Windows has evolved over the years, and there is no denying how Windows users are spoilt for options. Multiple OS versions rolled out at regular intervals, making it one of the best operating systems in the market.
Nevertheless, people are on the lookout for open-source options for their systems. Windows, being a closed-source OS, is not suitable for every computer user out there. Alternatively, Linux is an open-source operating system, and this Linux distro list is ideal if you are looking to switch from Windows to Linux.
Rest assured, you won’t have to stay away from your Windows favorites for very long.
Linux has been a wonderful operating system for many people. It’s free, it’s open source, it’s customizable, secure and much more.
We, like many other open source enthusiasts around the world as well, have been trying to convince people to switch to Linux from Windows for many reasons. These reasons should be all known for you by now.
But we have to be honest and admit that Linux is not for everybody. There are some specific cases where staying as an avid Windows user could be better for you than switching to Linux, and we’ll be seeing some of these in today’s article.
Purism is a company founded on the idea of having strict privacy and security features built into its computers. The Librem 14 is a prime example of this philosophy, and its hardware, firmware, and operating system have been designed with a significantly higher level of paranoia than typical computers.
The Librem 14 Linux laptop features multiple physical kill switches, which the company claims absolutely disables the related hardware. There are switches for the webcam and microphone as well as WiFi and Bluetooth. When it comes to the Librem 14 in particular, there are so many additional privacy features that the kill switches really are the least of it, but there are examples of such kill switches in regular laptops that don’t go to such extremes.
All the way back in 2018, HP was already shipping laptops with physical kill switches for the webcam. Their Specter laptops included these switches, so hopefully the chances of a hacked webcam recording you when you don’t want it to are virtually zero.
Kill switches may not always take the form of a traditional sliding switch on the side of a laptop. It’s entirely possible to integrate the kill switch with a physical, built-in camera shutter.
Partaker have created a new fanless mini PC equipped with a wealth of connectivity and capable of supporting both the Microsoft Windows 10 and operating system most Linux distributions depending on your preference. Pricing starts from $423 for the Intel Core i3-8130U processor version although a more affordable Intel Celeron 3865u/3867u/3965u processor version is also available with prices starting from $246. Both are barebone systems meaning that you will need to provide your own memory, storage and operating system, enabling you to tailor the system to your exact requirements.
A Quick overview of AlmaLinux OS 8.5
Proxmox Backup Server is a custom Linux distro that you can run on your server to have it serve as a backup endpoint. It integrates quickly and easily with Proxmox Virtual Environment, making it a great solution to back up your virtual machines and containers. In addition to that, it can also be used to store non-VM backups too, so running Proxmox Virtual Environment is NOT a requirement. In this video, I'll teach you everything you need in order to get started with Proxmox Backup Server.
Today's live stream event will be working on some of my GitLab projects. This may involve some chasing bugs, doing some scripting, spinning up a virtual machine to test things on, etc.
Nextcloud and friends go after Microsoft, modern packaging comes under fire, whether we should be targeting less advanced users, a new old Raspberry Pi OS, KDE Korner, and more.
Called Kuiper Linux, it incorporates Linux device drivers for ADI products, and supports other hardware including Digilent Zedboard, TerASIC DE10-Nano and Digilent Cora
“The reasoning behind creating this distribution is to minimise the barriers to integrating ADI hardware devices into a Linux-based system,” according to the company. “When starting with a generic Linux distribution, the kernel typically would have to be rebuilt with the desired drivers enabled. While this is not difficult for an engineer that is familiar with the process, it can be a daunting task even when everything goes right. ADI Kuiper Linux solves this problem, and includes a host of additional applications, software libraries, and utilities.”
It wasn't that long ago that the very idea that another language besides C would be used in the Linux kernel would have been laughed at. Things have changed. Today, not only is Rust, the high-level system language moving closer to Linux, it's closer than ever with the next "patch series to add support for Rust as a second language to the Linux kernel."
Hi SoC folks,
Please merge the new PMGR driver for 5.17.
