Yes, I am still here.... Just a quick update. :)
A video covering 5 specific distros I believe we need to keep an eye on in 2023. They range everywhere from basic distros to gaming distros. I believe they will bring new possibilities to the Linux community.
**ksirk** , **ksmtp** , **ksnakeduel** , **ksquares** , **ksshaskpass** , **kstars** , **ksudoku** , **ksystemlog** from the Slackware **kde** package set.
There are some dumb things you can do on Linux but what if you start using symbols in you file names that are used by other things, well luckily there are ways to deal with that.
Good bye 2022! 0:00 Loading, Please Wait... 3:52 Trying to get into the installer (bad display corruption) 10:08 Made it to the installer! (but it won't install) 23:14 Trying the installer again... 31:27 Introducing: BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium! 1:20:32 Playing some Indie Games 1:49:52 Androgee failing to destroy the distro 1:53:50 Egee Playing Guitar 2:01:45 The End (of 2022)
If you get an error message saying “Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement tkinter (from versions: none). No matching distribution found for tkinter”, can be frustrating and may prevent you from using Tkinter in your Python scripts. In this tutorial, we will learn how to resolve this error and successfully install Tkinter on a Linux system using either default package manager.
Welcome to our beginner’s guide to formatting EXT4 partitions on Linux! In this tutorial, we’ll walk you through the process of creating and formatting an EXT4 partition on a Linux system, using tools like `mkfs.ext4`. We’ll also cover some important considerations to keep in mind when formatting an EXT4 partition.
Before we get started, it’s important to note that formatting a partition will erase all data on it. Make sure you have backed up any important data before proceeding.
EasyOS uses the ext4 encrypt feature for folder encryption. At first bootup of a new installation of EasyOS, the 'init' script in the 'initrd' will see if the encrypt feature is not enabled and will offer to enable it.
The problem arises if you are booting with an old version of GRUB. GRUB v1 and GRUB4DOS will no longer recognize the partition as having an ext4 partition, if the encrypt feature is enabled.
I was surprised that GRUB v2 did not recognize the encrypt feature until mid-2017, after version 2.02 was released. The next official release was 2.04, in 2019, though possibly some distributions may have applied patches to 2.02 including recognize the ext4 encrypt feature.
Anaconda is an open-source software used to manage machine learning, data science, and other scientific workflows. It is an integrated Python environment that comes packed with hundreds of scientific packages that help you get started with your projects.
Anaconda is easy to install and configure on Linux as well as other operating systems, including Windows and macOS. Let’s see how you can install and set up Anaconda on Ubuntu via the command line.
Fedora, first released to the market as Fedora core, is a Linux distro developed by members of the Fedora Project. Red Hat supports it alongside other companies. This is one of the most stable and bleeding-edge Linux distros out there that centralized its project around generating a multi-purpose OS of free software packages. It is great for office work, software development, multimedia, web development, and more.
The Ubuntu version of Linux has thousands of deb packages that can be installed from the official Ubuntu software center or by using the apt command line utility. Deb is an installation package format used by all Debian-based distros, including Ubuntu. However, some packages are not available in the standard Ubuntu repo, but they can easily be installed by enabling the appropriate source.
Generally, when the software vendor does not offer a repo, they will have a download page from which you can download and compile or set up the deb package software from sources. Not so regularly, some software may be provided only as an RPM package. RPM, in this case, is just another package format used mainly by Red Hat and its derivatives like CentOS. As such, they are installing such an application requires some tweaks and tricks to get it done. Luckily, an alien tool permits us to set up an RPM file on Ubuntu or convert an RMP file into a Debian package file. Practically, anything from one Linux distribution can be done on another with a change in approach.
A Linux kernel is the primary interface between the PC’s hardware and its processes. It works as a channel for communication between the two, managing resources as effectively as feasible.
Just comprehend the kernel to be like a seed inside a hard shell because it exists within the operating system and takes charge of all the major functionalities of the hardware, whether it is a server, phone, laptop, or any other kind of computer. The kernel performs four tasks: memory management, which monitors the amount of memory being used to store what and where; device drivers, which act as an interpreter between processes and hardware; process management, which chooses which processes can use the CPU when and for how long; and, finally, system calls and security, which receives requests for service from the processes.
Usually, a standard android app is generated for a tablet PC or smartphone running on the Android OS. Still, this guide will explicitly show you how to set it up on your Linux machine without using an emulator.
Linux, on the other hand, is an open-source operating system. An operating system is software that directly interlinks and manages a system’s hardware and resources, such as storage, CPU, and memory. The OS sits or works as a bridge between apps and hardware and connects all your physical resources that do the work and your software.
How can you run Android games or apps on a Linux machine without an emulator? Because of the creativity and inventiveness of some dedicated Dev Ops, there are currently several ways to run Android apps on Linux. This post will focus on how we can do that without an emulator. Let’s get started.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install R and RStudio on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the programming language R. It is a popular tool among data scientists, statisticians, and researchers for data analysis, visualization, and statistical modeling. It is available as a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux, as well as a web-based application that can be accessed from any device with a web browser.
