Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is running out of money; Accountancy (outsourced) of Sirius is now the registered address of Sirius ‘Open Source’
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Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages. The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64′s “December Update,” is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It’s “a dream-of-a-SoC,” writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a “modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and “is genuinely future-proof.”
We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of New Mexico. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
In one of my early videos ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9uh2epShUY ), I showed off my rapping skills. It was a huge hit.
DXVK is one of the most important pieces to the Linux gaming puzzle but have you ever been curious about it’s early history and how we got here.
In this video, we cover an article on how Uber, the drive share company’s internal network, was hacked again. I thought this was an interesting article, so I thought I would share it.
VKD3D-Proton 2.8, known as Vulkan Direct3D for Proton version 2.8, was released today & assisted Linux Steam Deck users. The new implementation adds Direct3D 12 on Vulkan for Proton on Linux, which means that Valve’s Steam Play, coded in Proton, will allow users to play Windows games on the Linux ecosystem.
Let’s start with a spoiler. Recording one’s desktop in Linux is a fairly easy task. There are tons of tools that can do the job. Over the years, I’ve tested perhaps half a dozen of them, and even wrote a bunch of articles, both tutorials and reviews, right here on Dedoimedo. But I last did that in anger around 2010-ish. An infinity ago in Internet terms.
Indeed, it has been quite a while since I last had an actual need to record my Linux desktop session screen. But the need did arise, and I wondered whether to go back to my oldies and hopefully still goldies or start from scratch. I opted for the latter, as it makes for a better blog post material. So let’s have a look at a lovely little program called SimpleScreenRecorder, which will be our hero savior of the day.
We are proud to announce the release of GNU LilyPond 2.24.0. LilyPond is a music engraving program devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. It brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts.
This version includes improvements and fixes since the branching of the previous stable release in October 2020. A list of added features and other user-visible changes can be found at https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/changes/ This release switches to Guile 2.2 and features a completely rewritten infrastructure for creating the official packages, finally allowing us to offer 64-bit binaries for macOS and Windows.
Apache SpamAssassin 4.0.0 has been released! This is a major upgrade to SpamAssassin with full Unicode support and many other new features.
Android, being an open-source OS, is very customizable. You can customize it by adjusting device settings to your preference, using themes and apps, and so on. While some customizations can be achieved only after rooting your device, there are many others that can be done using ADB commands. ADB works like a bridge between Android devices and computers. However, before you can control your phone or tablet using ADB commands, you must set up ADB on your Windows, macOS, or Linux computer. In this guide, we’ll check out how we can install ADB and Fastboot on Linux.
ADB and Fastboot are multi-purpose command-line tools. By using ADB and Fastboot commands on your computer, you can get detailed information about your Android device, uninstall system apps without root, install apps, push or pull files, backup data, debug your device, enable and disable features and customize it in many ways. If you are interested in exploring the geeky aspect of owning an Android device, let’s start with installing ADB and Fastboot on Linux first.
All the devices on your network rely on the default gateway for communication. Data packets pass through the router to and from your network before being routed to the particular device that owns the packet.
Each operating system comes with a default gateway. However, you can temporarily or permanently change the default gateway to add another route for your network devices. You can use the IP command on Ubuntu to modify your default gateway.
SSH is a secure way of connecting to a remote server. With SSH, the client machine must get verified before it connects to the server, and that is done using a password and an authentication key, which can be public or private.
The authentication keys ensure that you safely connect to your server using the OpenSSH for Linux. This guide details how to use a private SSH key for authentication. We will discuss everything from generating the SSH key to using it when connecting to the server.
the idea was to have a dual-boot system.
if that is not possible, than it would be a GNU Linux host running a Windows 10 KVM guest VM, passing GPU through for gaming (but then 2x GPUs are required, one for “viewing the screen” and one for pass-through to Windows (UNTESTED with the 5600G Vega7 OnBoard GPU))
there are ACTUALLY drivers for AMD Raid for Ubuntu (PDF and a github (UNTESTED!))
So if it works with Ubuntu, it SHOULD also work with Debian.
The question is: Why use it?
As it might be the better idea to use the well tested GNU Linux MDADM.
per default Debian 11 setup does not recognize the AMD Raid: (it just sees two separate NVMe)
The Liquorix Kernel is an attractive option for anyone looking to benefit from more up-to-date kernels for their Ubuntu system and performance gains, especially for desktop users. The following tutorial will teach you how to import the Liquorix Kernel PPA and install the latest Linux Kernel on your Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or 20.04 Focal Fossa system with the command line terminal, along with how to restore the original Ubuntu kernel if you need to revert to it.
Linux Mint comes with the ability to install GIT directly from its default repositories. While this is preferred, there are multiple methods to install GIT for users seeking a newer version with bug fixes or performance improvements. The following tutorial will teach you how to install GIT in various ways on Linux Mint 21.x based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish or Linux Mint 20.x based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using CLI commands.
There aren’t any native podcast apps for Chrome OS. However, if you need one to enjoy your favorite podcasts, don’t worry! Thanks to Linux support on Chrome OS, you can install a Linux podcast app to play your favorite podcasts.
obarun stands for OpenboxRunit … but has been the home for arch based s6 implementation with tools (currently 66) to make s6 less hostile to MOST users of linux. Runit only lasted a few weeks before s6 was implemented and runit dumped. Currently featuring a graphic installer of base, openbox, jwm, xfce4, and plasma desktops and a setup of s6/66 to get you going.
joborun stands for JwmOpenBoxObarunRunit, so it is everything Obarun can be, plus runit that can coexist and alternatively boot instead of s6/66, but also replaces most core Arch pkgs with ones built in vaccuum of systemd/logind/udevd. Currently not including an installer, or an iso image, but an old fashioned tarball of the base and instructions on how to make it a bootable system within minutes. Joborun is basically a source based distro, although it provides 2 tarballs, base system, and builder system, and binary repositories of all packages it provides source for. You always need a binary system to build your binaries, joborun just makes the process easier and quicker, without frustrating fails.
2022-12-17 version 22.12 (x86_64, x86_64-rt & i486) changes:
- New feature: Metadata editor for the CD Ripper
- Option to change audio device settings without restart
- Backup and restore for Daphile settings
- Now Playing Screen
- Access via "Audio Player"-tab or http://<Daphile address>/nowplaying.html
- Keyboard and touch controls. Arrow keys or swipe up/down for volume and
left/right for rewind/forward. Space or tap for play/pause.
- Gracenote support for CD ripping metadata removed due to license expiration
- LMS update to 8.3 branch (Dec 12th 2022, git commit: 1cf9027)
- Kernel update to 5.15.83 and 5.15.83-rt54
- Perl upgrade to 5.34 version
- Daphile built with GCC 11.3
- Bug fixes and component updates
Deploying applications in containers provides lots of flexibility and compatibility benefits.
Once you package your application and its dependencies in a container, that container runs almost anywhere without issues. Very few of the old “it worked on my machine!” problems remain. However, the challenge of running a container and linking it up with other helpful pieces of software still remains.Web applications need something to serve HTTP requests and handle TLS. They also need databases, and those databases must be online and available first. All of these need reliable storage that is easily managed.
In my personal infrastructure, I keep coming back to docker-compose.
Red Hat announced several enhancements to Red Hat Insights, its predictive analytics offering. This includes integrations for ServiceNow and Slack, as well as expanded monitoring capabilities to identify known threats in Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
According to an IDC survey, “ease of deployment (33.5%), speed (31.9%), and vulnerability prioritization (30.4%) were the top three capabilities sought in DevSecOps tools. Taken together, this data suggests DevSecOps vendors must offer solutions that are a seamless part of the developer workflow and provide accurate and actionable results, while also communicating to CSO’s and upper management how the solution reduces the overall risk for the organization and fits as part of their comprehensive security strategy.”
Behind every great solution is an ecosystem of collaborative partners. At least, that’s the case at Red Hat. Founded on the spirit of upstream open source innovation, every milestone in Red Hat’s history is connected to open collaboration and driven by a skilled, vibrant ecosystem of software providers, solution providers, systems integrators and more.
As we build upon Red Hat’s open source portfolio, partners remain core to our vision and we continue to see the results with our customers. Therefore we are proud that CRN named Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 as winners for the 2022 CRN Tech Innovator Awards, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 honored as a finalist.
Red Hat provided Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes to manage their fleet at scale in collaboration with Red Hat Consulting. As part of the solution, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management delivers cloud-scale manageability by configuring the 5G RAN using a Distributed Unit (DU) profile, which deploys real-time OS kernel optimizations to run vRAN and other cloud-native application workloads from a single console. Red Hat OpenShift also incorporates zero-touch provisioning to enable distributed deployment at scale required to operate a large scale RAN.
Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced several enhancements to Red Hat Insights, its predictive analytics offering. This includes integrations for ServiceNow and Slack, as well as expanded monitoring capabilities to identify known threats in Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Ever been so frustrated with the options available that you build your own? Ben Darnell, Chief Architect and Co-Founder of Cockroach Labs, shares how his dissatisfaction with distributed databases led to the creation of CockroachDB. To build a distributed database that not only plans for but expects failures, they needed to implement the raft consensus algorithm. Getting it up and running was a tough technical challenge. But the result was an incredibly resilient database.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 11 (codename bullseye). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 11 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old bullseye media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Coming more than three months after Debian GNU/Linux 11.5, the Debian GNU/Linux 11.6 release is here as a fresh, up-to-date installation medium for those who want to deploy the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series on new computers.
This means that it includes all the security and software updates that have been released from September 10th when Debian GNU/Linux 11.5 was released until today, through the main Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” software repositories.
Debian 11.6 is now available, and while a minor release, it’s a mandatory step toward OS’s stability. So if you’re on Debian 11, it’s time to upgrade.
Debian is one of the oldest GNU/Linux distributions in active development. However, it follows a flexible release schedule. In other words, a new version is ready when it’s ready.
Today, the Debian Project has announced the general availability of Debian 11.6. It’s the sixth update in the Debian 11 “Bullseye” series. For the statistics, it contains 78 security and 69 bug fixes updates.
We have completed the election for the Ubuntu Technical Board, and have a result: https://civs1.civs.us/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_839774c82b466b28
C++ is a programming language that has strict syntax to be followed; we cannot skip even a semicolon while coding. Arrays are an important part of coding. Without arrays, programming would be very difficult. Arrays work as a container that contains the data of the same type in one place. Arrays have a fixed size; the size of an array cannot be changed automatically. Manually updating the size of an array is difficult, and this is now a problem. The solution to this problem is vectors which are known as dynamic arrays. That means that the size of arrays is flexible and we can insert more elements in an array after the initialization without worrying about the size. The arrays of vectors are like two-dimensional arrays that contain different columns and rows. We cannot change the number of rows but each row is a vector whose length can be changed. Each vector is a dynamic array of one dimension. Every index of the array is a vector whose elements are accessed using the iterators like for, foreach, etc.
The arrays of vectors make the data storage of similar types easy and flexible. These are mostly used when we don’t know the size of the array and when we are dealing with a two-dimensional array. Vectors are defined in STL which is the standard template library in the C++ programming language. Before using vectors, we have to import this library by including this piece of code in our program before the “namespace std”.
C++ is a language that is used to reinforce the basic programming concepts and improve the programmers’ logical thinking. In C++, we deal with arrays and strings since they are crucial to any programming language. In arrays, we store the same kind of data and a string is like an array of characters that is capable to store more than one character in it. To find the length of the array, we should know its size that we define at the time of initialization of the array. In the case of strings, we sometimes need to check the whole string to find a character or word. To find the string size, the len() function is used. But if we want to check the string or find a value, how can we find a character or word in a string? For that purpose, we use the “string::npos” method which is a constant static value. The “static” word reserves the memory for the variable and “constant” tells the compiler that this value cannot be changed until the program execution.