This should not have any hard deps with the previous pulls. The MAINTAINERS change already rode along the DT pull, for simplicity.
The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions.
Among the new driver activity for Linux 5.17 is an Apple PMGR driver for controlling the power states. The Apple PMGR block on their SoC has high-level power state controls for SoC devices. At the moment not all features are supported but important step forward for power management with Apple Silicon on Linux.
Last Friday Mesa classic drivers were removed from the mainline code-base and punted off to an "Amber" code branch where they will receive whatever attention moving forward. With that classic Mesa code removed, more code cleaning is now happening on top of the tens of thousands of lines of code already removed. Intel's OpenSWR driver has also now been removed from mainline.
Since the original classic Mesa drivers consisting of Radeon R100/R200, original Nouveau, and Intel i915 / i965 drivers were removed, more code cleaning can now happen on mainline for code that was just sticking around for these old, rather unmaintained drivers.
Along with XWayland touchpad gestures, another shiny feature was merged this week into X.Org Server Git for XWayland: DRM leasing support!
XWayland now has mainline support for the DRM leasing (drm-lease-v1) protocol for allowing X11 clients running through XWayland to lease non-desktop connectors/outputs from the underlying Wayland compositor. This is particularly useful and designed around the needs of virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays.
AWS recently introduced Amazon Linux 2022 in preview form as the latest iteration of their Linux distribution now based on Fedora with various alterations to catering to their customers running it on EC2. Last week were benchmarks looking at Amazon Linux 2022 compared to Amazon Linux 2 and other distributions like CentOS and Ubuntu. In this article we are seeing how Amazon Linux 2022 can compete with Intel's own Clear Linux performance-optimized distribution.
Quickemu is a command line wrapper for QEMU that can be used to quickly create and run highly optimized Linux, macOS, *BSD and Windows desktop virtual machines. It's currently only intended for use on Linux hosts (it also works on WSL), but in the future it might also support macOS hosts.
Instead of expecting an exhaustive list of configuration options, Quickemu tries to automatically "do the right thing" and creates the VM configuration automatically for you. Besides this, the tool also automatically downloads the Linux, macOS or Windows image, so all you have to do is run and install the OS in the virtual machine.
Even though using Quickemu you don't need to configure anything, e.g. it automatically calculates the number of CPU cores and RAM it should allocate to a VM based on the host computer specifications, you can still use custom config options in the .conf file.
What's more, if using the command line is not your thing, there's also a third-party GUI for Quickemu written in Flutter, called Quickgui:
This is one of the most exciting releases in 2021. I wholeheartedly recommend watching the “Every new feature in 6 minutes” video, it provides a pretty good summary of the most important changes.
DVD authoring is the process of creating a DVD video capable of playing on a DVD player. DVD authoring software must conform to the specifications set by the DVD Forum. DVD videos are logically divided into a first-play section, a set of top-level menus (called VMGM for Video Manager Menus) and one or more video title-sets (VTSs). Each title-set is logically divided into menus and titles, meaning the main content of the disc.
DVD authoring is the second step in the process of producing finished DVDs. The first step is the creation of the movie and the second, the authoring, is the creation of artwork, user menus, insertion of chapter points, overdubs/commentaries, setting autoplay and/or repeat options, etc. The final step is the manufacturing (replication) process to mass-produce finished DVDs.
This article showcases the best free and open source DVD authoring tools that run under Linux.
OpenBSD has recently stressed to us the value of key rotation by their use of “Signify” distribution release signatures. We have realized that SSH keys should also rotate, to reduce the risk of powerful keys that fall into the wrong hands which become “the gift that keeps on giving.” There have always been open questions on the retirement of SSH keys. These questions have grown in volume and many are joining the advocacy for SSH certificate authorities.
To “rotate” an SSH key is to replace it, in such a way that it is no longer recognized, requiring removal from the authorized_keys file. SSH rotation is commonly addressed with Ansible, but this leaves many users on smaller systems or lacking privilege without recourse. A more basic and accessible method to migrate SSH keys is sorely lacking.
