Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 29/01/2023: GNOME 43.3 Fixes and Lots About Games



  • GNU/Linux

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Leftovers

    • HackadayToroidal Propellers Make Drones Less Annoying

      Despite being integral to aviation for more than a century, propellers have changed remarkably little since the Wright Brothers. A team at MIT’s Lincoln Lab has developed a new propeller shape that significantly reduces the noise associated with drones. [PDF via NewAtlas]

    • The NationMy Nhan, Half Moon, Pokey, Midnight Mass, Navasky
    • HackadayLED Air Vent Gauges Are A Tasteful Mod For The Mazda Miata

      Anyone in the JDM scene can tell you, round air vents are prime real estate for round analog gauges. If you want a gauge but don’t want to block your vent, you could consider building these LED vent gauges from [ktanner] instead.

    • HackadayThe Times They Are A-Chaining

      If [Bob Dylan] had seen [Pgeschwi]’s bike chain clock, it might have influenced the famous song. The clock uses a stepper motor and a bike chain to create a clock that has a decidedly steampunk vibe. Despite the low-tech look, the build uses 3D printing and, of course, a bike chain.

    • Science

      • HackadayAn Atomic Pendulum Clock Accurate Enough For CERN

        That big grandfather clock in the library might be an impressive piece of mechanical ingenuity, and an even better example of fine cabinetry, but we’d expect that the accuracy of a pendulum timepiece would be limited to a sizable fraction of a minute per day. Unless, of course, you work at CERN and built€  “the most accurate pendulum clock on the planet.”

    • Education

      • Pro PublicaJudge Orders Washington State Private Special Education School to Turn Over Records

        A King County judge ruled last week that a private special education school that has been the subject of a recent Seattle Times and ProPublica investigation has to comply with public information laws and release records to the Times.

        The ruling has the potential to shed light on an obscure part of Washington’s special education system, in which school districts send students with disabilities to private programs at taxpayer expense. Few other legal rulings have defined how the state’s public records laws apply to private organizations that assume the functions of government agencies.

    • Hardware

      • HackadaySpeak To The Machine

        If you own a 3D printer, CNC router, or basically anything else that makes coordinated movements with a bunch of stepper motors, chances are good that it speaks G-code. Do you?

      • HackadayCut Your Own Gears With This DIY Machine

        You can buy gears off the shelf, of course, and get accurately machined parts exactly to your chosen specification. However, there’s something rugged and individualist€ about producing your own rotating components. [Maciej Nowak] demonstrates just how to produce your own gears with a homemade cutting tool.

      • HackadayHackaday Podcast 203: Flashlight Fuel Fails, Weird DMA Machines, And A 3D Printed Prosthetic Hand Flex

        This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi meet up virtually to talk about all the hacks that are fit to print. This week’s episode starts off with a discussion about the recently unveiled 2023 Hackaday.io Low-Power Challenge, and how hackers more often than not thrive when forced to work within these sort of narrow parameters. Discussion then continues to adding a virtual core to the RP2040, crowd-sourced device reliability information, and mechanical Soviet space computers. We’ll wrap things up by wondering what could have been had Mattel’s ill-fated ThingMaker 3D printer actually hit the market, and then engage in some wild speculation about the issues plaguing NASA’s latest Moon mission.

      • HackadayReverse-Engineering The Conditional Jump Circuitry In The 8086 Processor

        As simple as a processor’s instruction set may seem, especially in a 1978-era one like the Intel 8086, there is quite a bit going on to go from something like a conditional jump instruction to a set of operations that the processor can perform. For the CISC 8086 CPU this is detailed in a recent article by [Ken Shirriff], which covers exactly how the instructions with their parameters are broken down into micro-instructions using microcode, which allows the appropriate registers and flags to be updated.

      • HackadayA Single-Resistor Radio Transmitter, Thanks To The Power Of Noise

        One of the great things about the Hackaday community is how quickly you find out what you don’t know. That’s not a bad thing, of course; after all, everyone is here to get smarter, right? So let’s work together to get our heads around this paper (PDF) by [Zerina Kapetanovic], [Miguel Morales], and [Joshua R. Smith] from the University of Washington, which purports to construct a low-throughput RF transmitter from little more than a resistor.

      • Hackaday3D-Printed Servo Motor Has 360 Degrees Of Rotation

        Hobby servos are nifty and useful for a wide range of projects. There’s nothing stopping you from building your own servos though, and you can even give them nifty features like 360-degree rotation In fact, that’s exactly what [Aaed Musa] did!

