01.21.23

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Video ☛ Linux’s Odd World Of Virtual Reality Window Managers – Invidious

    Have you ever though a normal Linux desktop was boring, well lucky for you there are all these weird virtual reality window managers that have been popping up over the years

  • Video ☛ SMEM – Swap Memory Usage – Invidious

  • Video ☛ MX Linux – Advanced Hardware Support | Welcome To “OZ”

    A video covering the most recent release of MX Linux with the “Advanced Hardware Support” or ahs (OZ) kernel. It makes using the Debian based system easier to use on newer hardware.

  • Video ☛ KDE 5.27 beta, AI lawsuits and Linux Metaverse: Linux and Open Source News – Invidious

  • Video ☛ Quickly Switching to Linux – Invidious

  • Video ☛ This Python Logic Trick Is AMAZING #python #coding #programming – Invidious

  • Video ☛ EVERYONE needs to know this Python unpacking trick #python #coding #programming – Invidious

  • Video ☛ MdMxOS Neon DR460nized : The Next-Generation Linux Distro Is Here With STUNNING FEATURES ( FOR 2023)

  • Video ☛ First Freeze OF Debian 12 “bookworm”

    In This Video We Are Looking At Debian 12 (codenamed “Bookworm”) is expected to be released later this year and as such the first of several code/package freezes has begun.

  • Video ☛ Expirion Cinnamon 230112 Expirion Linux is based on Debian 11 Stable

    In This Video We Are Looking At Expirion 230112, Expirion is based on Debian 11 Stable with a XanMod Kernel, and uses the Refracta Installer

  • Video ☛ First Look: MX Linux 21.3

    In This Video We Are Looking At The first update of the 21.3 series of MX Linux , which was born as a collaboration attempt between AntiX and the MEPIS Linux community, built on the Debian “stable” version and using Xfce as the default desktop environment, has been released. information is not available.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux mailing lists ☛ Linux 6.2-rc5

    Ok, so I thought we were back to normal after the winter holidays at
    rc4. Now, a week later, I think I was mistaken - we have fairly
    sizable rc5, so I suspect there was still pent up testing and fixes
    from people being off.
    
    Anyway, I am expecting to do an rc8 this release regardless, just
    because we effectively had a lost week or two in the early rc's, so a
    sizable rc5 doesn't really worry me. I do hope we're done with the
    release candidates growing, though.
    
    Anyway, there's a bit of everything in rc5: various driver updates
    (gpu, rdma, networking, tty, usb..), some architecture updates (mostly
    loongarch and arm64), some filesystem updates, some core networking,
    and tooling.
    
    The shortlog is appended as usual. Nothing particularly odd stands out to me.
    
    Please do test,
    
                       Linus
    

• Applications

  • Johnnycanencrypt 0.13.0 released

    I just now released v0.13.0 of my johnnycanencrypt project. It is a Python module written in Rust, which provides OpenPGP functionality including allows usage of Yubikey 4/5 as smartcards. From 0.12.0 it is now licensed as LGPL-3.0-or-later.

  • Make Use Of ☛ Calcure Is the Terminal-Based Calendar and Task Manager You Never Knew You Needed

    Organize your life and make sure you’re always ready for important events by installing Calcure, a terminal-based calendar and task manager for Linux.

    Keeping track of what you’re supposed to be doing, and when, is a challenge which has dogged humanity since the dawn of civilization.

    If pen and paper is too archaic for you, and you don’t want to use a managed online calendar to organize your virtual book of days, Calcure is the terminal-based calendar and task manager you’ve been looking for.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install HPLIP on Fedora 37 – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HPLIP on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing) is a set of open-source drivers and utilities developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) that enables Linux users to use HP printers and scanners. The package includes a variety of tools, including a printer and scanner driver, a utility for configuring printers and scanners, and a tool for managing and monitoring print jobs.

    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 HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) drivers on a Fedora 37.

  • DebugPoint ☛ How to Auto Hide Default Dock in Ubuntu

    Here’s how you can autohide the default dock in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and other versions.

