes them key drivers in industrial settings and in assembly line work. However, says Katzschmann, “There are no rotating motors in nature. Nature uses muscles to smoothly wiggle, walk or run. Muscles combined with soft materials make for very adaptive and safe environments that you can use in your everyday life.”
Soft robots are made from materials that can approximate biological functions. In fact, the researchers in Katzschmann’s lab—chemists, material scientists, biologists, physicists, computer scientists, data scientists, and roboticists—are finding ways to make machines from live, contracting muscles. “If you want to really have robots be ubiquitous, be among us, they have to be made physically of something that at least mechanically matches us,” he says. If you can do that, he says, you can build a “future that’s more sustainable, and [one] that’s also preserving nature, without all this extra noise that comes from traditional machines.”
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Security
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Hartzbleed is a new side-channel attack that works against a variety of microprocressors. Deducing cryptographic keys by analyzing power consumption has long been an attack, but it’s not generally viable because measuring power consumption is often hard. This new attack measures power consumption by measuring time, making it easier to exploit.
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Himitsu is a new approach to storing secret information on Unix systems, such as passwords or private keys, and I released version 0.1 this morning. It’s available on Alpine Linux community and the Arch User Repository, with more distributions hopefully on the way soon.
So, what is Himitsu and what makes it special?
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Bleeping Computer ☛ The Week in Ransomware – June 10th 2022 – Targeting Linux [Ed: Ransomware is in fact targeting and exploiting Windows more than 90% of the time, based on studies, but Microsoft booster Lawrence Abrams helps Microsoft mislead the public and badmouth "Linux"]
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (cyrus-imapd, exo, sleuthkit, slurm-wlm, vim, and vlc), Fedora (golang-github-docker-libnetwork, kernel, moby-engine, ntfs-3g-system-compression, python-cookiecutter, python2.7, python3.6, python3.7, python3.8, python3.9, rubygem-mechanize, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (bluez, dnsmasq, exempi, halibut, and php), Oracle (.NET 6.0, .NET Core 3.1, and xz), SUSE (chafa, firejail, kernel, python-Twisted, and tensorflow2), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode).
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Defence/Aggression
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Harry Litman observed after yesterday’s January 6 Committee hearing that you might be able to charge Trump with the attempted murder of Mike Pence.
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Environment
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Energy
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Today, Bitcoin and other cryptos are plunging, and companies such as Coinbase, which runs the largest crypto exchange in the U.S, are announcing layoffs.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Misinformation/Disinformation
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Despite volunteering repeatedly, Sophie Zhang, former Facebook employee turned Whistleblower, has not been formally requested to testify before the Parliament of India on the revelations she made in 2021. Now, she has disclosed new documents which raise further concerns about the functioning of the social media giant in our country. To convey our concerns and request them to initiate an inquiry, we wrote to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications & Information Technology on June 16, 2022.
[...]
These harms include permitting political misinformation & violent content/groups, Facebook’s core mechanics being a significant part of why hate speech, misinformation & divisive political speech flourish on the platform, and failing to curb global misinformation & ethnic violence due to inadequate language capabilities. These harms have real world consequences. Reports on Facebook’s negative impact on elections, its role in contributing to violence, and its use as a platform for human trafficking paint a scary picture of how bad the situation already is. In this environment, disclosures made by Zhang pertaining to Facebook’s preferential treatment of one political party in India raise significant concerns.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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Should you buy the HP Dev One? Well, first things first, while it is a developer-focused machine, it is not only for developers. Anyone that wants a quality laptop that comes with a Linux-based operating system pre-installed should absolutely check it out. This is a fine laptop for developers, students, business users, home users… hell, anyone. The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U APU is even capable of light gaming.