      • HackadayIlluminate Your Benched Things With This Death Stranding Lamp

        [Pinkman] creates a smart RGB table lamp based off of the “Odradek device” robot arm from the video game “Death Stranding”.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • Proprietary

      • TechdirtAI Lawyer Has A Sad: Bans People From Testing Its Lawyering After Being Mocked

        Well, a lot has happened since I first started looking into the “World’s First Robot Lawyer,” from DoNotPay. First, Joshua Browder, DoNotPay’s CEO, reached out to me via direct message (DM) and told me he would get me access to my documents by 2 PM the next day – Tuesday, January 24th – saying that the delay was caused by my account being locked for “inauthentic activity,” a term he did not explain or define. Then, Josh claimed he was going to pull out of the industry entirely, canceling his courtroom stunt and saying he would disable all the legal tools on DoNotPay.com. He said he was doing it because it was a distraction, but the fact that he cited exactly the same two documents that I was waiting to receive seemed like a hell of a coincidence.

    • Security

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • TechdirtSurveillance Tech Firm Sued By Meta For Using Thousands Of Bogus Accounts To Scrape Data

          About a half-decade ago, major social media companies finally did something to prevent their platforms from being used to engage in mass surveillance. Prompted by revelations in public records, Twitter and Facebook began cutting off API access to certain data scrapers that sold their services to government agencies. Twitter blocked both Dataminr and Geofeedia from accessing its “firehose” API. Facebook did the same thing to Geofeedia, denying it access to both its core service and Instagram.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • Environment

      • Common DreamsNo False Solutions! Citizens Rise Up to Resist Dangerous Carbon Pipelines in the Midwest

        Iowa is the battle ground where the fate of world’s largest proposed carbon capture and storage pipeline is being decided. Summit Carbon Solutions intends to build a 2,000-mile pipeline to carry CO2 captured from ethanol plants across five states, to eventually inject and store it underground in North Dakota to supposedly reduce carbon emissions. But who truly stands to gain if the pipeline is built? A November 2022 report from the Oakland Institute, The Great Carbon Boondoggle, unmasked the billion-dollar financial interests and high-level political ties driving the project—despite opposition from a large and diverse coalition of Indigenous groups, farmers, and environmentalists.

    • Finance

      • Common DreamsHow Concentrated Wealth and Corporate Power Nurtures the Greed of Thieves

        What makes for a thieving culture? An overabundance of pickpockets? Tsunamis of burglary and shoplifting?

      • The NationWhy It’s Okay for Progressives to Enjoy Sam Bankman-Fried’s Downfall

        Political fortunes are always waxing and waning, but few roller-coaster rides have been as dizzying as the rapid ascent and precipitous fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, who went in a matter of weeks from being a billionaire savior clasped to the bosom of the Democratic Party establishment to a bankrupt pariah facing criminal charges. On August 4, 2022, Politico swooned over SBF (as he is commonly known) as the Democratic Party’s newest “megadonor.” Only 30 years old, he had already amassed vast personal wealth—estimated in the neighborhood of $26 billion—as a cofounder of the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Starting in 2020, with donations totaling more than $5 million to Joe Biden’s election run, SBF was quickly anointed a donor-class princeling. His stature rose even higher in the 2022 election cycle, when he gave more than $40 million to Democratic campaigns and offshoots. This lavish endowment made SBF second only to George Soros as a party benefactor. Politico breathlessly cited SBF’s promise that in the event of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024, he would kick in upwards of $1 billion to ensure a Democratic victory.1

      • TechdirtHBO Max Jacks Up Prices After Cheapskate Executives Trash Popular Shows, Refuse To Pay Artist Residuals

        We’ve already noted how HBO and Discovery executives keep demonstrating the immense, pointless harm of media megamergers. You’ll recall AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV wound up being a hot mess, forcing AT&T to take a huge loss and run for the exits after laying off more than 50,000 employees.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • ScheerpostFar Right Supreme Court Ready to Gut Unions (Again) as Workers Die on the Job

        By Eve Ottenberg / CounterPunch One of the first dead giveaways for fascism is animosity toward trade unions. That’s not to say all anti-union businesspeople are fascist, but simply that that hatred is a first step on the primrose path to a polity of utterly oppressed wage slaves and strictly limited civil rights, a step […]

      • The Nation“Restore Roe” Is Not the Answer to the Abortion Access Crisis

        As abortion rights supporters commemorated the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade this month, we were inundated with calls to action from elected leaders saying that we need to “restore Roe,” “codify Roe,” and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA).