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 R and RStudio 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.
Git is an open-source, free version control program that helps users manage big and small projects effectively. This tool allows several developers to work together on non-linear development as it keeps track of all the changes in a source code for each branch of a project’s history.
Git is one of the most prominent Distributed Version Control Systems(DVCS) for DevOps. Linus Torvalds developed Git during the setup of the Linux kernel back in 2005 to help developers collaborate with other members on their projects.
You must have, in one way or another, heard about Git at some point if you are learning software development and its various facets. But you don’t need to worry if you haven’t since this guide will explicitly cover Git in detail, along with a brief guide on setting up and configuring it on Linux, particularly Fedora.
The triumph of a team is solely dependent on effective communication. One such powerful solution is Microsoft Teams, a proprietary communication platform created by Microsoft as an element of the Microsoft 365 suite. This software offers a plethora of essential functionalities like file storage, application integration, videoconferencing, chats, and messaging.
Additionally, Teams integrates other services like CD/CI pipelines, Git, and much more. One of the most outstanding benefits of Microsoft Teams is that it is a cross-platform tool available for several operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, and web). Teams compete with the similar service Slack, replacing other Microsoft-operated business messaging and collaboration platforms, like Skype for business and Microsoft classroom.
Most large firms or organizations currently use Microsoft Teams to connect their employees, primarily because of work-from-home situations. Since this application is well-integrated with Office 365, it is a closed-source and paid app.
The LAMP server is one of the most commonly used sets of open-source apps for creating web apps. This stable and robust server structure is straightforward and simultaneously set up. LAMP is a combination of four components, namely: Linux, Apache, MySql, and Php. A similar counterpart for macOS and Windows is also there, namely MAMP and WAMP.
This free, open-source software app drives dynamic apps like Magento, WordPress, Joomla, and much more.
This guide will discuss how you can install Apache as the HTTP server, MariaDB or MySQL as a relation DBMS(database management system), and PHP as the server-side scripting language. For this article, we will be using Fedora version 37. In the end, your Apache web server will run a PHP script, connect to a DB and return a successful response.
Fedora often introduces numerous enhancements, bug fixes, security updates, and new features. Therefore, it is essential to keep all software up-to-date. Fedora supports package managers such as RPM (DNF), Flatpak, and OSTree – GNOME Software is the default graphical front-end.
This guide demonstrates how to update Fedora to obtain the most recent software. There are two ways to update Fedora: the graphical user interface and the command line.
Regardless of the distribution, it is essential to maintain all packages up-to-date. Updates to packages include numerous enhancements, bug fixes, security patches, and new or enhanced functionality.
Bitwarden became my go-to password manager a few years ago after I finally abandoned LastPass. Once I read the recent news about stolen password vaults, I was even happier that I made the switch. My original password manager from way back in my Apple days was 1Password. It had a great user interface on the Mac and on iPhones, but I found it frustrating to use when I switched to Linux laptops and Android phones.
Many but not all of the items I was hoping for from my 2022 roadmap are finished now.
While we didn’t get a new style for Breeze icons or inertial scrolling everywhere, we did get the merged “Formats and Languages” KCM and a major overhaul for multi-monitor support to make it all finally work properly. “The Wayland session can completely replace the X11 session” is a bit fuzzier, but I can tell you that it’s done so for me! I only ever use the X11 session for occasionally testing merge requests. This doesn’t mean it’s there for everyone, of course. But it got ever closer in 2022. And finally, the 15-minute bug initiative was a big success! We didn’t fix every one of the 142 bugs classified as “15-minute bugs” in 2022, but we did fix 95 of them! That’s a pretty good rate. We’ll keep up the focus on these quality-of-life issues in 2023, too.
2023 started. I'm still stuck at home due to COVID-19 and therefore I have more than usual time on hacking on Debian stuff. I've learnt schroot does most of what I have been doing with my home grown tools.
CrowdSupply recently featured the Lite3DP Gen2 which is a miniature MSLA resin 3D printer built around a ESP32 module from Espressif. This product supports all UV 405-nm resins and it can be configured with optional displays for real-time print progress.
The Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense Rev2 is an embedded platform featuring the NINA-B306 module (nRF52840 SoC) from u-blox. In addition to wireless support (BL + Zigbee), the new Sense Rev2 combines a 6-axis gyroscope/accelerometer sensor, a 3–axis magnetometer and various other sensors for data acquisition.
[Chris Gammell] moderated the KiCad 2022 End-of-Year Recap with several KiCad developers and librarians. They reviewed what’s been bubbling up in the nightly KiCad 6 builds, what we can expect from KiCad 7, and even answered some questions from the user community. Over the course of 2022, the KiCad project has grown both its development team and library team. The project even has a preliminary support commitment from the CERN Drawing Office!
Say, you’re starting your electronics journey with a few projects in mind. You have an ESP8266 board like the Wemos D1, a Li-Ion battery, you want to build a small battery-powered sensor that wakes up every few minutes to do something, and you don’t want to delve into hardware too much for now. Well then, does [Mads Chr. Olesen] have a tutorial for you! Here, you’ll learn the quick and easy way to get your sensor up and running, learn a few tricks for doing sleep Arduino environment, and even calculate how long your specific battery could last.
