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Links 14/09/2023: Sparky 7.1 and Curl 8.3.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Applications

      • TecMint11 Best Screen Recorders For Linux in 2023

        Recording your desktop session is a common and good practice for a variety of purposes, such as playing a hard level of a game, creating a video tutorial, or writing a how-to article. Screen recording software can help you accomplish all of these tasks.

        In this review guide, we shall cover some of the best screen recording and live video streaming software that you can find for your Linux desktop.

      • TecMint6 Best Email Clients for Linux Systems

        Email, an enduring method of communication, remains a fundamental way to share information; however, the preference has shifted from web applications to email clients over the years

        An email client is software that allows users to manage their inbox, send, receive, and organize messages directly from a desktop or mobile phone.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • University of TorontoA user program doing intense IO can manifest as high system CPU time

        Recently, our IMAP server had unusually high CPU usage and was increasingly close to saturating its CPU. When I investigated with 'top' it was easy to see the culprit processes, but when I checked what they were doing with the strace command, they were all busy madly doing IO, in fact processing recursive IMAP LIST commands by walking around in the filesystem. Processes that intensely do IO like this normally wind up in "iowait", not in active CPU usage (whether user or system CPU usage). Except here these processes were, using huge amounts of system CPU time.

      • David Buchanans32 Unix Clock

        It's pretty simple. The clock face has 256 "ticks" (annotated in hexadecimal), and four dials, each moving exactly 256 times slower than the previous. The longest and fastest moving dial moves at one tick per second, which means it takes very approximately 4 minutes to do a full revolution (4:16, actually). The next hand takes roughly 18 hours, the next roughly 6 months, and the smallest hand takes ~136 years - or exactly 2^32 seconds.

      • Jan Piet MensOn the importance of logging

        In spite of configuring debug logging and log forwarding from AWX, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. My assumption was the body of the post was missing something. I looked at the source code of the api view controller and still didn’t figure it out and basically gave up after an hour. Actual webhooks posted from Gitea worked (when configured in AWX as Github), but my simple curl invocation wouldn’t. (Remind me to rave about how I like Gitea and Forgejo.)

      • idroot

        • ID RootHow To Install Apache Maven on Debian 12

          In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Maven on Debian 12. Apache Maven is an essential tool for Java developers, providing a robust and efficient way to manage project dependencies, build, and deploy applications.

        • ID RootHow To Install PlayOnLinux on Debian 12

          In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Debian 12. PlayOnLinux is a remarkable graphical front-end for Wine, a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on Linux systems.

        • ID RootHow To Install WezTerm on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

          In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WezTerm on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In the world of Linux, having a powerful and versatile terminal emulator can greatly enhance your workflow and productivity. One such standout terminal emulator is WezTerm. It offers a modern and feature-rich environment for your command-line tasks.

        • ID RootWhat is a Maven Repository?

          In the dynamic realm of software development, effective project management and streamlined dependency management are crucial for successful outcomes. This comprehensive guide aims to unravel the intricate world of Maven Repositories, a fundamental component in modern software development.

      • HowTo ForgeHow to Install BookWyrm on a Debian 12 server

        BookWyrm is an open-source federated social network for book readers. It acts as an ad-free Goodreads alternative. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install BookWyrm on a Debian 12 server.

    • Games

      • GamingOnLinuxHeroic Games Launcher 2.9.2 Hotfix #2 is live

        It's time again to upgrade your install of the Heroic Games Launcher which helps you install games from Epic, GOG, Amazon and more on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

      • GamingOnLinuxHere's some alternatives to the Unity game engine

        In the wake of Unity setting everything on fire with their new revenue model for developers, here's a reminder on what other game engines and tech is out there for developers to look into.

      • GamingOnLinuxSteam Deck not picking up your SD Card? Check for the latest update

        After Valve recently launched a stable Steam Client update for desktop and Steam Deck, along with the recent SteamOS 3.4.10 release - SD Cards became a bit problematic.