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • TechdirtBiden Administration Declares War On The Internet, Clears Path For Offensive Hacking Efforts By Federal Agencies

        It’s impossible to be the “aggressor” of the free world. Those words just don’t make sense together. “Defender of the free world,” maybe. If you’re going on the offensive, it seems unlikely you’re there to protect anyone’s freedoms.

      • TechdirtNew Dumb Attack Against Gigi Sohn Tries To Shame Her For Being On The EFF’s Board

        We’ve explained how telecom and media giants have pulled out all the stops trying to block Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC. That has involved a sleazy smear campaign, seeded in the press by non-profits linked to companies like News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, falsely accusing Sohn of being a radical extremist who hates Hispanics, rural Americans, cops, puppies, and freedom.

      • EFFBrazil's Telecom Operators Made Strides and Had Shortcomings in Internet Lab's New Report on User Privacy Practices

        In this seventh annual assessment of Brazil’s providers, InternetLab evaluated six companies, and looked at both their broadband and mobile services. Operators assessed include Oi fixed and mobile broadband; Vivo (Telefónica) fixed and mobile broadband, TIM fixed and mobile broadband,Claro/NET (América Móvil), Brisanet fixed and mobile broadband, and Algar (broadband only). The operators were evaluated in six categories, including providing information about their data protection policies, disclosing guidelines for law enforcement seeking user data, defending user privacy in courts, supporting pro-privacy policies, publishing transparency reports, and notifying users when the government requests their data.

        This year, Oi broke into the top and tied with TIM in receiving the highest scores—each company garnered€  full credit in four out of six categories. Every company in the report received full credit for challenging privacy-abusive legislation and government requests for user data except Algar, which received half credit. While Brisanet improved its overall standing, earning full credit in this category, it received the least amount of credit among its peers, echoing last year’s report.

        With Brazilian providers steadily improving transparency and customer data protection over the years, methodological changes were made in this edition to raise the bar for achieving credit in a few categories. Specifically, assessing companies’ compliance with data protection legislation has been expanded to include more requirements for transparency about data sharing with third parties. New criteria for measuring transparency around customers’ rights,€  data handovers to authorities, and cybersecurity protocols were also added.

    • Monopolies

      • TechdirtThe Latest Antitrust Case Against Google Is, By Far, The Most Serious

        There have been a whole bunch of antitrust lawsuits filed against Google over the last few years. The DOJ filed one in October of 2020 that was pathetically weak. That one seemed like it was Attorney General Bill Barr appeasing then President Trump with what Trump hoped would be an election-boosting attack on “evil woke big tech.” Then, in December of that year, a bunch of states, lead by Texas’ Ken Paxton filed another antitrust lawsuit, which we noted got some fairly basic things completely wrong, but had some potential to be legit depending on what was behind a bunch of redactions. That case has plodded along, and the amended complaint filed last year was much stronger than the original complaint and looked pretty damning to us. Then there was another antitrust lawsuit from a bunch of other states.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 🔤SpellBinding: ACSILOG Wordo: FREON
      • Side Effects

        I've been diagnosed with psoriasis about two years ago. Around the age of 25, I noticed an uncontrollable itch in the lower back, the buttocks and the gluteal fold, especially after exercise or prolonged periods of sitting. It went away after some time, and I assumed it's just some random skin irritation. Around my 26th birthday, I noticed I have some bald spots in my beard, around the chin. My wife's aunt, a well-regarded naturopathy practitioner with clients all over the country, said it looks like alopecia areata and must be related to stress. She gave me some custom-made homeopathic potion, which didn't work, and I decided to finally go to a skin doctor, to solve both problems.

      • Most things are not worth it

        Most things are not worth your attention you give to them!

      • Strange High Pressure Weather 2023-01-29 (Fairbanks, AK, US)

        From what I've read and observed, usually when a high-pressure bubble develops in the winter, then you get clear skies and colder temperatures. But the opposite is the case: we have overcast skies and warm weather, and snow. Also, humidity is quite high: late yesterday evening, about 4pm AKST, we had frost suddenly form on all our parked vehicles. And that appears to be the NOAA forecast continuing for the next few days: warm temps, cloudy skies, and steady snow.

      • Show notes

        This week was a busy week. On monday, the plan was to have a look around St Joseph's Church, but it was closed, so we wandered down Wangfujing and ended up outside the Theatre Museum of Beijing People's Art Theatre. We weren't sure exactly what it was, but it looked interesting, so we headed inside.