Below is presented an SSH key rotation script written in nothing more than the POSIX shell.
There is palpable danger in the misuse of such a tool. Many administrators control inaccessible systems that entail massive inconvenience in a loss of control. Demonstrated here are rotation schemes of increasing risk, for any holder of a key to choose, to their own tolerance. Hopefully, I have not made grave mistakes in the design.
The most conservative users of this approach should tread with extreme caution, test carefully, and ensure alternate means of access prior to any deployment. As the author, I have no desire to assume any responsibility for a failed rotation, and its consequences. I especially disavow the “wipe” option below to remove entries from authorized_keys. It is presented as commentary, not working code.
In any case, we foolishly rush in where the more prudent fear to tread.
I recently found that, in order to demonstrate some monitoring software, I needed to replicate a slow network that was being used in a VDI environment. Using the Linux Traffic Control (tc) command, which is found on most modern Linux systems, I was able to easily accomplish this. I used it on a virtual machine (VM), but I have also used it on physical systems with the same results.
In two previous articles, I showed you how I installed Ubuntu on older equipment and on a virtual machine (VM), and then how I installed the VMware Horizon Client on it and was able to use it to connect to a Horizon desktop. I decided to focus on this topic as I have found that, due to the current chip shortage, many people are having to repurpose older systems because they simply cannot find new devices to use to attach to remote desktops.
I logged into my Linux system and was able to launch the Horizon Client and connect to a Horizon desktop without any issues.
So, you have just installed a fresh copy of Linux Mint 20 and are ready to make the most of your new system. How do you move forward?
In this guide, we will highlight some of the useful tools to consider installing which will enhance your user experience in Linux Mint.
Note that this is not a comprehensive list of the tools you need to install, but a collection of some of the most popular tools that will considerably enhance your experience.
Inkscape is an illustration application, and it works in vectors to ensure limitless resolution for your drawings. Vector illustration is different from freehand illustration. If you're used to drawing freehand, vectors may at first feel restrictive, but once you get used to how vectors get created and how you can use them to construct an image, it's a powerful way to build visuals of all sorts. And if you're not much of an illustrator at all, you might just find that the hands-off approach of vectors means you can draw in Inkscape even though you can't draw with pen and paper.
As you can see in the photo in above link, there is /files, with sub-directories such as 'downloads', 'media', etc. Folder /files is no longer a symlink. Up to the current release of EasyOS, /files is a symlink to the actual /files folder at /mnt/wkg/files, that is, on the working-partition.
For a very long time I have considered this file to be deprecated. The time has now come to retire that file completely.
WebVirtCloud the (virtualization web interface for admins and users).
So, WebVirtCloud is a virtualization web interface for admins and users.It can delegate Virtual Machine’s to users. A noVNC viewer presents a full graphical console to the guest domain. KVM is currently the only hypervisor supported.
Pip is a package management system written in Python and is used to install and manage software packages. It connects to an online repository of public packages called the Python Package Index. It can also be configured to connect to other package repositories.
Usually, Pip is automatically installed while working in a virtual environment, and also if you are using Python that has not been modified by the redistributor to remove ensure pip.
Pip is recommended tool for installing Python packages. For you to start using pip, you need to have python installed on your system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Podman on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Podman is a daemon-less container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Podman provides a Docker-compatible command-line front end that can simply alias the Docker CLI.
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 through the step-by-step installation of the Podman container on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Sometimes it's nice when those devices can be consolidated. So, when I discovered a little tool called scrcpy, I was thrilled. Why? Because I could easily mirror my Android phone on my desktop and interact with it without having to always be picking up the device.
Now, there are a couple of caveats to this. I can't unlock my Pixel 6 phone from the desktop (because it requires a fingerprint). Nor can I take calls from the desktop. I can answer calls from the mirrored version of Android, but I have to immediately switch to speakerphone or pick up the device to actually speak to the caller. Unless said caller is spam … then I can just block 'em from within the mirrored window (which I always do).