Look, folks, the HP Dev One is thin, fairly light, and very solidly built. The specs are all respectable and both the RAM and storage are user-upgradeable. Pop!_OS is one of the easiest Linux distributions for beginners, but even expert-level Linux users love it too. When such wonderful software and hardware come together, greatness happens. This is simply a great laptop that is a joy to use. At $1,099 you just cannot go wrong.
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Server
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What does that mean? Unlike traditional system administrators, site reliability engineers (SREs) apply solid software engineering principles to their day-to-day work.
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Applications
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Got a bunch of images with huge file sizes taking too much disk space? Or perhaps you have to upload an image to a web portal that has file size restrictions?
There could be a number of reasons why you would want to compress images. There are tons of tools to help you with it and I am not talking about the command line ones here.
You can use a full-fledged image editor like GIMP. You may also use web tools like Squoosh, an open source project from Google. It even lets you compare the files for each compression level.
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Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.
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I’ve been curating summer mixtapes for friends (well mix SD cards since their cars don’t have tape players) and I’ve needed to do a bit of basic tag editing to make sure everything is correctly labeled.
As I’m sure you’re aware, there is a ton of ace audio tag editing software for Linux, much of it open source. These apps are great and can do what I need to. However, I find some of them a little overwhelming for my simple metadata editing needs, often to the point that I don’t know how to use them correctly.
I don’t need something resembling a MySQL database just to correct the odd bit of errant capitalisation in the artist field of a couple of MP3s, y’know?
Fitting the role perfectly is Tagger. This is a relatively new GTK4/libadwaita app that bills itself as an “easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor” and YOU’LLNEVERGUESSWHAT?!! – I found it to be exactly that.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The environment variable is a pair of keys and values stored within the system and can be accessed by an application from the shell or sub-shell.
You can set environmental variables for your programs, such as user preferences, long commands into the more minor abbreviations, system locale, the path of the executable file, development environment variables, etc.
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Hello Linux geeks, welcome to the guide on how install Docker on Fedora 36 step by step. This guide also be applicable to previous versions of Fedora 35/34. During this guide, we will be installing docker community edition package from docker official repository.
Docker is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) tool which leverage the OS level virtualization to spin up containers. System on which docker is installed is known as Docker Engine.
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The bash prompt is probably the happiest place for most Linux users. A typical Linux bash prompt will look like the following screenshot.
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Wine is popular software that allows many Windows applications to run on Linux. The problem with Wine, however, is some required configurations for each application you want to use can be extremely time-consuming and prone to errors while setting up. A great PlayOnLinux will make your life easier by providing easy-to-understand automated installation of many popular installations, which can benefit the average desktop users or new users of Linux.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PlayOnLinux on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal using the default Ubuntu APT repository or installing the Flatpak third-party package manager to get a newer version binary.
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The term filesystem is a fancy word to describe how your computer keeps track of all the files you create. Whether it’s an office document, a configuration file, or thousands of digital photos, your computer has to store a lot of data in a way that’s useful for both you and it. Filesystems like Ext4, XFS, JFS, BtrFS, and so on are the “languages” your computer uses to keep track of data.
Your desktop or terminal can do a lot to help you find your data quickly. Your file manager might have, for instance, a filter function so you can quickly see just the image files in your home directory, or it might have a search function that can locate a file by its filename, and so on. These qualities are known as file attributes because they are exactly that: Attributes of the data object, defined by code in file headers and within the filesystem itself. Most filesystems record standard file attributes such as filename, file size, file type, time stamps for when it was created, and time stamps for when it was last visited.
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Cryostat is a tool for managing JDK Flight Recorder data on Kubernetes. Cryostat 2.1 is now installable using a Helm chart. While the Cryostat Operator is our preferred installation method for production environments, the Cryostat Helm chart is a better choice for demo purposes. The Helm chart has a flexible design and requires few permissions to allow many users as needed.
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A process ID is the number assigned to an application by the operating system. This serves to identify the application uniquely while it is running. This number changes for each copy of a program running. And it is different each time an application opens and closes.