Ever want to play with an FPGA, but don’t have the hardware? Now, if you have one of those ever-abundant Pi Picos, you can start playing with Verilog without getting an FPGA board. The FakePGA project by [tvlad1234], based on the Verilator toolkit, provides you with a way to compile Verilog into C++ for the RP2040. FakePGA even integrates RP2040 GPIOs so that they work as digital pins for the simulated GPIOs, making it a significant step up from computer-aided FPGA code simulation
sslh-v2.0-rc2 is now available from the usual sources: https://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh/download.html
Today, as I began to use that new affordance in earnest, I discovered a new challenge. In order to assign someone to a list, or change a list assignment, I clicked the link in the account_url column to open that person’s profile in the Mastodon web app. That was fine for accounts on my home server, mastodon.social. An account URL like Shelley Powers’ https://mastodon.social/@burningbird brings me to Shelley’s profile on my home server where the list manager is available.
During my (brief) stint teaching senior leaders about AI, there was one question that I urged them to learn above all others.
● What is the acceptable failure rate?
There is a long standing issue with my {dqrng} package: weighted sampling. Since implementing fast un-weighted sampling methods quite some time ago, I have now started looking into possibilities for weighted sampling.
Recap the year with some of the most popular episodes of "Scheer Intelligence."
This server was upgraded on Feb 2 2019. Only the storage persisted. Everything else was upgraded.
Berry’s criteria for deciding whether or not to adopt a new tool or technology into his life resonate clearly with current discussions around digital degrowth – not least reframing digital technology consumption along lines of ‘voluntary simplicity’, ‘conscious minimalization’, ‘reparability’ and so on. To quote a series of dot-points that Berry offers toward the end of his essay in way of a conclusion: [...]
We have a tradition that every year I organise a group tramping trip in the South Island in December, between students finishing exams and Christmas. Typically we do one "easy" tramp and one "hard" tramp, balancing welcoming new trampers with pursuing tougher but more rewarding challenges. This year the "easy" tramp was Paparoa Track and the "hard" tramp was the Travers-Sabine Circuit (which we previously did in 2019).
I completed all the official "Great Walks" some years ago, but recently the Paparoa Track was created as a new Great Walk, and this year seemed like a good time to re-complete the set. We did it over three days (December 12-14) which seemed about right; one could spend an extra day and stay at Ces Clark hut, but that would make it a bit too easy for my taste. So we started at the southern end, Smoke-Ho car park, and walked north, staying at Moonlight Tops Hut on the first night and Pororari Hut on the second night. We hired three rental cars to get all thirteen of us to the track start (staying the night before at Greymouth Top 10 Holiday Park), and hired Buller Adventures to move those cars to the track end while we were walking. These logistics all worked out well.
Yes! Ultimately both words are from Persian naft, which is the Old Persian word for petroleum. Then the Greeks borrowed it as ýìÃâ øñ (naphtha) and the Russians, via Turkish. Petroleum is neft in many other languages, not just the ones you would expect like Azeri, Dari, and Turkmen., but also Finnish, French, Hebrew, and Japanese.
In my four most recent posts, I went over the memoirs and biographies, the non-fiction, the fiction and the 'classic' fiction I enjoyed reading in 2022.
Twitter is shutting down Revue, the newsletter platform that I use for Next. Thus, I’m migrating to Substack.
However, new research in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides evidence that not only are chloroviruses regularly eaten, they are also nutritious, which has broad implications for how we think about food chains and the cycling of carbon earth. The paper was co-authored by a plant pathology professor James Van Etten, who first discovered chloroviruses in 1980.
An influx of Arctic air is blasting across the U.S., sending temperatures plunging, dropping snow, disrupting Christmas travel plans, and setting social media atwitter about the polar vortex.
But what exactly is the polar vortex? Where does the cold air come from? And is global warming making cold snaps like this one more likely? Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Bob Henson has answers.
I mentioned on Mastodon that while the chips in my Commodore 128 barely break a sweat most of the time, there are a few in the new Commodore 64C that definitely do. The SID gets warm to the touch, and the VIC-II gets hot; enough that it made me flinch.
Sometimes you pick a project because the world needs it to be done. Or maybe you or a friend need it. Or maybe you don’t really need it, but it fulfills a longstanding dream. In my mind, the last stop before you reach “why am I doing this” is the “just because” hack.
In the catalogue of the Chinese parts supplier LCSC can be found many parts not available from American or European suppliers, and thus anyone who wants to evaluate them can find themselves at a disadvantage. [Sleepy Pony Labs] had just such a part catch their eye, the Sam&Wing AI08 8 channel capacitive touch controller. How to evaluate a chip with little information? Design a dev board, of course!
[RichardG] has noticed a weird discrepancy – his Ryzen mainboard ought to have had fourteen USB3 ports, but somehow, only exposed thirteen of them. Unlike other mainboards in this lineup, it also happens to have a USB-C port among these thirteen ports. These two things wouldn’t be related in any way, would they? Turns out, they are, and [RichardG] shows us a dirty USB-C trick that manufacturers pull on us for an unknown reason.