The “string::npos” is a static constant that has the highest value of -1 with a “size_t” element that tells the compiler on the size of a string and tells how the compiler checks the character until the “size_t” is met. When the required element matches the value of a string, the compiler automatically changes from -1 to 0 by incrementing 1. “Npos” means no position, it shows the position, and is initially set to -1. When an element is found, it is incremented.
Santa was absent-mindedly going through the Rakudo commits of the past weeks, after hearing about the new 2022.12 release of the Rakudo compiler. And noticed that there were no commits after that release anymore. Had all the elves been too busy doing other stuff in the Holiday Season, he wondered. But, in other years, the Raku core elves had always been very busy in December. He recalled December 2015 with a bit of a smile on his face: my, my, had the elves been busy then!
A little worried, he asked Lizzybel to come in again. “So, why is nobody working on Rakudo anymore”, he asked. “Ah, that!”, Lizzybel said. “Not to worry, we changed the default branch of Rakudo to ‘main’”, she said. “Why would you do that?”, Santa asked, showing a bit of grumpiness. “Was the old default branch not good enough?”. Lizzybel feared a bit of a long discussion (again), and said: “It’s the new default on Github, so us Raku core elves thought it would be a good idea to follow that, as many tools now assume ‘main’ as the default branch”.
“Hmmrph”, said Santa, while he switched to the ‘main’ branch’. “Wow!, more than 780 commits since the 2022.12 release, how is that possible?”, he exclamed. “Don’t the elves have nothing better to do in this time of the year?” he said, while raising his voice a bit. Lizzybel noticed his cheeks turning a little redder than usual.
“Ah that!”, said Lizzybel again.
A few reddit posts ago I saw an interesting article about maze generation and game written in Perl. Game development, I fully believe, is key to intellectual engagement, provides amusement to developers and non developers, and highlights the capabilities of a programming language. This led to an brief exploration of other Perl arcade/action games; Such games such as construdo and deliantra show how complex games can be created. Frozen Bubble is another addictive Perl classic. As a non-developer, I find these games only demonstrate the chasm between my lack of coding agility and the cleverness of others.
Many well-known mathematical procedures have built-in functions in Python’s SciPy scientific computing package. The scipy.integrate sub-package includes an integrator for ordinary differential equations as one of the integration techniques. This article will teach you how to utilize the “SciPy Integrate” to solve integration problems using the integration approach. We’ll talk about some related topics as well. These are SciPy integrate, trapezoid SciPy integrate quad, and SciPy integrate simpson. To help you comprehend and use the concepts on your own, we will go through these ideas in detail and with useful programming examples. So, let’s start.
CI Fuzz CLI leverages algorithms and automated instrumentation to dynamically generate millions of unusual inputs to test Java apps.
This week, Asus released a rugged Mini-PC powered by i7/i5/i3 and Celeron Alder Lake processors from Intel. The PL64 comes in a metal chassis and it can handle triple 4K displays, dual LAN ports, two M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSDs, integrated Wi-Fi 6E/BT support, etc.
[...]
The PL64 offers two M.2 2280 Gen4x4 slots supporting 256GB/512GB/1TB SSD. Additionally, the device offers two SO-DIMM slots for DDR4-3200 MHz memory.
The device offers two LAN parts, although one of them is 2.5GbE (Intel I225V) and the other is 1GbE (Intel I219V). This Mini-PC can support up to three 4K displays at the same time via HDMI 20 ports with EDID emulation and virtual display.
Following the mid-year announcement, the Atom repository was archived on December 15, ending an era for this widely used text and source code editor.
Atom is a cross-platform, free, open-source text and source code editor, built on Electron, with support for plug-ins and embedded Git Control, developed by GitHub. Due to its flexibility and customization ability, Atom has been a popular choice for developers in the last eight years. But, unfortunately, his life cycle has come to an end.
I’m going to preface this by saying I have a dog in this race. You see, as you probably understand, I’m a writer. I not only write about technology, but I’m also a writer of fiction. I’ve been writing for thirty years now and have published over fifty novels. I’m also an actor and a screenwriter. Needless to say, creativity is encoded into my DNA. I live to create. The creating of my art fills my soul. It’s as simple as that.
And I work tirelessly at it. According to Grammarly, I wrote over 6 million words in 2021 and am on track to beat that record this year. While writing, I make every effort to improve my craft. The same thing holds true with my acting… always doing everything in my power to be better.
They all entice me to buy books and then I don’t read them because they are boring. The pantheons are boring, the histories are boring, the people and cultures are boring. I’d rather surf on Wikipedia, remove the sexism and racism and slavery and other shit I don’t want in my games and it’ll be time well spent.
Everyone has been all up in arms about AI crap, chatGPT, ai art generators,
and what not. Please, don’t feed these things. I’m probably once again
preaching to the choir here, as most people on gopher/gemini/etc… are
already aware of this, so I won’t go too much into detail, but if you’re
looking for a good writeup on why to avoid AI tools, check out sunset’s
gemlog entry “Just say no to robo God” (1) – it’s hard enough for artists
to make a living in capitalist society as it is. But let me talk a bit more
about the copyleft licensing issues…
Continuation of testing why comitium feed agregator have failed to handle geminispace.info backlinks (as I mentioned in [previous post at Sat 29 May 2021 08:36:05 PM CEST]).
The first part of answer is obvious because geminispace.info backlink page template consists in [root/serve/templates/fragments/footer.gmi] two variables. One of it is printed, and it is changing every time geminispace.info index is updated.
The second part of answer is still unclear for me. Because I have added two backlinks pages to my comitium installation. The first for szczezuja.flounder.online domain, and the second for szczezuja.space domain. And there must be some difference because, beside index update date, the pages are in different “days” on comitium feeds page.
Writing code in Lisp is really fun.
I started playing with Lisp not very long ago, so still have a lot to learn. I fool around in Elisp and in Common Lisp.
Recently I have created two new Elisp scripts, one for my Kindle Highlights and one for the Goodreads export CSV.
Around the time that the Raspberry Pi 4 was released I took what was for me a pretty major plunge and got rid of all of my x86 desktop computers in favor of using the little Arm sbc’s as home servers, while keeping a couple of x86 laptops for development and other day to day use. Currently there are three of them in a stack on my TV stand next to the router. The one running this capsule also run Apache and Gitea. Up until this week it had been running quite happily on OpenSuse Tumbleweed. I’m a fan of rolling release distros, even though the upkeep can be a little bit more work. I have been using mostly Arch for the past ten years, but Suse had proven to be stable for me for quite a long run. That run came to an end when the board failed to boot after an update.
It turns out that this has to with the release of OpenSSL 3. OpenSSL no longer tolerates TLS connections that don’t shut down with a close_notify message, as per the TLS specification. So now things will break (as they should!) until people fix their servers.
I had rebooted my moribund mastodon account out of curiosity. People otherwise unfamiliar with it were asking me about it. I’d ignored the quicktime evisceration of what passes for a digital commons in our era by Musk – save to hope it kept his attention to earth instead of mucking up LEO with junksats. But curiosity always gets the better of me despite being quite run through at least 6 lives on my heartmeter by now.
After a few years of abstinence from any sort of social media (beyond posting here), it is meet to record my impressions of mainstream social media. And fediverse must now be called mainstream if the flood of “refugees” from Birdsite is to have any import. But more than numbers, the sheer manic pace of the 128 character agora overwhelms me.
I never was into social media. Never had a twitter account, never had a
facebook account, never had an instagram account etc,… I did have a
reddit account for a while, but I ditched that when things started to get
way too corporate-y. It got really bad with them looking to go public…
I don’t remember what the last straw was, probably ads or something but it
came to feel really wrong to exist in that space.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
2018 and 2019:
2019 and 2020:
2020 and 2021:
Growing debt, no money left in the bank.
Summary: When the founder of Sirius ‘Open Source’ divorced his wife a new company was formed, almost cashless; there was a lot of debt, but workers could not ask about it
TRUTH be told, the state of Sirius has not been good for years, but treatment of staff worsened a lot after management had changed. Then, there was a tendency to blame staff for failures, even if and when the failures were attributed to actions at the very top. Below we present part 2 of the relevant section of the report. As shown above, as the years went by the company was running out of money and out of time (way too much debt). These figures are all in the public domain. The lesson of the story is, desperate companies may resort to bullying, and the bullying would then be directed at anyone but the management.
The company had not shared with us financial information or contract details (amounts of money) in about half a decade. Financial statements are publicly available, however, in the public domain.
Apparently there was something in the wiki when the CEO’s ex-wife was around, but it’s all gone now. Is the company heavily indebted to a bank? According to the latest statement, the company is very, very deep in debt. Notice witness in the financial documents of the bank: the office manager. Even at that point the company understated the severity of the situation as debt grew every year despite a significant cut in the number of salaried staff. Some names/signatures are rubbed off, but maybe those aren’t relevant. The CEO’s ex-wife is not listed in some of the recent documents. One is left guessing aimlessly. Transparency would be much appreciated.
The office manager refused to tell Roy why the CEO had relocated or was based in the US and was repeatedly evasive when Roy asked. Workers were not told why the company changed registration (like a new company minted; new contracts needed to be signed), so some speculated that post-divorce ownership may have been a motivation. Those were dark times for the company with many questions hanging and an absent CEO, at one point showing up in a rib shirt for a company meeting online. This felt rather inappropriate.
Those observations may not be pleasant to see or hear. But those are very important and they hopefully help explain a certain change in attitude. For instance, the company’s use of Slack probably violates privacy law associated with some of our clients, never mind our own. We are aware of several colleagues who may have left due to management being rude and unpleasant.
The harshest bit was, after key colleagues had left the bullying from management intensified, taking out frustration on the wrong people. For instance, Roy and Rianne were sent to be interrogated. The HR agency that interrogated Roy and Rianne (this lasted for nearly 3 hours!) totally sided with Roy and Rianne and asked important questions about the management; the HR people urged Roy and Rianne to keep record of everything and assumed this thing was likely politically-motivated (or similar). In other words, this backfired spectacularly on the accuser and moreover cost the company a lot of money, never mind the moral damage. No clarify or apology was consequently issued to Roy and Rianne. The accusers were not punished this this misuse of company budget and one remains on the payroll to this day. What are decent people supposed to expect from a company that treats veteran (long-time staff) like that? By that time, Roy had been in the company about 5 times longer than the principal accuser. Roy was encouraged by HR to keep documentation for self-defensive purposes, as per this document. █
One of the first – and most crucial – decisions that a website owner will need to make is what type of web server to use. The decision to host your website on a Linux system is a no brainer, but when it comes to web servers, there are a few choices and they all come with their own pros and cons. Among the most popular on Linux is NGINX and OpenLiteSpeed, both well known for their speed and ability to host concurrent connections.
In this tutorial, we will compare NGINX and OpenLiteSpeed web servers across a few key areas. The right choice will largely come down to a site’s needs and the administrator’s preference. Our comparison of these two web servers will help you decide on which software is the better choice for hosting your website.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos delighted in the aural qualities of Kristina’s brand new, real (read: XLR) microphone before embarking on creating a podcast highlighting the best of the previous week’s hacks.