By the nature of the system, further applications are spawned by the original process that is loaded when the operating system is loaded. So all processes have a parent and child relationship with the process that spawned them.
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The Apache web server default root directory for storing site content is at the “/var/www/html” path. This directory can be manually changed to the custom directory of your choice.
To achieve this, you need to edit Apache configuration files depending upon the distribution you were using and replace the current directory path with the new location.
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Continuous Delivery or commonly known as CD is quite a common term in Software Development. It is basically used for all the code changes which automatically are updated n the production release. It can update all the changes from new features to configuration changes, and from bug fixes,—into production.
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Waterfox is fresh air for those who want to maintain their privacy and security online. This browser has been made explicitly with 64-bit processors in mind but also runs on ARM devices like smartphones or tablets without any issues! In addition, it can be found across multiple platforms, including classic desktop systems and recent ones such as Mac OS X/ Linux interfaces, where users will enjoy its fast performance thanks to an open-source codebase that ensures stability over time.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Waterfox Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS desktop using the command line terminal with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.
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qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. qBittorrent is a native application written in C++ which uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and libtorrent-rasterbar library and is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to UTorrent.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qBittorrent on Debian 11 Bullseye desktop GUI and install qBittorrent-nox, which can be installed on a desktop or headless server using the command line terminal to access the WEB UI.
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A software called Atinout reads a list of AT instructions. It sends each instruction/command to the modem one at a time while waiting for the current command’s final result code before moving on to another command on the list. Atinout is a program that runs the AT commands in order and records the modem’s answer. In this article, we will discuss the installation and the use of Atinout on Ubuntu systems.
Atinout is an application available for different versions of Linux. Ubuntu is a Linux operating system that is very popular and easy to use. We can install and use Atinout on the Ubuntu system.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Reviews
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openSUSE is a project which almost always impresses me with its technology, its integration, and its flexibility. However, it’s never a distribution I’ve run as my main operating system for various reasons. One of the main reasons I haven’t fully embraced openSUSE, despite its many technological capabilities, is its inconsistent polish. Some aspect of the operating system are polished and developed to near perfection. The installer is both fairly easy to navigate and surprisingly flexible. The default Btr filesystem is powerful and its snapshots easy to use. The YaST control panel is remarkably good at adjusting low level aspects of the operating system and integrates nicely with Btrfs.
However, on the other side of things, we have issues like the KDE Wallet utility nagging the user and displaying vague prompts about which cryptography functions to use. The live media offers a different and quite less appealing experience than the installed operating system, and (despite the progress in this arena) the documented steps to install media codecs are still some of the most complex in the Linux ecosystem.
openSUSE 15.4 feels like a distribution by system administrators for administrators. We can set up a printer and rollback filesystem snapshots with a few clicks of the mouse, but installing video codecs is a two-commands-and-four-prompts command line process. Managing services and setting up network shares takes just a few clicks, but getting sound working on the live disc was an exercise in frustration. openSUSE is a distribution which makes a lot of usually hard tasks easy and the normally easy tasks hard.
In short, some parts of openSUSE feel like the Iron Man nanotech suit and some parts feel like they were built in a cave. The former parts definitely outweigh the latter, but the little issues are what separate a good, solid distribution from a great experience.
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New Releases
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Manjaro Linux is a rolling-release distribution. So, technically, you will be on the latest version if you regularly update your system.
It should not be a big deal to upgrade to Manjaro 21.3.0, considering I am already running it without issues for a few days before the official announcement.
Also, you might want to read my initial experience switching to Manjaro from Ubuntu (if you’re still on the fence).
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SpiralLinux is the result of the creator of GeckoLinux turning their attention to Debian – with an interesting outcome.
Some Linux distros have many remixes and respins, while some have very few. For example, there are multiple downstream variants of Debian and Ubuntu, but very few of Fedora. The Reg FOSS desk is only aware of one for openSUSE: GeckoLinux, whose Rolling edition we looked at earlier this year.