    Being the most popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu is used by millions and installed on different hardware with varying screen sizes. That ranges from 13-inch to much bigger screen laptops.

    Also, if you have a multiple-display setup, then the GNOME desktop adapts itself to the new screen.

    However, for smaller screen sizes, adequate screen space is limited. This affects the developers and artists the most, where IDEs and apps don’t get much space. And the dock is fixed at the left, eating away precious screen space.

  • Make Use Of ☛ How to View Saved Wi-Fi Passwords on Linux

    Wi-Fi hotspots are everywhere, in our homes, public buildings, and cafes. This makes Wi-Fi one of the most common ways to connect to the internet from your computer.

    Did you know that on Linux, you can easily check all the Wi-Fi networks that you have previously connected to? You can even view saved Wi-Fi passwords on Linux using nmcli.

  • XDA ☛ How to install and use Firefox on a Chromebook

    Chromebooks might be powered by Google Chrome, but that doesn’t mean you always have to use the Chrome web browser. If your Chromebook or ChromeOS tablet is powerful enough, you can actually install other web browsers and expand your horizons a bit, just like you can on a Windows laptop.

  • The New Stack ☛ Kubernetes Needs to Take a Lesson from Portainer on Ease-of-Use – The New Stack

    Not two years ago, I could easily deploy a Kubernetes application and make it available outside of the cluster. That same process no longer works. To be more specific, I seriously struggle with getting Kubernetes applications and services to be accessible from a LAN.

    It shouldn’t be this hard.

    Seriously.

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ This Extension Can Save & Restore All Open App Windows in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

      I don’t remember when’s the last time auto-save session feature works correctly in my Ubuntu machine. While, enabling hibernation could be the best choice now to save and restore all open app windows in Ubuntu.

      But for those who really like the auto-save session feature, here’s an Gnome Shell extension can do the job partially.

      It’s ‘Another Window Session Manager’, an extension which adds an indicator icon on top panel system tray area. It provides an option to manually save all open windows, then allows to restore either manually via menu button or automatically at login.

    • FOSSLinux ☛ The 15 Best Linux Mint Cinnamon Themes | FOSS Linux

      Linux mint is a great community-driven Linux distro based on Ubuntu. It is a well-known OS among newbies due to its easy-to-use nature. Despite having Debian at its core, the user interface is beautiful and modern. This is primarily because Cinnamon’s default desktop environment can be used on Linux Mint and other Linux-based distros. Because of its conservative design model, Cinnamon is nearly identical to GNOME 2 and Xfce.

      But since its introduction to the market in 2011, it has gotten massive coverage. For a fact, the active developer community of Cinnamon is day-in and day out coming up with active Cinnamon themes for many users. Themes work as modifies to offer your desktop a gorgeous and eye-catching look. Besides changing your PC’s look and feel, themes, be they fully-fledged or icon themes, refresh your experience with your Linux Mint system. There are already several available themes for nearly all the distros that give great versatility and style to the system. Today, we will look at some of the finest Linux Mint themes.

      But before we jump into the list of themes, there’s one or two to keep in mind. There are two approaches by which you can customize your system – with suitable wallpapers and by modifying the system’s look. If you are looking for mind-blowing wallpapers, you have to find them on your own as they precisely depend on the user’s mind. Here, we will be covering a handful of the system-modifying themes.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Adriaan de Groot ☛ Ubuntu Summit and Calamares | [bobulate]

    Time flies when you’re swamped. The Ubuntu Summit 2022 was months ago already. Jon has written about it. Heather has written about it. Me, I got COVID there (in Prague, not necessarily at the conference) and won’t write about that, but do want to be enthusiastic about it. Better very late than never.

    [...]

    Meeting some of my online friends – people like Simon Quigley of Lubuntu with whom I’ve worked for years around Calamares, but never met before. And now we have, and drank beer together (or was it wine? it was certainly later in the evening). So there was a bit of talk about Calamares development and how it’s slowed down in community mode. More on that another time.