Seeing the higher than expected power consumption on AMD’s new Radeon RX 9700 XT(X) cards has been concerning.
IBM’S CONDOR, THE world’s first universal quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits, is set to debut in 2023. The year is also expected to see IBM launch Heron, the first of a new flock of modular quantum processors that the company says may help it produce quantum computers with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025.
While quantum computers can, in theory, quickly find answers to problems that classical computers would take eons to solve, today’s quantum hardware is still short on qubits, limiting its usefulness. Entanglement and other quantum states necessary for quantum computation are infamously fragile, being susceptible to heat and other disturbances, which makes scaling up the number of qubits a huge technical challenge.
Republicans and Democrats alike have long taken aim at TikTok, since it is owned by Beijing-based tech behemoth ByteDance. Lawmakers worry about the Chinese Communist Party using the app to spy on Americans, or using the app's algorithm to amplify pro-China narratives.
While the company denies it would ever be used for nefarious purposes, national security experts say China-based businesses usually have to give unfettered access to the authoritarian regime if information is ever sought.
But any justice that comes to these families through the civil courts will come too late. That’s why prevention is key. We must recognize the harm inherent in social media for minors — harm not unlike that posed by cigarettes to youths revealed in the U.S. surgeon general’s famous 1964 report on the dangers of smoking. And we must protect our nation’s children.
[...]
The data is in for social media as well. Self-harm and suicide rates were steadily declining among young people in the United States until 2008. As social media use among minors has risen dramatically, so have self-harm and suicide rates.
A simple plan to get more people enjoying the outdoors on New Year's Day has become a nationwide movement in the U.S. after a hike at a Massachusetts park more than three decades ago.
Just 380 people participated in the initial First Day Hike in 1992 at the nearly 2,830-hectare Blue Hills Reservation just south of Boston. On Sunday, tens of thousands of people are expected to take part in First Day Hikes at hundreds of parks in all 50 states.
On October 4, 2022, new Omicron sub-variants BF.7 and BA.5.1.7 were detected in Yantai and Shaoguan cities in South China. The detection was amid the latest Covid outbreak in the country. According to reports by Global Times, It's the first time the BA.5.1.7 subvariant has been detected on the Chinese mainland.
Several reports published in Britain over the last few years attest to the fact that staggering levels of social inequality, fuelled by austerity policies, have claimed the lives of around a million people.
Earlier this month a paper led by the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH), found as a “a conservative estimate” that there were 334,327 excess deaths beyond the expected number in England, Wales and Scotland over the eight-year period from 2012 and 2019. GCPH is a partnership between NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Glasgow City Council and the University of Glasgow.
About 1 percent of Americans have diagnosed Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) like Crohn's Disease or Ulcerative Colitis. And about 1 in 500 Americans (0.2%) have ostomies—small openings called stomas that help when their bowels get really screwed up (whether through disease, cancer, or trauma).
An estimated 16,000 unionized nurses from private hospitals across the New York City metropolitan area announced strike authorizations on Friday as current contracts are set to expire and the region continues to experience a "tridemic" health crisis that includes Covid-19, flu, and the respiratory illness known as RSV.
That meant that when Dobbs v. Jackson overturned the protections that Roe promised to people seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare, we were prepared. We were prepared to answer questions about what exactly your phone knows, Google knows, and Facebook knows. And how that information could be obtained. The sudden disappearance of federal protections, combined with a growing number of “bounty laws” targeting support for such care, raises a host of concerns regarding data privacy and online expression. And this expanded threat to digital rights is especially dangerous for BIPOC, lower-income, immigrant, LGBTQ+ people, and other traditionally marginalized communities, and the healthcare providers serving these communities.
The repeal of Roe created a lot of new dangers for people seeking healthcare. This past year, EFF has worked to protect your rights in two main areas: 1) your data privacy and security and 2) your right to free speech.
With law enforcement looking to punish those who seek abortions, your digital paper trail is now potentially incriminating evidence. Google maps data can tell police if you searched for the address of a clinic. Chat logs can show if you talked about abortion with someone. A digital dragnet can give police names of anyone in the vicinity of a place suspected to offer abortion services. These are just a few examples of things law enforcement already does in other criminal contexts and can now do with regard to reproductive health. The good news is that EFF has a lot of experience in fighting these fights. And so our initial efforts focused on protecting the data privacy and security of people seeking, providing, and facilitating abortion access.
This year's most notable decision affecting gender justice—the overturning of federal protection of the right to abortion in the US—happened more than 6,000 miles from Africa, but its impact was felt here too.
In this video, I check out the newly created project that the Linux Foundation started to overthrow Google Maps’ dominance.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) said in a statement that the state reached a settlement with Google for $20 million to resolve its lawsuit over the company’s “deceptive location-tracking practices.”
Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you have a Firefox "Preferences" option and you'd like to know for sure what about:config setting corresponds to it. One way to do this is to look it up in the Firefox source code, which is probably most readily done online through searchfox.org. This has to be done in two steps because there's a little bit of indirection in the Firefox code base (due to localization).
In an important decision by a federal judge, a remote proctoring “room scan” by a public university - Cleveland State University in Ohio -€ was deemed an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. “Room scans,” where students are forced to use their device’s camera to give a 360-degree view of everything around the area in which they’re taking a test, are one of the most invasive aspects of remotely proctored exams. Often, these scans are done in a personal residence, and frequently a private space, like a bedroom.€
The district court recognized that room scans provide the government (public schools are government entities) with a window into our homes—a space that “lies at the core of the Fourth Amendment’s protections” and long-recognized by the Supreme Court as private. There are few exceptions to this requirement, and none of the justifications offered by the university—including its interests in deterring cheating and its assertion the student may have been able to refuse the scan—sufficed to outweigh the student’s privacy interest€ in this case. Though this decision isn’t binding on other courts, any student of a state school hoping to push back against room scans in particular could now cite it as persuasive precedent. The school is expected to appeal to the Sixth Circuit.€
EFF began looking more closely at student activity monitoring software, which is basically indistinguishable from spyware, and is used to filter, block, and flag vast amounts of student activity on their school-issued, and sometimes personal, devices. We already know that the machine learning algorithms in this software that filter, flag, and block content routinely misclassify any LGBTQ+ content as “Adult” content. We know that Securly flags “Health” sites (like WebMD) as “needs supervision,” andGoGuardian blocks access to reproductive health materials. It isn’t difficult to see the harms that will occur as more anti-trans laws pass and the legal right to abortion is overturned: students who use their devices to research topics such as trans healthcare or abortion-related material could find those devices weaponized against them, potentially resulting in criminal charges. Moreover, there are already examples of these apps outing LGBTQ+ students.
Wouldn’t it be weird if the CIA invested in, and influenced, Tech companies?
Spoiler: The CIA totally does that.
Through a puppet venture capital firm known as “In-Q-Tel”, the CIA invests in a wide range of Tech companies.
Video games. Search engines. SQL databases. Even website load balancing. The CIA has their hands in it all.
Outside experts estimate that North Korea already has enough fissile material to build about 50 nuclear weapons, as well as a growing number of missiles that could be capable of carrying such warheads.
Kim’s moves are in line with the broad direction of his nuclear weapons development program as he has repeatedly vowed to boost both the quality and quantity of his arsenal. Some experts said Kim will likely continue a provocative run of weapons tests this year before he would ultimately try to use his enlarged arsenal to wrest concessions like sanctions relief in future dealings with his rivals.
Meduza offers a brief summary of December 31, 2022, and the start of January 1, 2023.
Russia has stepped up satellite navigation jamming, especially around Moscow, in an apparent attempt to ward off any long-range strikes by Ukrainian drones.
Russia is known for interfering with global navigation satellite systems, in particular GPS, which is operated by the US military and is ubiquitous in smartphones, car satnavs and other devices. Updates from the monitoring site GPSJam show that Russian jamming activity has increased sharply within Russia (see map, above).
Isaiah 9:For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end.
It's been an extraordinary year in foreign policy, dominated by an ongoing, brutal war following the February Russian invasion of Ukraine. NATO, struggling with its mission before 2022, appearsmore emboldened and unified than ever.
What would the United States be like if it was like Israel?
Juan Cole imagines a United States that, like Israel, is ruled by religious extremists and neocolonial settlers.
The General Assembly of the United Nations on Friday approved a resolution that asks the International Court of Justice to issue an opinion on the legal consequences of Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Auto research firm J.D. Power estimates electric vehicle batteries have a lifespan of ten to twenty years — so electric vehicles have now been around long enough in Canada that some batteries will need to be replaced near the end of the decade.
Finding ways to recycle their costly, toxic batteries could address the environmental questions that arise from building electric vehicles in the first place.
During the chilly season, many people receive pricey bills for propane, natural gas, and electricity.
Winter’s snow and cold temperatures often arrive alongside skyrocketing energy bills. Whether you rent or own your home, there are many ways to save money this winter — from increasing energy efficiency to applying for financial assistance.
In addition, clean energy tax credits to help you weatherize your home, purchase more efficient appliances, buy a heat pump water heater, and more go into effect in 2023.
Indigenous leaders from around the world are calling for a bigger role in negotiations at the United Nations’ Biodiversity Conference which convenes today in Montreal. Known as COP15, delegates from nearly 200 countries are expected to finalize the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, a set of international goals and standards for conservation efforts over the next decade.
I was bored, and was curious to know what the charging behaviour of my Pixel 6 Pro looked like. I decided to use a Ugreen Nexode 100w USB-C charging brick with a Macbook charging cable as the power supply, and left my phone in its case. I note this because I will in the future perform this same test with the phone artificially cooled to see how much of a difference temperature makes to charging rate. I picked the Ugreen Nexode PSU because it has the widest support for quick charging standards I’ve ever seen. It supports all sorts of weirdo standards, and I highly recommend owning one. It supports (and I am sure this is not an exhaustive list): [...]