Now, the creator of GeckoLinux – who prefers to remain anonymous – has turned their attention to one of the most-remixed distros there is, Debian, to create SpiralLinux. What can a new remix bring to the already-crowded table of Debian meta-distributions? (That is: distributions built from other distributions.)
SpiralLinux is to Debian what GeckoLinux is to openSUSE. They both offer easier, friendlier ways to install the upstream distro, but the final result is as close as possible to its parent. Neither adds any new components that aren’t in the parent distro, and updates come direct and unmodified from upstream.
Both Debian and openSUSE offer default downloads which boot directly into an installation program. This is in contrast to the more modern Ubuntu and Fedora way of doing things, where the install image boots into a live desktop, so you can try it out and get a feel for it before you commit yourself to installing it. (We must be fair and note that both Debian and openSUSE do offer optional live-image downloads as well – but you need to know to look for them.)
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Security remains a top concern for developers working with containers and Kubernetes. In a just-released paper from Red Hat, the 2022 State of Kubernetes security report, 93% of respondents experienced at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environments during the previous year. And 31% of respondents attributed revenue or customer loss to these security incidents.
Innumerable tools exist—including intrusion detection systems, code scanners, and more—to improve security in an increasingly at-risk software development environment. Unfortunately, few of these are built with the unique risks and needs of a Kubernetes environment in mind.
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Organizations looking to improve the customer service experience have long turned to digital solutions – to great effect if done correctly. According to McKinsey, organizations that successfully leverage digital products to improve the customer experience are able to increase customer satisfaction by up to 20 percent, reduce the cost to serve by up to 40 percent, and boost conversion rates and growth by 20 percent.
However, to truly impact and improve the customer experience, organizations need to go beyond simply purchasing a product. Research from Boston Consulting Group shows that 70 percent of digital transformation efforts fail, often for reasons that have more to do with implementation than with the actual solutions themselves.
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At a recent Tech Titans Industry luncheon, I had the honor of moderating with three distinguished leaders of change on how to improve diversity in IT…
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Devices/Embedded
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SparkFun has unveiled a data logging module compatible with their own Thing Plus devices. The SparkFun Thing Plus Dual-Port Logging Shield features an ATtiny841 MCU which allows the user to interface with a microSD card through SPI or USB-C.
According to the company, the Dual-Port Logging Shield was designed for easy data transmission using any standard Arduino SD library. The module can be connected to a computer via USB-C and perform read/write operations with speeds up to 35MBytes/seconds.
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The Iono RP D16 module provides sixteen digital 24V I/O lines, an RS-485 serial interface, a wide range 12-28V power supply input, and its DIN-rail case enables installation in electrical cabinets and automation control systems.
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With the growing importance of Raspberry Pi and its compute module series, the Banana Pi company has introduced its own series similar to Raspberry Pi. They have right now released several series of micro-computers, but this time they are releasing Banana Compute Module, getting inspiration from the previous Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. However, the developers have put in some amazing specs in the device to blow up your mind.
If you don’t know about the Banana Pi Compute Module, you should read this article that will provide you with all the information about the compute module developed by BananaPi foundation.
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We’ve written about STMicro Time-of-Flight ranging sensors several times over the year, including the latest VL53L8 which offers a range of up to 4 meters. But if your application would benefit from a more extended range, Toppan and Brookman Technology have designed a three-dimensional range image sensor (3D sensor) capable of measuring distances from one to 30 meters. using a hybrid Time-of-Flight (ToF) method.
That method, proposed by Professor Shoji Kawahito of Shizuoka University, is a new sensing technology combining the indirect ToF method of measuring distance by phase difference and the direct ToF methodology for measurement based on time differences. The hybrid method is said to be more tolerant to ambient light noise than the conventional indirect ToF method, especially outdoors.
