GNU/Linux

• Make Use Of ☛ 6 Benefits of Getting Your Computer From a Linux PC Maker

  Although you can install Linux on your laptop for free, there are immense benefits to buying a Linux computer directly from a dedicated vendor.

  You may not see Linux on any computers at a physical big-box store, but there are many companies that will sell you a PC with Linux pre-installed online. Even though these retailers often have higher prices, it’s still worth seeking these companies out when considering your next purchase. Here are some of the reasons why.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • WordPress ☛ Episode 46: The WP Bloopers Podcast – WordPress News

    This episode of the WP Briefing features all the Josepha bloopers our little elves have stored away over the year.

  • Video ☛ Haiku Is Such A Unique Operating System – Invidious

    Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the old BeOS operating system, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn…

  • Video ☛ TLDR – Get Examples of Terminal Commands – Invidious

    Man and –help are good, but TLDR is perfect because it gives you real world examples without reading much.

• Kernel Space

  • LWN ☛ Linux 6.1.2

    I'm announcing the release of the 6.1.2 kernel.
    
    All users of the 6.1 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 6.1.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.1.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 6.0.16

    I'm announcing the release of the 6.0.16 kernel.
    
    All users of the 6.0 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 6.0.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.0.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    

  • LWN ☛ Linux 5.15.86

    I'm announcing the release of the 5.15.86 kernel.
    
    All users of the 5.15 kernel series must upgrade.
    
    The updated 5.15.y git tree can be found at:
    	git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.15.y
    and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
    
    https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
    
    thanks,
    
    greg k-h
    
    

• Graphics Stack

  • Free Desktop ☛ [ANNOUNCE] mesa 22.3.2

    Hello everyone,
    
    The bugfix release 22.3.2 is now available, a day late because I've been
    sick. Aren't vacation days fun?
    
    Anyway, as it's been the holidays, this is a slow release, not much
    going on; the next one will probably be similar in that regard.
    
    If you find any issues, please report them here:
    
    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
    
    The next bugfix release is due in two weeks, on January 11th.
    
    Cheers,
      Eric
    
    

• Applications

  • Linux Links ☛ 24 Best Open Source Linux Note Takers – LinuxLinks

    It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield.

    In part, this is because of passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as ‘brain fog’. To combat this, we arm myself with open source software that helps us efficiently capture a lot of information. We generally prefer to keep our information local and cloud-free, primarily for security reasons. And we primarily advance software which doesn’t tie itself to any specific company or service, whether it’s Evernote, Google, or Microsoft.

    Note-taking apps are the online equivalent of notebooks, and because they’re digital, they can do more for you than paper can. Note-taking apps also include text search, so in a matter of seconds, you can find whatever notes you need.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The New Stack ☛ Kubernetes 101: Deploy Portainer to a MicroK8s Cluster – The New Stack

    Portainer is a powerhouse container management platform that is not only perfectly at home with Docker deployments but with Kubernetes environments as well. However, as anyone who’s ever dealt with Kubernetes will tell you…it’s hard. Given how many moving pieces are to be had with a Kubernetes cluster, unless you really know what you’re doing, you’ll find managing such an environment can be an absolute nightmare.

    Thankfully, there are GUIs like Portainer that go a very long way to simplify your Kubernetes experience. Yes, you still have to have an understanding of how Kubernetes works — you need to know about namespaces, pods, networks, applications, ingresses, and much more. Imagine having a web-based GUI to clear away some of that confusion so you can actually get to the important part…deploying your applications and services.

    That’s what Portainer does and with the help of MicroK8s, you can deploy Portainer in such a way as to make managing Kubernetes exponentially easier.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Use Bash to Concatenate Strings

    Concatenation is the process of joining two values together. String concatenation is an integral part of programming and you’ll find a use for it in all types of software.

    Different programming languages deal with string concatenation in different ways. Bash offers a couple of methods of concatenating two strings.

    Take a look at how you can join strings together in Bash.

  • What is ’init’ Process and Command in Linux?

    In this article, you will learn about the short description of the init process, the runlevels of init, and the init command in a Linux system.

    [...]

    The “/etc/inittab” script is used by the “init” process. It has entries for processes that do basic things when the system starts up and shuts down, like showing the user a login screen with gettys, mounting and unmounting file systems, and managing daemons.

    As a result, it should be kept running until the system terminates. If the kernel is unable to start it, the system will reach a stage called “Kernel Panic“.

  • TecAdmin ☛ Running a Cronjob Inside Docker: A Beginner’s Guide – TecAdmin

    When it comes to scheduling jobs and programs that automatically run at set intervals or can be triggered by another event, you have plenty of options. You can use a general-purpose utility like cron, the built-in scheduler in macOS or Linux, or a specialized tool like AWS Lambda. Cron, though not as powerful as AWS Lambda, is a solid choice if you’re using containers because it’s designed to handle background tasks on Unix systems. With Docker, however, things get a little trickier because you can’t just launch a new cron instance from your terminal and expect it to work.

• Games

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – 2022: A Retrospective

    The work of Godot 4.0 begun in 2019 when I forked it after 3.1 was released with the hopes of rewriting the rendering architecture using Vulkan as a target API. I worked on it alone for a while, while it was just a graphics fork.

    But then things happen, in the years in between the community (both users and contributors) grew massively and so did our funding thanks to many generous large donations.

    With more users come more demands and, suddendly, the will to use Godot for larger and more serious projects required that large parts of the core were modernized. Godot 3.x core architecture is still that of an engine of the late 2000s, when computers were single core and the difference in speed between CPU and memory was not as significant as it is today.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Felipe Borges: What a year!

      What a year, huh? There was something about 2022 that was different for me than the previous years. There were lots of things to celebrate and many to be sad about. This is my GNOME blog, but I am more and more convinced that I can’t separate my whole self from my ~work persona~. Life beyond the computer happens and shapes everything we do.

      Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been in my mind a lot lately. I live relatively close to the conflict here in the Czech Republic, and you might not know, but Ukrainians were already the biggest immigrant community in here. I have many Ukrainians being part of my life and it breaks my heart seeing the pain they are going through. I feel the world has gone numb to the suffering of everyday life people and the conversations have become abstract, touching more on the ideological and political aspect of events than its impact on human life.

      Across the Atlantic my people in Brazil have experienced a significant decrease on their life standards and the news of people in my life enduring poverty and disease have kept me awake many nights this year. The sadness morphed into frustration and anger at those that have the means to revert this situation but instead choose to profit from it. Accountability won’t bring back the lives of the almost 1 million Brazilians that have passed in the last couple of years due to the government’s disturbing decision to NOT take action to alleviate the consequences of the pandemic.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• New Releases

  • Linuxiac ☛ Vanilla OS: Promising Idea, Disappointing Implementation

    Vanilla OS, a fresh new Linux distribution, has released its first stable version. Unfortunately, the final result is not yet ready for real usage.

    I was hesitant to write this piece. However, I was confused after reading a few articles about the brand-new Linux distribution Vanilla OS and comparing them to my personal experience with it.

    In addition to applauding stories about yet another new and exciting thing on the Linux horizon, we, as authors, need to give readers a trustworthy and expert evaluation of what we write about. Here’s my opinion on the new kid on the block, Vanilla OS.

  • LWN ☛ Vanilla OS 22.10 released [LWN.net]

    Vanilla OS is a new, Ubuntu-based distribution with an immutable(ish) core and a focus on containers. Version 22.10, the first stable release, is out.

  • Changelog 27 – Thriving Thirteen, Amazing Aperture, Careful Commonization – LineageOS – LineageOS Android Distribution

    As many of us start traveling again and the world returns to normal, of course, it’s time for us to break the status quo! You probably weren’t expecting to hear from us until… somewhere near April according to our historical releases? HA! Gotcha.

    With all that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 13’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s largely UI-based changes in Android 12, and Android 13’s dead-simple device bring-up requirements, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 13 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features such as our awesome new camera app, Aperture, which was written in large part by developers SebaUbuntu, LuK1337, and luca020400.

    Now, let’s remind everyone about versioning conventions – To match AOSP’s versioning conventions, and due to the fact it added no notable value to the end-user, we dropped our subversion from a branding perspective.

    As Android has moved onto the quarterly maintenance release model, this release will be “LineageOS 20”, not 20.0 or 20.1 – though worry not – we are based on the latest and greatest Android 13 version, QPR1.

  • 4MLinux Blog ☛ 4MLinux Releases: 4MLinux 42.0 Core BETA released.

    This is a core system (only about 15 MB in size) for the 4MLinux 42 series. The system includes: the Linux kernel 6.0.9, GNU C Library 2.36, and BusyBox 1.34.1. The 4MLinux 42 series uses GNU Compiler Collection 12.2.0 to compile programs designed for the x86_64 architecture.

    Despite its extremely small size, 4MLinux Core supports both BIOS and UEFI boot modes.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ LINMOB.net – Looking back, looking forward (2022/2023)

    To be frank: When I look back at 2022, I look back in disappointment at my output. I did not manage to deliver the promised “2 Years with PinePhone video”, I did not manage to go through with a series of blog posts about the Librem 5 that I planned with my original October 23rd, 2017, pre-order-Librem 5 that arrived in March – in fact, I barely touched the thing. And while LinuxPhoneApps.org is technically a separate project, I did not nearly manage to add the number of apps I hoped to add.

    Time and energy were just far too scarce, due to a new, demanding day-job, and also due to private matters – I don’t want to go into detail, so let’s just say Re-evaluating Priorities, Section Two, Paragraph One still applies – which, in many ways is good, considering the alternative scenario.

    So, at the end of this year, I sit here with batteries depleted and have to summarize: Personally, 2022 really sucked.

  • Colors of Noise: Phosh 2022 in retrospect

    I wanted to look back at what changed in phosh in 2022 and figured I could share it with you. I’ll be focusing on things very close to the mobile shell, for a broader overview see Evangelos upcoming FOSDEM talk.

  • Wired ☛ Update Android Right Now to Fix a Scary Remote-Execution Flaw | WIRED

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How Long Can You Keep Using an Android Phone?

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Can You Use an Android Phone Without a Google Account?

  • XDA ☛ LineageOS 20 based on Android 13 is here, bringing new features and a new default camera app

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: pgCluu version 3.4 released

    pgCluu is a Perl program used to perform a full audit of a PostgreSQL Cluster performances. It is divided in two parts, a collector used to grab statistics on the PostgreSQL server using psql and sar, a reports builder that will generate all HTML and charts output.

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PostgreSQL: external_file extension v1.1 released

    Allow access to “external files” from PostgreSQL server file systems.

    This extension adds the same functionalities given by the Oracle’s BFILE data type that stores unstructured binary data in flat files outside the database. A BFILE column stores a file locator that points to an external file containing the data: (DIRECTORY, FILENAME). Here the data type is called EFILE.