The time has come again to reflect for many. We are almost at the end of 2022 and as in recent years, I want to look back and look forward to different aspects of my life. A lot has happened for me, both personally and professionally, both good and not-so-good, and I think that probably applies to everyone to some degree. On RealLinuxUser.com we talk about everything Linux related together, so here I would like to look back and look forward to Linux-related topics. As I did for the previous years, I want to look back at my Linux experiences and share with you my favorite applications you and I can use in the new year. As a Linux blogger I look at and try out a lot of different software solutions and I always do my best to write useful and valuable articles that hopefully help you in your decision-making on software selection or just help to explain how applications work, how problems can be solved, or how software can improve your life. Out of all the applications, I tried, a substantial list of applications have my real preference over other applications and I therefore regularly use them for my personal work, productivity, creativity, and whatever I further do with my Linux-based setup. So in this article, I will share my 40 most favorite applications for Linux for you to use in 2023.
Are you a Linux user who’s looking for the best Note Taking app to make your life easier? Look no further! We’ve rounded up the top Note Taking apps that are perfect for Linux users. From simple note-taking solutions to powerful productivity tools, these apps will help you organize and keep track of your ideas, thoughts, and projects. So, buckle up, and let’s dive into the world of Note Taking apps for Linux.
In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, there was a popular file manager for DOS called Norton Commander. It was beloved by many computer users of the day, but it fell out of favor as graphical file managers became the default. Fortunately for fans of the original commander, and those who missed out on the original, an open source file manager with a similar design was released, called Midnight Commander or, more commonly, just mc.
Although Ubuntu Linux is known for being a very stable operating system, it can’t protect your files against a failing hard drive or other components that can corrupt your files. Therefore it is always a good idea to regularly create backups. There are many types of backup software, and many possible backup strategies which can be implemented on Ubuntu using free and open source software, so how do you pick the best one?
In this tutorial, we have compiled a list of our favorite backup tools for Ubuntu Linux. These days, backup programs are easy to use and will give you the peace of mind you need when it comes to the longevity of your data. Check out our picks below to find one that suits you best. Give them a try. You might be surprised.
In order to access a USB drive on Linux, it needs to have one or more partitions on it. Since USB drives are usually relatively small, and only used for temporary storage or to easily transfer files, the vast majority of users will choose to configure just one partition that spans the entire USB disk. However, you can also logically separate the USB drive into different sections if you wanted to use multiple partitions.
In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to partition a USB drive on a Linux system. You will also learn how to create new partitions, delete partitions, and to shrink or expand existing partitions on the USB drive. You will see the steps for both command line and GUI methods, so you can follow along with set of instructions you are most comfortable with. Let’s get started.
In this tutorial, we will cover how to install FreeFileSync on Ubuntu 22.04 step-by-step. It is an open-source file synchronization & backup tool.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the hostname on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, In the Linux operating system, the hostname is a name that is assigned to a device (such as a computer or server) that is connected to a network. The hostname is used to identify the device on the network and is usually a combination of letters and numbers. In this case, we can assign a unique hostname to each machine to remember them easily. Hostname also allows each machine to communicate using the device name rather than the IP address.
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 change of hostname on Rocky Linux. 9.
On December 11, 2022, Linux Kernel 6.1 was released with a significant new addition – initial Rust language support in mainline Kernel. This release has been highly anticipated by users who seek to increase security and memory-safe code. While performance enhancements are typically in a Linux Kernel release, this may be especially desired for users with new hardware that is unsupported or has issues in their current Linux distribution Linux kernel.
Specific Linux distribution, such as AlmaLinux, is known for providing long-term stability. However, the latest Kernel requires installation from a third-party source such as ELRepo unless you are comfortable compiling it yourself. For most users, dealing with the frequent release of minor updates that can occur almost weekly using a well-known repository that supports the latest Linux Kernels, such as ELRepo, comes in handy and is recommended.
As discussed in the introduction, the best option is to use the ELRepo repository, which has an excellent reputation amongst EL9 and EL8 distributions such as CentOS, Oracle, Rocky Linux, etc. The following tutorial will show you how to import the ELRepo for AlmaLinux 9 or AlmaLinux 8 desktop or server using cli commands for the users that require to update their Kernel for better hardware support.
Installing Ubuntu Linux onto a USB stick will allow you to have a portable operating sysem that you can plug into any computer. This differs from a live environment USB, as installing Ubuntu directly to a USB stick will create a persistent operating system, the same way it does when you install to a typical hard disk. However, the process of installing Ubuntu to USB is not the same as a usual hard drive.
There are some differences in the installation process and important caveats to keep in mind if you plan to install Ubuntu to a USB stick. We will go over those in the sections below. In this tutorial, we will cover the step by step instructions to install Ubuntu Linux to a USB flash drive.
Vivaldi is a powerful and innovative browser attracting considerable attention among Ubuntu desktop users as a strong contender to replace the default installed Firefox browser. It came about after the developers of Opera decided to switch from their successful Presto engine to the Chromium-based browser; many traditional Opera fans were understandably upset at this transition, which resulted in an upsurge in interest in Vivaldi as an alternative option. Even though it is relatively new, its popularity has proved highly significant, with many computer users now considering it an important competitor against Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. A range of unique tools and features make Vivaldi an excellent choice for those seeking a reliable Internet browsing experience.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi on Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, and 20.04 Focal Fossa using the command line terminal and also the option of Vivaldi stable or Vivaldi snapshot browser versions.
Several years after Ubuntu abandoned the Unity desktop environment, a few volunteers put effort to release a new version 7.6. Heck! Their Ubuntu Unity project is now an official Ubuntu flavor.
If you liked the Unity desktop and want to try it again, you don’t necessarily have to use Ubuntu Unity. Arch Linux users have a way to install it.
ModSecurity, often referred to as Modsec, is a free, open-source web application firewall (WAF). ModSecurity was created as a module for the Apache HTTP Server. However, since its early days, the WAF has grown and now covers an array of HyperText Transfer Protocol request and response filtering capabilities for various platforms such as Microsoft IIS, Nginx, and Apache.
How the WAF works, the ModSecurity engine is deployed in front of the web application, allowing the engine to scan the incoming and outgoing HTTP connections. ModSecurity is most commonly used in conjunction with the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS), an open-source set of rules written in ModSecurity’s SecRules language, and is highly regarded in the security industry.
We have covered the installation steps for setting up Docker packages on Almalinux 9 using the command terminal in this tutorial.
Almalinux 9 is the latest server Linux distro based on RedHat code. We can easily configure Docker on Almalinux 9 to run container service. Container service is slightly different than our regular VirtualBox or Vmware Desktop Virtualization.
In Docker, the OS images are lightweight, hence easy to install and consume fewer resources. Further, they run virtual containers at native speed. Many cloud services offer Alamlinux, hence let’s know how to use it for working with Docker Containers.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure OpenLiteSpeed as a reverse proxy server. A system that sits between a client and a web server (or servers) can be configured as a reverse proxy. The proxy service acts as a frontend and works by handling all incoming client requests and distributing them to the backend web, database, and/or other server(s). The advantages of a reverse proxy become most apparent under high traffic conditions or situations where multiple backend servers are deployed and need some form of load balancing.
Follow along with us below as we take you through the step by step instructions to configure OpenLiteSpeed as a reverse proxy server on a Linux system. OpenLiteSpeed can act as our central point for incoming connections and provide us with load balancing, central logging, improved security, and better performance. We will set up OpenLiteSpeed as a reverse proxy for our Apache backend in the steps below.
One of the most alluring features of OpenLiteSpeed is that it is highly compatible with Apache, so web admins migrating from Apache web server to OpenLiteSpeed will not have to spend much time converting their configuration. When using the Apache web server, .htaccess files (also called “distributed configuration files”) are used to specify configuration on a per-directory basis, or more generally to modify the behavior of the Apache web server without having to access virtual hosts files directly (this is usually impossible for example, on shared hosts).
Although .htaccess files were developed with Apache in mind, OpenLiteSpeed also has the ability to read them. This makes OpenLiteSpeed able to act as a drop in replacement for those wishing to migrate from Apache. In order for OpenLiteSpeed to recognize .htaccess files, the pertinent setting must be enabled. In this tutorial, you will see how to enable htaccess support in OpenLiteSpeed on a Linux system.
Most people probably know of Ubuntu as a desktop operating system. But Ubuntu’s massive popularity and strong footing in the Linux community have allowed Canonical to produce a very viable server edition and still maintain their desktop release. Ubuntu Server is a great choice if you are looking for an operating system for your production servers such as web servers, database servers, file servers, etc. It is free, stable, scalable, and has optional support plans.
After downloading Ubuntu Server and installing the operating system, there is some initial setup and configuration that administrators should do. In this tutorial, we will guide you through some of the most common tasks that beginners should know about, so you can get your Ubuntu Server up and running smoothly.
The purpose of this tutorial is to make a bootable USB drive from an ISO file. USB drives have recently overtaken CDs and DVDs as the primary media of physically distributed software. It is now a common task for system administrators and normal users to install operating systems and software via USB.
When you download a Linux distro, chances are that it will come as an ISO file and you will need to burn it to USB in order to install Linux on a computer. This allows you to boot directly into the Linux installer. Similarly, we can also put other software on the USB drive, assuming that the installer is distributed as an ISO file.
In this tutorial, you will see the step by step instructions to create a bootable USB from an ISO file on a Linux system. We will cover the steps for both command line and GUI on major Linux distros.
Linux users often use “more” and “less” commands interchangeably to read large files without understanding their differences, as their definitions are also identical in the manual.
So, what’s their difference, and when should you use them? All of this doubt will be cleared in this article, including how to effectively use them with practical examples.
But first, let’s start with their definition:
The more command is used to read large files by displaying one page at a time and scrolling up and down through pages; you can even pipe it with other commands like cat.
To install a package, knowing the exact name of the package is necessary.
Such as to install apache in Ubuntu, you can not use sudo apt install apache. You will have to specify the apache2 instead of plain apache.
And I have encountered many errors like this and that’s why I came up with this guide so you don’t have to.
This guide features a nifty program called ttyd which allows you to share your Linux terminal over a web browser.
Ttyd is a simple command-line utility used for sharing your Linux terminal over a web browser. It is a cross-platform and fully-featured terminal built on top of libuv and WebGL2 Javascript API for performance and SSL support based on OpenSSL.
In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install ttyd on Linux using source tarball and snap tool.
Every person in the tech industry or those that have spent some time tinkering with computers has heard of GNU/Linux. When it comes to FreeBSD, far less people are aware of its existence and not a lot of users (or even system administrators) understand the difference between the two operating systems. The most likely scenario of how you wound up here is that you have used Linux for a while, and are now wondering if FreeBSD is better or if it is a good idea to switch.
In this article, we will shed some light on FreeBSD vs GNU/Linux, as we compare the operating systems across a few key areas to help you understand the differences between them. You will find that the two systems have a lot in common, but also substantial differences once you get past the superficial similarities. Join us below as we go into the details of these two operating systems, ultimately helping you choose which one would be better for your needs.
Consumer electronics aimed at young children tend to be quite janky and cheap-looking, and they often have to be to survive the extreme stress-testing normal use in this situation. You could buy a higher quality item intended for normal use, but this carries the risk of burning a hole in the pockets of the parents. To thread the needle on this dilemma for a child’s audiobook player, [Turi] built the Grimmboy for a relative of his.
Software-defined radio is all the rage these days, and for good reason. It eliminates or drastically reduces the amount of otherwise pricey equipment needed to transmit or even just receive, and can pack many more features than most affordable radio setups otherwise would have. It also makes it possible to go mobile much more easily. [Rostislav Persion] uses a laptop for on-the-go SDR activities, and designed this 3D printed antenna mount to make his radio adventures much easier.
