Bonum Certa Men Certa

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

IBM: The B Turns From "Business" to "Bailouts" to "Buybacks" ("IBM is the Next Intel")
Trying to shore up the falling share price/stocks while veteran workers and Vice President (with high salaries) are cut off
It's Friday Night Again, So Microsoft is Again Shelving (Under Weekend Lull) Nightmare News for XBox Staff
It did the same thing when the chiefs of XBox got canned
 
IBM CEO Can Become a Billionaire by Laying Off Tens of Thousands of Workers (or Buying Companies Using Borrowed Money, Only to Lay off Thousands in Them)
Like he did Confluent recently
Reminder That Linuxiac is a Slopfarm or Hybrid of Bobby and His LLMs
LLM fetishist that claims to cover Linux
BetaNews is Still Publishing Fake Articles, Sometimes Fake News, or LLM Slop Disguised as 'Journalism'
Slop isn't yet a thing of the past, but hopefully we'll get close to that by the end of this year
Gemini Links 30/05/2026: Writer's Block, Evil GAFAM (Google), and Scepticism of Slop
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2026: Fairphone 6, China’s Rise in Drug Development, Slop Wastes Money Without Delivering Value
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2026: Alarm Over Large Companies Cancelling Slop Contracts, Ozzy Osbourne Resurrection as Slop Draws Ire
Links for the day
Red Hat Exodus or RAs (or PIPs) in 2026 Not Limited to China, IBM is Doing Well at Hiding Layoffs
All we need to know is, does IBM hand out lots of PIPs?
SLAPP Censorship - Part 92 Out of 200: A Spouse Cannot be Turned "On" and "Off" Like a Faucet
Today's part will be very short because we keep the parts shorter in weekends and summer is officially around the corner (June on Monday)
The Register MS Has Just Published Fake Article That Mentions "AI" 23 Times. "Sponsored by Arm." It Does This Every Day.
A lot of the time we see this term everywhere in "the news" simply because slop pushers are paying for it
SQLite Under DDoS Attack by Slop Reports or Fake 'Bugs' (Just Like cURL and Many Other Projects)
Even Linus Torvalds is starting to talk about this
Links 30/05/2026: More GAFAM (Amazon) Mass Layoffs, Peter Schiff Warns of Trillion-Dollar Slop Bubble Waiting to Implode
Links for the day
Slop is Plagiarism
Trillions of dollars down the drain, invested in a dud
Gemini Links 30/05/2026: Rehabilitation and Taming Emacs Cache and Temporary Files
Links for the day
Richard Stallman (RMS) Talks and Secure Transmission of Private Communications in Formats Everybody Can Access With Free Software
Maybe the FSF should step up a bit the campaign to use Free software to communicate with one another
General Consultative Committee (GCC) Discusses Working Conditions of Employees of the European Patent Office (EPO)
On the agenda: Salary Erosion Procedure, Breastfeeding Policy, New Amicale Framework, Public Holidays 2027
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, May 29, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, May 29, 2026
Links 29/05/2026: "Spyware Economy" and Cuba's Energy Crisis
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/05/2026: Rap Rant and LLMs Criticised
Links for the day
Akira Urushibata on Misleading Numbers From Anthropic's Project Glasswing (False Marketing by FUD Tactics)
Posted yesterday and approved a short while ago
Censorship of Information Unflattering to IBM (or GAFAM)
Years ago we gave a platform to a censored Microsoft whistleblower
Silent Layoffs at Microsoft in 2026
Time will tell is there are investigative journalists out there who will quit parroting Microsoft (e.g. false layoff figures) and relying on LLMs controlled by Microsoft to spew out false "facts" for them
SLAPP Censorship - Part 91 Out of 200: Legal Aid in Support of Freedom of the Press and British Women (Attacked by Americans)
bolstered by prominent counsels
Codecs and Software Patents - Part XII - GNU's Web Site Will Soon Have Many Recent Talks by Chief GNUisance Richard Stallman (RMS)
GNU videos being transcoded or converted into AV1
[Video] Richard Stallman's Rapperswil (Switzerland) Talk Online
accessible without proprietary software
Trusting Trust is an Old Issue, Predating Rust and LLM Slop by Over Half a Century