    The extension access to external files using secure call to the server side lo_* functions and not by directly reading/writing to files.

• Programming/Development

  • Trail Of Bits ☛ How I gave ManticoreUI a makeover

    During my internship at Trail of Bits, I explored the effectiveness of symbolic execution for finding vulnerabilities in native applications ranging from CTF challenges to popular open source libraries like image parsers, focusing on finding ways to enhance ManticoreUI. It is a powerful tool that improves accessibility to symbolic execution and vulnerability discovery, but its usability and efficiency leave much room for improvement. By the end, I implemented new ManticoreUI features that reduce analysis time through emulation, improved shared library support, and enabled symbolic state bootstrapping from GDB to side-step complex program initialization. With these new features, I found and reported a vulnerability in the DICOM Toolkit (DCTMK), which is a widely deployed set of libraries used in medical imaging!

  • Trail Of Bits ☛ Manticore GUIs made easy

    Trail of Bits maintains Manticore, a symbolic execution engine that can analyze smart contracts and native binaries. While symbolic execution is a powerful technique that can augment the vulnerability discovery process, it requires some base domain knowledge and thus has its own learning curve. Given the plethora of ways in which a user can interact with such an engine and the need for frequent context switching between a disassembler and one’s terminal or script editor, integrating symbolic execution into one’s workflow can be daunting for a beginner.

  • Using Emacs for R

    To start using R, or almost anything else in Emacs you basically need to know 3 things: 1) How to move in Emacs, meaning understanding what is what and learning a few key commands; 2) What is the configuration file and how to use it and 3) How to use packages to extend Emacs. In the first half of this post I will try to show how easy it is to cover these 3 points even for people who are inexperienced in programming. If you don’t believe me I invite you to read just the first paragraph of the next section to give you an idea of how easy it really is. During the second half I will show how I’m using R in Emacs to give you a starting point of a fully functional environment for R, and will conclude with some topics that can be further explored.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ How to Use Git merge

    Git was designed to make branching simple and fast. In contrast to other version control systems, branching on Git is a trivial matter. On multi-developer projects especially, branching is one of Git’s core organizational tools.

    Branches sandbox new development efforts so that code can be modified or added without affecting the code in other branches, especially the main or master branch. This usually contains the stable version of your code base.

    Isolating these changes from your stable code version makes perfect sense. But sooner or later the new code will be tested, reviewed, and rubber-stamped to be rolled into the master branch. At that point, you need to merge your branch into the master branch.

    Actually, branches can have sub-branches so you might be merging your branch into some other branch instead of the master branch. Just remember that merges always take one branch and merge it into a target branch, whatever that branch may be. If you want to merge your master branch into another branch, you can even do that too.

    Like most actions in Git, you perform merges in your local repository and push them to your remote repository.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Marketing Committee Achievements in 2022 | tprfmarketing [blogs.perl.org]

      Looking back over 2022 the Marketing Committee presents our accomplishments to the Board and the Communities we serve.

      [...]

      We are excited for the opportunities that the new year presents and express our continuing commitment to growing the Perl and Raku communities.

      The committee exists to coordinate and facilitate volunteer efforts to promote the Perl and Raku ecosystems, create and distribute quality content, promote Perl and Raku related events, and assist with getting people involved.

Leftovers

• Science

  • uni Duke ☛ Designing With DNA | Duke Today

    But the researchers say these are more than mere nano-sculptures. The software could allow researchers to create tiny containers to deliver drugs, or molds for casting metal nanoparticles with specific shapes for solar cells, medical imaging and other applications.

  • ACM ☛ Designing with DNA

    An open-source software program developed by researchers at Duke and other universities lets users take drawings or digital models of rounded shapes and turn them into 3-D structures made of DNA.

    While researchers have been experimenting with DNA as a construction material since the 1980s, designing structures with curved surfaces like those found in nature has been tricky. Duke Ph.D. student Dan Fu is part of a team that developed software called DNAxiS, which relies on a previously described way to build with DNA by coiling a long DNA double helix into concentric rings that stack on each other. DNAxiS lets users design shapes automatically, using algorithms to determine where to place short DNA “staples” to join the longer DNA rings together and hold the shape in place.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • reviewed and published our highlights of the year

    what mostly defined the year was the start of my phd program and our big move from mexico city to madrid.

• Politics

  • The “Russia Russia Russia” hoax

    The Mueller investigation found a Justice Department guideline that prohibits the federal indictment of a sitting president, but resulted in charges against 34 individuals and 3 companies, 8 guilty pleas, and a conviction at trial. This prohibitory guideline kinda makes sense in theory since it’d put us in a position where we’d have to rely on the executive branch to police itself (both president’s office and the DoJ are that branch), but the real check on the presidency, impeachment, has been corrupted to uselessness by partisanship. In practice all the branches — even the court system — have divided among party lines.

• Technical

  • Internet/Gemini

    • RSS – A Follow-up

      Get an RSS reader and connect everything to it!

      Between switching to Mastodon for my social media allowance, and using a dedicated RSS reader has really cut down my overall consumption and wasted PC time.

GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • AIM ☛ The Curious Case of Linux: It’s for Everyone, but Nobody Uses it

    Linux has grown from a project operating as an antithesis to greedy corporations to a burgeoning ecosystem with something for everyone. Still, the barrier to entry has stopped many users from even trying the OS. Linux has solidified its position as the go-to for enterprises operating servers and data centres, but consumers have become intimidated by the perceived dread of using the command line and not having a familiar GUI.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Podcast 199: Ferrofluid Follies, Decentralized Chaos, And NTSC For You And Me

    This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos decided against using one of Kristina’s tin can microphones to record the podcast, though that might be a cool optional thing to do once (and then probably never again).

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Everything About /proc File System in Linux

    Proc file system (short for “procfs”, referring to “/proc” dir) is a virtual file system (not a real file system) that is mounted on system boot to store information related to running processes.

    The proc file system stores useful information about the running process and also lets the kernel space and user space communicate with each other.

    When you list the content of the “/proc” directory using the ls command, you will get a bunch of directories, and their names will be in integer format, where “integer” refers to a process identifier.

  • Beebom ☛ How to Delete Apps on a Chromebook (6 Methods) | Beebom

    Compared to Windows and Mac, apps and programs are lightweight on Chrome OS. But if you have a low-end Chromebook, they can easily eat up your crucial resources. In addition, if you use Android apps, Chrome extensions, and Linux apps on your Chromebook, they can slow down your device over time. To avoid such a scenario, you can delete apps on your Chromebook. It will free up storage, CPU resources, and most importantly, memory. So if you want to uninstall apps on a Chromebook, including web apps, Android apps, Chrome extensions, and Linux apps, follow our detailed guide below.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Remove RPM Package on Linux – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to remove RPM packages on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) is a package management system used by Linux distributions such as Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora. It is designed to allow users to easily install, update, and remove software packages on their systems. RPM packages are files that contain software and metadata about the software. The metadata includes information such as the name, version, and dependencies of the package, as well as instructions for installing and removing the software.

    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 RPM Packages on Linux.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 70: the defined pseudo-class

    :defined represents any element that has been defined. This includes standard elements and custom elements that have been successfully defined.

  • Manuel Matuzovic ☛ Day 69: width in container queries

    In a media query, it’s obvious what width means. It always refers to the width of the viewport. With size container queries it’s not that obvious.

  • Adriaan Zhang ☛ What’s In a JPEG?

    This image is 299 by 400 pixels. Each pixel consists of three components, red, green, and blue. The brightness of each component is encoded as an 8-bit value, so each pixel contains three bytes of information. Multiply that by the number of pixels, and we get a file size of around 350 kilobytes. Yet the image shown above is actually only 43kB in size, just 12% of the value we just calculated. In other words, by encoding the image using the JPEG format, we can achieve a compression ratio of roughly 8:1. How does JPEG accomplish this astonishing feat? Let’s dive in.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Some practical notes on the systemd cgroups/units hierarchies

    At the top level, systemd has a -.slice (the root slice or cgroup). Underneath that are up to three slices: user.slice, for all user sessions, system.slice, for all system services, and machine.slice, for your virtual machines that are started in ways that systemd knows about (for example, libvirt). You’ll probably always have a system.slice and usually a user.slice if you’re looking at a machine, but many of your machines may not have a machine.slice. There’s also an init.scope, which has PID 1 in it, and possibly some essentially empty .mount cgroups that systemd-cgls won’t bother showing you.

  • Michael Uplawski ☛ Web-Fonts – Don’t let “them” get you

    The question had once been valid, but it is no more. This is just one of those things which you should invest some reflection in, when you want to style HTML-documents to use certain fonts:

    Web-Fonts are nowadays (2020) just fonts that you use on the Web.

    What “they” want you to believe is that a Web-Font is a font which “works” on the web, in contrast to others which do not! While nobody can give you a list of fonts which do currently not work on the Web, they do have Web-Fonts to offer. And as you want to be sure that your documents are nice and readable.., you read on and do not take any decisions until you prove me right or wrong, at the end of this block-post and maybe some research and verification.

• Games

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Valve revealed the most played games on Steam Deck for 2022

    Valve put up a big list of all the top games on Steam for 2022, and they’ve given a breakdown across different categories like the Steam Deck. So here’s what they listed as the most played, plus a note about the best reviewed games released playable on Steam Deck in 2022.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ The final free game during the GOG Winter Sale is Daymare: 1998

    Act fast to claim a free copy of Daymare: 1998 on GOG that they’re giving away as the final free game in their Winter Sale. Scroll down on the GOG home page when you’re logged in, and you’ll see the giveaway banner to claim it.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Beware of scam Steam Deck and Steam Account stores

    It came to my attention recently that there’s a website out there selling different models of the Steam Deck, at a discount, along with Steam Accounts. Don’t fall for the trap like accessory maker JSAUX did.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• HaikuOS ☛ HTTP Network Services Preview in R1 Beta 4

  The newest beta of Haiku includes a preview of a redesigned, modern HTTP library as the initial part of an renewed Network Services Kit. The primary goal of including the library is to get developers to experiment with it and give feedback on how it works within their software. The secondary goal is to gather some feedback on the use of modern C++ and some additional experimental features. This article provides a background to the new kit, some pointers on how to get started, and some notes on experimental designs that utilize modern C++ features.

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • FOSS Post ☛ Can Rocky Linux Be Used as a Desktop Workstation?

    It has been two years now since Red Hat dropped the red letter for CentOS, and shifted focus towards CentOS Stream. The world has moved then to distributions like Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE and others.

    All of these distributions are fairly good alternatives for CentOS in the server world, and perhaps Rocky Linux is the best bug-to-bug alternative for it, thanks to its devs focusing on being an exact copy of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

    But one could be wondering: Can Rocky Linux be used as a desktop Linux operating system instead of a server? After all, it does ship with a workstation installation option, and a normal GNOME desktop that can be used like any other distribution, so why not?