Vim is the greatest or the worst text editor of all time, depending on the tribe you’re in. Either way, members of both camps can appreciate this build from [Chris Price], which uses a foot pedal to ease operations for the user.
We have the pleasure of celebrating the birthdays of Jane Austen and Arthur C. Clarke by announcing the release of OCaml version 5.0.0.
The highlight of this new major version of OCaml is the long-awaited runtime support for shared memory parallelism and effect handlers.
This multicore support is the culmination of more than 8 years of effort, and required a full rewrite of the OCaml runtime environment. Consequently, OCaml 5.0.0 is expected to be a more experimental version of OCaml than the usual OCaml releases.
In this release, the native compiler only supports the x86-64 and arm64 architectures. In terms of operating systems, Linux, the BSDs, macOS and mingw64 on Windows are supported.
We are planning to restore the support for most previously supported architectures and operating systems, and address remaining known issues over the course of the next year.
Don’t let those words of caution hinder your experimentation with OCaml 5:
OCaml 5 as a language is fully compatible with OCaml 4 down to the performance characteristics of your programs. In other words, any code that works with OCaml 4 should work the same with OCaml 5.
The politics of austerity suffered a significant setback in Colombia. After three months of debate and negotiations, President Gustavo Petro achieved a major legislative triumph in November when Congress passed his ambitious tax reform bill.
My father taught me how to read music and to play all my major and minor my scales at the family keyboard, and it was he who showed me how to play records on the turntable. The first one I can remember putting on myself was a Columbia LP of the Russian virtuoso David Oistrakh playing Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. To my seven-year-old self, the performance captured on that disc seemed ancient, as if it came from Bach’s own lifetime, even though the classic recording was made in 1956, then not yet two decades distant.
There’s a long way to go before the electric car revolution even comes close to the version that currently exists in everybody’s heads. Getting enough rare-Earth minerals to ramp up EV production at the scale most have in mind will be a big challenge. Then there are other issues related to safety thanks to EVs’ incredible acceleration combined with higher-end EVs incredible weight.
In November, the First Unitarian Universalist Church and Red Oak Community School in Columbus, Ohio, announced a “Holi-Drag Storytime” event where drag queens would read books to children and perform holiday-themed dances. “We value social justice and inclusivity and believe that creating a more equitable world for all people requires us to begin this work at a young age,” wrote the school. “When young children are raised with these values, it prevents bullying, hate and fear of ‘others’ later in life.”
You’ve probably had a company not support one of your devices as long as you’d like, whether it was a smart speaker or a phone, but what happens if you have a medical implant that is no longer supported? [Liam Drew] did a deep dive on what the failure of several neurotechnology startups means for the patients using their devices.
Turn the clock back a couple of decades, and the only time the average person would have given much thought to batteries was when the power would go out, and they suddenly needed to juice up their flashlight or portable radio. But today, high-capacity batteries have become part and parcel to our increasingly digital lifestyle. In fact, there’s an excellent chance the device your reading this on is currently running on battery power, or at least, is capable of it.
If you’re doing any serious work with microphones, you’ll typically find yourself in want of a dedicated preamp. [ojg] needed just such a thing for acoustic measurement duties, and set about working up a cheap DIY design by the name of ThatMicPre.
If you can avoid COVID, avoid COVID. It’s probably not worth doing whatever it was that got you infected.
I get that people have to go to work, but we all need to continue to be vigilant and not take any extra stupid risks.
According to the CDC, I outlasted 97% of Americans as far as when COVID hit me the first time. I have no doubt that some day I’ll likely get it again, but I’d rather minimize it.
There are people out there getting it 3-4 times per year, and not even treating it with pills, and by that point it’s just absolutely devastated their body, and you can tell by talking to them that they’re not right anymore. Not good.
I keep rubber gloves in my car for the gas pump, hand sanitizer, we still wear face masks if we do go somewhere even if those around us don’t, and I don’t do any of my grocery shopping in the store anymore.
But it’s a given that my spouse has to work in person and the customers and coworkers are idiots who don’t understand that they are playing with fire. If I get it again, that’ll be why.
Now that I know how it’s likely to play out, I do plan to always have some COVID tests on hand so if I feel weird at all I can test and get to the medicine quickly, and I’m going to have a bottle of Valtrex ready to go so that if HSV or VZV outbreak follows, I can start on it as soon as the first blister appears.
I’ll at least have the advantage of it not being my first time down at the rodeo.
EFF supported three bills—A.B. 2091, A.B. 1242, and S.B. 107–that were signed into law and take steps to set California as a data sanctuary state for anyone seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Authored by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, Assemblymember Mia Bonta, and California State Senator Scott Wiener, these bills will protect people by forbidding health care providers and many businesses in California from complying with out-of-state warrants seeking information about reproductive or gender-affirming care.
Health privacy has always been important to EFF. While we are not focused on reproductive justice or gender-affirming care advocacy, we joined those advocacy communities in support of these bills because no one should fear receiving a medical procedure because of privacy risks. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, the increasing criminalization of health care makes protecting health privacy newly important.
In addition to these three bills, EFF supported A.B. 2089, authored by Asm. Bauer-Kahan, which was signed into law by Gov. Newsom. This bill extends the protections of the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (CMIA) to information generated by mental health apps—previously a glaring hole in medical privacy protections.
Retired Air Force lieutenant colonel William Astore gives a rundown of this country’s nuclear “triad” and what it all adds up to these days.
There was once a wing of the Democratic Party that stood up to the war industry. J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire, and, of course, Dennis Kucinich. But that was largely decades ago. The new Democrats, especially […]
“The Defense Department has failed its fifth-ever audit, unable to account for more than half of its assets…”
The Russian Ministry of Justice updated its list of “foreign agents.” This week’s additions include:
Russian courts have issued the first sentences based on laws about desertion and abandoning a unit without authorization during the period of mobilization and combat operations. The publication Mediazona discovered the sentencings on military courts’ websites.
Multiple Crimea residents prosecuted for criminal offenses under Russian law have been sent to penal colonies outside of the peninsula, the Ukrainian outlet Grati has reported.
More than 40 House Democrats introduced legislation Thursday aiming to bar former President Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot, citing the 14th Amendment clause prohibiting insurrectionists from holding federal office.
“Donald Trump very clearly engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021 with the intention of overturning the lawful and fair results of the 2020 election,” Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), the lead sponsor of the new bill, said in a statement. “You don’t get to lead a government you tried to destroy.”
In an overwhelming bipartisan vote late Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed legislation authorizing $858 billion in military spending for Fiscal Year 2023, a sum that drew dissent from just a handful of lawmakers and outrage from watchdogs who said the money should be spent on fighting the climate emergency, poverty, and other pressing crises.
The $858 billion budget amounts to a roughly 10% increase from the previous year and $45 billion more than the historic sum President Joe Biden requested, and it was approved even after the Pentagon failed yet another audit, unable to account for more than 60% of its assets.
President Joe Biden’s stated opposition to the death penalty did not stop the United States from joining Saudi Arabia, Iran, and North Korea in voting against a United Nations resolution supporting a worldwide moratorium on the practice on Thursday, leading critics to question once again whether the president will make good on his campaign pledge to eliminate capital punishment in his own country.
The resolution passed in a vote of 125-37 with 22 abstensions, but as it has in the past when a proposed death penalty moratorium has come up for a vote at the U.N., the U.S. delegation did not aid its passage.
Since negotiations with Russia ended in late March, the president of Ukraine has proclaimed a goal of uncompromising victory: “Free our entire territory. Drive the occupiers out of all our regions.” The battle to achieve this victory has relied on a vast surge of military equipment, of steeply increasing sophistication, destructiveness and reach, provided by the United States, in military aid in excess of $15 billion. How well does the uncompromising battle fit Ukrainians’ desires? Not well enough to justify the U.S. government’s encouragement and support.
In a significant departure from its postwar national security strategy—nominally limited to self-defense along with hosting U.S. troops—Japan on Friday announced its plan to embark on a five-year, $320 billion military buildup to secure offensive strike capacity amid growing regional tensions.
Japan “faces the severest and most complicated national security environment” since the end of World War II, according to the new blueprint unveiled by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s conservative government, which named China as its “biggest strategic challenge,” followed by North Korea.
Government Attic, a website that regularly files FOIA requests and posts the provided records, estimates that at least 60 percent of federal agencies, when faced with filling requests for FOIA standard operating procedures (SOP), claimed that the documents are in draft form and exempt from disclosure or that they don’t have any such records at all.
FOIA is one of the key mechanisms for government transparency. EFF regularly uses FOIA and state public records laws in its work, including to learn about policy making and implementation, expose local police surveillance, and protect the public’s right to know what the government is doing.
FOIA requests are rarely processed within the 20-workday time frame required under federal law. A lot of agencies have a lot of backlog to address; the Central Intelligence Agency, for one, reports having more than 1000 requests in queue for processing. As part of the annual Chief FOIA Officer reports submitted by government agencies to the Department of Justice, agencies are supposed to offer some transparency around how the FOIA offices process requests and the work they did to try to improve their workflows. The standard operating procedures (SOPs) for FOIA offices are regularly mentioned in these reports.
An influential US think tank has hosted a well-known UK climate science denier at an event attacking what one speaker called Europe’s “socialist” net zero policies.
The Heritage Foundation panel event on December 8, called “Lessons for America from Europe’s Green Energy Disaster”, featured Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group.
California regulators on Thursday unanimously greenlighted a blueprint to cut planet-heating emissions by 85% and get the state to carbon neutrality by 2045, a plan that climate campaigners framed as flawed but still a major step in the right direction.
“This board is starting to show some real climate leadership.”
Gazprom expects to continue exploring for new reserves in the North Sea, having paid itself a £28 million dividend from drilling operations in the area, its latest accounts show.
Subsidiaries of the Russian state-owned gas giant still have stakes in multiple fields more than nine months after the invasion of Ukraine began and despite its chief executive being under UK sanctions.
When Gary Dye, a former engineer with Oregon’s largest gas utility, began blowing the whistle on alleged unethical behavior by his employer, he never dreamed his nearly two-dozen complaints would amount to nothing.
He filed 21 internal complaints in 2012, then bumped them up to the Oregon Public Utility Commission (OPUC), the group that regulates utilities in the state, later that year. There, he met with OPUC staff in person and exchanged emails with Lori Koho, then OPUC’s senior official overseeing natural gas utilities. He hoped that his list of complaints would show “how the unethical culture [at NW Natural] goes all the way to the top,” as one of his emails to Koho explains.
All through the 1980s and 1990s, professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray grew plump from best sellers about the criminal, probably innate, propensities of the “underclass,” about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms. […]
More than a decade after Occupy Wall Street, inequality remains a major political issue in the world today. Most people agree that inequality is too extreme and needs to be reduced.
In their new book, “Chokepoint Capitalism,” Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow examine Big Tech’s takeover of the creative labor market.
In a press release following its final meeting of the year, Russia’s Central Bank warned that the country’s “labor shortage is growing in many sectors” due to mobilization.
As child care centers across the U.S. were closing or struggling to stay open last year and appealing to the Democratic Party to pass far-reaching aid for the industry and families as part of the Build Back Better Act, a coalition of deep-pocketed nationwide chains was working to ensure the families they serve would not benefit from the legislation, fearing reduced profits.
In a report on private equity firms taking interest recently in investing in child care chains such as Bright Horizons and Primrose Schools, The New York Times noted on Friday that several nationwide for-profit chains used their lobbying arm, the Early Care and Education Consortium, to express concerns to lawmakers about Build Back Better (BBB), the Biden administration’s domestic spending plan.