Public subsidies for coal plants are merely the icing on the cake of a triumphant year for multinational fossil fuel corporations operating in this country. Michael West and Callum Foote report on Fossocracy Australia.
“The damages caused by Brexit just continue to mount. In the two years since the end of the transition period, we have seen no advantages to leaving the European Union. The cost of living crisis and recession are being felt more deeply in the UK than anywhere else, with recent research showing food bills in the UK are €£210 higher in the last two years due to Brexit. Households on the lowest incomes are the hardest hit.
“The UK economy is fundamentally on the wrong path and there is no real alternative on offer within the current system. The Scottish Government is committed to giving the people of Scotland a choice about the future they want – a greener, wealthier and fairer economy within the European Union, or a sluggish, stagnating economy outside of the European Union. We will continue to publish the Building a New Scotland series of prospectus papers to ensure people can make that informed choice.
Senator Bernie Sanders is not asking anyone to be shocked that Donald J. Trump was very good at not paying taxes, but he also wants people to know that the disgraced former Republican president is far from the only rich person or powerful corporation who gets away with paying little or nothing each year federal income tax.
It’s a post-Christmas feast. We are serving up the Top 40 Tax Dodgers, the crème de la crème of Australia’s biggest and meanest tax tricksters.
"Most of what passes as “the economic policy we need now” is really pleading by a self-interested employer class. Raising interest rates to fight inflation is the big example these days. Among the forms and fields of class struggle, debunking economic policies’ claims of being class neutral is an ongoing battle."
With its disguises as “high finance” for the mystified and “Keynesian fiscal policy” for those “in the know,” deficit spending by the government was quite a successful scam for a long while. When the UK’s ex-prime minister opened her new government in September, Liz Truss followed tradition by trying to run the oft-used scam again. But this time it did not work. Eventually, even successful scams stop working. Its failure became hers but also her party’s, the Conservatives.’ Neither of them understood the scam’s limits. Perhaps its disguises had worked best on those who repeated them most in thought and word.
[...]
The scam’s seamy side was massively “underreported.” It was and still is a fact that UK governments borrowed most of the money for deficit spending from the UK corporations and the rich. Once the government had cut taxes, the money saved by those corporations and the rich could be and was often lent to that government. The scam offered a certain “no-brainer” opportunity to corporations and the rich. Instead of making a one-time tax payment to the government (like other taxpayers do) corporations and the rich can instead lend that money to the government. The government security obtained in exchange provides repayment in full in the future plus annual interest payments till then.
This scam has worked for many years across global capitalism. After former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson lied his way out of office, Liz Truss presumed she could and would run the scam again, loudly and proudly, with the usual political applause. All her predecessors had. But this turned out to be the time and the place where the scam would hit its limits. Ironically, the very beneficiaries of the tax cuts Truss proposed for the corporations and the rich were the “investors” who balked. They took a good look at the UK government’s financial conditions and decided not to lend it more money without much higher interest rates (and maybe not even then). Very quickly—as these things often go—higher interest rates drove down bond prices threatening UK pension plan assets. Suddenly, the unraveling of the UK economy could be glimpsed as could be its risks for global capitalism. Leading the blind, President Joe Biden said of Liz Truss that she had “made a ‘mistake.’”
The old scam’s Achilles’ heel: at some point, corporations and the rich might see too much risk in lending the government money they saved from their cut taxes. The very repetition of the scam over decades might accumulate levels of the UK’s national debt plus conditions in global capitalism that are rendered risky. Lending the UK still more money suddenly made little sense as an investment; other options were better.
Climate Change, Christmas and Capitalism chaotically converged with an epic operational failure at Southwest Airlines that stranded thousands of holiday travelers and airline staff at airports for days. Winter Storm Elliott slammed the continental United States with snow, pelting winds and freezing cold arctic air in what meteorologists call a "bomb cyclone." Air travel was understandably impacted, but the scale of the disruption at Southwest was many times greater than other airlines, accounting for an estimated 90% of the tens of thousands of canceled flights. Central to this travel catastrophe are the deregulation of the airline industry during the late 1970s, during the Carter administration, and the decision by Southwest executives to prioritize their investors over customers and staff.
New York has become the first state in the U.S. to sign a right to repair bill into law. In theory the bill, and others like it, puts the power back into consumers' hands. Instead of paying costly repair fees or having to replace a broken device, people can simply buy a replacement part and fix their own tech. The European Union is looking to put right to repair laws in place, and there is also a push to get something enacted at a federal level in the United States. On paper, New York has beaten everyone to the punch. In reality, the state's new right to repair bill isn't all that it seems — and people aren't happy.
“It’s a genuine concern, I think, for the U.S. government in the sense that because the parent company of TikTok is a Chinese company, the Chinese government is able to insist upon extracting the private data of a lot of TikTok users in this country and also to shape the content of what goes on to TikTok, as well to suit the interests of the Chinese leadership,” Mr. Burns told PBS.