  • OpenSource.com ☛ 12 resources for open source community management in 2023 | Opensource.com

    Open source projects thrive because of their communities. It makes sense that community management is a big topic on Opensource.com. This year, we had several good articles looking at different aspects of communities and how they’re started, protected, and nurtured.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Stacey on IoT ☛ What’s the range of a Matter over Thread device?

    On a recent Internet of Things Podcast episode, we took a call from our Voicemail hotline segment with a question about Matter over Thread devices. John called in to ask about the range of Thread devices in a smart home.

    On one side of his house, he has a second-generation Google Nest Hub that will work as a Thread Border Router. And he has a Matter device that uses Thread one floor down on the other side of his house. John is wondering if and how those two devices will communicate with each other, given their locations and about a dozen walls between them.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Old VCR ☛ Another weird MOS Pong console: 1976 Allied Leisure Name of the Game II

    Hialeah, Florida-based Allied Leisure was Atari’s first arcade Pong licensee in 1973 (which they badged as Paddle Battle), but they had been producing games since at least 1968, making electromechanical attractions and eventually broadening into pinball. Some of this work was contracted to Universal Research Labs (unhappily for later Google searches abbreviated to URL) who fabricated the Paddle Battle circuit boards and produced their own paddle game, the similarly odd octagonal Video Action table. In 1974 Allied Leisure’s production facility suffered a massive fire and the financial hit they sustained left URL with warehouses full of unsold components. URL turned these into the Video Action-II, which in 1975 was one of the earliest Pong systems to hit the home market.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ That elusive Commodore 128 80-column mode

    The 80-column mode on my Commodore 128 from the imitable Screenbeard continues to produce no output, regardless of whether its involed with the 40/80 switch, or using GRAPHIC 5 in the functional 40-column mode. But I think I’ve made progress since blogging about it last year.

  • Adafruit ☛ Scanntronik manuals for Commodore 64 now available #Commodore #VintageComputing @pagetable

    The German company “Scanntronik” offered a lot of high-quality hardware and software for the Commodore 64 series computers, most in the space of graphics and desktop publishing. They are well-known for their Pagefox and Printfox software as well as their Handyscanner 64 hardware.

  • Adafruit ☛ Get a Raspberry Pi Pico pinout on the command line #PiDay #RaspberryPi @Raspberry_Pi @RPiSpy

    Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using Matt’s “picopins” Linux bash script. The script displays the pinout in a color coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins.

  • Raspberry Pi Spy ☛ Pi Pico Pinout Display on the Command Line

    Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using my “picopins” script. The script displays the pinout in a colour coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins. I find it useful if I’m coding Pico projects on my laptop or Pi 400 and need to check the location of a GPIO pin.

    The bash script runs from the Linux command line and I’ve tested it on Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • CNX Software ☛ Year 2022 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics – CNX Software

  • 9to5Google ☛ Android tablets and Chromebooks are on another crash course

  • Forbes ☛ Android Circuit: Galaxy S23 Ultra Leaks, Honor’s New Gaming Phone, Google’s Pixel Future

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Scott Feeney ☛ A quote toot is just a link

  As the Twitter exodus continues, there’s been a lot of talk on Mastodon about wanting to boost posts while adding a comment above them, like Twitter’s “quote tweet” feature.

  Many people both supportive and fearful of adding quote toots are, in my view, overlooking a basic fact. Mastodon posts are just web pages, and a quote toot is just a link.

• Jon Udell ☛ How many people in my Mastodon feed also tweeted today?

  I lasted tweeted on Dec 22. (It was, unsurprisingly, a link to a blog post about Mastodon.) Today I wondered what percentage of the people who appear in my Mastodon timeline today also appeared on Twitter today.

• Bèr Kessels ☛ The Fediverse never Forgets

  So, any content that has been published, should, in theory, be considered out of your hands: with no way to remove it. In that sense, the fediverse adds nothing new. People can (and will) have screenshots, proxies can (and will) keep copies. Archivers have copies, search engines have it indexed, data-collectors have it collected, AI embedded in their models, and so on.

• MWL ☛ “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” ebook leaking out

  The ebook of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems went to sponsors, Patronizers, and pre-order folks yesterday. It’s in my online bookstore today, and will appear elsewhere through the weekend as I upload to all the stores and all the databases churn.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • University of Toronto ☛ Disabling automatic form autofilling in Firefox (which is now simple)

      If you allow Firefox to memorize your logins and passwords on web sites, by default Firefox will automatically pre-populate login forms with them. However, for years I’ve had this turned off, probably no later than when I read 2017′s No boundaries for user identities: Web trackers exploit browser login managers. I was going to say that there’s no Preferences option to control this, but it turns out that there is these days, in “Privacy & Security”‘s “Logins and passwords” section as ‘autofill logins and passwords’. This controls the about:config setting signon.autofillForms. If you untick this option (or set the value to false from the default true), you need to click or otherwise select the field before you’ll get the option to autofill it.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • YottaDB ☛ Happy New Year; r1.36 released; new GUI

    As you might expect, we have been developing software all year. YottaDB r1.36 is released, a new GUI awaits your beta testing pleasure, and Octo continues to gain additional functionality.

    YottaDB r1.36 is a major release, not because it has a common theme, but because of the number of enhancements that it includes.

  • Dinesh Gowda ☛ Materialized View: SQL Queries on Steroids

    have been working with a client with close to 600k images on their home page. The photos are tagged with multiple categories. The index API returns paginated pictures based on various sets of filters on classes.

    Recently, they normalized their data, and every image was mapped to 4 different categories through join tables. So to load the home page, the app server used to join 8 tables on runtime and return the results.

• Programming/Development

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Quickly checking that a string belongs to a small set

    Suppose that I give you a set of reference strings (“ftp”, “file”, “http”, “https”, “ws”, “wss”). Given a new string, you want to quickly tell whether it is part of this set.

  • Amos Wenger ☛ Day 16 (Advent of Code 2022)

    It seems like we’ll want to do a little graph traversal here. My idea is: knowing how many turns we have left, find the valve we should open, or in other words, the valve that, once we travel to it and open it, will release the most pressure total.

  • Pete Warden ☛ Online Gesture Sensor Demo using WASM

    If you’ve heard me on any podcasts recently, you might remember I’ve been talking about a Gesture Sensor as the follow up to our first Person Sensor module. One frustrating aspect of building hardware solutions is that it’s very tough to share prototypes with people, since you usually have to physically send them a device. To work around that problem, we’ve been experimenting with compiling the same C++ code we use on embedded systems to WASM, a web-friendly intermediate representation that runs in all modern browsers. By hooking up the webcam as an input, instead of the camera, and displaying the output dynamically on a web page, we can provide a decent approximation to how the final device will work. There are obviously some differences, the webcam is going to produce higher-quality images than an embedded camera module and the latency will vary, but it’s been a great tool for prototyping. I also hope it will help spark makers’ and manufacturers’ imaginations, so we’ve released it publicly at gesture.usefulsensors.com.

  • Hackaday ☛ 2022 FPV Contest: ESP32-Powered FPV Car Uses Javascript For VR Magic

    You don’t always need much to build an FPV rig – especially if you’re willing to take advantage of the power of modern smartphones. [joe57005] is showing off his VR FPV build – a fully-printable small Mechanum wheels car chassis, equipped with an ESP32-CAM board serving a 720×720 stream through WiFi. The car uses regular 9g servos to drive each wheel, giving you omnidirectional movement wherever you want to go. An ESP32 CPU and a single low-res camera might not sound like much if you’re aiming for a VR view, and all the ESP32 does is stream the video feed over WebSockets – however, the simplicity is well-compensated for on the frontend.

  • Hackaday ☛ Turn A Webpage Into A Desktop App With Gluon

    Electron is software for running web-written apps in the same way as native ones, and has gotten plenty of bad press for its RAM appetite around these parts. But while the execution might leave something to be desired, the concept itself is quite solid —  if you’ve already got code written for the web, a quick and easy way to bring it over to the desktop would be very valuable.

  • Python

    • ScrapingBee API ☛ Web Scraping with Python: Everything you need to know (2022)

      In this post, which can be read as a follow-up to our guide about web scraping without getting blocked, we will cover almost all of the tools to do web scraping in Python. We will go from the basic to advanced ones, covering the pros and cons of each. Of course, we won’t be able to cover every aspect of every tool we discuss, but this post should give you a good idea of what each tool does and when to use one.

Leftovers

• Democracy Now ☛ RIP Pelé: Afro-Brazilian Soccer Icon Overcame Racism & Poverty to Be Ambassador for Beautiful Game

  Brazil has begun three days of national mourning to mark the death of the global soccer icon Pelé at the age of 82. Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé was a poor Afro-Brazilian who led the Brazilian national soccer team to its first World Cup title in 1958 at just 17 years old, and ultimately two more times in later years — more than any other player in history. Pelé was seen as a symbol of Brazil and played for 20 years in the country before retiring and becoming a global ambassador for the sport of soccer. He was also criticized for embodying the commercialization of the sport and was seen as complying with Brazil’s repressive dictatorship. Pelé later became a cabinet member in the Brazilian government in the early 1990s. We discuss the life and legacy of the soccer icon with Brenda Elsey, co-host of the feminist sports podcast “Burn It All Down,” co-author of “Futbolera: Women, Sports, and Sexuality in Latin America” and editor of the book “Football and the Boundaries of History.”

• Techdirt ☛ New Year’s Message: The Opportunity To Build A Better Internet Is Here. Right Now.

  Long term readers of Techdirt know that, since 2008, I’ve written a final post of the year on reasons to remain optimistic. It started when some people kept telling me that when they read what I wrote I sounded angry and frustrated, but when they’d meet me in person, I always seemed optimistic about the prospects for the world. As I’ve noted, I don’t see this as a contradiction at all. I remain incredibly optimistic about the potential for innovation, and generally frustrated and angry at whatever is getting in the way of making that optimistic vision a reality.

• James G ☛ Create a sparkline showing your MediaWiki contributions

  On my website home page, I have a “sparkline” that shows all of my contributions to the IndieWeb wiki. The sparkline doesn’t show any specific values. The goal is to show my activity and trends contributing to the wiki as opposed to showing exactly how many contributions I have made. I enjoy this visualization. Every time I go to my home page I get a quick reminder about how often I have contributed to the IndieWeb wiki. Sometimes I look and realise I contributed a lot; sometimes I see I contribute more in bursts.

• Ruben Schade ☛ CallMeKevin, and the quarter life crisis?

  CallMeKevin’s best video of the year wasn’t about a game he was playing, it was a heartfelt reflection on changes he made to his channel and life over the past year. He delivered it with his trademark honesty and good humour, and I have tremendous respect for him for doing so. Kevin is Good Civ.