Few economists would deny that supply-side disruptions have been a significant driver of inflation. Rising input costs and shortages created real constraints for corporations and prevented them from fully accommodating strong demand for consumer goods, such as automobiles and furniture, as the global economy emerged from the pandemic. Supply chain issues also slowed production and made it more difficult to get goods into the hands of consumers.
The spending bill now heads to President Biden’s desk.
Russian State Duma Deputy Nina Ostanina, who heads the parliament’s Committee on Family Issues, has reportedly drafted a bill that would criminalize repeat violations of Russia’s ban on LGBTQ+ “propaganda.” Current legislation categorizes violations of the ban as misdemeanor offenses.
Peruvian human rights defenders said Friday that the death toll has risen to 21 in nationwide protests sparked by the ouster and jailing of leftist President Pedro Castillo, whose pretrial imprisonment term was extended to 18 months by the Andean country’s high court.
“It’s becoming clear that early elections will not be enough to quiet the protests.”
Mass protests are intensifying in Peru following the ouster and jailing of President Pedro Castillo, who was impeached on December 7 after attempting to dissolve Congress and rule by decree. At least 17 protesters have been killed in the unrest as police have attacked crowds with tear gas and live ammunition. On Thursday, a judicial panel ruled that Castillo should remain locked up for 18 months of pretrial detention, and Castillo’s successor, his former vice president, Dina Boluarte, has declared a state of emergency across the country, suspending some civil rights. Peruvian sociologist Eduardo González Cueva calls the government’s heavy-handed response “a coup within a coup” and says dissatisfaction with the entire political establishment is driving the protests. “This is no longer about Castillo personally,” he says. “This is about the people of Peru who do not see themselves represented in this political system and are calling for a very radical change.”
Since the end of the 2022 election cycle, political analysts have increasingly been writing Donald Trump’s political obituary, describing the former president as a washed-up force. Trump, the argument goes, is weakened by the electoral loss of many of the candidates he recruited and endorsed—most notably Herschel Walker in his failed senatorial bid in Georgia. According to a Washington Post analysis, “Trump’s seclusion within the ornate walls of his club and a series of controversies—from the dinner with antisemites Ye and Nick Fuentes to a social media post suggesting the ‘termination’ of the Constitution—have left him increasingly isolated within his party as he tries to mount a political comeback. Walker’s loss in a Tuesday runoff election became the latest blow, prompting more Republicans to join the chorus faulting him for dragging down the party’s performance in this year’s midterms.”
Josh Hawley is right.
President Biden has pledged $55 billion to Africa over the next three years, announced during a three-day summit in Washington with leaders from 49 African nations. The U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit was held as the United States is trying to counter the growing influence of China and Russia across the continent. President Biden also announced plans to visit sub-Saharan Africa next year for the first time as president, and expressed support for the African Union to join the G20 and for Africa to have permanent representation on the United Nations Security Council. We speak with Emira Woods, the executive director of the Green Leadership Trust and an ambassador for Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. She says both Democratic and Republican administrations have seen Africa primarily as a place of geopolitical competition over resources. “What you see is that people on whose land those resources lie continue to be rendered invisible,” Woods says.
A new UNICEF report finds that over 11,000 children have been killed or injured in the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen since 2015. A six-month ceasefire between warring parties expired in October. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders withdrew a Senate resolution Tuesday that would have ended U.S. support for the war, following pressure from the White House. Sanders said he would bring the resolution back if they could not reach an agreement. Shireen Al-Adeimi, a Yemeni American assistant professor at Michigan State University and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, says many Democrats who decried U.S. support for the Saudi coalition when it was seen as “Trump’s war” have now fallen silent despite the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. “The situation on the ground is so volatile that this War Powers Resolution is absolutely essential,” says Al-Adeimi.
A European Union official on Friday denounced Elon Musk for suspending several journalists from Twitter and warned the social media site’s billionaire owner, a self-described champion of free speech, that his attack on press freedom is likely to result in sanctions.
Taking to the platform, E.U. Commissioner for Values and Transparency Věra Jourová wrote: “News about [the] arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying. E.U.’s Digital Services Act requires respect of media freedom and fundamental rights. This is reinforced under our Media Freedom Act. Elon Musk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”
Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It’s how it always goes.
So, yes, I’ve written a few things now on Elon’s silly excuses for his frantic speedrun through the content moderation learning curve. It’s getting more mainstream press because of journalist accounts getting banned (including, this morning, Insider’s Linette Lopez, who did not post any “doxing” info but has reported critically on Musk for years, which lead to him harassing her).
Twitter CEO Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, suspended a number of journalists from the social media platform on Thursday in what the ACLU condemned as “an attack on free expression” that should be reversed.
Musk justified his decision by claiming those suspended—including Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, and Matt Binder of Mashable—shared real-time details about his location, an accusation stemming from the journalists’ reporting on a Twitter account that tracked the movements of the billionaire’s private jet.
“Musk suspending journalists’ accounts is petty and vindictive and absolutely disgraceful—and especially so because Musk has styled himself, however absurdly, as a champion of free speech.”
The studio of television channel TV3, whose facilities TV Rain broadcast from in Riga, will terminate its lease with the Russian network, TV3 spokesperson Karlis Poznyakov told Latvian publication Delfi.
We in progressive politics have a public safety problem. So do those in conservative politics, to be clear—a much darker, more insidious problem. But the progressive problem on public safety is one we can solve, one we on the left must solve to meet both the country’s health and safety needs and our movement’s electoral needs.
It’s no surprise the government cheats when it prosecutes people. Judge Jed Rakoff pointed this out while resigning from the DOJ’s Forensic Science Committee when it became clear the DOJ was not interested in rooting out junk science. He called the government’s refusal to allow defendants to examine forensic means and methods “trial by ambush.”
Creating a culture of collective care in the workplace is as essential as laying a strong foundation for a sturdy home.
In their largest labor action to date, Starbucks workers across the United States launched a three-day strike on Friday with the goal of forcing the coffee giant to bargain in good faith with hundreds of newly organized shops and put an immediate end to its unlawful union-busting efforts.
Starbucks Workers United said in a statement that roughly 1,000 baristas from approximately 100 unionized shops nationwide will walk off the job starting Friday, and a majority of the workers taking part in the action will remain on strike through Sunday.
Perhaps you’ve noticed there are several new phone companies offering very low-cost cell service, some for as little as $5/month. There’s competition in the cellphone space that’s driving down prices and driving up service, at least in many parts of the country.
Every so often, Techdirt writes about the long-standing problem of orphan works, the huge collection of older creations that are out of circulation and have no obvious owners. Arguably, they should be called “hostage works”, since they remain uselessly locked away by rigid and outdated copyright laws, to no one’s benefit. Despite that, the copyright industry always fights hard against the outrageous idea that we should make it easier to bring these works back into circulation, where people can enjoy and use them.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Code readability is important and most professionals take coding conventions to heart, using pycodestyle you can make your code more readable to others by making it more standard by conforming to certain coding conventions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zoom Client on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Zoom is a communications technology platform that provides video telephony and real-time online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform. The Zoom meetings application offers a range of features and is easy to use, making it a popular choice for remote teams and individuals. On Linux, the Zoom client is available as a downloadable package that can be installed on the most popular distributions, including Fedora, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
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 Zoom Client on a Fedora 37.
You can use the ::part CSS pseudo-element to style an element within a shadow tree.
Dual monitors using a laptop as a second display. This guide assumes that you are using a Debian based distro (X11 only). Both devices must be connected to the same network.
These days, YAML is used as the configuration file format for an increasing amount of systems that I need to set up and operate for work. I have my issues with YAML in general (1, 2), but in the process of writing configuration files for programs that use YAML, I’ve found an entirely practical one, which I will summarize this way: a YAML schema description is not actually documentation for a system’s configuration file.
One of the things that I use Linux libvirt for is a collection of virtual machines that I only NAT onto the network, instead of giving them their own distinct public IPs. When I first set this up, I didn’t do anything special to give these NAT VMs consistent IPs or any names at all, which made it a bit annoying when I wanted to SSH in to one (most of them are Fedora VMs, so I can actually do that). Eventually I went through the effort to set up fixed, static IPs for these and give them names that I could use, which has turned out to be much more convenient.
There’s been a lot of hype lately around the CSS :has() pseudo-class. And rightly so! It’s basically the “parent selector” we’ve been asking for for years. Today I want to focus on ways we can use :has() to make HTML forms even better.
Is that email attachment too large? Does imessage insist on converting images to crappy MMS messages when you send to non-iPhone people?
You could always upload the file to Google Drive and just send a link. Or you could host your own file sharing platform, with only a single simple CGI script.
I made one, and I use it.
Valve released another bunch of updates for the Steam Deck and Desktop Steam Beta Clients, along with a small Steam Deck OS Preview (SteamOS) update.
Klei continuing to do great work here to expand the excellent Oxygen Not Included, along with a fancy new animated short that I always enjoy from them. This update is for both the base game and the Spaced Out expansion.
Needing a good UI for managing Razer hardware on Linux? RazerGenie is one (of a few) choice, and a big 1.0 release just went out. It can work with Razer devices thanks to the excellent OpenRazer project, which bundles a ton of drivers together to get loads of devices working nicely with all the added extras.
Team PSXITA have released Psxitarch v3 for PS4, a Linux distribution entirely optimized for the PS4. This distro release is really different from most other Linux releases for PS4 out there, because it’s been thought from the ground up to run on PS4/PS4 Pro.
This week is a twofer! We have the long-awaited Wayland fractional scaling support, and the equally long-awaited ultimate fix for Plasma’s multi-screen woes! Let’s take them one at a time…
The Wayland protocol for fractional scaling was finally merged last week. Kenny Levinson proposed the protocol itself, and this week, the KDE and Qt implementations for Plasma 5.27 which have been done by David Edmundson were merged. Thanks a lot, everyone!
On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either following a Long-Term-Support approach or adopt a rolling approach. Historically I have found that the rolling release approach, such as following Debian testing, has lead to unreliable systems, since little focus was given to system integration stability. This probably changed in the last 10 years or so, and today add-on systems like Homebrew on macOS gives me access to modern releases of free software easily. While I am likely to stay with LTS releases of GNU/Linux on many systems, the experience with rolling Guix (with unattended-upgrades from a cron job to pull in new code continously) on my backup servers has been smooth: no need for re-installation or debugging of installations for over four years!
Starting with Fedora 36 it’s been possible to run Gnome using Wayland on NVIDIA cards. The experience was not perfect. Some programs, like the mpv media player, had notable display issues and had to be forced to launch in X11 mode, using XWayland. However, the experience has been improving steadily and with Fedora 37 I haven’t found any major drawbacks to running Wayland on my NVIDIA system. Notably, even Firefox works using Wayland, and WebGL apps or Google Maps run in hardware acceleration mode.
During AnsibleFest 2022, we announced the launch of Ansible validated content. This new initiative is focused on delivering an expert-led approach for automating your platform portfolio across infrastructure, networking, cloud, security and edge use cases.
Ansible validated content is a new set of collections containing pre-built YAML content (such as playbooks or roles) to address the most common automation use cases. You can use Ansible validated content out-of-the-box or as a learning opportunity to develop your skills. It’s a trusted starting point to bootstrap your automation: use it, customize it and learn from it.
GitOps as a way of working has dramatically increased in popularity over the past few years. It can be quite a different approach to application and cluster deployments for folks new to storing configuration as code.
