A Quick Overview of EuroLinux 9.0
In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to connect to a VPN on Ubuntu. Beginner-friendly, step-by-step instructions with screenshots.
Virtual machines are a great way to run new operating systems without installing them directly on your computer. You can try out your favorite Linux distributions before switching to them permanently, given the isolated, yet easy-to-install procedures.
If you are sure about installing Manjaro directly on your PC, you can create a bootable USB/CD and use it to boot your computer. On the contrary, if you want to try Manjaro Linux before installing it on your system, you can use a virtual machine.
Here's how to install Manjaro Linux on your PC, both directly and using VirtualBox.
True Prometheus histograms have a specific set of metrics and time series that they're made up of. As covered in the documentation, there are a bunch of '<basename>_bucket' time series, a '<basename>_count' time series, and a '<basename>_sum' time series that's the cumulative sum of all of the observations that are in the histogram. How all of this works is covered in, eg, How does a Prometheus Histogram work?.
However, not all external sources of histogram data provide a cumulative sum. For example, ZFS IO statistic histograms just give you histogram bucket counts. When generating Prometheus histogram metrics from such histogram sources, it seems common to generate a _sum metric (well, time series) that's just 0. This gives you something that will work in many situations, but after having wrestled with histograms built this way I've come to feel that you want to avoid it if possible. Prometheus histograms are more useful with their cumulative sums, and you can't rebuild an approximation of this information in PromQL as far as I know.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an HTTP-header based mechanism that allows a server to indicate any origins (domain, scheme, or port) other than its own from which a browser should permit loading resources. CORS also relies on a mechanism by which browsers make a “preflight” request to the server hosting the cross-origin resource, in order to check that the server will permit the actual request. In that preflight, the browser sends headers that indicate the HTTP method and headers that will be used in the actual request.
The CORS standard describes new HTTP headers which provide browsers a way to request remote URLs only when they have permission. Although some validation and authorization can be performed by the server, it is generally the browser’s responsibility to support these headers and honor the restrictions they impose.
Arch Linux users love the terminal, however, it’s not the only way to use the operating system. Introducing Pamac, the default package tool for Manjaro Linux. With it, users can install everything from native Arch Linux packages, AUR packages, and even Snap and Flatpak if they choose.
If you’re on Arch Linux, or an operating system based on it (Garuda, BlackArch, etc.) and want a nice GUI to install packages, this guide is for you. Follow along as we show you how to install and use Pamac.
Despite most of the web moving away from Java applications and towards browser-integrated apps, there are still some things that require the Java runtime. If you’re on Pop_OS Linux and need the latest version of Java for an app, we can help you.
This guide will go over the various ways you can get the Java runtime environment working on Pop_OS 22.04 (and newer).
If you use virtual sticky notes on Linux, you’ve probably wondered if it is possible to sync them across desktops via the internet. Well, if you have an Evernote account, you can do this with Eversticky.
Eversticky is a sticky notes application with Evernote integration. With this, you can create stickies on your desktop and ensure they get backed up to your Evernote account. Here’s how to use Eversticky on your system.
‘The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow’, developed by Cloak & Dagger Games and published by Wadjet Eye Games, is set for release later this year.
The folk horror adventure is set within the isolated moors of rural Victoria England and it was previously known as ‘Incantamentum’.
Antiquarian Thomasina Bateman is writing a book on the barrows of England, documenting the treasures she finds buried within. When an intriguing letter summons her to the small village of Bewlay, tucked away in the remote countryside, she sets off by train with her assistant a day behind.
 In July 2022, Xfce 4.16 users received a new version (4.16.3) of Xfce Settings, which is probably the most important component of the lightweight desktop environment as it lets you manage all the settings, that brought a few bug fixes and several language translations.
Mousepad 0.5.10 simple text editor for Xfce was released as well in July 2022 with improvements to encoding conversion when saving or opening files, the ability to update the charset when a byte order mark is detected, and several bug fixes, including one for a memory leak in menu item realignment.
Microsoft invented the Win95 desktop from scratch. Its own previous Ones (e.g. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows NT 3.51 and OS/2 1.x) looked nothing like it.
The task bar, the Start menu, the system tray, "My Computer", "Network Neighbourhood", all that: all original, *patented* Microsoft designs. There was nothing like it before.