• The Nation ☛ Christmas in the Shul

• The Nation ☛ Better Future

• FAIR ☛ Best of CounterSpin 2022

  All year long CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter—that we need.

• Scheerpost ☛ Watch Chris Hedges on C-SPAN On Jan. 1

  C-SPAN 2 will host ScheerPost columnist Chris Hedges on Jan. 1 to discuss and take calls about politics, war, incarceration in America and more.

• Scheerpost ☛ Scheer & Hedges: They Know Everything About You

• Education

  • Troy Patterson ☛ Students Prioritize Using Moodle

    I posted about having students prioritize choices (Ranking The Bill of Rights). I’ve now created a Comic with instructions on how to do this. Although I’ve used the Bill of Rights, this could easily be done with a wide variety of topics.

  • The New Stack ☛ New Book Identifies 26 Lines of Code that Changed the World

    My favorite illustration in the book shows Neil Armstrong walking on the moon — and then to the left of the image is the code that got him up there. Is there perhaps also a hopeful message in there — maybe a once and future hope, that if we innovated once, we can innovate again — now fore-armed with some knowledge about what could go wrong?

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Audio Old And New Meet In Perfect Harmony

    There’s an uneasy meeting in the world of audio between digital and analogue. Traditional analogue audio reached a level of very high quality, but as old-style media-based audio sources have fallen out of favor there’s a need to replace them with ones that reflect a new digital audio world. To do this there are several options involving all-in-one Hi-Fi separates at a hefty price, a cheaper range of dongles and boxes for each digital input, or to do what [Keri Szafir] has done and build that all-in-one box for yourself.

  • Hackaday ☛ Test Your Capacity For Circuit Sculpture With Flashing Lights

    Have you tried your hand at circuit sculpture yet? Well, if you were waiting for the ideal first project with a great build video to go along with it, keep reading. [4dcircuitry]’s 555-based flashing circuit sculpture ticks all the go-for-it boxen for us — the component list is short, the final circuit looks cool, and well, there are blinkenlights.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Common Dreams ☛ Biden EPA Restores Water Protections Rolled Back by Trump

    Clean water advocates on Friday applauded the Biden administration for “resoundingly” rejecting the gutted regulatory framework left by former President Donald Trump as the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule restoring many water protections.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Pharma Giants to Hike 350+ US Drug Prices in the New Year: Analysis

    Global pharmaceutical giants plan to hike U.S. prices for hundreds of drugs next month in anticipation of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which will allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of certain drugs starting in 2026, an analysis published Friday revealed.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Healthcare Privatizers Are Always Trying to Rob Us

    Ontario Premier Doug Ford is hoping you’ll see his health-care fight with Ottawa as just more federal-provincial mud wrestling, rather than as a battle for the country’s heart and soul.

  • [Old] Kleefeld on Comics ☛ On History: Lucky Luke’s Cigarette

    Lucky Luke debuted in 1946, and appeared smoking for 37 years. We’re now 33 years away from when he stopped smoking, and many of his most visible cigarettes (i.e. the ones on the book covers) have been retroactively removed. Despite this, and the fact that I’ve officially read more stories of him not smoking than ones where he did, I can’t shake the iconic image of Lucky Luke and his cigarette out of my head. That is some powerful imagery!

  • [Old] Lambiek Comix-Strips ☛ Morris: Maurice De Bevere

    For a long time, it was not a big issue that Lucky Luke was a chain smoker. Morris countered his critics by explaining the cigarette was part of his character’s profile. It took until the early 1980s, when the U.S. Hanna-Barbera Studios turned the comic into an animated TV series, before Luke’s trademark shag was eventually removed. The comic book version followed the example of the animated Luke, and starting with the 1983 album ‘Fingers’, Lucky Luke chews on straws instead. On 7 April 1988, the initiative to remove all the smoking from his comic pages earned Morris an award from the World Health Organization.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ New Yorkers Flock to the City’s First Legal Weed Store

    Though cannabis possession and (limited) public consumption were OK’d for adults by the city last year, the first licenses took months to be awarded. This was partly because the state approached the new market from a social equity standpoint, giving first dibs to candidates who had either been directly affected by the war on drugs, or who were set up to give back to that community. So it made sense that longtime nonprofit Housing Works — which operates thrift and bookstores throughout the city, providing jobs and services to the unhoused as well as people suffering from addiction or HIV/AIDS — was responsible for opening the city’s first legal dispensary. “We see the effects of drug criminalization everyday,” Housing Works CEO Charles King tells Rolling Stone, adding that they plan to start a program to help “justice-involved” individuals with drug convictions get licensed for the new industry.

  • TruthOut ☛ DOJ Suit Accuses Major Drug Distributor of Fueling US Opioid Epidemic

• Proprietary

  • [Repeat] 9to5Google ☛ Google seems to be ramping up Fuchsia development going into 2023

    Since 2017, we’ve been carefully studying the progress of Google’s “Fuchsia” project, an effort to make an entirely new operating system and kernel, rather than relying on existing options like Linux. In that time, Fuchsia has steadily grown from an interesting experiment to become the foundation of Google’s Nest Hub smart display software. As we reported earlier this year, the next immediate frontier for the Fuchsia project is to run Google’s smart speakers, including the 2020 Nest Audio and new speakers likely to release in 2023.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ Mac OS Ventura issues

    Recently, Michael Tsai has compiled quite the list of issues he’s having with Ventura. While reading it, and while reading all the comments where other people chime in with additional problems, I wasn’t really surprised by the amount of issues taken as a whole — I and others have sadly observed the downward trajectory Mac OS has been following since Catalina (I’m being generous here: another popular opinion is that Mac OS has been getting worse since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion); thus, I kind of expected this bugfest from Ventura.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Dhole Moments ☛ What We Do in the /etc/shadow – Cryptography with Passwords

      Even in a world where we use hardware tokens with asymmetric cryptography to obviate the need for passwords in modern authentication protocols, we’ll still need to include “something you know” for legal and political reasons.

      In the United States, we have the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prevents anyone from being forced to testify against oneself. This sometimes includes revealing a password, so it is imperative that passwords remain a necessary component of some encryption technologies to prevent prosecutors from side-stepping one’s Fifth Amendment rights. (Other countries have different laws about passwords. I’m not a lawyer.)

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Home Assistant ☛ 2023: Home Assistant’s year of Voice

      TL;DR: It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Mike Hansen, creator of Rhasspy, has joined Nabu Casa to lead this effort. We’re starting off by building a collection of intent matching sentences in every language.

  • Confidentiality

    • Filippo Valsorda ☛ Why Did The OpenSSL Punycode Vulnerability Happen

      Some room-temperature takes on yesterday’s not-quite-RCE vulnerabilities in OpenSSL 3.0, and on what there is to learn about safe cryptography engineering.

    • arXiv ☛ EarSpy: Spying Caller Speech and Identity through Tiny Vibrations of Smartphone Ear Speakers

      Abstract: Eavesdropping from the user’s smartphone is a well-known threat to the user’s safety and privacy. Existing studies show that loudspeaker reverberation can inject speech into motion sensor readings, leading to speech eavesdropping. While more devastating attacks on ear speakers, which produce much smaller scale vibrations, were believed impossible to eavesdrop with zero-permission motion sensors. In this work, we revisit this important line of reach. We explore recent trends in smartphone manufacturers that include extra/powerful speakers in place of small ear speakers, and demonstrate the feasibility of using motion sensors to capture such tiny speech vibrations. We investigate the impacts of these new ear speakers on built-in motion sensors and examine the potential to elicit private speech information from the minute vibrations. Our designed system EarSpy can successfully detect word regions, time, and frequency domain features and generate a spectrogram for each word region. We train and test the extracted data using classical machine learning algorithms and convolutional neural networks. We found up to 98.66% accuracy in gender detection, 92.6% detection in speaker detection, and 56.42% detection in digit detection (which is 5X more significant than the random selection (10%)). Our result unveils the potential threat of eavesdropping on phone conversations from ear speakers using motion sensors.

• Defence/Aggression

  • TruthOut ☛ Putin Planned Before Invasion to Cut Off Ukraine’s Electricity During the Winter

  • Meduza ☛ Draft-evading Russian FSO major deported back home from Kazakhstan could face almost two decades in prison — Meduza

    The Kazakhstani government has deported a Russian Federal Protective Service officer for crossing illegally into the country from Russia. Like hundreds of thousands of other draft-eligible Russians, Major Mikhail Zhilin fled abroad earlier this year after President Putin announced a widescale mobilization to reinforce Moscow’s invasion forces in Ukraine. According to Zhilin’s wife, her husband was not extradited at Russia’s request but deported for a border-crossing violation. Nevertheless, he is charged in Russia with felony counts of illegal border crossing and desertion — offenses with maximum penalties of two years and 15 years in prison, respectively.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Patrick Lawrence: The Souls of Ukrainian Folk

    As Kyiv prepares to persecute the souls of its own people, it seems we are about to witness just how inhumane this project has been from the outset.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Giving Europe the chance to come to its senses’ Meduza got access to a Kremlin handbook on how propagandists should sum up 2022 — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ The Devil went down to Kyiv Scholar Eliot Borenstein examines the worrying ‘video game logic’ behind Moscow’s fundamentalist fight — Meduza

  • Meduza ☛ ‘If a person doesn’t resist, they send him away’ Russia’s fall conscription campaign is wrapping up. Here are four stories about what it takes to avoid the draft. — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • NBC ☛ Andrew Tate’s arrest inspires misinformation, memes and defenders online

    But Ramona Bolla, a spokesperson for DIICOT, refuted that the pizza boxes had anything to do with Tate’s arrest. Bolla told the Associated Press the rumor was “funny, but no.” Prosecutors said that Tate and his brother had been under criminal investigation since April, according to Reuters, when Tate’s Bucharest mansion was searched by police in connection with human trafficking allegations.

    Still, that didn’t stop the misinformation from taking over Twitter and becoming fodder for memes.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Right-Wing Influencer Arrested on Human Trafficking Charges After Attacks on Greta Thunberg

    Supporters of climate leader Greta Thunberg cheered late Thursday into Friday after Andrew Tate, the latest right-wing influencer to attack Thunberg online, was arrested in Romania after bragging to the activist about owning dozens of emissions-heavy vehicles.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ ‘Amazing!’ Lula Applauded for Naming Amazon Defenders as Brazilian Ministers

    Environmentalists and rights advocates around the world are celebrating Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s selection of Marina Silva and Sônia Guajajara to serve as the nation’s environment and Indigenous ministers, respectively.

  • Energy

    • Common Dreams ☛ How Corporations Own the Wind

      The north-westerly gale billows and shakes the heavy white PVC of the marquee on the Portsoy harbourside, Aberdeenshire. At one end of the tent, a wall is taken up by a row of roller banners printed with text and logos, maps and images.