Hannah Garden-Monheit, who was involved in the antitrust executive order, will take over his antitrust policy work. Elizabeth Kelly, who works on digital asset policy for the National Economic Council, will inherit his portfolio of technology policy issues, the White House said. Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, will continue to oversee both areas.
In 2003, Wu coined the phrase “net neutrality” to describe a principle that has since become a major focus for the telecommunications industry. The principle states that internet providers should treat the data traveling through their infrastructure equally and not throttle or charge more for certain types of traffic.
Both alarm and concern were expressed Saturday in response to new reporting about a charitable group with close ties to the U.S. Supreme Court that has been soliciting and accepting donations from corporate interests and far-right activists with cases before the court.
Dozens of independent, social-media-based information projects have emerged after pressure from the Russian government's crackdown, most of them run by journalists or activists who fled the country under threat of imprisonment. In interviews with RFE/RL, they said they were motivated primarily by their consciences and that their main mission is to make sure Russians are not left alone against the massive tide of pro-war state propaganda.
A prominent Tibetan writer who disappeared last year in Chinese custody was arrested for taking part in politically sensitive discussions about Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, Radio Free Asia has learned.
Rongwo Gangkar, author of such popular works as The Knot and An Interview With Gendun Choephel, a collaboration with other writers, was taken into custody in western China’s Qinghai province more than a year ago, a source living in the region said.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will request leave from the high-security Belmarsh Prison to attend Dame Vivienne Westwood's funeral, his wife says.
This will not be an easy transition. For instance, according to a report by workplace research firm Leesman, office-based working has been most popular with one group alone—senior leaders who had their own offices (or private meeting spaces). As a result, in 2023, veteran corporate managers will likely use the economic downturn to do a final attempt of dragging workers back to the office. It’s implausible to imagine that these more traditional managers might be rubbing their hands at the prospect of a short economic slowdown ahead, but using a softer job market as leverage to bring employees back to the office could prove a popular strategy. It might be too late; top talent has already made its mind up. There could be conflict ahead as it resolves itself.
In yet another unusually warm subarctic day last August, members of the à ÂñÃÂñÃÂdlñèñè Kà ³ÃÂÃâ¢Ã First Nation in the Northwest Territories of Canada held a fire-feeding ceremony, drummed, raised their eagle-emblazoned flag, and prepared a celebratory feast for themselves and a group of scientists 30 miles south of where they live in Fort Simpson.
A year that started with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and is ending with famine in Africa, while still spreading death and misery through an enduring pandemic and a deteriorating climate crisis — 2022 has been an apocalyptic warning of the frailty of our planet and the woeful shortcomings of humankind.Beyond the stark statistics of millions of people displaced by war and natural disasters, it has been a 12 months that tragically highlighted our global interconnections and how a confluence of events and trends can bring another year of record levels of hunger.
We need to put it clearly: 2022 was an unyielding disaster. The effects of what happened this year will echo for decades to centuries, but far from there being any lessons learned from it, what the managers of global capitalism are doing is trying to make next year even worse.The most worrying statistic of the year, the one that assures us that what happened in 2022 is not fleeting, is the fact that the record for global-scale greenhouse gas emissions has been broken again. With a 1% increase over 2021, the decrease in emissions that occurred during the pandemic has already been surpassed. The year's increase was led by the burning of more fossil fuels, particularly in the United States and India.The volume of extreme events this year, both meteorological and social, economic, and political, means that most of them have simply been wiped from our collective mind and consciousness, because we effectively have no capacity to process what is happening to us, and the institutions that run global capitalism even less so. The cost of living crisis, intrinsically linked with the gas on which so much of the European economy depends, looks like the crisis that will precipitate a new global recession. That is the decision of governments and central banks. These institutions have decided that prices and inflation will be reduced by rising interest rates, that is, by widespread defaults on loans, evictions, bankruptcies, unemployment and austerity.
The purview of the freedom struggle from British colonial rule in India is as vast as its geography and culture. Many who were part of the freedom struggle did not realise the crucial weight of their ‘simple’ actions.
P Sainath’s The Last Heroes finds stories of the country’s Independence struggle from forests, villages, homemakers and farmers. His book tells stories like that of of Bhavani Mahto, who were left out of mainstream history books.
Of course, those hits weren’t enough to stop Netflix from bleeding subscribers throughout the first half of the year, and their long-term value is debatable in terms of their potential to drive future growth and financial return. “Stranger Things 4” was one of the most expensive TV seasons ever produced, at $30 million per episode, while the rewards of “Dahmer” and “The Watcher” may not balance out the costs of Netflix’s massive overall deal with Murphy.
With 2022 nearing its end, we take a look at the most-read news articles posted on TorrentFreak this year. The Z-Library crackdown dominated the headlines with several articles. At the same time, prominent Spider-Man and House of the Dragon leaks drew a lot of eyeballs, while the 'You Wouldn't Steal' PSA was put in a new perspective.
If I'm good at nothing I can always relate to people that are bad at something.
As I'm writing this it's officially the first hour of 2023! I don't have expectations of this year, I just want to keep improving and reach a lifestyle I can be satisfied with, whilst being more present and more "me," also a lot more of (applied!) philosophy for sure.