Transferring hard-earned Pokémon out of the second generation GameBoy game worlds into the ‘Advance Era’ cartridges (and vice versa) has never been officially supported by Nintendo, however [Goppier] has made these illicit trades slightly easier for budding Pokémon trainers by way of a custom PCB and a healthy dose of reverse engineering.
Changes to the data structure between Generation II on the original GameBoy (Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal) and Generation III on the GameBoy Advance (Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen and Emerald) meant that trades between these cartridges was never a possibility – at least not through any legitimate means. In contrast, Pokémon trades are possible between the first and second generation games, as well as from Generation III and beyond, leaving the leap from Gen II to Gen III as an obvious missing link.
One more to liven up the December bridge, and that is that there is nothing more entertaining to pass the time than to play a game and that is partly Linux Play, our premiere native games section for Linux with this, its monthly edition with the best that came out in November. Including construction and survival title and Punk wars, the classic war strategy of Axis & Allies 1942 Online, the RPG hardcore Melvor idle… And a lot more, without forgetting the free title with which we close the list and that this time transfers the television phenomenon of The Squid Game to PC controls under the name of Crab Game. Linux Play!
NeuroNet: Mendax Proxy is an upcoming adventure that the developer claims blends together elements found in the likes of Your Grace, Reigns and Astrologaster into something new.
Set to launch in 2022, NeuroNet sees you take control of an AI charged with managing a city called Catena. You will need to make quick-fire decisions that impact the future and the prosperity of its citizens, with every choice and decision taken having a lasting effect on those you meet and the city's status. Lots of cyberpunk theming going on here with a new trailer giving a look into what to expect you can see below.
The biggest update yet for the award-winning Spiritfarer lands on December 13, with plenty of new content. Spiritfarer is a casual thoughtful experience about being a ferrymaster for the deceased. You build up a boat, explore and care for various spirits before letting them go.
With the new update coming the developer said it is the biggest yet with a new island to explore, there's two new spirits to make friends with and a hospital to bring back from the brink. On top of that there's also some sort of new platforming event and new upgrades for your ferry.
Packing three months worth of improvements since the Plasma Mobile Gear 21.08 update, Plasma Mobile Gear 21.12 is the first release of the software suite to switch its telephony stack from oFono to ModemManager.
As you may know, ModemManager integrates with the NetworkManager network management daemon, which is currently being used by many popular GNU/Linux distributions for network connectivity of all sorts, including but not limited to Wi-Fi, wired and mobile connections, as well as for telephony functions.
Now the 3D cube effect is back thanks to Simon Schneegans (of GNOME Pie/Fly Pie fame). Much like the original Compiz cube it’s inspired by, this marvellous re-make isn’t masquerading under any pretence. The GitHub project description even states: “indulge in nostalgia with useless 3D effects”.
Fancy giving it a go?
This 3D Cube GNOME extension requires GNOME 40 or above. So to use the Desktop Cube GNOME extension on Ubuntu you need to be using Ubuntu 21.10 or later (or a Linux distribution with GNOME 40 or above).
The add-on also requires the default horizontal workspace switcher to be present, so be sure to disable any workspace-altering extensions prior to this one.
he Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on more feature work for the current Fedora 36 cycle as well as Fedora 37 due out toward the end of next year.
Arguably most interesting from the latest batch of approved changes is Fedora 36 establishing ELN-Extras. ELN as "Enterprise Linux Next" continues going strong with the various Fedora / Red Hat / CentOS organizational changes. ELN-Extras now is a new build target similar to ELN but closer in function to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). ELN-Extras will be the target for preparing and maintaining packages that are planned for EPEL N+1 while ELN is still targeting RHEL N+1.
Today I tried to update all packages with sudo dnf --refresh upgrade command in my Fedora 35 desktop. During the package update, I encountered with this issue - error: rpmdb: damaged header #5904 retrieved -- skipping.