    • Hackaday ☛ If You Can’t See A Solar Panel, That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not There

      In the shift away from fossil fuel energy sources, there has been a huge expansion in solar power. We’ve seen solar thermal plants in the desert and photovoltaic panel farms covering huge areas of land, but perhaps the most potential comes from placing the panels on rooftops. In some parts of the world this is encouraged through a system of subsidies, as is the case in Italy. But what if your building is part of a protected world heritage site such as the Roman city of Pompeii? The answer comes in the form of traditional roof tiles that hide their photovoltaic elements under a polymer skin that looks for all the world like a traditional Roman pan tile. As is so often the case with such products, the manufacturer’s description page is cagey about the details in the name of protecting their invention. What they do tell us is that the tile uses conventional solar cells mounted underneath the polymer layer, which is described as “opaque at the sight but translucent to sun rays“. This sounds like an inherent contradiction, so naturally, we’re intrigued as to how it works.

    • Common Dreams ☛ As Lease Sale Flops, Environmentalists Vow to Keep Fighting for Cook Inlet

      Environmentalists in Alaska and beyond pointed to the oil and gas industry’s lack of interest in a Friday lease sale for nearly a million acres of seafloor as the latest evidence that the U.S. must move beyond fossil fuels and protect the Cook Inlet.

    • [Repeat] David Rosenthal ☛ Dominoes [iophk: Wasted electricity]

      When important parts of the cryptosphere collapse, such as Terra/Luna or FTX/Alameda, people often ask “is this the end of [cryptocurrency]?”. The answer so far is no. But as the “[cryptocurrency] winter” continues, and contagion spreads from exchanges to miners and their financiers, the number of important parts still standing is decreasing.

      Below the fold I explain why [cryptocurrency] will effectively end when there are no large, liquid exchanges, and look at the possibility that failures of major exchanges might happen.

    • NPR ☛ Intense cold strained, but didn’t break, the U.S. electric grid. That was lucky

      “It was sunny and it was windy,” Johnson says. That meant a lot of wind and solar power to help meet the surging demand. And the cold front was moving, which meant by the time the coldest temperatures hit the southeast, the middle of the country had some extra power to spare.

      Between abundant wind and solar power, sharing energy as the cold front moved, and having plenty of natural gas to supply the functioning power plants, most of the nation’s grid managed to avert a profound crisis.

      It’s no reason to be complacent, Johnson says.

    • India Today ☛ Want heaters, not Bitcoin! Mining plummets as demand for electricity rises

      Hash rate is a measure of the overall computational power to carry out transactions on the blockchain and execute mining activities. It is determined by how many guesses are made per second, which happens via a mammoth global network of mining machines. It must be noted that each machine has to make millions of guesses per second, requiring a lot of electricity.

      Interestingly, Bitcoin miners consume around 129 Terawatt-hours of energy, which is around 0.6% of the world’s total, according to The University of Cambridge’s Bitcoin electricity consumption index.

    • RFERL ☛ Iran’s Power Company Warns Of Cuts Due To Illegal Cryptocurrency Mining

      Iranian officials have repeatedly blamed unlicensed cryptocurrency miners for using vast amounts of electricity — draining the power grid and raising air pollution levels in many cities.

      The operations are an enormous energy drain because they use banks of high-powered computers to try to unlock complex numerical puzzles related to international financial transactions.

    • IEEE ☛ Why Can’t Computing at the Heart of Bitcoin Be More Useful?

      Bitcoin currently consumes as much electricity as a small country thanks to the huge amounts of processing required to verify transactions. What’s worse, the bulk of this number crunching is dedicated to churning out strings of digits with no practical use.

    • The Star MY ☛ Four premises caught stealing electricity for [cryptocurrency] mining

      These were found during a 30-man joint operation by the Department of Electrical Services (DES) on Wednesday (Dec 28). Joining the operation were Royal Brunei Police Force (RBPF), Fire and Rescue Department (FRD) and Autoriti Elektrik Negara Brunei Darussalam (AENBD).

    • TruthOut ☛ Oil Industry Now Set to Control Both Congressional Energy Committees

• Finance

  • Common Dreams ☛ Deadly Winter Storms Highlight Necessity of Ending Homelessness

    Just before Christmas, much of the United States was hit by an extraordinary weather event: Winter Storm Elliott. In Chicago, we saw temperatures that dipped down to -10 degrees Fahrenheit with windchills that hit below -40 on the backs of 40-mile-per-hour winds. Such weather is dangerous to everyone,but it is particularly dangerous to people experiencing homelessness on our streets. Regardless of how good a person’s tent, gloves, hat and coat are, it is impossible to stay safe and warm in those conditions for more than a few minutes. Add in that many people experiencing homelessness are dealing with health issues due to limited access to regular health care, and we have incredible cause for concern.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Corporations Are the Modern-Day Scrooges

    Corporate Scrooges in the UK have boasted about donating as little as 0.007% of their cash to charities at Christmas, analysis by openDemocracy has revealed.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ House Panel Releases Six Years of Donald Trump’s Tax Returns

    After a protracted legal fight and relentless obstruction by the former president, the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday finally released six years of Donald Trump’s individual and business tax returns.

  • The Nation ☛ How the GOP Learned to Hate the FBI

    Donald Trump, like many of us, likes to use holidays as an excuse to become more exuberant and expressive. On Christmas Eve, the former president wrote a Truth Social post airing his year-end grievances. Even by Trumpian standards, the statement was extravagantly baroque in its bile: “Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Instigation [sic] that is illegally coercing and paying Social and LameStream media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and USA LOVING Donald J Trump, and, of course, the Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special ‘Prosecutor’ who, together with his wife and family, HATES ‘Trump’ more than any other person on Earth. LOVE TO ALL!’”

  • Kevin Norman ☛ Surviving Hotel Hell and Visa Chaos: A Cautionary Tale

    I learned a few important lessons during my experience with short-term accommodation. First, never trust a visa estimate and don’t make any plans until you have the actual visa in hand. This mistake was entirely my own and I regret it deeply. Second, living in a hotel is not enjoyable. Being unable to cook or clean for oneself is miserable. Third, Airbnb is no longer a reliable option for reasonable, short-term accommodation. Even via other avenues, most landlords are hesitant to rent out their properties for a short, undefined period. Fourth, I learned that it is not advisable to rely solely on a smartphone for technology, as I was without a computer for the first eight weeks and had to purchase a laptop. Finally, it is important to be prepared for unexpected events, such as the death of a monarch, which can have an impact on the availability and cost of accommodation.

  • Democracy Now ☛ “Angola Do You Hear Us?” Oscar-Shortlisted Doc on Plantation Prison Takes On Mass Incarceration

    We look at a remarkable film that follows how acclaimed playwright Liza Jessie Peterson gave a mesmerizing performance of her one-person play “The Peculiar Patriot” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola, before authorities stopped it halfway through. “Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices from a Plantation Prison” has just been shortlisted for an Oscar, and Peterson and the film’s director, Cinque Northern, join us to describe how they hope to raise awareness about conditions inside the infamous prison.

  • TruthOut ☛ Human Rights Advocates Alarmed Over Israel’s New “Fascist, Racist” Government

  • TruthOut ☛ We Need a Labor Movement Willing to Challenge the Status Quo

  • Counter Punch ☛ An Empire of Absurd Suffering Under an Atrocious Externalization of PRP to R2P

    This small article is based on the contention that the primary agenda driving the world in the early 21st C. at a deep state level of geolitical unipolarity is that of reducing human population thru a population reduction program (PRP) as a responsibility to protect (R2P) the planet. This hideously atrocious as necessarily hidden agenda based on 99 and 44/100% pure absurdity to employ a Corporatist slogan under irony is without doubt the greatest threat which mankind has ever faced in the course of history by way of Eros being ‘fluxed over’ as to an enantodromiata of entropy accelerated. In the 17th Century Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ as to a remarkable metapolitical perspicacity and metaphysical flight of imagination articulated described such entropy accelerated as a ‘frith narrowed’ under satanic determination and concerning hatred of, and rage against Life as God created.

    Apologies to Heraclitus for the use of the phrase ‘fluxed over’ as a play on words in the above.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Unauthorized Disclosure: Last Episode Of 2022

  • Counter Punch ☛ Half Lives, Half Stories and Half Truths from Department of Energy This Week

    When Jennifer Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Energy, posthumously restored the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer this week, she revealed little that had not been known about the “father of the Atomic Bomb”, and more about the culture of secrecy that surrounds the history of nuclear weapons.

    Testimony in secret committee hearings about Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, declassified after sixty years, attested to Oppenheimer’s patriotism, his singular contribution to the development of the fission bombs that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his ardent support for tactical nuclear weapons defending Europe against Soviet invasion.

  • Democracy Now ☛ “Unacceptable”: NY Progressives Vow to Stop Dem. Gov’s Nomination of Conservative Judge to Top Court

    In a remarkable development, New York Democrats look likely to defeat Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s nomination of Hector LaSalle to be the state’s next chief judge, after progressives raised concern about his conservative judicial record and anti-abortion, anti-labor and anti-bail reform positions. “We have a situation here in New York where we have an opportunity to shift the highest court in a progressive direction, and the governor is completely fumbling that opportunity,” says Jabari Brisport, a Democratic Socialist state senator in Brooklyn who was one of the first to oppose LaSalle’s nomination.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • VOA News ☛ Iran Top Court Accepts Protester’s Appeal Against Death Sentence

    Iran has already executed two people involved in unrest that erupted in September after the death in custody of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police enforcing the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code for women.

    Amnesty International has said Iranian authorities are seeking the death penalty for at least 26 others in what the campaign group has said is a push to intimidate protesters.

  • Meduza ☛ Play in St. Petersburg starring outspoken war critic is canceled after Moscow politician threatens to send mercenaries on stage — Meduza

    Citing planned maintenance work, a performing arts theater in St. Petersburg has canceled a January 4 performance of a play starring Liya Akhedzhakova following criticism from Moscow City Council officials regarding Akhedzhakova’s opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • NPR ☛ Trailblazing journalist Barbara Walters has died at 93

    “She always had to wait to ask the fourth question, because the men in charge wouldn’t let her ask first but she just pushed ahead and she always asked the smartest questions,” Mitchell said.

  • VOA News ☛ Analysis: Nearly 1,700 Journalists Killed Over Past 20 Years

    The two decades between 2003 and 2022 were “especially deadly decades for those in the service of the right to inform,” said the Paris-based media rights campaigners.

  • Scheerpost ☛ Ralph Nader: The New York Times Is Diminishing Itself

    Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader laments the deterioration of the once great newspaper of record in recent years.