      • GamingOnLinuxFanatical's Killer Bundle 27 has 20 great games included

        Another chance for you to fill up your Steam library ensuring there's never a dull moment - Fanatical launched the Killer Bundle 27 with 20 games included. This is not a build it yourself bundle either, all games are included in it for one purchase.

      • GamingOnLinuxVKDoom is a ZDoom-based source port with a focus on Vulkan

        Well this is pretty fun to see! The ZDoom / GZDoom family is expanding with VKDoom, a new source-port that has a focus on expanded Vulkan support and modern rendering. Now it's worth noting that GZDoom already supports Vulkan, but VKDoom has a focus on making the Vulkan support much more modern with advanced rendering features for modern GPUs.

      • GamingOnLinuxHumble Bundle has a big Cities: Skylines bundle

        Fancy city-building but don't want to pay a big sum for all the extra content? Humble Bundle have a new Cities: Skylines Bundle live now with the base game and major expansions. This game has Native Linux support and is rated Steam Deck Playable.

      • GamingOnLinuxGOG has a big Indie Festival Sale on

        Stock up on some fantastic indie games, as GOG have launched their Indie Festival which is live now until September 25th, 10 PM UTC. While there's been numerous big releases over the last year, don't forget about all the really great indie games that often do things the bigger lot won't.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • [Repeat] HaikuOSHaiku Activity & Contract Report, August 2023

      This report covers hrev57184 through hrev57256.

      It’s worth noting: the main Haiku CI is currently offline as the developer who was hosting the build machine moved to a location with much slower internet. A new build machine and home for the CI has already been selected, but isn’t fully online yet, so the nightly builds are a bit behind at the moment.

    • Daniel XuAppImage explosions

      To the user, an appimage is a binary that looks and feels like a statically linked binary. In fact, you’d have a hard time discovering a binary is an appimage at all.

      At its core, an appimage is a squashfs image that contains an application and all of its dependencies. Prepended to the binary is a statically linked runtime that: [...]

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • University of TorontoMy (new) simple system to open URLs on my desktop from remote Linux machines

        I have a long standing setup where I read my email on one of our Linux login servers, instead of on my desktop. Email can include URLs that I want to open, so I need some way of opening these URLs in my desktop browser. For a long time this has been through one of two options; either I forwarded X over SSH and used Firefox's X-based remote control, or I was operating purely with text and selected the URLs in the terminal to use with my tools to open URLs in various browsers.

      • Daniel Stenbergcurl 8.3.0

        The number of security fixes is adjusted due to the recently rejected CVE-2023-32001

    • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Linux Links4 Best Free and Open Source Office Suites

        Microsoft Office still dominates market share of office suites. Businesses have often rejected free Office alternatives. However, things are changing. With the cost of a price subscription plan for Microsoft Office, the average home user or small business will welcome a free alternative. Fortunately, there are some truly excellent open source alternatives available for Linux (and other operating systems).

        Our recommendations are captured in our legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.

    • Education

      • Cendyne NagaSoftware Security Fur All

        The security industry is not too accessible. It focuses on common details, rather than fundamental problems and solutions. We can do better by building communities with free knowledge and compassion, rather than exclude newcomers with paywalled content and competitive hazing. Fundamentals like separating code and data must be top of mind as new technologies like large language models get deployed. Bad cryptography is everywhere and we hope to make cryptographic knowledge more accessible.

        This talk summary is part of my DEF CON 31 series. The talks this year have sufficient depth to be shared independently and are separated for easier consumption.

    • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

      • Open Data

        • RlangUtilizing R for Reproducible Open Science Research in Tucson, Arizona

          In this meetup, we will replicate open science research. This meetup is the second event of the Reproducing Open Research Series. We chose the paper “Learning, Inside and Out: Prior Linguistic Knowledge and Learning Environment Impact Word Learning in Bilingual Individuals” within the linguistics domain and features experimental data.