(The closest was Acorn's RISC OS, with an "icon bar" that works very differently, on the Archimedes computer. A handful of those were imported to North America, and right after, NeXT "invented" the Dock, and then Microsoft invented the task bar which is quite a bit more sophisticated.
Release highlights of Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" with details about the new features, updates and download details.
Linux Mint 21 is coming out today!
Many thanks to all the people who participated in the BETA. 152 issues were reported in the last 15 days and this allowed us to fix many bugs in preparation for the STABLE release.
Many thanks also to people who donate to our project and to our sponsors for backing Linux Mint.
Although Linux Mint 21 is now stable, we still have a few fixes and improvements planned post-release. These will come as software updates.
We’re also focused on opening the upgrade path from Linux Mint 20.3 to Linux Mint 21. We’ll make announcements when this is ready.
Early August LMDE 5 will receive the new Cinnamon 5.4 along with the new features from Linux Mint 21.
Linux Mint is one of the most popular Linux distros out there. Moreover, it uses Ubuntu as its base and particularly the Long Term Support releases for up to 5 years of software support.
Now, we have a new version upgrade, i.e. Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” based on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, which was released in April. Thus, users can expect security updates until 2027.
Let’s take a look at the highlights of this release.
Just yesterday, we told you 4MLinux 40 was available for download. We also stated 4MLinux was an operating system that simply didn't need to exist. Another such distribution that isn't necessary anymore is Linux Mint. While Mint is a very solid OS, the brutal truth is, users would be wise to just use the operating system on which it is based -- Ubuntu.
But OK, many people have been using Linux Mint for years and they are not interested in changing their ways. Fair enough. If you are such a person that is prepared to "ride or die" with Linux Mint, today, the latest version of the operating system is officially released. Code-named "Vanessa," Linux Mint 21 can be downloaded immediately.
The stable release of Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” is now available to download.
This is the latest version of the Ubuntu-based distro, and it carries a sizeable set of changes compared to the Linux Mint 20.3 release we saw at the start of the year.
In this post I show you what’s new in Linux Mint 21, where to download it, and recap how to upgrade to Linux Mint 21 from an earlier version should you be running one.
As ever, Linux Mint 21 is available in three distinct distillations: the flagship Cinnamon edition (which uses the Cinnamon desktop environment by default), an Xfce variant (using the Xfce desktop), and a MATE option (which ships with the MATE desktop by default). In this post I focus primarily on the Cinnamon version.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines Cloud Native as a technology that empowers organisations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds. Containers, service meshes, microservices, immutable infrastructure, and declarative APIs exemplify this approach.
These techniques enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable. Combined with robust automation, they allow engineers to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.
Cloud native is about speed and agility.
The Search For Inexpensive and Portable Positional Accuracy As both a caver (a person who explores caves, often referred to as spelunking) for more than 30 years and an ambitious contributor to an open-source map project (OpenStreetMap (OSM)) since 2009, Eric Sibert has a long-standing passion for positional accuracy. In all that time, Sibert has been on a quest to find an accurate and portable tool that allows him to easily switch between these tasks - a quest that has proven to be not so simple.
Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics!
Millions of data are being generated daily. And companies store their valuable data in databases. A database is organized information stored in a dedicated system. To process the data stored in the system, the role of the database management system comes into the picture. Analogically, it’s like an office with the number of files stored in it.
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is more than just a programming style; it’s a philosophy. R has offered various forms of OOP, starting with S3, then (among others) S4, reference classes, and R6, and now R7. The latter has been under development by a team broadly drawn from the R community leadership, not only the “directors” of R development, the R Core Team, but also the prominent R services firm RStudio and so on.
I’ll start this report with a summary, followed by details (definition of OOP, my “safety” concerns etc.). The reader need not have an OOP background for this material; an overview will be given here (though I dare say some readers who have this background may learn something too).
This will not be a tutorial on how to use R7, nor an evaluation of its specific features. Instead, I’ll first discuss the goals of the S3 and S4 OOP systems, which R7 replaces, especially in terms of whether OOP is the best way to meet those goals. These comments then apply to R7 as well.