I kept getting this error a lot. I couldn't update the Fedora system. After a couple web searches, I found that the RPM database is corrupted for some reason.
If you ever stuck into a situation like mine, you can easily solve the "rpmdb damaged header" error by rebuilding the RPM database as shown in the following steps.
This article shows how you can visualize Apache Kafka Streams with reactive applications using the Dev UI in Quarkus. Quarkus, a Java framework, provides an extension to utilize the Kafka Streams API and also lets you implement stream processing applications based directly on Kafka.
Digital transformation initiatives should be comprehensive and defined by a vision that leads organizations toward more efficient, data-driven, and goal-oriented performance. Digital transformation requires a clear end goal as well as detailed benchmarks to help lead teams in the right direction. The more specific and considered the goals and benchmarks, the more likely the organization is to see progress and ultimate success.
As your organization establishes its digital transformation vision, the most important question may be whether it is goal-oriented or outcome-oriented. While a goal-based perspective considers the big picture and long-term priorities, focusing on outcomes will prioritize steady progress and finding opportunities for incremental improvement on existing processes. The outcomes of that progress – cost savings or reduced workload, for example – help to build buy-in and momentum for the broader transformation.
Regardless of your overall approach, it’s important to use frequent, consistent measurements to ensure that work is moving forward. Regular measurement helps you identify your most successful efforts, which you can then replicate in other areas of the business. It’s also essential to not only review your goals regularly but also refine them. Benchmarks that made sense in January may no longer be ambitious enough after review in July.
IT automation often occurs organically – a sysadmin writing Bash scripts to simplify redundant tasks in their day-to-day job, for example. This kind of incremental automation doesn’t preclude big-picture vision and planning, however.
Automation strategies should be incremental. As recently noted by Red Hat technology evangelist Gordon Haff, incremental progress is part of the attraction. It’s in automation’s DNA.
“This is automation through the lens of traditional system admins and even site reliability engineers in many cases,” Haff says. “Do something manually more than once and automate it so that you don’t have to, ever again.”
This is a perfectly reasonable progression that can also be aligned with a higher-level strategy.
Tech careers are hotter than ever these days, but candidates still need to stand out in this competitive field. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, technology-related jobs will grow much faster than jobs in most other fields over the next decade. So, what does an ideal candidate look like at a startup or a large established corporation?
The IBM i operating system on the AS/400 is a system that runs on PPC for “midrange” systems. I did a bit of reading about it after seeing an AS/400 on ebay for $300, if I had a lot more spare time and energy I might have put in a bid for that if it didn’t look like it had been left out in the rain. It seems that AS/400 is not dead, there are cloud services available, here’s one that provides a VM with 2GM of RAM for “only EUR 251 monthly” [1], wow. I’m not qualified to comment on whether that’s good value, but I think it’s worth noting that a Linux VM running an AMD64 CPU with similar storage and the same RAM can be expected to cost about $10 per month.
Everytime I get to use Red Hat’s Open Shift I think to myself: “I should use OpenShift more”. It is a really great tool not just for high availability clusters but for general software development also. Its Web interface is super intuitive and nice to use, and you can provision all sorts of stuff in minutes. And everything is open source. Its really great.
So naturally I decided to run it locally, especially after the news that starting from version 4.8 you can use it on single node architecture also. I decided to run it virtualized in libvirt so I can destroy it if I no longer needed. Hooray!
The last two years or so I’ve been working with NVIDIA on general distro support including UEFI and ACPI for their Jetson Xavier platforms. Their Xavier platform, except a few quirks, are mostly SystemReady-ES compliant, so having a SBBR compliant firmware goes quite some way to having a widely available, relatively affordable, platform that “just works” for the arm ecosystem. I was very excited to finally have NVIDIA finally release the first version in March this year. This firmware is a standard UEFI firmware based on the open source TianoCore/EDK2 reference firmware, it allows booting in either ACPI or Device-Tree mode and supports all the basic things needed. The ACPI mode is not as fully featured as the Device-Tree mode as yet. In ACPI you get compute (cpu/memory/virt etc), PCIe, USB, network, which is just fine if you’re just looking for standard server or for testing a SystemReady system but there’s no display or accelerator support as yet. The Device-Tree mode is more feature full but both work pretty well with upstream kernels and NVIDIA are improving and upstreaming more things regularly.