  • Common Dreams ☛ The New York Times Is Rapidly Diminishing Itself

    Give the New York Times its due. Its teams of reporters produce more investigations of wrongdoing by entrenched vested interests than does the entire recess-rich, Tuesday-to-Thursday U.S. Congress with all its Committees and Subcommittees. The Times should promptly publish some of its exposes as small books. Their on-the-ground series on the burning Amazon Forest and their series on expanding sports gambling corruption and addiction exemplify great reporting.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Democracy Now ☛ More Jails Became Death Traps in 2022 Amid Lack of Mental Healthcare, Housing, Bail Reform Backlash

    In 2022, more jails in the United States became death traps, as people faced inhumane conditions in overcrowded facilities amid a lack of mental healthcare, housing and backlash against bail reform. Most of those who died were incarcerated pretrial, and activists say this number is heavily underreported. From New York City to Houston, Texas, jail deaths have reached their highest levels in decades. We get an update from Krish Gundu, with the Texas Jail Project, and Keri Blakinger, investigative reporter with The Marshall Project. Blakinger is the organization’s first formerly incarcerated reporter, and her memoir, “Corrections in Ink,” was banned from prisons in Florida this week. She also discusses a new searchable database of which books prisons don’t want incarcerated people to read.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Katie Hobbs Picks Matthew Stewart to Lead Arizona’s CPS Agency

    Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is taking the state’s child protective services agency in a radically different direction in the wake of a ProPublica-NBC News investigation into the racial disparities that have plagued the child welfare system here.

    This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work.

  • RTL ☛ Council of State submits formal opposition to police bodycam bill

    The state plans to invest €6 million on bodycams over the next five years. In the bill’s explanatory memorandum, the government argues the bodycams are there to protect police officers in situations where they risk being attacked, or if they later have to prove the legality and legitimacy of their actions following an operation.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Migrant Rescue Crackdown by Italy’s Far-Right Gov’t Slammed as ‘Call to Let People Drown’

    Human rights defenders on Thursday condemned a decree by Italy’s far-right government limiting the operations of migrant rescue ships, warning that the new restrictions would add to a refugee death toll that’s already in the tens of thousands.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • EFF ☛ Ending the Scourge of Redlining in Broadband Access: 2022 in Review

    This trend did not happen overnight, but rather developed over more than a decade. Fixing it will take years. But the opportunity to address this problem now sits before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which was tasked by Congress with a new law to to end discrimination in broadband access.

    Enormous government efforts to end the digital divide have begun. These include EFF’s supported infrastructure law in California. Congress also passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that includes a  national broadband infrastructure plan. One key provision that made it through Congress, despite last ditch efforts by big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to remove it, was a ban on discrimination in broadband deployment. This is otherwise known as the digital discrimination rule. If implemented fully, it will transform broadband into a utility akin to water and electricity by prohibiting profiting from discrimination.

    At the start of the pandemic, EFF predicted that legacy networks that lack fiber infrastructure would suffer from the increased usage, driven by remote uses such as education. Legacy networks have a physical limit on how much traffic they can handle and are more expensive to maintain. Ask any school district in areas the federal government considers “fully served” (an exceedingly low bar to hit) and they will share countless stories of low-income families with inferior access unable to obtain remote education.

  • Hackaday ☛ Acoustic Coupler Gets You Online Through Any Desk Phone

    Up until the mid-1980s, connecting a computer to a phone line was tricky: many phone companies didn’t allow the connection of unlicensed equipment to their network, and even if they did, you might still find yourself blocked by a lack of standardized connectors. A simple workaround for all this was an acoustic coupler, a device that played your modem’s sounds directly into a phone’s receiver without any electrical connection. Modem speeds were slow anyway, so the limited bandwidth inherent in such a system was not much of a problem.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • MWL ☛ Why “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” is not in Amazon’s Kindle store

    TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over. Amazon is the only retailer that does this. Other retailers, I make somewhere around 65%-70% no matter the retail price. Everything follows from that math, but if you want the details read on.

• Monopolies

  • Meduza ☛ In farewell message to staff, Yandex founder Arkady Volozh makes it official: he’s out — Meduza

    Russian technology entrepreneur and Yandex founder Arkady Volozh has finally, formally informed staff that he’s left the company completely. In a message posted today on an internal company portal, he announced his departure and thanked long-time colleagues for helping to build “the best technology company in the country,” according to The Bell. “All these 30 years, we’ve been doing this together,” Volozh wrote. “From nothing, amid global competition, we endeavored to operate openly and honestly.”

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Australia Launches Copyright Enforcement Review & Consultation

      The Australian Government will conduct a review of current copyright enforcement measures in 2023, to ensure they remain “appropriate, effective and proportionate.” The Attorney-General’s Department has released an issues paper for public consultation, the first step towards determining whether Australia’s existing enforcement regime is fit-for-purpose.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ ‘House of the Dragon’ Is The Most Pirated TV-Show of 2022

      ‘House of the Dragon’ is the most-pirated TV show released on torrent sites in 2022. The popular ‘Game of Thrones’ prequel dethroned ‘Wandavision’, which topped the chart last year. Amazon’s ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ takes the second spot at a respectable distance.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Star Log 2022-12-30 Evening (Fairbanks, AK, US)

    The sky appeared to be clear when I peeked outside about 8pm AKST, and there was a bright waxing moon, just a little past first quarter, so it seemed like a good opportunity for moongazing. I used the 60AZ-M telescope, and tried out the 25mm, 12.5mm, and 6mm eyepieces, along with the neodymium filter. The view was mostly good, except there was a noticeable amount of rippling and some occasionally blurriness. I’m not sure if that was turbulence in the upper atmosphere, or maybe turbulence inside the telescope since I hadn’t given it much time to reach thermal equilibrium. The 25mm and 12.5mm eyepieces worked pretty well, but the refraction (color bending) was very noticeable when using the 6mm.

    My wife bought me a neat little book called the National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky (ISBN 978-0-679-40852-9). The material is a bit old (1991) but it includes some great maps of the lunar surface, with a map for each phase along with a matching photo.

  • Urban Mountain Bike Ride Report

    I grew up riding bikes, living at the edge of a city and beginning of the suburbs. I was lucky to grow up near extensive woods with lots of both urban riding as well as offrode forest riding in an urban area. In college I biked with friends who were more enamored with bikes, organizing rides and silly races (and a root beer keg). They really got me excited for mountain biking, and after college I continued to ride as my main form of transportation, mostly on a singlespeed mountain bike for a few years, but later on a stable of bikes.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FYMORTI Wordo: BHANG

• Technical

  • digital preservation

    we live in a world where the cloud rules, where digital books wear out faster than physical books¹ and where encryption makes content unreadable (without decryption) regardless of whether or not it’s vulnerable. what do we have to show for all our work, all our memories? at this point in history it’s next to nothing, even though our potential to preserve is at a maximum. i am not against preservation and archiving using technology. i simply want to bring one of our biggest overlooked problems into the light; our behaviors which are turning this era into an inevitable digital great unconformity²…

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gopher Server Down

      I hadn’t posted in a while before yesterday and after I did so, I
      discovered my gopher server was not running. I’m not even sure for
      how long it had been down.

    • Laptop Refresh

      I have two Asus X551 laptops that are about 8 years old. One my wife
      uses as her primary computing device, and one I keep for when I have
      to travel (which admittedly has not been much the past few
      years). They both have failed batteries and probably soon-to-die
      hard drives, but the displays are still fine.

      [...]

      It has Slackware 14.2 on it now

GNU/Linux

• Jumpstart Your Embedded Linux Career: 10 Expert Tips! – Linux Careers

  Embedded Linux is an increasingly important field of technology that is used to enable the development of many products and services that are used in everyday life. For those wishing to pursue a career in embedded Linux, there are many opportunities available, ranging from entry-level positions to advanced roles. With the continued growth in the field, an embedded Linux career can offer a stable, rewarding, and exciting career path with plenty of opportunity for growth.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ 3 Best Linux Apps Of 2022 – Invidious

    A video covering what I believe are the three best Linux applications of 2022. Now I know everyone has their favorites but these are the three that I use the most and make my job easy. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments below.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • DebugPoint ☛ Files and Directories Processing Using LibreOffice Calc Macro using Basic

    This article demonstrates how to process/read individual files and directories in the Unix file system using Basic and LibreOffice Calc Macro and put the file names/directory names in LibreOffice Calc cells.

    For LibreOffice automation, it is necessary to know the file system and directory processing. This tutorial is based on the Unix file system, which is different from Windows.

  • UNIX Cop ☛ How to convert Markdown files to HTML using terminal on Ubuntu 22.04

    In this post, you will learn how to convert Markdown files to HTML using terminal on an Ubuntu 22.04 system The procedure is simple, let’s go for it.

    Markdown is a lightweight markup language that tries to achieve maximum readability and ease of publishing in both its input and output form, drawing inspiration from many existing conventions for marking up email messages using plain text.

    One of the main advantages of Markdown is that formatted text can be written quickly thanks to a syntax that is easy to learn and use.

    The first implementation of Markdown was with Perl, but it has been implemented by many languages and blogging platforms that have plugins that interpret it to HTML.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install qBittorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04 – LinuxCapable

    qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. qBittorrent is a native application written in C++ which uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and libtorrent-rasterbar library and is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to UTorrent.In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qBittorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa desktop GUI and install qBittorrent on a headless server using the command line terminal.

  • FOSSLinux ☛ How to install KVM on Ubuntu

    Kernel-based Virtual Machine, known as KVM, is an open-source virtualization tech built into the Linux kernel. This virtualization module in the Linux kernel allows the kernel to work as a hypervisor. This software can run multiple Linux or Windows guest virtual machines. Each guest OS is isolated from the others and has its operating system and dedicated virtual hardware like network interfaces, CPUs, storage, and memory.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install Microsoft Edge on Fedora 37 | 36 [Ed: Microsoft Edge is a proprietary password stealer controlled by the company which attacks GNU/Linux the most. Never install it. It is technically malware.]

    Microsoft Edge is a popular browser choice for those who prefer fast browsers based on a chromium-based engine. The following tutorial will show you how to import the Microsoft RPM that contains the browser builds and install Microsoft Edge on Fedora 37/36/35 desktop using the command line terminal.

  • Barry Kauler ☛ How to install EasyOS page updated

    This page explains how to write the easy*.img file to a drive, internal or removable drive, and boot from it.

    I have edited the page, as someone recently did something that caused the Limine bootloader to fail to boot. See the new section “Precaution” in that page.

    Another thing that someone did recently was run the ‘tune2fs’ utility on an older Linux distribution, to modify the UUID of the ext4 partition where EasyOS is installed. It failed.

    Please be wary of older Linux distributions, they may have older utilities that lack capabilities of the more recent utilities.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install PHP 8.2 on AlmaLinux 9 | 8 – LinuxCapable

    PHP 8.2 has been officially released, along with the retirement of PHP 7.4. AlmaLinux does not support this version in either EL9 or EL8 but can be installed using the Remi PHP Repo. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to import the REMI PHP Module and install PHP 8.2 on AlmaLinux 9 or AlmaLinux 8, along with some tips about configuring Nginx with FPM using the command line terminal.