Package yfR recently passed peer review at rOpenSci and is all about downloading stock price data from Yahoo Finance (YF). I wrote this package to solve a particular problem I had as a teacher: I needed a large volume of clean stock price data to use in my classes, either for explaining how financial markets work or for class exercises. While there are several R packages to import raw data from YF, none solved my problem.
Package yfR facilitates the importation of data, organizing it in the tidy format and speeding up the process using a cache system and parallel computing. yfR is a backwards-incompatible substitute of BatchGetSymbols, released in 2016 (see vignette yfR and BatchGetSymbols for details).
Alice Walsh and Karla Fettich of the R Ladies Philly talked to the R Consortium about the thriving R Community in Philadelphia. The group has broadened its reach both locally and internationally during the pandemic. However, they have a deep commitment to the local community and remain focused on local issues. Every year, the group partners with local non-profit organizations to host a Datathon to promote learning while contributing to the local community.
Today we’re excited to announce Quarto, a new open-source scientific and technical publishing system. Quarto is the next generation of R Markdown, and has been re-built from the ground up to support more languages and environments, as well as to take what we’ve learned from 10 years of R Markdown and weave it into a more complete, cohesive whole. While Quarto is a “new” system, it’s important to note that it’s highly compatible with what’s come before. Like R Markdown, Quarto is also based on Knitr and Pandoc, and despite the fact that Quarto does some things differently, most existing R Markdown documents can be rendered unmodified with Quarto. Quarto also supports Jupyter as an alternate computational engine to Knitr, and can also render existing Jupyter notebooks unmodified.
Every so often I wind up writing something that needs to do something more complicated than can be readily handled in some Bourne shell, awk, or other basic Unix scripting tools. When this happens, the language I most often turn to is Python, and especially Python is my default choice when the work I'm doing involves processing text in some way (or often if I need to generate text). For example, if I want to analyze the output of some command and generate Prometheus metrics from it, Python is often my choice. These days, this is Python 3, even with its warts with handling non-Unicode input (which usually don't come up in this context).
(A what a lot of these programs do could be summarized as string processing with logic.)
In theory there's no obvious reason that my language of choice couldn't be, say, Go. But in practice, Python has much less friction than something like Go while still having enough structure and capabilities to be better than a much more limited tool like awk. One part of this is Python's casualness about typing, especially typing in dicts. In Python, you can shove anything you want into a dict and it's completely routine to have dicts with heterogenous values (usually your keys are homogenous, eg all strings). This might be madness in a large program, but for small, quickly written things it's a great speedup.
We did not use any paper maps, and instead relied on the OpenStreetMap data, which is very good, as well as the official(?) GPX tracks on Komoot, which are linked from the official route descriptions. We used OsmAnd.
In general, trails are generally very well marked (red circle with white center, and frequent signs), but the signs rarely tell you which way the Via Alpina goes, so the GPS was needed.
Sometimes the OpenStreetMap trail and the Komoot trail disagreed on short segments. We sometimes followed one and other times the other.
In most things that interest me, the term (and concept) Bourgeoisie comes up so often that I cannot afford to have light grasp of it. I have learned, mis-learned, forgotten, and relearned its definition so many times that I’m forced to create this page to remind myself.
As I write this I’m suffering from severe post-camp blues. Every four years the Dutch hacker community organizes a stupendously large multi-day campsite event, with ample international help. To a large extent, “everyone” is there. And this time, like every time, people who originally decided they could not make it.. show up by day two. Because the pull is just too strong. Over 3500 people attended the event.
I’ve played with a MACCHIATObin Single Shot board for the last month. I decided to pick this up instead of a different board because of its sheer connectivity. This board has 1x1GbE, 1x2.5GbE, and 2x10GbE, which is very rare for those kinds of boards. I was most interested in the two 10GbE due to some projects I have in mind.
I was interested in installing Fedora, which proved very easy. The first time I created a bootable micro-SD card with Fedora, it worked perfectly out of the box. After a few tests, I decided to install Fedora on a SATA drive. The SATA installation proved a bit more complex because I assumed it could boot from USB, but I did not manage to do so. I then moved the Fedora ISO to a micro-SD card and installed it from there, which proved to work flawlessly.