For flashing with the latest Fedora releases you’ll want the Linux for Tegra (L4T) R32.6.1 release and the latest UEFI firmware (1.1.2 ATM). The R32.6.1 release fixes issues with python3.9 and later so you’ll need that for Fedora. The following will extract everything into a directory called Linux_for_Tegra. Note the release for Xavier is different to the L4T for the TX1/TX2 series of devices such as the nano.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a framework for building and operating IT automation at scale. The platform includes many of the tools you’ll need to implement automation across your organization, allowing you to simplify and centralize control of your infrastructure.
Ansible Automation Platform includes a visual dashboard, role-based access control (RBAC) and automation tools, including Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
In part 1 of this story we traced the history of Red Hat Product Security from its inception in 2001 through to its shift into the Customer Experience and Engagement (CEE) team in 2013.
But that was just the beginning...security was always important, of course, but it was about to become front-page news.
As we approach the end of 2021, I wanted to thank all of you who have worked so hard this year towards the betterment of the project. This year we've made governance more transparent, welcomed several new SIGs, made big strides in consolidating infrastructure with Fedora where it made sense, and begun to return to in-person events. We could not have done this without the passion and hard work of the project community. Thank you.
Pop!_OS has been making news for some of its recent development decisions.
For instance, they introduced a customized GNOME-based desktop environment experience with COSMIC. Moving forward, they decided to create their desktop environment from scratch based on Rust.
Overall, Pop!_OS has been putting a lot of effort into providing a unique desktop experience keeping all the essential factors in mind like user-friendliness, resource efficiency, and security.
Now, in a tweet, a Pop!_OS user noticed that System76 had replaced the PPA repositories with its self-hosted APT system in Pop!_OS 21.10 beta, instead of Canonical’s launchpad.
And, to that, System76’s Principal Engineer, Jeremy Soller, responded with a confirmation sharing more details.
The developers behind Freespire 8.0 have decided to put strong focus and take full advantage on Google’s services with this release.
For those of you unfamiliar with what Freespire is, let’s start with some history. Freespire started off under the name Lindows twenty years ago as an easy-to-use Linux-based operating system with great Wine integration and easy application support, but then changed to Linspire following a Microsoft lawsuit.
Nowadays, Freespire is a desktop oriented Ubuntu-based Linux distro powered by Xfce. It’s the open source equivalent of Linspire, but containing mostly FOSS components.
Freespire is sponsored by Linspire, a commercial, desktop-oriented Linux distrio based on Debian and Ubuntu and owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC.
A couple of days ago the Freespire development team announced the release of Freespire 8.0, so let’s take a brief look at it.
In the early years of the computer revolution, a machine like the Sol-20 really stood out. Where most hobbyist machines had front panels that bristled with toggle switches and LEDs, the Sol-20 was a sleek, all-in-one that looked like an electric typewriter in a walnut-trimmed box. Unfortunately, it was also quite expensive, so not that many were sold. This makes them hard enough to find 40 years later that building his own reproduction Sol-20 is about the only way for [Michael Gardi] to have one of his own.
Imagination unveiled four RISC-V-based “Catapult” CPU cores: two 32-bit MCU cores and two 64-bit designs that run Linux, including an automotive functional safety core.
The big news on the first day of the RISC-V Summit in San Francisco was the announcement from Imagination Technologies that it was launching four RISC-V core designs under a Catapult brand. This summer, Imagination revealed it was building RISC-V CPU cores, and it has now announced four Catapult CPU designs.