Evolving out of DevOps workflows came GitOps: a set of principles to guide your deployment processes based on using Git as a single source of truth. With a Kubernetes controller monitoring your clusters, GitOps compares the system you’ve described in Git to what is actually deployed. A change to your cluster or to your Git repository will automatically trigger an action – notifying you of the change or even self-healing to match your ‘desired state’.
2022 marked the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. While some tech companies beckoned employees back to their offices, Red Hat is embracing flexibility (in a conference room or stretchy pants).
Today we present a new way to use the Red Hat Insights Advisor service by using system tags to enable extended security hardening recommendations.
Not all systems are equal. For example, a web server and a workstation have different security profiles. For systems with extended security hardening recommendations enabled, Advisor identifies additional risks and remediation steps.
In November 2022, Red Hat published their ninth Global Tech Outlook, a report conducted by Red Hat that explores the challenges and funding priorities of thousands of customers for the upcoming year. Mirroring last year, talent and skills gaps were highlighted as the top barrier to digital transformation, emphasizing the importance of both hiring knowledgeable team members and upskilling existing employees on key technology. In fact, skills training is one of the top non-IT funding priorities for customers heading into 2023.
This year, Red Hat hosted dozens of pioneering service providers, ecosystem partners and technologists to come together to share real 5G deployment stories—diving deep into the open technologies and processes behind them. Through this event, we’ve continued to learn so much about 5G networks—how to monetize, innovate, close the skills gap, while digging into the critical role open source technologies play in making this happen. From overall strategy to edge computing to automation and sustainability, we’ve learned about building resilient networks that will power the next generation of eco conscious cars, healthcare applications, robotics, the list goes on and on. While Open5G hosted over 40 outstanding sessions, I wanted to share some of the big highlights we can take away as we plan for 2023.
Large scale, major release updates can be daunting. Red Hat can help.
This article explores using Red Hat Insights to run a pre-upgrade analysis on all (or a group of) systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in your fleet. Results are displayed in a simple, consolidated view, giving you management-ready reporting on your organization’s OS upgrade readiness.
The LapPi 2.0 is a DIY laptop kit with an acrylic enclosure, a UPS HAT with a 18650 battery holder, and off-the-shelf parts including speakers, a touchscreen display, a Raspberry Pi camera, and a wireless keyboard that’s suitable for the Raspberry Pi 4 and pretty much any other small single board computer from Radxa, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, FriendlyElec, Hardkernel, and others.
We’ve seen several Raspberry Pi laptops over the years with the CrowPi L and Pi-Top, and I have to say the LapPi 2.0 is not the most eye-pleasing or sophisticated design, but at least, it’s versatile and not limited to the Raspberry Pi family.
Tonight’s story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn’t make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound driver to fix it. (Download link at the end.)
My favourite beige Power Mac is the Power Macintosh 7300 and its relatives. They’re compact, capable, upgradable and easy to work on. For as much as people raved about the pull-down side door of the Yosemite G3 and the Power Mac G4, they owe their design to their fold-out Outrigger Power Mac ancestors which did it all and did it horizontally — and in some ways did it better.
Over the past months, we’ve been working with two partner organisations, Team4Tech and Kenya Connect, to support computing education across the rural county of Machakos, Kenya.
Every year, Itch.io hosts Open Jam, a game jam where developers build an open source video game over a weekend. This year’s Open Jam ran from October 28th to October 31st.
Open Jam is a friendly competition with no prizes, which makes it a great opportunity to try new things, experiment with a new game idea, or learn a new programming language. While projects don’t necessarily need to be built with open source tools, the game submission needs to have an open source license. Entries in Open Jam get “karma” or bonus points for how open source the game is, such as how many open source tools were used to create it or running on an open source operating system.
Each Open Jam has a specific theme, and this year’s theme was “Light in the Darkness.” It’s up to each developer to interpret how to apply that theme to their own game. I entered the Open Jam with a game called the Toy CPU, a simulation of a simple computer that you program using “switches and lights,” similar to an old-style Altair 8800 or IMSAI 8080.
Joplin meets these criteria except for additional features. Joplin isn’t a feature-rich app like Evernote and Notion. It’s bare bones, so it’s impractical for anyone looking for something that offers all the bells and whistles.
For example, with Evernote, you access mobile scanning, advanced templates, and OCR for images. Joplin has none of these features. So if you need a more feature-rich note-taking app, Evernote is a better option.
Varnish Cache is an open-source web application accelerator that helps optimize web pages for faster loading times. It does this by storing copies of web pages in memory. When a user requests a webpage, they get back the cached version instead of having to wait for the original web server to generate the page from scratch.
Late 2017, we announced our desire to create a free, decentralised and federated alternative to YouTube.
Five years later, we are releasing PeerTube v5, a tool used by hundreds of thousands people on a thousand interconnected platforms to share over 850,000 videos.
The neat thing about a <select> element is that, when clicked, it triggers a menu drawn by the underlying operating system in a manner best suited (and accessible) to the given user’s device and preferences.
One of the things I really miss from my days using Jekyll, is the use of data files. Can this be done in WordPress?
So what do I mean by data files? Well, it’s probably best that I use an example.
Kubernetes v1.24 introduced an alpha quality implementation of improvements for handling a non-graceful node shutdown. In Kubernetes v1.26, this feature moves to beta. This feature allows stateful workloads to failover to a different node after the original node is shut down or in a non-recoverable state, such as the hardware failure or broken OS.
[...]
In a Kubernetes cluster, it is possible for a node to shut down. This could happen either in a planned way or it could happen unexpectedly. You may plan for a security patch, or a kernel upgrade and need to reboot the node, or it may shut down due to preemption of VM instances. A node may also shut down due to a hardware failure or a software problem.
To trigger a node shutdown, you could run a shutdown or poweroff command in a shell, or physically press a button to power off a machine.
A node shutdown could lead to workload failure if the node is not drained before the shutdown.
In the following, we will describe what is a graceful node shutdown and what is a non-graceful node shutdown.
It is a mess. The code from the blog post works on most systems, but most systems these days use 8-bit characters; the article is about systems where a character is defined as 16-bits (allowed by the C Standard) and where an integer is also 16-bits (again, allowed by the C Standard and is the minimum size an integer can be per the C specification). It’s rare to have non-8-bit characters on desktop computers these days (or even tablet and smart phones) but it seems it’s not quite that rare in the embedded space, where you have DSPs that have weird architectures and a charater is most likely the same size as an integer. And that’s where the trouble starts.
The main issue is with fputc(). The C Standard states: [...]
Creating software isn’t only about writing code; you need to build all the source code to get a usable software artifact. This build process can be done manually, but it can become difficult as you start working on larger projects. This is where tools like CMake and Make can help you automate the process. Both of these tools allow you to go from source code to executables.
In this article, you’ll learn how CMake and Make work and the key differences between them. You’ll then implement CMake and Make to see their differences in action.
One of the things I knew right when I started at my current job is that a lot of my work would be for “nothing.” I’m saying this because I work (as Staff SRE) for an observability vendor, and engineers tend to operate under the idea that the work they’re doing is going to make someone’s life easier, lower barriers of entry, or just make things simpler by making them understandable.
While this is a worthy objective that I think we are helping, I also hold the view that any such improvements would be used to expand the capacities of the system such that its burdens remain roughly the same.
I like how the day 14 puzzle sounds, because I think it’ll give me an opportunity to show off yet another way to have Rust embedded in a web page.
From my perspective, the obvious question is: how might ML and GAI change programming? In particular, the rapid advances in GAI have led many to assume that we will gradually do away with programming as a human activity. Although it’s rarely spelt out explicitly, this implies that a GAI system can take in a human description (or “specification”) and produce usable software from it. At a small scale, this is already possible, with the best known example being CoPilot.
The current generation of LLMs uses natural language as an input/output. This is convenient (and impressive) for human interaction, but what about computer-to-computer communication?
Suppose you would like to check that a string is not present in a large document. In C, you might do the following using the standard function strstr: [...]
Not so fast! My own experiments with the underlying technology suggest we have a ways to go before we get there.
Still, what is different about ChatGPT versus previous AI wunderkinds is that it isn’t just the tech and business media who are paying attention: Regular folks are too.
Last week I dove into the topic of psychological safety and how to build a culture where employees feel comfortable enough to speak up with ideas, concerns or even to admit mistakes.
Of the 4 stages of psychological safety, the stage I feel isn’t discussed enough is the challenger safety stage.
Challenger safety is about feeling comfortable challenging the status quo or ideas.
Indulge me for a minute! Think about the last time you challenged someone at work. I mean truly looked someone dead in the eye and maybe said something along the lines of, “I don’t agree with your approach.”
How did that make you feel?
Did you get that sinking feeling in your stomach? Did you instantly worry about how this would impact your relationship? Or worse, did you think about how this would impact your growth at the company?
Your data pipeline is too slow, or uses too much memory. How should you speed it up?
One obvious solution is purchasing better hardware. With cloud computing, switching to a computer with more cores, or adding more RAM, can be done in minutes or seconds. Given that developer time is expensive, switching to more powerful hardware is often seen as a cheap first solution to slow software.
But there are longer-term costs involved that aren’t immediately visible. If your first solution to any performance problem is spending more money on hardware, you may eventually end up with software that is unnecessarily slow, hard to speed up, and extremely expensive.
There are so many brilliant posts on GPT-3, demonstrating what it can do, pondering its consequences, vizualizing how it works. With all these out there, it still took a crawl through several papers and blogs before I was confident that I had grasped the architecture.
So the goal for this page is humble, but simple: help others build an as detailed as possible understanding of the GPT-3 architecture.
The use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques, specifically ML (Machine Learning) and its various sub-fields, is changing many fields and undoubtedly will change more in the coming years. Most of us are at least generally familiar with the idea of using ML to identify patterns in data. More recently Generative AI (“GAI” for the rest of this post), in the form of systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, has made itself more widely known. Rather than simply classify new data, GAI can, as the name suggests, generate new outputs that conform to the underlying patterns contained in the model [1]. Existing ML systems, in general, and GAI systems particularly, are almost certainly the harbingers of further advances. This inevitably leads to speculation about “what’s next?”
Using Pod::To::HTML2 a new custom FormatCode, D<> (D for deprecation), can be made to help with the Raku Documentation process. The new FormatCode should show a span of documentation that is deprecated in some way. This happens a lot when Rakudo is being upgraded. However, people using older versions of Rakudo need to understand what has changed, as well as what has been added. So it is not a good idea to delete older information, but it is not efficient to re-generate the entire Documentation suite for each new version of Rakudo.
[...]
However, this is about making a bespoke plugin to implement a new Formatting Code. Pod::To::HTML2 interprets specified local sub-directories whose name does not contain the character _ after the first character of the name to contain plugin information.
Pod::To::HTML2 is a sub-class of ProcessedPod, so below I shall mention instances of ProcessedPod, though possibly I should be saying instances of Pod::To::HTML2.
The CSS Working Group is continuing a debate over the best way to define nesting in CSS. And if you are someone who writes CSS, we’d like your help.
Nesting is a super-popular feature of tools like Sass. It can save web developers time otherwise spent writing the same selectors over and over. And it can make code cleaner and easier to understand.
It’s understandable that the company is not planning to implement RSS feeds. Believe me, I know how many more ideas a company usually has than time it has to implement them. However, that second sentence poking me in the eye for even asking such a silly question seems rather unnecessary.
Now I’m certainly reading this unkindly. I simply find it infuriating when companies botch simple customer support so readily. It will be my downfall because it makes me naively believe that I could succeed at various businesses simply because I’d demand human, kind communication with customers.