    Meeting up with people from Akademy – Mauro, Luca, Aleix, Harald, Jon, Pedro – was keen as well, although it did drive home that between events I get very little KDE coding done.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Arduino ☛ Sci-fi film prop doubles as a DJ helmet | Arduino Blog

    Take a moment to think about some of your favorite electronic music DJs. How many of them wear some sort of a helmet or mask? You can probably think of at least a few. For whatever reason, DJs like their privacy. Daniel Aagentah was tasked with making a sci-fi film prop helmet and decided to use it for DJing, too. The result is this cool sci-fi-themed, audio-reactive headpiece that incorporates an Arduino-controlled display.

    Aagentah is part of a team working on an indie sci-fi movie being filmed in Manchester, England. He was assigned the job of constructing a helmet for a character costume and this is the result. He made the helmet out of every cosplayer’s favorite material: EVA foam sheet. That is a lightweight and strong material that is easy to cut and form. He carefully worked that EVA foam into a helmet shape, then gave it a coat of silver paint that we all know is synonymous with the future. The final touch was a seven-segment display mounted where the eyes should be.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Tom’s Guide ☛ 11 hidden Android features you should be using | Tom’s Guide

  • Android Authority ☛ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

  • Android Police ☛ OnePlus 10T vs. Nord N20 5G: Which phone is right for you?

  • The Sun ☛ People are only just realizing there’s an Android keyboard trick that is ‘much kinder’ to your thumbs | The US Sun

  • Notebook Check ☛ Realme GT Neo 5 240W version will launch with Android 13 and 16GB of RAM – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Android Police ☛ Twitter now shows ‘For you’ feed by default to Android users

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.1.9 on CRAN: New Upstream

    RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

    This release updates the underlying simdjson library to version 3.0.1, settles on C++17 as the language standard, exports a worker function for direct C(++) access, and polishes a few small things around the package and tests.

  • ZDNet ☛ C++ programming language and safety: Here’s where it goes next | ZDNET

    There’s been a shift towards ‘memory safe’ languages. So, can updates to C++ help it catch up in the eyes of developers?

  • Tagebuch eines Interplanetaren Botschafters: Diff modulo base, a CLI tool to assist with incremental code reviews

    One of the challenges of reviewing a lot of code is that many reviews require multiple iterations. I really don’t want to do a full review from scratch on the second and subsequent rounds. I need to be able to see what has changed since last time.

    I happen to work on projects that care about having a useful Git history. This means that authors of (without loss of generality) pull requests use amend and rebase to change commits and force-push the result. I would like to see the only the changes they made since my last review pass. Especially when the author also rebased onto a new version of the main branch, existing code review tools tend to break down.

    Git has a little-known built-in subcommand, git range-diff, which I had been using for a while. It’s pretty cool, really: It takes two ranges of commits, old and new, matches old and new commits, and then shows how they changed. The rather huge problem is that its output is a diff of diffs. Trying to make sense of those quickly becomes headache-inducing.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppFastFloat 0.0.4 on CRAN: New Upstream

    A new release of RcppFastFloat arrived on CRAN yesterday. The package wraps fast_float, another nice library by Daniel Lemire. For details, see the arXiv paper showing that one can convert character representations of ‘numbers’ into floating point at rates at or exceeding one gigabyte per second.

    This release updates the underlying fast_float library version. Special thanks to Daniel Lemire for quickly accomodating a parsing use case we had encode as a test, namely with various whitespace codes. The default in fast_float, as in C++17, is to be more narrow but we enable the wider use case via two #define statements.

Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ Alter Egos: Some Are Great, Others Are Chris Gaines

  Despite the clearly successful legwork done by figures like Bruce Wayne, Tupac Shakur, Sacha Baron Cohen, David Bowie, Will Oldham, and Eminem, I would like to inform you that not every alter ego is going to be a success. In fact, many alter egos just don’t connect, even though the whole point of having an alter ego is to give yourself a persona to do things that you, yourself would not be able to easily pull off. Call it “The Chris Gaines Rule”: For every successful alter ego that’s out there, there’s at least four or five others that should have have never left the station. Today’s Tedium is going to talk about alter egos good, bad, and ugly—including, but not limited to, Chris Gaines.