Microsoft Lunduke wants to make a case against Rust and slop (LLMs), but the issues he addresses aren't exactly new or unique
California Should Have Abandoned So-called 'Age‑Verification Laws', Not Make Exemptions (for Now)
This has nothing to do with 1) children 2) safety 3) safety of children
Links 29/05/2026: Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Feels So Broken, American Pope on Defederation
Links for the day
Techrights Does Not Censor Information About IBM, It Platforms and Retains Suppressed Voices From Inside IBM
They don't like it when people criticise the management [...] panic attacks mentioned
Bob (Robert) Cringely Devoted Three Years of His Life Trying to Profit From LLM Slop and Now He Sounds Off, It's Just Not Working and It Can Crash the Economy Soon
"The labs raising money at valuations with too many zeros are happy"
Techrights After About 60,000 Articles in 20 Years
Sites fail if they don't offer anything new or if they wrongly believe that adopting slop to parrot other sites will give them exposure
Organised Plunder or Robbery: GAFAM and Hardware Companies Rely on Media Bribery to Perpetuate False Narratives and to "Drive Sales" (and Drive Prices Upwards)
The price-fixing seems plausible and, if so, we need to demand action
Linux Foundation Destroys the Identity and History of Linux
Groklaw's PJ was thorn on the side of LF sponsors
The Problem of Microsoft Crimes
Opposing crime isn't "hatred"
The Fall of Slop (Even Microsoft Admits There's a Problem)
If Microsoft admits that slop is too expensive and is for "entertainment purposes" because it cannot be relied upon, why would anyone other than the pushers and profiteers still insist that slop bears potential?
Red Hat Will Die Inside a Dying IBM
IBM isn't where Red Hat came to thrive but where it came to die
Very Large Strike at the European Patent Office Today, "Production" Sank a Huge Deal
At this pace, we might be looking at tens of thousands fewer European Patents being granted this year
Gemini Links 29/05/2026: Leadership and Religion, the Board Game (Second Edition)
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 28, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, May 28, 2026
Links 28/05/2026: Pakistan and Afghanistan Are Still Fighting, Iranians Back Online
Links for the day
"LLMs Are Not Much More Than Plagiarism Engines"
the impact of LLMs on communities and software projects
Is Slop Profitable Yet? No.
Everything is a giant minus
Bob (Robert) Cringely Has Just Explained That After 3 Years of Hard Work It Became Apparent LLM Slop is Unfit for Purpose in Courts
Added moments ago to Daily Links
Links 28/05/2026: LibreSSL 4.3.2, "Jeff Bezos Is Afraid Of What Comes Next", Measles Making a Comeback
Links for the day
PCs That Are Made to 'Expire' and 'Secure' Boot Contributing to Planned Obsolescence
People who are responsible for this ought to be held accountable
Evil, Faceless Corporation: Google Steals Money From You If You Don't Purchase an Android Device for MFA
At this point, under the guise of "hey hi" (slop) Google is firing tens of thousands of workers
People Go Back to Basics, Abandon Microsoft's GitHub to Avoid Slop
The media didn't pay any attention to GitHub's de facto chief quitting Microsoft only a few months ago
SLAPP Censorship - Part 90 Out of 200: When Efforts to Silence His Spouse and Also the Wife of a Blogger in Another Continent Only Give More Exposure to Embarrassing Information
The Garrett trial ended in October 2025
IBM - Much Like the European Patent Office (EPO) - Gives the President (Head of Board and CEO) All the Money While Staff Drowns in High Inflation Rates
They're discussing the same sort of thing we often see mentioned in the EPO
"THE REGISTER EXPLAINER" as "Paid-for SPAM" at The Register MS With "AI" 40 Times in the Short Page
What will be left of The Register MS in a few years?
2025: EPO President Campinos Breaks the Cookie Jar, Steals Another Million Euros While His "Brother-in-Law" Does Cocaine at the Office and Staff Prepares Rolling, Indefinite Strikes
any additional month of Campinos in charge of the EPO is a liability not just to the EPO but the EU as well
Gemini Links 28/05/2026: Dumping Microsoft GitHub, Gopher Rabbit Hole
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 27, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 27, 2026