    • Programming/Development

      • Raspberry PiColour-based object tracking with Raspberry Pi

        She worked with Shafat Insha and Midhat Munira to develop a smart colour-based object tracking system, using OpenCV and Raspberry Pi 3. The autonomous Smart Object Tracking Robot can detect and track objects of a specific colour in real time.

      • Daniel LemireTranscoding Unicode strings at crazy speeds with AVX-512

        In software, we store strings of text as arrays of bytes in memory using one of the Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF), the most popular being UTF-8 and UTF-16. Windows, Java, C# and other systems common languages and systems default on UTF-16, whereas other systems and most of the web relies on UTF-8. There are benefits to both formats and we are not going to adopt one over the other any time soon. It means that we must constantly convert our strings from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and back.

      • ButtondownIf you work on a big language, I'd like to talk

        Directed graphs are ubiquitous, so it's incredibly weird to me that not a single mainstream programming language has a built-in directed graph type. And it's even weirder that not a single mainstream programming language has them in the standard library.

      • Juha-Matti SantalaPull requests are great

        I have recently been seeing an increasing amount of chatter about and against pull requests. These especially often come from the crowd that advocates for pair or mob/ensemble programming. I saw a great one in Mastodon the other week but failed to save it so I can’t reference it. In essence, that toot asked: What legit benefit is there for pull requests for teams that trust each other?

        And I’ve seen this sentiment quite often: some people consider that pull requests’ main or even only function is to prevent malicious or bad code from entering a codebase from untrusted sources. And in many distributed open source projects that is one of its functions. However, I’d argue that focusing solely on the trust issue and then dismissing pull requests for teams that trust each other, is short-sighted.

      • Matt RickardThe New Economics of Generating Code

        "The next is replace -- replace feature after feature after feature of the older Cerner system with a new Cerner system, new Millennium, which we are not coding in Java like we usually do. The new Cerner system is being generated -- as you know, generative AI generates code. We have an application generator called APEX. And we are not writing code for the new Cerner; we are generating that code in APEX, and it's going extremely well."

        This is a quote from Larry Ellison in Oracle’s latest earnings call. It should be taken with a grain of salt — Ellison is a master of narrative, and he’s addressing an audience of investors. Whether APEX works as well as he claims or if developers are simply using GitHub Copilot, the fact remains: this is the future of a good chunk of software development.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • New York TimesHow to Navigate Apple’s Shift From Lightning to USB-C

        Allow me to unpack that. To comply with recent European regulations, the iPhone 15, unveiled Tuesday, will abandon the Lightning connector that has been the method for charging iPhones for 11 years. In its place will be a different oval-shaped connector: USB-C.



Recent Techrights' Posts

They Say That People Are Afraid of or Worried About "Hey Hi", But the Worriers Should be the Fools Who Invested in It
At the end of the day nobody should worry more than those who invested their money in this bubble
Throwing Away "Old" Computers (Mozilla and Other Climate Deniers)
Mozilla is not leftist
 