The last new PC I bought was a Dell PowerEdge T110II in 2013. That model had been out for a while and I got it for under $2000. Since then the CPI has gone up by about 20% so it’s probably about $2000 in today’s money. Currently Dell has a special on the T150 tower server (the latest replacement for the T110II) which has a G6405T CPU that isn’t even twice as fast as the i3-3220 (3746 vs 2219) in the T110II according to passmark.com (AKA cpubenchmark.net). The special price is $2600. I can’t remember the details of my choices when purchasing the T110II but I recall that CPU speed wasn’t a priority and I wanted a cheap reliable server for storage and for light desktop use. So it seems that the current entry model in the Dell T1xx server line is less than twice as fast as fast as it was in 2013 while costing about 25% more! An option is to spend an extra $989 to get a Xeon E-2378 which delivers a reasonable 18,248 in that benchmark. The upside of a T150 is that is uses buffered DDR4 ECC RAM which is pretty cheap nowadays, you can get 32G for about $120.
First, a refresher. Nova Labs, which changed its name earlier this year in an attempt to distance itself from the low-power long-range Helium Network, has a long history in the IoT sector. The company was started in 2013 and went through several pivots before settling on the idea of using tokens to incentivize people to place Helium hotspots in their homes. The hotspots act as wireless gateways, receiving LoraWAN or Helium’s own proprietary LongFi radio signals and using the hotspot owner’s broadband network to transfer the data to the internet.
To reward users who put the hotspots in their homes, Nova Labs established the Helium Network Token (HNT). A hotspot owner generates HNTs by providing both coverage and transferring data. And companies that want to buy data on the network use the HNTs to buy data credits. Each data credit is worth $0.00001. So the June revenue reported by Nova Labs from data transfers represents 650 million data packets.
As a point of disclosure, I run a Helium hotspot in my home, and have since 2020. I made about $20,000 by selling HNTs in 2021 and currently have 126 HNTs worth about $1,195 at the current price of roughly $9. In the time I’ve had the hotspot, the price of HNTs has ranged from less than $1 to a high of around $55, peaking as interest in cryptocurrency peaked.
Meanwhile, he had forgotten to cancel his joke 100 ETH offer, which remained active. The new buyer accepted the offer and sold the NFT back to him, pocketing 98 ETH in the process. Franklinisbored wrote on Twitter, "I was celebrating my joke of a domain sale, sharing the spoils, but in a dream of greed, forgot to cancel my own bid of 100 ETH to buy it back. This will be the joke and bag fumble of the century. I deserve all of the jokes and criticism." He also sent the 1.9 ETH back to the other person, with a message asking them to reverse the transaction. The other person replied, "No, thank you for the money though."
Molly White reports on an NFT “joke gone wrong”ââ¬â°—ââ¬â°but I read it as a joke gone right. Delicious.
With over $20b in assets under management Celsius Network is the biggest centralised lending platform in the crypto space. Its flagship product: 10 to 12.68% annual returns on USD stable coins and this with little to no risks.
Sounds too good to be true? It certainly is!
Sam Harris just had Marc Andreessen on his show and I heard a concept in the episode that intrigued me.
They were talking about their current politics and Marc said he’s now seeing things according to James Burnham’s model of Managerial Capitalism, which is an instance of the Principal-Agent problem.
The Principal-Agent problem is where owners (Principals) put managers (Agents) in charge of their businesses or assets, and there are misaligned incentives between the agent and the principal.
I love audiobooks. When I was a high-school-aged page at a public library in the 1980s, I would pass endless hours shelving and repairing books while listening to "books on tape" from the library's collection. By the time iTunes came along, I'd amassed a huge collection of cassette and CD audiobooks and I painstakingly ripped them to my collection.
Then came Audible, and I was in heaven – all the audiobooks, none of the hassle of ripping CDs. There was only one problem: the Digital Rights Management (DRM). You see, I've spent most of my adult life campaigning against DRM, because I think it's an existential danger to all computer users – and because it's a way for tech companies to hijack the relationship between creators and their audiences.
[...]
As I said then, computers are stubbornly, inescapably "general purpose." The only computer we know how to make – the Turing-complete von Neumann machine – is the computer that can run all the programs we know how to write. When someone claims to have built a computer-powered "appliance" – say, a smart speaker or (God help us all) a smart toaster – that can only run certain programs, what they mean is that they've designed a computer that can run every program, but which will refuse to run programs unless the manufacturer approves them.