The in-order cores include two 32-bit MCU-like cores and two 64-bit models that run Linux. The UK-based company refers to the four core categories as “dynamic microcontrollers; real-time embedded CPUs; high-performance application CPUs; and functionally safe automotive CPUs.”
In the home theater space most people would tell you the age of optical audio, known officially as TOSLINK, is over. While at one time they were the standard for surround sound systems, the fiber cables with their glowing red tips have now been largely supplanted by the all-in-one capabilities of HDMI on new TVs and audio receivers. But of course, that doesn’t mean all that TOSLINK-compatible hardware that’s in the field simply disappears.
If you’re looking to connect a Raspberry Pi to the optical port of your AV system, [Nick Sayer] has you covered. His “TOSLINK Transceiver Hat” utilizes a WM8804 chip from Cirrus Logic to go from the Pi’s I2S audio output to S/PDIF. From there the signal goes directly into the TOSLINK input and output modules, which have the appropriate fiber optic hardware and drivers built-in. All you have to do from a software standpoint is enable a boot overlay intended for a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) from HiFiBerry.
For a standard that has been in use since the 1980s, MIDI is still one of the most dominant forces on the musical scene even today. It’s fast, flexible, and offers a standard recognized industry-wide over many different types of electronic instruments. Even things which aren’t instruments can be turned into musical devices like the infamous banana keyboard via the magic of MIDI, and it also allows augmentation of standard instruments with other capabilities like this guitar with a MIDI interface built into the pick guard.
[Ezra] is the creator of this unique musical instrument which adds quite a few capabilities to his guitar. The setup is fairly straightforward: twelve wires run to the pick guard which are set up as capacitive sensors and correspond with a note on the chromatic scale. Instead of using touchpads, using wires allows him to bend away the “notes” that he doesn’t need for any particular piece of music. The wires are tied back to an Adafruit Feather 32u4 microcontroller behind the neck of the guitar which also has a few selectors for changing the way that the device creates tones. He can set the interface to emit single notes or continuously play notes, change the style, can change their octave, and plenty of other features as well.
Firefox 96 isn’t a major update, but it’s the first release of the open-source web browser in 2022 and it introduces several performance and security improvements to make your browsing experience more enjoyable, more reliable, and much safer.
For example, the upcoming Firefox release significantly reduces the main thread load, significantly improves noise-suppression and auto-gain-control, slightly improves echo-cancellation, and enforces the Cookie Policy: Same-Site=lax option by default to protect users against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.
RLBox — a new technology that hardens Firefox against potential security vulnerabilities in third-party libraries — is now enabled on all platforms.
We’ve reduced CPU usage on macOS in Firefox and WindowServer during event processing.
You can now move the Picture-in-Picture toggle button to the opposite side of the video. Simply look for the new context menu option Move Picture-in-Picture Toggle to Left (Right) Side.
Firefox 95.0 is now available. With this version the RLBox sandboxing technology is enabled on all platforms, as is the Site Isolation security architecture, which protects against side-channel attacks.
You've collected your leaving card, novelty presents, and perhaps a bottle of wine – what's next on the list for the departing developer? For one, it's a blog rubbishing the technology he's been working on for five years.
That was the choice of Steinar Gunderson, a former principal software engineer at Oracle and member of the MySQL optimiser team.
In an online missive, the engineer, who has now taken up a role in Google's Chrome team, left no reader in doubt of his views on MySQL.
With the caveat that his reasons for leaving were complex, he went on to say: "MySQL is a pretty poor database, and you should strongly consider using Postgres instead.
"Coming to MySQL was like stepping into a parallel universe, where there were lots of people genuinely believing that MySQL was a state-of-the-art product."
New version of MySQL-to-PostgreSQL, a program to migrate MySQL, MariaDB or Percona databases to PostgreSQL, has been released.
check_pgbackrest is designed to monitor pgBackRest backups from Nagios, relying on the status information given by the info command.
It allows to monitor the backups retention and the consistency of the archived WAL segments.