At the moment, I'm reorganizing my digital life, so you could say my resolution is to definitely be more "out of date" with things, as to limit the flow of information, to be slower, more present. I've curated my RSS feeds and my bookmarks, I've also bought an nice e-reader, using a 4:3 resolution on my computer and switched to an old-ish (un)smartphone with a custom ROM. I'll get a few words written about the topics I've mentioned in the upcoming days. Even while not being present on social media, being on the Internet is still overwhelming for various reasons, which is why I want to start using Gemini and Gopher again more often, as I found myself using the Corporate Web more than I would have liked.
I can understand the rhetorical concern that someone might think “what way forward do we as leftists even see, if we wanna exclude millions of wrong-hearted backwards-thinkers to this extent? We’re not inviting them to dialogue, we’re not listening to them, we’re breaking up friendships with them. What’s gonna happen in the long term? Is it us vs them until one side is dead?”
I don’t actually see people raising this point a lot on the left; that might mean that people are really short-sighted, close-horizoned on this, but it might also mean that they’ve already figured this out:
I think I'm resigned to the fact that every January 1^st and July 4^th I have to suffer living in a war zone. Unlike past years [1], Bunny and I decided to head outside and at least enjoy the show. The most impressive ones were at the other end of our street—huge ones shot perhaps only a couple hundred feet if that, in the air, with the embers nearly hitting the nearby roofs still lit accompanied by the loud thunderclap a second or two later.
If you run into someone who’s missed the memo on how the phrase “white supremacy” is increasingly used, and I don’t mean anyone on here of course, but if y’all have friends and fam who’s been out of the loop on this, this Wikipedia page is a good overview that you can send them...
And if your blog is already listed but another blog you like is not, please encourage them to get in touch. I don't want to add people without their consent…
It's hard to believe how far PowerPC has fallen. In 2010, chips from a half dozen companies were ubiquitous across the industry - servers, cars, game consoles, networking, defense. By 2015, embedded PPC was a pale ghost of itself, the Power.org consortium was effectively dead, and IBM was pinning the future of the platform on its server-oriented OpenPower initiative.
[...]
C*Core, perhaps the most interesting, still actively designs and sells parts based on the PPC 476 (which they call "C9000") for a range of uses in the PRC domestic market. At one point a pair of new high-end cores, the C9100 and C10000, were roadmapped and then canceled before shipping; my strong suspicion is that the C9100 would have been an enhanced PPC 476 with VMX added, and that the C10000 would have been a member of IBM's A2 family (which saw use in Blue Gene/Q supercomputers and possibly in the PowerEN network processor.) Surprisingly enough, C*Core announced in early 2022 that a new and advanced PPC core, also named C10000 but probably unrelated to the canceled C10000 design, was in a late stage of development.
If you are watching news, you might see that especially recently, Taiwan and China isn't having a great relation. And unfortunately I live in Taiwan. I'm not going into the politics of it, but I'm going to talk about my plains of keeping my surroundings to have access to important information. Thus more likely to survive in case a war breaks out.
First, I'm assuming under war, the opponent won't be following the Geneva convention. It's war crime but it's in the opponent's best interests. Cutting infrastructure access is devastating to civilians. There's nothing I can do for water and gas. But I can do something for internet (not fully, we'll see) and power.
Last night I finished the game "Stray", released earlier this year by BlueTwelve Studio. I played it on the PS4 but it is also available for the PS5 and Windows. I really, really enjoyed it, more than I can remember having enjoyed any other game I've played in a long time (not that play an awful lot of them).
As a *game*, it's fairly lightweight. That sounds like a criticism, but I genuinely don't mean it as one. I'm just trying to calibrate your expectations. It took well under a week to complete, okay, playing a little more often over the holiday period than I would always find time to while working, but by no means did I binge play the thing. It's just relatively short and relatively simple. I never got stuck on any of the puzzle elements for more than ten minutes and I never got frustrated trying and failing for hours to get past what felt like impossibly overpowered enemies. Again, don't take this the wrong way, "Stray" is absolutely not a boring, stuck-on-rails interactive fiction kind of game where you just run between cutscenes. Far from it. I found it engaging and enjoyable to play from start to finish. I just want to make it clear to any hardcore gaming types that if you want something "meaty" with complex strategy that you will find a real challenge to complete, or wildly non-linear, open world freedom that you can explore for months on end, "Stray" is definitely not that.
I just joined a new nook of the fediverse, a funkwhale pod, with a few old tracks previously only available on soundcloud. More things to be added later.
In my last gemlog entry[1] I talked about the gemini server framework I created but hadn't yet made the code available. This wasn't because the code wasn't ready to publish but because I didn't yet know where I wanted to publish it.
Test::UnixCmdWrap, mostly written for testing my unix scripts, tests below whether /bin/echo when given "foo" returns something that matches "foo". (A better test might be qr/^foo$/ or that there is only a single line that only contains "foo"--a bad echo could emit "foofoo" or "foo\nfoo" and pass the following test, but that's not relevant here.)
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.