• Science

  • EarthSky ☛ EarthSky | Korean moon probe grabs spectacular images

    The Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) has released a set of black-and-white images of the Earth and moon that rival the work of legendary nature photographer Ansel Adams. The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter – also known as KPLO or Danuri (moon enjoy) – captured the soon-to-be-iconic pictures during an approach to the moon, and later as it orbited 100 km (62 miles) above the lunar surface.

    South Korea launched Danuri on August 5, 2022, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster. The probe entered lunar orbit on December 26, 2022. This month (January 2023), it’s due to begin studying the moon for a mission that should last at least a year.

    According to KARI’s highly-detailed mission summary, the probe’s set of six instruments and cameras will study the makeup of the moon, as well as provide high-definition imagery of permanently shadowed areas near the moon’s poles.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Video ☛ Excess deaths in young adults, 2022 data

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • A dog’s breakfast

    This week we had a two-day workshop. The location was just an hour

    away, so I only needed a single night to stay in the hotel. It was

    great though, the workshop was held in a castle that was also a hotel.

    We however stayed overnight not on the castle grounds, but in the

    guest house. For a single night it was OK.

• Politics

  • Reading in 2021 and 2022

    Over this year I’ve read a variety of books. I’ve absorbed some, dredged through others, and read the first few pages of a couple. Now that the year is over, I’d like to share some thoughts about the books I’ve read, along with some ideas for books to read in 2022.

• Technical

  • Why GrapheneOS Rox

    GrapheneOS is an independent Android distribution based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) but hardened in multiple ways. Other independent Android distributions, like LineageOS, are also based on AOSP, but GrapheneOS takes it further so that it can be my daily driver on my phone.

  • smolZINE: Issue 37

  • Orphans of Netscape, part II

  • Orphans of Netscape, part II

    I started writing my recent post, “Orphans of Netscape”, with lots of positive energy and conviction, and the first part of it came together really quickly and easily. But I found it difficult to derive a good conclusion from the comparison between the orphans of Apollo and Netscape which didn’t come across as sounding a lot more defeatist than the whole thing felt in my head. I wrestled with the draft for days without really making a lot of progress on this front. I became frustrated with how long it was taking to get right (there’s not supposed to be any sense of urgency on the small internet, of course, but I had – and still have – lots of posts that have developed unwritten in my head during my recent quiet year or so that I’m now keen to get down “on paper”, so I supplied my own internally generated urgency). So in the end I tacked what I clearly felt at time were way too many caveats and softening paragraphs on the end and posted it. I didn’t really feel good about it and even wondered if I might take it down the next day (something I can’t remember ever doing before). Instead I got quite a bit of positive feedback about it via email, so decided maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.

  • Reading in 2022 and 2023

    First of all, hello! I haven’t written on this gemlog in a while, but I’m happy to start writing out some of my thoughts again. I’ve been occasionally reading Antenna but otherwise, as you can tell, I’ve been silent.

    I stopped gemlogging partially because I noticed a tendency beginning to form where I posted partially-developed thoughts that ended up being rhetorical word games rather than useful discussions. I have delisted several of them. Over this next year, I hope to think about things more deeply and write accordingly. I wish to write that which is useful to others, not merely that which makes me feel relieved to express. Going forward, I’m going to try to be less afraid of sharing wrong ideas, but more intellectually honest and willing to correct myself in the meantime.

  • Announcements

    • Lagrange v1.15: Preferences Redesign, Tab Reordering

      v1.15 addresses some long-standing issues and feature requests, mainly related to tab management and multi-window behavior. The Preferences dialog has been redesigned and it now opens as a detached window. Tabs can be reordered and there is a new Window menu for desktop PC platforms.