The SHA-1 algorithm, one of the first widely used methods of protecting electronic information, has reached the end of its useful life, according to security experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The agency is now recommending that IT professionals replace SHA-1, in the limited situations where it is still used, with newer algorithms that are more secure.
Someone complained earlier today that my Pixel 6A article was picked up by Planet Emacslife. While I wasn’t involved in adding my blog there and I never promised to write exclusively about Emacs, this is a good opportunity to remind people my blog has several topic-specific RSS feeds about: [...]
For a while in 2021, I regularly had a newsletter on Revue to put a lot of my “seconds” or things that I wrote but don’t feel really “fit” on this blog. It seems that Revue is being shut down as a result of the Elon Musk owning Twitter fiasco so I’m going to act ahead of the curve and shut it down now.
The blog Wait But Why is the kind of cultural artifact that some people become intensely interested in, inhaling the website 10,000 words at a time. But unlike niche hobbies and internet corners, readers feel a great need to show WBW to everyone they know because, as a blog about the human experience, the topics feel so universal. Except I’ve sent Wait But Why posts to dozens of people and nobody has really cared. Half a million people read the blog per month, and I’ve probably never met any of them. As a person named Preston S. said in a Wait But Why Q&A: “As one of the many (I’m assuming here) people out there who read snippets of your posts to an unreceptive spouse …” Can’t argue with that, Preston S. Maybe it’s true that the best things in life are polarizing. Today’s Tedium is a trip through the exhaustive and wide-eyed world of Wait But Why and its author, Tim Urban—and this includes an interview, because I somehow got him on the phone.
An interview with the UW computational linguist Emily M. Bender, who was quoted in, then rebutted, science journalist Steven Johnson’s big New York Times story on OpenAI.
Hassam: Are there any novel ideas from Awk that have yet to be adopted by others?
Dr. Kernighan: The main idea in Awk was associative arrays, which were newish at the time, but which now show up in most languages either as library functions (hashmaps in Java or C++) or directly in the language (dictionaries in Perl and Python). Associative arrays are a very powerful construct, and can be used to simulate lots of other data structures.
I guess the pattern-action paradigm was also not novel but not widely used at the time. It’s an effective way to organize some kinds of computations.
Hassam: Are there any novel ideas from your languages that have yet to be adopted by others?
Dr. Wirth: Mostly the “philosophy” of simplicity and regulalrity of the concepts. I always focused on the “teachability” of a language. After all, one should not teach a language, but programming. One must focus on programming concepts, and not on language features.
Hassam: Are there any neat ideas from Lisp that have yet to go mainstream?
Dr. Fahlman: It took a long time for Lisp’s automatic storage allocation and garbage collection to go mainstream. This is more than “neat”, it eliminates a whole class of bugs that are among the most subtle and difficult to find and fix. But people resisted this as being too inefficient until Java came along and made the idea more mainstream.
The other “neat” idea — still not “mainstream”, as far as I know — is to represent programs as the same kind of objects that the system is good at manipulating: linked lists, in the case of Lisp. The transformation from text to list-structured representations is trivial (that’s why Lisp programs have some many parentheses), and you can run that code directly in an interpreter, or compile it on the fly into fast, efficient machine code.
In his work towards Open Science, Dr. Pampel always strove for reconciliation and was not known for openly attacking the publishers. So while Dr. Pampel’s position may have been to at least try and work with the corporations rather than against them, it never seemed in doubt that he was on Team Scholarship. The Team Scholarship that values the public good over profit, that values the needs of society and science over those of corporations. The fact that of all the corporations involved in academia, Dr. Pampel has decided to now side with the single one that like no other stands for investing billions of $/€ over decades to flagrantly and unapologetically oppose everything Team Scholarship strives for, just reeks of hypocrisy, even betrayal – no matter what he tries to say to defend his decision. One can easily imagine the glee of Elsevier about their latest acquisition. Whether and to what extent the Berlin Einstein-Center/Foundation is also funded by Elsevier, is currently subject to a freedom of information request.
If universities hope to graduate ‘digitally literate’ members of society, then the skills above should be cultivated in every student, regardless of field of study. Strategies that promote active learning also help students develop important critical thinking skills.
These skills can be the underpinnings of the ability to test facts later in life and to help to develop more rational and thoughtful members of society.
With the growing circulation of confusing and false ‘facts’ facilitated by the ubiquity of technology and the digital space, it is time to manage the digital commons as a global public good. Higher education institutions must work to make lying wrong again.
South Korea, also a major computer chip producer, should take note and increase its presence in global semiconductor supply chains, the Business Korea report said. Both countries face high geopolitical risks, such as invasions by North Korea or China, and a larger role in a key part of the electronics industry would reduce the risk of military action taking place.
For comparison, a single box of long matches is about £4. So I only need to use this thing 174 times before it has paid for itself. NICE!
I realize that it was just the other day that I wrote about how, since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, everything old is new again among antivaxxers. What I did not mention is that, when it comes to pure antivax bonkers, it’s hard to surpass what has been happening in Florida lately, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has apparently decided that the path to becoming President runs through recycling every old “health freedom” antivaccine trope I’ve been writing about for 18 years now, after having used them to dictate Florida’s pandemic policy for nearly two years. Examples of how Gov. DeSantis has done this include his embrace of the “Urgency of Normal,” which advocated reopening schools with, in essence, no COVID-19 mitigations “for the children”; his appointment of Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who first made his name promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure-all for COVID-19 with the grifting right wing conspiracy group known as America’s Frontline Doctors, and then pivoted to opposing in essence any COVID-19 mitigations that are not completely voluntary or inconvenience anyone; and the conversion of the Florida Department of Health into a pandemic-opposing antivax organization, complete with dubious studies falsely extrapolating their results to argue that vaccinating children against COVID-19 is more dangerous than letting them catch COVID-19.
Congress this week passed a bill that takes aim at the risk of improper influence when government contractors work for both federal agencies and private-sector clients. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill.
Nobody working to bring a $346 million Microsoft project to rural Virginia expected to find graves in the woods. But in a cluster of yucca plants and cedar that needed to be cleared, surveyors happened upon a cemetery. The largest of the stones bore the name Stephen Moseley, “died December 3, 1930,” in a layer of cracking plaster. Another stone, in near perfect condition and engraved with a branch on the top, belonged to Stephen’s toddler son, Fred, who died in 1906.
“This is not as bad as it sounds,” an engineering consultant wrote in March 2014 to Microsoft and to an official in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, who was helping clear hurdles for the project — an expansion of a massive data center. “We should be able to relocate these graves.”
Software subscriptions and online tracking are two sides of the same coin: they’re attempts to make regular income off continual effort. Depending on your perspective, they either make software and websites cheaper to use, or they come with nasty strings attached.
On the back of an index card, they began drafting a list of the most critical government databases to preserve: a list of the country’s population; the land ownership registry; the tax system; the anti-corruption and procurement systems; and the justice, education, and health care systems. As he left the embassy that day with a list of Ukraine’s most precious digital assets in hand, a distinct thought passed through Maxwell’s mind: “Don’t mess this up.”
Over the next several months, Amazon Web Services helped Kyiv migrate over 10 petabytes, a colossal amount of crucial government data, from across almost 30 government ministries to the cloud and out of the reach of Russia’s invading forces. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation, would later credit the move with helping to preserve the Ukrainian government and economy.
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit company, has announced the launch of its own open-source program called the Overture Maps Foundation (via Gizmodo). This new project is placing its efforts into curating and collating map data from around the world using multiple data sources. Overture’s mission is stated as being one that can “enable current and next-generation map products by creating reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data.”
Once upon a time, there was a straightforward good way of displaying things like alerts over time or health check failures over time in Grafana, as I wrote about in How I’m visualizing health check history in Grafana. Unfortunately Grafana broke the (once) very nice Discrete panel starting in 8.4, either through an unfixed bug or through an incompatible API change (in a minor release). As of the current Grafana 9.3.1 (as I write this), I’ve managed to find only five potential options among first and third party panels, none of them excellent.
After President Biden signed the executive order that implemented rules for the Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework in the US in October, the Commission conducted an assessment into the US legal framework that the bill was based upon. That assessment, released Tuesday, says that the legislation ensures an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies.
Now, the draft adequacy decision has been transmitted to the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) for its opinion.
According to TV2, Danske Bank is the only bank in the country to still provide cashiers – but at only two of its branches: in Copenhagen and Aarhus.
Inevitably, soon they will close too.
In announcing the legislation, Rubio’s press office cited the “risk of TikTok being used to spy on Americans” by the Chinese communist regime. TikTok, which boasts more than 1 billion users for its short-form video entertainment app, has been a political football since its inception because it is owned and controlled by Chinese [Internet] giant ByteDance.
“This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio said in a prepared statement about the Senate bill. “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”
Following the arrest of the Greek Social Democrat MEP Eva Kaili on serious corruption charges, the EU Parliament today voted to revoke her Vice-Presidency with one vote against and two abstentions. Now, however, further consequences must follow in order to increase transparency in the EU Parliament and prevent further incidents of corruption in the future, demands MEP Dr Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party). In addition, Kaili’s involvement in digital legislative proposals, which she had recently significantly influenced, must be scrutinised.
We’ve written a bunch of posts concerning KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is one of those moral panic kinds of bills that politicians and the media love to get behind, without really understanding what they mean, or the damage they’d do. We’ve covered how it will lead to greater surveillance of children (which doesn’t seem likely to make them safer), how the vague language in the bill will put kids at greater risk, how the “parental tools” provision will be used to harm children, and a variety of other problems with the bill as well. There’s a reason why over 90 different organizations asked Congress not to slip it into a year-end must pass bill.
Today, the European Commission issued a new adequacy decision replacing the”Privacy Shield” decision, that was previously invalidated by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) over US surveillance. The CJEU required (1) that US surveillance is proportionate within the meaning of Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) and (2) that there is access to judicial redress, as required under Article 47 CFR. Updated US law (Executive Order 14086) seems to fail on both requirements, as it does not change the situation from the previously applicable PPD-28. There is continuous “bulk surveillance” and a “court” that is not an actual court. Therefore, any EU “adequacy decision” that is based on Executive Order 14086 will likely not satisfy the CJEU.
The House of Representatives select committee will seek an unprecedented charge of insurrection against a former US president, according to US media.
The panel is expected to publish its final report next week.
The May 16th raid had potential to be the bloodiest yet. It was a mystery, though, right up to the last minute. For a couple of months his crew, then known as Squadron X, had been training for a “special” job over lakes in the English Midlands, learning to drop bouncing bombs that had to be released at precisely 60 feet and 200 knots. They bounced because they were set spinning in the bomb bay beforehand. It was all top secret, and none of the crew knew what the target was. On the night before the raid they learned they were to attack three dams, the Möhne, the Eder and the Sorpe, to flood the industrial centre of Germany. Bouncing bombs could breach the defences of the first two dams. But his crew’s target, the Sorpe, built of earth-banked concrete and set among hills, defied any bomb-sight and couldn’t be flown at directly. They would have to skim very low along the dam and drop an inert bomb, with 6,600lb of explosives, at the estimated centre of it. They had not practised that.
A little over a decade ago, Gary Dye, then a gas measurement engineer at NW Natural, Oregon’s largest gas utility, lost faith in his employer to responsibly deal with what he believed to be systematic inaccuracies among the company’s hundreds of thousands of gas meters.
On a quest to tame these inaccuracies, in late 2011, he proposed a simple technical fix that he claims will “result in more accurate billing, extended meter lives, reduced landfill waste, and a more efficient utilization of [utility] personnel.”