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ShaRPiKeebo is a new tiny Linux computer complete with a daylight readable screen, keyboard and long-range transceiver. Measuring just 6 x 11 x 1.5 cm and powered by a Raspberry Pi (RPi) Zero W or 2W.
“Who hasn’t dreamed of a computer the size of a calculator they could use to play games or carry out system-administration tasks when they’re on the go? Who doesn’t want a way to keep busy or stay entertained on a bus or a train or a subway? (A way that does not require balancing expensive hardware on their lap while repeatedly elbowing their neighbors…) Who wouldn’t enjoy leaving their bag or backpack at home more often? Scenarios like this speak to us, here at Morpheans, so we decided to make them a reality—with the ShaRPiKeebo nanocomputer.”
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lectronic enthusiasts, students, hobbyists and those interested in building a Raspberry Pi robot may be interested in a new tutorial published to the Hackster.io website this week providing information on how to create a small form factor Raspberry Pi robot. The Zumo can be controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and STM32 micro-controller and takes about four days to complete according to the project details on the Hackster.io website.
Hardware components include a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W mini PC, Zumo Chassis Kit, DFRobot Micro metal Gear Motors, Custom Hardware & Software all powered by a rechargeable Pimoroni Lipo battery 3.3V 2000mAh.
“The first step was to decide not to use the Zumo Shield from Pololu. It’s a great shield designed specifically for the Arduino Uno, but it cannot be used to charge batteries. I wanted to use Lipo Battery Charger from Adafruit. However, with chip shortage being the pain of the day (week? month? year?? When will it end lol), I did not have anything which would meet my first need, a battery charger and boost converter. Not to let a crisis go to waste, I decided to design my own Battery Charger and Boost Converter Circuit.”
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Programming/Development
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I have been kicking the tyres of the Hare programming language recently. I find that a useful program to create when exploring new programming languages is to echo stdin to stdout.
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Qt has been released as Open Source since its very first version all the way back in 1994. But development happened in a closed-source fashion inside the companies owning Qt (Trolltech and then Nokia). In 2011, we changed this. We took the big step and turned Qt into a real Open Source project, with a public governance structure consisting of Approvers, Maintainers and one Chief Maintainer.
I had the honour of being the Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project since that time. It’s been 11 fantastic years for Qt, where we’ve seen a huge amount of new features and work flowing into Qt. We’ve seen a large growth in our user base, and we released 2 major versions, 21 minor versions and countless patch level releases of Qt.
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Here at Enterprising Enterprise, we love technology, but we’re also pushing it hard, constantly trying to expand the frontier of what’s possible.
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Recently I was looking at a panel in one of our Grafana dashboards and noticed that its PromQL queries used avg_over_time() when it (now) felt as if max_over_time() was what the panel should be using. It’s been years since I created this panel and last touched it, and I definitely no longer remember what I was thinking at the time. Did I have a good reason that avg_over_time() was necessary, or did an average just feel more correct for the purpose of the panel at the time I created it?
We have Prometheus alert rules with similarly tangled PromQL expressions, but since Prometheus alert rules are (normally) configured in YAML text files that allow comments, most of our complicated and non-obvious alert rules have commentary about why they’re that way, what options don’t work, and so on. This commentary has periodically been extremely helpful for refreshing my mind about what on earth past me was thinking when he wrote the rule.
Setting up Grafana panels and dashboards is normally done through their web GUI, which doesn’t really offer any good way of writing this sort of commentary.
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The new version of compliment has already been integrated in cider-nrepl 0.28.5 and it’s being used by CIDER’s 1.5-SNAPSHOT builds. That’s probably the easiest way to take it out for spin. I hope you’ll love this release and I hope I didn’t mess anything up!
You might be wondering why I’m doing the release announcement this time around instead of compliment’s author and all-star Clojure hacker Alex Yakushev. Well, sadly Alex has been impacted much more by the war than me. He’s from Ukraine and is now fighting for the freedom of his country. In the mean time I’ll be helping Alex out a bit with the maintenance of compliment until he’s back home safe and sound.