  • What are File Descriptors in Linux

    In this article, you will learn everything about file descriptors, like their uses in Linux, what a file descriptor table is, how to view the file descriptors under a specific process, and how to change the limit of a file descriptor in Linux.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install EPEL on Rocky Linux 9 | 8

    EPEL, which stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, is an open-source and free repository that provides extra packages for Enterprise Linux that can benefit Rocky Linux 9 or 8 distributions. The following tutorial will teach you how to install and enable EPEL on your Rocky Linux desktop or server.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install QSpeakers on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

    QSpeakers is a free, open-source graphical software that simulates common acoustical enclosure behaviors to help design and tune loudspeaker systems based on the loudspeaker driver’s Thiele / Small parameters and the chosen enclosure type. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install QSpeakers on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the standard APT repository on Ubuntu or using a Flatpak installation utilizing the Flathub repository.

  • Linux Capable ☛ How to Install BleachBit on Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

    BleachBit is a free open-source disk space cleaner, privacy manager, and computer system optimizer. Any Ubuntu user who has used the Ubuntu Cleaner software would see similar traits in BleachBit. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install BleachBit on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using the standard APT repository.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install QMPlay2 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install QMPlay2 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, QMPlay2 is a lightweight and easy-to-use multimedia player that is designed to support a wide range of audio and video formats. Its support for various sources and its range of features make it a good choice for users who want a versatile and flexible player. Whether you’re looking to play local files or stream content from the internet, QMPlay2 is a good choice for anyone who wants a reliable and feature-rich multimedia player.

    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 QMPlay2 music player on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Raft on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Raft on a Chromebook.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to Install GNU Octave on Ubuntu

    GNU Octave is an open-source, powerful programming language used to solve linear and non-linear mathematical problems and perform scientific computations. It’s available to download for free and you can install it on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

    There are several ways to install GNU Octave on Ubuntu: using Ubuntu Software, Flatpak, and via Snap Store. Here’s how to get started.

  • Linux Cloud VPS ☛ How to Install Laravel on AlmaLinux | LinuxCloudVPS Blog

    Laravel is an open-source web framework written in PHP. Today many websites are made in this framework supported by its large community that is growing on a daily basis. Laravel is Symfony based and follows the MVC architectural pattern. We have many posts about this, but this time we will install it using the LAMP stack on the latest AlmaLinux 9 distribution.

    Installing Laravel on AlmaLinux is a straightforward process that may take up to 15 minutes. Let’s get things working!

  • Linux Host Support ☛ How to Install Uptime Kuma on Ubuntu 22.04 | LinuxHostSupport

    Uptime Kuma is an open-source monitoring solution. We can monitor our websites and servers’ uptime and configure them to send us notifications via multiple options, like Telegram, email, Discord, etc. Uptime Kuma is an easy-to-use monitoring tool, and it is powerful for traffic control, observability, service discovery, etc. This article will show you how to install Uptime Kuma on Ubuntu 22.04.

  • DebugPoint ☛ apt vs apt-get: Key Differences That You Should Know About

    Here’s a brief list of items that explains the comparison of apt vs apt-get commands in Debian and Ubuntu Linux.

    If you have a brief idea of Linux or Ubuntu, you must have come across “sudo apt” or “sudo apt-get”. Those already familiar with Linux or Ubuntu know that apt is a command you run to install the software in Debian-based distros.

    This wiki article explains some of the trivia & differences between apt and apt-get.

• Games

  • FOSSLinux ☛ Top 10 browser games you should be playing in 2022 | FOSS Linux

    Graphics, gameplay, and other features of computer games have advanced significantly in recent years. However, did you know that various online browser-based games are available that do not necessitate the purchase of a powerful PC or gaming console? You may play these games on your PC’s web browser anytime, between tasks or after your online class concludes.

    So, in this comprehensive article, we have included some of the greatest browser games available online. Some of them may be played alone, while others offer multiplayer gameplay. So, without further ado, below is the list of the greatest browser games to play online in 2022.

  • Boiling Steam ☛ Reviewing our Linux Gaming Predictions for 2022: Eki – Boiling Steam

    There’s only a few more hours left in 2022 so it’s a good time to come back and check how our individual predictions for 2022 fared!

    [...]

    This is probably the most wrong I have been in all of my predictions, since the actual opposite came true here. I expected most influencers to be working/paid by big companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, and potentially biased towards the Steam Deck at release. It turns out that most reviews of the Steam Deck were very enthusiastic and positive. Not 100%, but maybe 80 to 90% sounds quite accurate. In effect, the coverage was pretty fair: the typical issues were properly identified by most outlets, and the fact that the gaming experience on the Deck was pretty much glorious also shared in most places. This has restored a bit of faith about what you can see online: influencers may be paid by numerous corporations, but are unlikely to give a negative review for a very well designed product.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Nate Graham ☛ This week in KDE: end-of-year goodies – Adventures in Linux and KDE

      Welp, 2022 draws to a close, but KDE never sleeps, and its developers have managed to whip up some new years’ treats for everyone!

    • ~redstrate / Fixing the XP-Pen Artist 22R Pro tablet on Linux

      While almost every part of the tablet works, only one of the two stylus buttons is functional. One button is middle mouse click, and the other one is right mouse click. For some reason, only the first stylus button works! This is obviously troublesome, so where do we begin to fix this issue? Let me take you on a journey, if you have no experience with how input works on Linux – well that makes two of us!

    • ~redstrate / Follow-up: Fixing the XP-Pen Artist 22R Pro tablet on Linux

      So as described in the original post, I have to patch the uclogic HID driver. Let’s start by going through the process of submitting a patch upstream!

      Before we even think about sending this patch upstream, I have to first – fix it. While the patch is mostly fine in it’s original form, there is one big issue I would like to tackle – which is the tablet frame buttons. Not even the original author seemed to figure out this issue, so I’m excited to jump in and figure it out.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Christian Hergert: Frame pointers and other practical near-term solutions – Happenings in GNOME

      I’m the author/maintainer of Sysprof. I took over maintainership from Søren Sandmann Pedersen years ago so we could integrate it with GNOME Builder. In the process we really expanded it’s use cases beyond just being a sampling profiler. It is a system-wide profiler that makes it very easy to see what is going on and augment that data with counters, logs, embedded files, marks, custom data sources and more.

    • This Week in GNOME ☛ #76 Last Fragments of 2022 – This Week in GNOME

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 23 to December 30.

    • Daniel García Moreno: The end of 2022

      I’ve been focused this year on the GNOME Translation Editor, migrating it to Gtk4. It’s not ready yet, but I hope I will be able to have a working version soon™.

      It started this summer with one intern from Outreachy, that did some initial work, building with the new Gtk4, and after the summer I started to clean the code and fixing issues, and lately, I’m trying to replace some deprecations for the next Gtk release.

      so I’m working on the code, modernizing it, and replacing every usage of GtkDialog and GtkTreeView, and trying to follow the GNOME HIG as much as possible.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ The 5 Best Linux Distros of 2022 – OMG! Ubuntu!

  In this post I look back at the best Linux distros of 2022 — and spoiler: they’re not all Ubuntu-based!

  I know: I make the same joke every year I do this. But hey: I write about Ubuntu. I use Ubuntu. You may expect me to keep it all about Ubuntu. But the Linux ecosystem? It’s more than just Ubuntu. There are a ton of top-tier Linux distros out there deserving of praise, celebration, and recognition. This list is my small way of giving ’em that!

  That said, what follows is not a posit of superiority, nor a ranking of importance. It’s just me, a person, giving a shoutout to some of the year’s best Linux releases. Is it comprehensive? No. And it’s also not a critique, so if an OS you love isn’t featured below the omission is not because I think it’s awful!

  With the SEO gods (hopefully) satiated by that lengthy introduction, lets look at my top 5 Linux distros of 2022!

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Fedora Project ☛ Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-52 – Fedora Community Blog

    Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

    I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

• Debian Family

  • DebConf8: who slept with who? Rooming list leaked

    The DebConf8 room list has finally been leaked. We are going to progressively leak DebConf9 and subsequent room lists so volunteers can analyze the romantic conflicts of interest.

    Why do some people get to bring their girlfriend or gay partner to DebConf but other people are told to share rooms with strangers? Volunteers have a right to know that some people are getting advantages that are denied to others.

    Debian misfits are currently publishing defamation that violates the privacy of a volunteer’s family. As long as there is rampant defamation and privacy violation on debian.org, in mailing lists and in the Debian keyring repository, everybody’s dirty laundy is going to come out. What a bunch of misfits.

    Only one person took a suite at DebConf8: Mark Shuttleworth

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Announcing Edubuntu Revival – Flavors – Ubuntu Community Hub

    Since Edubuntu is no longer an official flavor, I couldn’t figure out a good place to post this, so this seemed to be most appropriate.

    If you’ve been around Ubuntu for any amount of time, you may have heard of Edubuntu, the official flavor of Ubuntu that was for classrooms, schools, homes, and communities of education that was discontinued in 2016.

    This past November, I was given the opportunity to attend Ubuntu Summit as the leader of Ubuntu Studio and for my nearly five-year contributions to Ubuntu. I brought my wife and son with me. My wife, Amy, was sad to learn that Edubuntu wasn’t a flavor anymore. She didn’t realize you could do so much with Ubuntu and open-source software in general. She felt inspired by the many talks and conversations she had while there.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Hackster ☛ Linux on MicroBlaze: ArtyA7 Linux Design in PetaLinux 2022.1

    This project details how to develop an embedded Linux image for a MicroBlaze design on the Arty A7 in PetaLinux.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Nifty cam-following plotter can draw many shapes | Arduino Blog

    Before CNC (computer numerical control) came along, automated machines utilized mechanisms like cams and tapers to act as guides. Those are physical components with precise contours meant to guide the tool, like an artist tracing lines with a pantograph. Such mechanisms are uncommon today, as CNC is far more versatile and much easier to implement. But Mr Innovative turned to those traditional techniques to build this cam-following plotter that can draw many shapes.