        It turns out that it's not just a theatre museum, it is also a theatre. We'd headed into the box office, where the staff offered us a choice of plays to buy tickets for. After we'd established we were looking for a museum, they made some phone calls and we found our way to the museum.

      • back to the internet

        I stumble around with all these static site generators so often, but actually what i want is to be able to write. I don't want to faff with a command line. Things don't work. Installing jekyll breaks. This post is the post i write most often because i'm too caught up in the means to the end than in the end in itself. I think of something that i want to share with my own place on the internet and yet i cannot because my place is a shambles.

      • Trumpet, Illness and a Leap of Faith

        I'm adopting a new belief system, or joining what appears to be the winning side of a paradigm shift. I'm learning the Maggio System. For me, it's a completely new way to play the trumpet, after 23 years.

        As a kid, my trumpet teacher taught me to smile to play higher, but keep the corners of the mouth tight. The lip is a string, he said, and you need a thin string that vibrates freely, to play high. Like many trumpet players, I also learned that I need to press harder to increase the vibration and produce louder and fuller notes, especially when I play high.

      • Hakuho's Retirement Ceremoney
        When a rikishi retires, they will keep to the rules of being a sumo 
        wrestler until they have a retirement ceremony known as a 
        danpatsushiki. This ceremony is often many months after the rikishi 
        has announced their retirement. Well yesterday was Hakuho's, held over 
        a year after his retirement in September 2021.
        
    • Politics

      • Investment Times, Hargreaves Lansdown

        Average house price: €£296,000 Average discount on the asking price: 4% Average first time buyer ager 2021: 32 Average time it takes to sell: 18 weeks Proportion of sellers who've cut the asking price: 25% Average gain in price since the onset of the pandemic: €£69,000 Average first time buyer deposit 2021: €£53,935

      • RE: Are you ok?

        I’m not okay, no. And the world around me isn’t, either. I mean the entire reason I CAN go out and touch grass is because the snow that’s supposed to be covering it, isn’t. In January in the Midwestern US.

        My finances are shit. I’m about a week away from bankruptcy at any given moment.

    • Technical

      • Maintaining Simplicity While Acknowledging FOMO

        As people can see from the “Gemini Helpers” section on my home page, I spent quite some time figuring out the best way to layout and structure my capsule and especially the gemlog.

      • Pavlov's dog receives e-mails

        I'm a natural zero-inboxer. So from the first e-mail box, I am acting what I read afterward as inbox zero rules. All unwanted messages are flagged as spam. All quick matters are dealt with on the spot. The rest things are marked to deal with them at the proper time (invoices, birthday reminders, etc.).

      • Science

        • Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space

          Given the theme of Gemini, I just remembered an old DOS game I played in the early 1990s. It’s called “Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space” and let players re-play the race into space from a US or Soviet point of view. It was released to the public domain years ago, so it’s free to play.

      • Programming

        • Validate email address using Regex in C++

          Qucik one. Something I want to write down before I forget. Validating email addresses have been a constant pain for software developers. The RFC spec for a valid email is complex. No, it's not simply `^\S+@\S+\.\S+$`. For example. The spec prohibits email addresses on TLD. Thus `bob@example` is not valid. There's a very helpful post on the internet that shares how to validate on using regex.

        • Tools: redo (part 6) The yacc/bison problem: one call produces two artifacts

          One of the things any build system must do for me, is the build of hoc, the "Higher Order Calculator" as presented in "Kernighan, Pike --- The Unix Programming Environment" published in 1984. There is this one detail: a call to bison produces two targets from one prerequisite file. bison should not be called twice during the build --- even though in the case of hoc this is an affair of seconds.

        • Tools: redo (part 7) The N artefact problem, a minimal example

          I wanted to have something to simulate a call to a code generator, which will produce a number of artefacts, which in turn are needed to build a (generated) hello world executable. And I wanted to build this thing using redo. How hard can it be?

          This was not overly complicated. The generator comes in at 71 lines of code. This comes in a bit smaller than the 73 lines of code I needed in all .do snippets together.

        • Configure syncthing to sync a single file

          Quick blog entry to remember about something that wasn't as trivial as I thought. I needed to use syncthing to keep a single file in sync (KeePassXC database) without synchronizing the whole directory.

          You have to use mask exclusion feature to make it possible. Put it simple, you need the share to forbid every file, except the one you want to sync.

          This configuration happens in the `.stignore` file in the synchronized directory, but can also be managed from the Web interface.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



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