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A bunch of almost unbelievably clever tech tricks come together into something practical with redbean 2: a webserver plus content in a single file that runs on any x86-64 operating system.
The project is the culmination – so far – of a series of remarkable, inspired hacks by programmer Justine Tunney: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε, Cosmopolitan libc, and the original redbean. It may take a little time to explain what it does, so bear with us. We promise, you will be impressed.
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Standards/Consortia
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When it comes to sort out your emails, there are many strategies. Since I have been working at W3C, I’m a fan of dated spaces. I apply this strategy to my emails using Sieve.
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Leftovers
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Recent blood studies on the continent show up to 65% of people in Africa have been infected with COVID-19.
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New studies suggest that bits of COVID-19 can linger in a patient’s gastrointestinal system for months after the person is infected.
Ami Bhatt, an oncologist and geneticist at Stanford University in California, and Timon Adolph, a gastroenterology internist at the Medical University of Innsbruck in Austria, led separate studies. In the pandemic’s early days, the number of COVID-19 patients who experienced vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and other gastrointestinal issues baffled both Bhatt and Adolph.
“At that time, this was thought to be a respiratory virus,” Bhatt, who referred to the lingering coronavirus bits as “ghosts,” told Nature magazine.
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Proprietary
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June’s Patch Tuesday update releases for Windows 11 have once gain proved to be problematic. Microsoft has acknowledged a new known issue with the operating system following the installation of the KB5014697 update. The KB5014697 update was supposed to address a number of security flaws in Windows 11, but it also introduced connectivity issues for some users, Microsoft is currently investigating the problem which affects Windows 11’s Wi-Fi hotspot feature.
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Security
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The primary use of computers in any form, whether it’s a mobile phone, personal computer, or a workstation, or a server offering services on the internet, is for the storage and manipulation of data and generation of information to support our daily lives. Paramount in our use of or interaction with computers is privacy and data or information security whether these entities are at rest (in storage) or in transit.
Even as a beginner or an intermediate Linux user, it will serve you right to always use your laptop, workstation, or VPS in the cloud with security in mind. We have prepared a list of features security features and tools for you to get started with understanding and practicing security on any Linux operating system.
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Defence/Aggression
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Saudi Arabia doesn’t exactly have a positive track record when it comes to digital espionage.
In 2018, the country’s government reportedly used the notorious spy software Pegasus on devices belonging to the family of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and journalist who was killed that year in a gruesome assassination allegedly orchestrated by the government.
In 2019, two former Saudi employees of Twitter in the US were charged with using the popular social media platform to unmask critics of the Saudi government.
And last year, a Saudi aid worker who had used a Twitter account to make jokes about his government was jailed for 20 years. His case is believed to be connected to the government’s infiltration of Twitter.
And then there’s Google. The online giant has the most popular search engine and most-used, web-based email service in the world. Part of US company Alphabet Inc., Google regularly boasts about how carefully it protects users’ data. But it has also had some noteworthy run-ins with authoritarian leaders.
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A new EU certificate allows drones over 25 kilograms to fly beyond visual range in civil and military airspace. But there have been crashes.
The German Armed Forces Procurement Office tested a drone for the first time in military airspace beyond visual range, while regular air traffic was also taking place there. Flown was the UAV One 150 fixed-wing aircraft from the Primoco company in the Czech Republic.
The aircraft was equipped with transponders for this purpose in addition to radio communication. This allowed it to be integrated into the air traffic management system of manned aviation. The required sensors came from the German interception specialist Plath.
Plath and Primoco described the drone flights as a „milestone“ in a German military airspace. In fact, the tests could provide a breakthrough. That’s because until now, aviation law has stipulated that heavy drones can generally only fly in restricted airspace. This enormously reduces the possibilities for use in the military and civilian sectors.
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