    A “cam” is a rotating or pivoting component in a mechanism, which has an irregular profile to control the actuation of something. Internal combustion engines, for example, often contain rotating cams that to open and close the valves at the proper times. In this case, the plotter’s cam controls the movement of the pen in the X axis. Wider portions of the cam push the pen further right, while narrower portions of the cam allow the pen to move left. A rubber band pulls the pen arm cam follower tight against a cam. The paper moves at a constant rate in the Y axis, and its speed combined with the shape of the cam determine the resulting plot shape.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android 14: What to expect from the new version in 2023 | NextPit

  • GSM Arena ☛ Samsung Galaxy A04s is now receiving the One UI 5 update based on Android 13 – GSMArena.com news

  • CNET ☛ Fitbit Charge 5 and Luxe Can’t Sync With Samsung Phones on Android 13 – CNET

  • Business Standard ☛ Google rolls out Material You design for Nearby Share on Android devices | Business Standard News

  • Best Android Party Games 2022 – Droid Gamers

  • Business Insider ☛ 3 Ways to Keep Your Android Screen on for Longer

  • The Verge ☛ 9 great Android games and gaming subscriptions from 2022 – The Verge

  • Android Police ☛ The best Metroidvania games on Android in 2022

  • Make Use Of ☛ The 6 Best Android Games With a Built-In Level Editor

  • 9to5Google ☛ Essential apps for hardcore Android users [Video]

  • Android Police ☛ The Google Pixel Buds Pro are Android Police’s 2022 earbuds of the year

  • Android Police ☛ The Samsung Galaxy Tab S8+ is Android Police’s 2022 tablet of the year

  • The Sun ☛ Millions of Android owners must look for ‘red alert’ right now – it’s very serious | The US Sun

  • Liliputing ☛ Hisense Hi Reader Pro is an Android smartphone with a 6.1 inch E Ink display – Liliputing

  • Android Headlines ☛ OnePlus 11 will feature Android’s strongest vibration motor yet

  • Liliputing ☛ Lilbits: Handbrake adds AV1 support, Fairphone 4 can now run Android 13 (unofficially) – Liliputing

    The Fairphone 4 is a smartphone with mid-range specs that began shipping in 2021, but which should be supported at least until the end of 2025 thanks to Fairphone’s commitment not only to continue releasing software updates, but also spare parts.

    And while Fairphone has a pretty good track record of providing its own software updates, the company’s phones also ship with unlocked bootloaders, allowing independent developers to port other software to the platform. Recently the Linux-based postmarketOS and Ubuntu Touch operating systems added support for the Fairphone 4. And now xda-developers member tfbb has released an unofficial build of LineageOS (based on Android 13) for the Fairphone 4.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ A message from FSF president Geoff Knauth: Your FSF membership will help us build a stronger future for software freedom

    This year-end, we are putting emphasis on one of the four freedoms, sharing, to help remind everyone that our work to defend computer users everywhere can effect change in all areas where software touches modern life. However, we can only achieve this if we do it together. We have a goal of gaining 455 new associate members before December 31. The deadline is only one day away! — and we are behind on this goal. We need your support to reach this number. The more members we can count, the better equipped we are to defend important freedoms such as the #FreedomToShare, and educate people about its importance. Below is a message from our president, Geoffrey Knauth, reflecting on the FSF’s mission to protect software users everywhere.

• Programming/Development

  • ZCAM-js – A ZCAM implementation in JavaScript | Timj’s bits and tests

    Earlier this year I had to investigate perception of colour attributes for some of my projects. There exists a long history of colour models that try to approximate perception, each with its own shortcomings and complexities. For a decent modern colour space suitable for image processing and with accompanying C code, OkLab can be recommended (based on CAM16 and to some extend IPT).

    [...]

    And it supports back transforms into XYZ/sRGB/etc colour spaces (while inverting the white point adaption if needed) from three of the ZCAM colour appearance model parameters: one of lightness Jz or brightness Qz, one of chroma Cz or saturation Sz or colourfulness Mz or vividness Vz or whiteness Wz or blackness Kz, and one of hue angle hz or hue composition Hz.

    Also, the code now contains functions to find the chroma & lightness cusps for a given hue and the chroma maximum for a given hue and brightness within a gamut, needed for gamut clipping.

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ Hours left to donate to The Perl and Raku Foundation in the US 2022 tax yer | dean [blogs.perl.org]

      There are still a few hours left to donate to The Perl Foundation in the US 2022 tax year. Please support the great work the foundation does to support Perl and Raku

    • Perl ☛ PSA: Changing your b.p.o password is recommended | Meta [blogs.perl.org]

      HTTPS support on blogs.perl.org, announced last month, has now undergone some additional small improvements to plug the previously still theoretically possible exposure of session cookies in unencrypted requests.

      As such, now is a good time to update your blogs.perl.org password to ensure you are not using credentials which may have previously been passively collected on an open network or the like.

Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Tedium Trends 2023: Anyone Else Feeling Frazzled from 2022?

  I don’t know what else you could say about 2022 that hasn’t been already said—not as awful as 2020, but maybe the awful is coming from some new main characters, and that’s no fun. (Let me strengthen that statement: Nothing about it is fun.) I do these year-end pieces to offer a look ahead at the state of our Tedium, and I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling kind of … what’s the word? Distracted? Yeah, that’s it. With shiny objects all over the place, what’s a tedious person to do? Let’s ponder and clear the slate. Today’s Tedium talks about 2023, distractions, and finding a new path forward.

• Favourite books of 2022: Non-fiction – Chris Lamb

  In my three most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, classics and fiction books that I enjoyed the most in 2022. But in the last of my book-related posts for 2022, I’ll be going over my favourite works of non-fiction.

• Security

  • KDE policy made my digital life more secure

    Two month ago, in October 2022, KDE’s GitLab made me use a two-factor authentication (2FA). Without a second factor, I was no longer able to push code, comment on merge requests, or contribute anything meaningful on KDE Invent.

    For a long time, I have known I should use two-factor authentication for my important accounts; especially for those accounts used to commit code other people are executing because they trust me. But I was too lazy to have everything prepared to use the second factor.

    Thanks to Ben and the KDE infrastructure team, there were no more excuses and I had to set up a secure login.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Video ☛ MSG Takes Facial Recognition Security Too Far – Invidious

      In this video I discuss Madison Square Gardens Entertainment using facial recognition in the security cameras as the Radio City Music Hall to identify a women who worked for a law firm that made litigation’s against the company in the past and kick her out because of that.

• Environment

  • On generators and physics – Kevin’s musings

    On tuesday here we had a massive wind storm come through. 25-35mph winds with gusts up to 75mph or more, along with heavy rains and near freezing temps. It’s a pretty crazy thing to experience in the forest. 250-300ft douglas fir trees swaying 30 or 40 degrees in the winds, branches coming off and flying by. A large gust came through and broke 3 of our large trees off and pulled another one out by it’s roots. Very sad to see these big trees go.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Video ☛ TikTok Is Used to Spy on US Reporters – Invidious

    This week in the Weekly News Roundup, TikTok used their app data to track US reporters, a new scamvertising scam is going around, and Linux is overtaking Mac for developers. We also visit SillyVille.

Gemini* and Gopher

• Politics

  • Regarding Sambusas

    If you live somewhere in the world, you probably have heard of this thing called a samosa, which is a classic Indian food item. When I moved to Central Asia, I learned about this other (related) thing called sambusa. You’ve probably never had one, but it’s one of the most delicious things in the universe. They’re typically made with meat, but they aren’t always; a very popular recipe uses pumpkin instead.

    I don’t know about other parts of Central Asia, but in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in particular it’s an essential native food item, more or less like a fast food thing but can also be served in formal settings and made at home. (Or can?)

• Technical

  • Microscope Ready

    I got a coin microscope for Christmas, the TOMLOV DM4, which I was planning to use for taking close-up photos of crystals that I grow. It is a budget model, but I think it will work pretty well now that I have it set up. The main challenge was the SD card. The advertisement seems to imply that an SD card is included, but I didn’t see one in the package. I eventually found one of my SD cards but then realized it needed a microSD card, not the larger variety. So I bought one, but it didn’t work, and eventually I figured out that the microscope only will use SD cards that are 32GB or smaller, which is kind of funny because it is actually challenging to find an SD card less than 64GB at the supermarket. So I made a second trip and was able to find a 32GB SD card on clearance.

    A few details of operation are a little confusing, like how to switch between video and photo mode, but I worked it out after a few minutes in the ESL manual. The focuser knobs are pretty straightforward. The base is not especially heavy or stable, so you have to hold everything steady while pressing the “OK” button to take a picture.

  • Radio updates

    Not long at all after the war broke out in Ukraine, somebody at my workplace organised the collection of a wide range of items for donation, via a local church group. This was not stuff to be given to refugees, who had then only just started arriving locally in significant numbers, but stuff that was actually going to be sent into Ukraine, as soon as possible, before an anticipated closure of borders. The church group supplied a “wish list” which included things like first aid supplies and night vision equipment (which apparently is easy enough for civilians in non-war-torn countries to buy for hunting etc.), which made it pretty clear that this stuff was even likely to end up be given to soldiers. It was a sobering thought, the prospect of an army fighting for survival using at least partially second-hand civilian gear. I donated a lot of the camping gear I had used previously for S24O trips, as this was a lot less useful to me now that I have been stripped of my Everyman’s Rights. We also donated a lot of heavy duty cold weather clothing which we had bought and used in Finland but which was now overkill here in slightly more Southern climes, as well as pretty much the entirety of our home medical supplies.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Whitespace, part… 5? ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

      I was looking for something mildly useful that I could try in Whitespace. “Obviously,” I thought, “a Gemini client, because there aren’t many of them.” But the network communication makes this a no-no. There’s no way to open a socket in Whitespace, and if there were, I’m not about to implement TLS. But I can render in Whitespace if I have something that will fetch a page to a file. So I wrote that first.

      Then after a lot of faffing in Whitespace assembler with line types and text flow and pausing after every screenful and letting the user pick a link, I now have a (really bad) Gemini client. I can look at Antenna, follow the links, and read posts.

    • Social Media, Victims, Responsibility

      I really don’t like when someone complains about a social network

      banning them, so they cannot communicate via a TikTok or Facebook

      or WhatsApp. People cannot just accept that the social network is

      a private company and that they can ban some users violating the

      rules. I’m cool with it if the user does not pay. Let it be.

      Some say that businesses lose money and customer, and are being shut

      down because of bans, so the social networks should be liable for

      the losses.

    • Youtube ads

      Normally I avoid the google as much as possible. I therefore avoid youtube, but a couple of days ago I realized that I am totally bored by Hulu, HBO, Netflix and Amazon Prime… So I reluctantly put the youtube ap on my TV.

      I find it is much nicer to relax before sleep by doing something that takes me away from any real concerns. Like learning in great detail how a diesel locomotive works, or delving into the details of quantum chromodynamics. So much nicer than the idiotic TV shows…

      The ads are annoying but I am really impressed. A lot of ads are 5 seconds long, which is about how long I can stand it. And a lot of the longer ads may be skipped by pushing a button. That was somewhat unexpected, and got me thinking.

  • Programming

    • 2022 Review

      Rust was the first new programming language I played with this year. I used it to build a simple to-do CLI program and had a pretty good experience with it. The main things that stuck out to me were the compiler’s helpful messages and memory safety checks.

      I don’t expect I’ll be working with Rust very much in the future though. It just seems best suited for systems programming which isn’t really my thing.