Xubuntu Site Compromised
Let's hope it is not a security breach
Links 10/09/2025: Retaliation at Facebook and Microsoft Reveals Almost 100 Security Holes
Links for the day
Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Annihilation of Self, The Future Eaters, and Leaving Academia
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Harassment evidence: franceinfo's Clara Lainé report on Ubisoft prosecution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 10/09/2025: Microsoft Layoffs in "RTO" Clothing and Windows TCO, GitHub TCO
Links for the day
Blaming Everything on China
TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
"crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Hospital and Large Feeds
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 09, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 09, 2025
The Bluewashing of Red Hat is Being Completed, Many Staff Understand They'll be Made Redundant
Jim AllowHurst (Whitehurst) is meanwhile promoting Microsoft's agenda from within other companies
statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 10% in Bulgaria This Month
What can Microsoft still do to stop GNU/Linux?
Dark Patterns
Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
To "Facebook prison" you are bound
Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
Links 09/09/2025: Microsoft Mass Layoffs Again and "RTO" (Timed Like It Serves as a Distraction From the Mass Layoffs)
Links for the day
RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
"if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
Much Ado About Nonsense
Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
Current Events in France
It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
Further Media Cut-downs
media reporting about the media being cut
Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
Links for the day
Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
Links for the day
Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
The company is all about sound bites
Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
"Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
The state of the Web isn't just bad; it's utterly terrible
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 08, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
A very large third one expected next week
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
the "upgrade treadmill"
Rumour: Second Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in September to Commence Third Week of September
That basically answers questions like, "Any specific date or time of the month?"
If Your Machine Still Has "Secure Boot" Enabled, Then Microsoft Has a de Facto Kill Switch (Even If Your Machine Doesn't Have Windows and Never Had Windows)
It is not incorrect to call UEFI 'secure boot' a "kill switch"
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Reality, ROOPHLOCH 2025, and Writing Another Gemini Client
Links for the day
Updating Firmware is Not the Solution But Only Additional Risk, Disable "Secure Boot" Today
firmware blobs are buggy, secret, impossible to audit, and barely tested
Microsoft Tim's DevClass (Part of The Register MS/Situation Publishing) is Full of Slop
Looking at many sites that are full of slop images is becoming an eye sore and hallmark of text too likely generated by LLMs or 'assisted' (tainted) by them
Microsoft Trying to Fake Demand for Slop. At What Cost?
That's a giant demotion and broken promises
Reddit is Corporate Propaganda
To make matters worse, Reddit ousted many original moderators
Jeff Geerling Shocked to Discover Many Metrics in YouTube Are Fake (His Audience Turns Out to be Much Smaller)
Maybe self-host all videos, don't rely on Google's "FOMO" cheating (addiction based on false assumptions)
Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant and Kryptonite/Garlic to Vampires
Transparency (sometimes described by words like "Sunlight" or "Truth") is paramount
The Register MS Uses Slop in Articles About Slop
we are fairly certain it's slop or CG based on other people's work
Visiting a Web Page or a Public URL Should be Safe, Predictable, and Benign
It's probably too late to "fix" the Web
The Register MS (Situation Publishing) is Paid to Spread Mindless Hype for the "Hey Hi" Ponzi Scheme and That's a Serious Problem
"Sponsored by Zoom."
Links 08/09/2025: Burger King Cracked, Cox v. Sony Analysed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Socialist Computer Museum and GAFAM/ByteDance/TikTok-Dominated Net
Links for the day
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Links for the day
EPO Workers Point Out that the EPO is Destroying the Planet Under the Guise of "Hey Hi" (It Also Grants Many Invalid Patents Illegally
On 12 March and 16 June 2025, staff representation met with the administration in the Local Occupational Health, Safety and Ergonomics Committee (LOHSEC) in Munich
Turn Off Microsoft's Restricted Boot ("Secure Boot")
We're still running a series on this issue
Social Control Media Sites Have Become Bot Farms (Not Limited to LLMs and Automation)
linkedin.com was nothing but trouble and losses for Microsoft
Deep in Debt With the Magnitude of Losses Quickly Growing, Microsoft "Open" "Hey Hi" Now Uses Broadcom for Vapourware, Pretending It'll Do OK Next Year
At some stage it'll collapse
You Can Tell Microsoft is in Trouble When Its Own Fans and Staff Blast it
"Microsoft sinks billions into chasing artificial intelligence fads to hype up its share price."
Multiple Undersea Cable Cuts and We're Still OK
Microsoft customers experience problems
Lawyers Who Think They Are Online Assassins Don't Deserve a Licence to Operate
they've become a laughing stock in their "sector"
Microsoft Windows Fell to 3.9% "Market Share" in Bahamas
Based on statCounter
How the European Union (EU) Fell Out of Love With Free/Libre Software
Lots of bribery
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 07, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 07, 2025