Alex De Vries has published Cryptocurrencies on the road to sustainability: Ethereum paving the way for Bitcoin, a detailed review of the energy implicantions of Etereum’s switch from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake. This analysis broadly concurs with mine from The Power Of Ethereum’s Merge that while the power reduction of Ethereum’s network is of the order of 99+%, the impact on the total energy consumption of cryptocurrencies is much less. Below the fold I discuss the details.
Moreover, a section headed “Acceptable Use Policy” states: “Neither Customer nor those that access an Online Service through Customer, may use an Online Service: to mine cryptocurrency without Microsoft’s prior written approval.”
If the most recent decade is a guide to the future, Diener says, the district can only expect to receive enough water to grow crops on about 300,000 acres in an average year. That’s half the original area of Westlands Water District, and 40% less than what’s available to grow crops today.
What’s worse, the water comes in bursts. In 2017, when rain drenched California, Westlands actually turned away potential water deliveries because no growers wanted it. Other years, the district gets no water at all, except for what it can buy on the open market at exorbitant prices. Such drastic fluctuations in water availability have been especially tough on growers with almond trees that require water every year just to stay alive. Growers now are ripping out some of those parched orchards.
What’s urgently needed, according to Diener and other growers, is the infrastructure to store water underground when it’s abundant, so that it’s available when the rains stop.
It was called the Plan for Transformation, the most ambitious public housing makeover in U.S. history.
Under the plan, launched in 2000, the Chicago Housing Authority would demolish most of the city’s public housing developments, displacing thousands of families. Then, over the next 10 years, the agency would replace or repair 25,000 units of housing while bringing new investment to low-income communities.
The reality is that Hepfner should know that these are just links which include credit and certainly cannot be reasonably described as theft. Indeed, canvassing Hepfner’s own Facebook page reveals that she has regularly posted links to articles from the CBC.ca and Hamilton Spectator (here, here, here, and here).
Does Hepfner believe these are all examples of theft? If so, is she an accomplice to theft by posting the links in the first place? The links each take the reader to the source, generating potential ad revenue for the CBC or Hamilton Spectator. Is that a lack of credit? Ultimately, why does she think that Facebook should compensate those news outlets for the links that she posted? Or consider that she posted the same link on both Facebook and Twitter on the same day. Consistent with the bill she just voted for, why does she think that Facebook is stealing the link, but Twitter is not?
The suspended accounts include The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Voice of America’s Steve Herman, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, Mashable’s Matt Binder, former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, and independent journalists Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.
Musk, who has reinstated literal Nazis on the platform in the name of free speech, has claimed that the real-time flight trackers available on other larger platforms pose a risk of violence. He claimed that a man had followed a car carrying his young son because he thought it was him earlier this week, vowing legal action against the owner of the @elonjet account even though it’s unclear how the flight tracker would aid someone in identifying and tracking a car. Musk had the Twitter policy on the flight trackers, which he had vowed not to ban, changed so to accommodate his complaints – days after criticizing previous Twitter management for restricting access to Hunter Biden laptop data and banning accounts that had not violated the actual terms of service.
Teen Vogue spoke with activists and organizers about Twitter’s uncertain future. They all requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about their work and concerns.
In the United States, leftist accounts, including mine, have been targeted for suspension after right-wing users organized a mass reporting campaign under false pretenses. Other left-wing organizers and media accounts fear they could be next. One Twitter user who spoke to Teen Vogue says the platform’s change of ownership threatens their livelihood — they often uses Twitter to report at protests — and their safety.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has made radical changes that have sparked fears for the future of the platform, from firing half the staff to restoring ex-president Donald Trump’s account and suspending those of several journalists.
AFP looks back at a rollercoaster two months at the Silicon Valley giant.
It is not immediately clear why Twitter, now owned by billionaire Elon Musk, suspended them, though some of the journalists covered and have been in some cases critical of Musk. Olbermann, shortly before being suspended, tweeted a link to a Mastodon social account that tracked Musk’s private jet (the Elon Musk jet account had been active on Twitter, until Musk changed the terms of service earlier this week to ban accounts that share real-time location information about private individuals).
On Thursday, Twitter accounts for at least nine journalists and one left-leaning political pundit were suspended. An antifascist and an anarchist media account were also canceled. The account for Mastodon, a platform that has emerged as one of Twitter’s major competitors, was suspended as well, and links to Mastodon and other autonomous, decentralized networks were blocked as “unsafe” links that could no longer be tweeted. Some of the suspensions were initially communicated as permanent, but Musk then stated in a tweet that they would last for seven days.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, who released the first batch of “Twitter files,” said that while he saw general warnings from the government to Twitter about possible foreign hacks, he saw no evidence of specific government involvement in Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s story on the Hunter Biden laptop.
But Jordan said that the revelations are enough to warrant more investigation.
What is ActivityPub and how does it work? At the simplest level, it is a method (protocol) for social media servers to talk to each other even if they are owned by different entities and dedicated to different purposes. Imagine that CBS News, BBC, National Review and Fox News create their own social media servers using the Mastodon user interface and ActivityPub as a server-to-server protocol. All that the owners of these sites must do to connect to each other is to list the server addresses of each other on a list of “federated sites.”
A variety of celebrities and politicians throughout the country and world have slammed Musk for the suspensions, which occurred Thursday night. Musk has said the journalists, who work for outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, have posted information about his location.
Those who were suspended were covering Twitter’s suspension of an account that tracks the location of Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Musk defended suspending the account and those of journalists, stating on Twitter that “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”
In the post, which was written by Mr. Carmack, 52, the technologist criticized his employer. He said Meta, which is in the midst of transitioning from a social networking company to one focused on the immersive world of the metaverse, was operating at “half the effectiveness” and has “a ridiculous amount of people and resources, but we constantly self-sabotage and squander effort.”
Twitter is blocking users from tweeting links to many major servers for Mastodon. The bans were enacted sometime after after journalists and Mastodon’s own account were unexpectedly suspended.
I’m calling this model “the unbundled web,” and I think RSS should be the primary method of interop. (The term “decentralized” has already been co-opted by all those bitcoin people, so I’m using “unbundled” as a synonym with less baggage.)
That’s a pretty high-level view of things. Over the past several months I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it looks like if you zoom in to the next level. If I had the ears of a bunch of people working on publishing, reading, and community apps, what features would I ask them to implement? What features should I implement in Yakread, my own reading app?
My Twitter account was suspended last night, around the same time that a wave of prominent journalists being suspended for criticizing Elon Musk.
My account suspension was a bit less egregious than how journalists were treated, but it’s still remarkable because I have several comparable data points from before Musks’s takeover.
Gjevjon is the creator of an all-lesbian group called the Hungry Hearts, an art project that produces music, live performances, and installations. In 2017, the Haugar Art Museum invited Gjevjon’s Hungry Hearts to participate in an exhibition on gender fluidity. At the time, Gjevjon warned the museum’s curator that trans activists would pressure management to exclude her.
Just a few days prior to the exhibition’s opening, Gjevjon was informed by museum management that they had received multiple complaints about her work, and in particular, the lyrics to a song she had produced that referenced vaginal anatomy. Her contributions were removed from the exhibition after the museum asserted her safety could not be guaranteed.
Prior to its removal Friday, the Pornhub Official channel had amassed nearly 900,000 subscribers. It was first launched in December 2014. The channel’s URL now displays a 404 (“not found”) error on the web.
Today, four Pirate Party Members of the European Parliament (Greens/EFA) and Stella Assange address US President Joe Biden in an open letter co-signed by 41 EU lawmakers, NGOs, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and many more, asking him to pardon Julian Assange. WikiLeaks co-founder Assange is currently imprisoned in the United Kingdom and waiting for extradition to the United States to stand trial on charges of espionage and computer misuse.
The silencing of prominent voices could raise the regulatory heat on Twitter, and possibly Mr. Musk’s other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, which is a big recipient of government funding and projects. It could also hurt his push to get reluctant advertisers back onto the platform.
The action set off a wave of protests. News organizations, including The Times and CNN, have demanded that Mr. Musk explain his rationale. Supporters of the journalists argued on Twitter that the move was overly punitive.
Twitter suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover Elon Musk on Thursday night, including Keith Olbermann and Aaron Rupar.
The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, the Intercept’s Micah Lee and Tony Webster have also been suspended, according to NBC News.
The discussion revolved around the suspension of numerous journalists. The accounts of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster had all been suspended as of Thursday evening.
The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as a Twitter alternative, was also suspended early Thursday evening. Twitter accounts operated by NBC News journalists were unable to tweet any links to Mastodon pages. Mastodon was, however, trending on Twitter.
Videos obtained by VOA’s Persian News Network, PNN, along with similar video posted to social media, show crowds marching and chanting anti-government slogans. PNN reported they also taunted Iranian security forces, including the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, comparing them to the terrorist group Islamic State.
In one video, demonstrators packing the streets can be heard chanting, “This nation wants freedom, this nation wants a settlement.”
The government has responded with a harsh crackdown, leaving hundreds dead and thousands arrested, and leading to international condemnation and sanctions.
Today is International Day Against DRM 2022, so let’s check in on my ebook collection statistics. It seems that this is becoming a biennial endeavour rather than a quarterly one, but hey, better late than never!
A Digiday report said that Netflix had allowed advertisers to take back money for ads that had not yet run. The Thursday report cites some instances in which Netflix had only delivered about 80 percent of the expected audience to advertisers.
The Amazon Spends Money To Sell Montague Portal hardcover and ebook sale has ended. Amazon has reverted the price to normal everywhere except for Kindle in the UK, and I’m sure that’ll follow soon. At first, I thought The Algorithm was drunk, but the hardcover sale stopped right when their spend crossed $500. That could be a coincidence, sure, but it’s a strangely regular number. Maybe someone at Amazon knew I’d take advantage of this and decided to give my career a hug? I will never know. This goes down as a Christmas miracle, and is hereby dubbed “the gift of the Bezi.”
Google’s decision to completely deindex pirate sites from search results is spreading across Europe. Earlier this year the MPA admitted that around 10,000 domains had already been removed but today’s figure is likely to be much higher. Takedown notices on the Lumen Database and a report published in Lithuania cast additional light on a stealthy but massive piracy deindexing program.
Hi there, I am back into gemini.
Long story short, ever since I moved back to Brazil I wasn’t able to setup my Odroid server back up.
So, now I’m using flounder.online to host my Gemini site under my own domain.
Anyway, more updates coming soon. Bye for now.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
The next victim of Public Relations stunts?
Summary: Moldova is now threatened from both directions; António Campinos, desperate to pretend that EPO is “growing” (by adding a 40th country without European Patents and of no relevance to the Office), wants to extend his patent ‘empire’; António Campinos is also paying money to Belarus, which is attacking Moldova’s neighbour, Ukraine, at Putin’s behest/behalf
Video download link | md5sum 5e4e311b8fdc460319a8df5d938eeb0d
Tough Year for EPO, Shallow PR
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The EPO, which sponsors Lukashenko, is only a short hop away from seeking to expand by enlisting countries which are irrelevant to the EPO; then again, the EPO already breaks many laws and even incites politicians to break both laws and constitutions
THE EPO‘s site (epo.org) has some rather comical things in it today. The video above responds to the latest pair, namely an expensive new video that almost nobody watches (and commenters already heckle) and some fluff about Moldova, which hardly has any European Patents.
Next year we’ll have a lot more time to write about the EPO and the Unitary Patent charade. █
Summary: eBuzz Central has explained why WSL is a very bad thing
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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