But this is also technological nonsense. The program that checks to see whether other programs are approved by the manufacturer is also running on an untrusted adversary's computer (with DRM, you are the manufacturer's untrusted adversary). Because that overseer program is running on a computer you own, you can replace it, alter it, or subvert it, allowing you to run programs that the manufacturer doesn't like. That would include (for example) a modified DRM program that unscrambles the manufacturer-supplied video, audio or text file and then, rather than throwing away the unscrambled copy when you're done with it, saves it so you can open it with a program that doesn't restrict you from sharing it.
As a technical matter, DRM can't work. Once one person figures out how to patch a DRM program so that it saves the files it descrambles, they can share that knowledge (or a program they've written based on that knowledge) with everyone in the world, instantaneously, at the push of a button. Anyone who has that new program can save unscrambled copies of the files they've bought and share those, too.
DRM vendors hand-wave this away, saying things like "this just keeps honest users honest." As Ed Felten once said, "Keeping honest users honest is like keeping tall users tall."
The Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology hearing into the Rogers outage was notable for how similar Tony Staffieri, the Rogers CEO, and Ian Scott, the Chair of the CRTC, sounded on key issues related to the outage and the state of Canadian telecom regulation. In fact, Conservative MP Tracy Gray noted during the hearing that “listening to the answers from the executives at the CRTC, I felt like I was actually questioning senior telecom executives not the regulator.” Ms. Gray wasn’t wrong. While it is obviously the role of the CRTC to regulate the industry, the two were often indistinguishable, leading me to create this quiz with actual quotes from the hearing from Staffieri and Scott. Can you tell the difference?
The Rogers outage came to Parliament Hill yesterday as the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology conducted four hours of hearings into the issue. The day started with Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, followed by Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri, CRTC Chair Ian Scott, and a panel of consumer and public interest voices. I was pleased to be part of the final panel and I’ve posted my opening remarks below and created a special Law Bytes podcast featuring my opening remarks and the question and answer session with MPs.
[...]
Indeed, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the hearing is how it quickly became readily apparent that any prospect that the massive Rogers outage affecting millions of Canadians might become the much-needed wake-up call for reform has already largely passed. The MPs from all parties seemed to get the anger and frustration among Canadians, but it is pretty much business as usual for the Minister, CRTC, and even Rogers. In fact, all three sounded more or less the same on the key issues as they all sought to downplay suggestions that there were broader concerns with Canada’s communications system at work.
Minister Champagne kept talking about demanding action from Rogers, but when the questions turned to competition or the proposed Rogers-Shaw merger, he was quick to change the subject. In fact, when pressed he downplayed the role that competition might have played in the outage, noting it might help network resilience but seeking to treat the outage a one-off limited to a single company. By the end of the hour, Champagne had said little about competition, the merger, legislative reform, and the weakness of the CRTC. However, there were no shortage of references to “demanding” action or being in “solution mode.”
To my imaginary readers, I apologize for not being able to write anything for so long. I've gotten a job!
My first job. At a restaurant. But it's only part time, and when I'm not working, I'm probably sitting at my desk. Despite this, writing an entry for this log was a huge hurdle to leap. It was really intimidating since it takes so long to get my words down in text, when I could be using that time to do more "productive" things.
Anyway enough of that. I've done a lot since my last post! But my sense of time is really bad and I don't actually know what those things are...
[...]
I bit the bullet and installed Fedora on my PC. No more valorant. I hate that game anyway. Sucks that I can't play Dead by Daylight now though, I wish behavior games would FIX THEIR ANTICHEAT
What to make of the strange case of Blake Lemoine? The Google A.I. engineer made headlines this past week when he claimed one of the company’s chatbots had become “sentient,” which, if it were true, would be an earth-shattering achievement meaning the technology had become conscious or self-aware. Furthermore, he said that he had been suspended from his job for raising ethical concerns internally about the bot’s treatment.
a kind chap gifted me a DeWalt DW701 chop saw. it has seen much use but still works.
DW701 was missing one of it's five adjustable leveling feet.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.