Apache ShardingSphere is an open source distributed database, plus an ecosystem users and developers need for their database to provide a customized and cloud-native experience. In the three years since it joined the Apache Foundation, the ShardingSphere core team has worked hard with the community to create an open source, robust, and distributed database and a supporting ecosystem.
ShardingSphere doesn't quite fit into the usual industry mold of a simple distributed database middleware solution. ShardingSphere recreates the distributed pluggable system, enabling actual user implementation scenarios to thrive and contributing valuable solutions to the community and the database industry.
At the start of November, we revved up a new Month of LibreOffice, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out…
The Rblp team is happy to announce a new version 0.3.12 of Rblpapi which just arrived at CRAN. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).
This is the twelveth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. Changes are detailed below and include both extensions to functionality, actual bug fixes and changes to the package setup. Special thanks goes to Michael Kerber, Yihui Xie and Kai Lin for contributing pull requests!
The LLVM compiler infrastructure supports not only a growing number of CPU architectures but continues to lead when it comes to its support for different accelerators. Back in 2019 NEC was working to upstream their SX-Aurora VE "Vector Engine" Accelerator and now as of this week that target is considered officially supported upstream.
NEC originally launched the SX-Aurora Vector Engine (VE) back in 2018 as a PCI Express accelerator card and supporting up to eight vector processors per server. The NEC SX-Aurora has its own architecture for the "VE" and is backed by HBM2 memory. The current VE processor is rated for 1.53 TB/s of memory bandwidth and a double precision peak performance of 3.07 TFLOPS or 4.91 single precision TFLOPS.
Web pages are built with HTML, which specifies the content of a page. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a separate language which specifies a page’s appearance.
CSS code is made of static rules. Each rule takes one or more selectors and gives specific values to a number of visual properties. Those properties are then applied to the page elements indicated by the selectors.
Here’s our recommended books to learn CSS.
Thinky the Elf was sitting in his office, it had been a closet but he’d been given it as his office after the great baked beans incident. It wasn’t his fault. He was right that feeding the reindeer beans would give them a jet boost but Santa had not been all that happy about it. And his tendency to stare of into space while suddenly having a thought wasn’t great while working on the shop floor meant it was safer to put him out of the way to do some thinking.
Recently he’d been thinking about how to sort children into naughty or nice. This was Santa’s big job all year and Thinky thought that there must be a way to simplify it, he’d spent some time watching videos on YouTube and there was one that gave a brilliant description of Neural Networks (jump to 20 minutes for that bit but it’s an interesting video). As Thinky watched this he couldn’t help thinking about Raku and how the connections between nodes felt like Supplies.
Once again they are facing some criticism for the Linux Foundation's annual report being made on macOS using Adobe software products. They've done that in the past and in public settings pre-pandemic it hasn't been uncommon to find Linux Foundation directors and other stakeholders running Apple MacBook products with macOS.
After last year's blunder with trying to hide the Adobe toolchain and using hilarious stock photos, the Linux Foundation did much better in their 2021 annual report published Dec. 6, 2021.
In 2021 the Linux Foundation (“LF”) emerged from the worst pandemic in a century and embraced new horizons. The collaborative activities in our project communities weathered the COVID-19 crisis exceptionally well, and many communities are now pushing forward with a renewed sense of purpose.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE) is becoming a community project as part of the ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹Cyber Domain Ontology (CDO) project under the Linux Foundation. CASE is an ontology-based specification that supports automated combination and intelligent analysis of cyber-investigation information. CASE concentrates on advancing interoperability and analytics across a broad range of cyber-investigation domains, including digital forensics and incident response (DFIR).
Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users.
Tracked as KAX17, the threat actor ran at its peak more than 900 malicious servers part of the Tor network, which typically tends to hover around a daily total of up to 9,000-10,000.
Some of these servers work as entry points (guards), others as middle relays, and others as exit points from the Tor network.
Their role is to encrypt and anonymize user traffic as it enters and leaves the Tor network, creating a giant mesh of proxy servers that bounce connections between each other and provide the much-needed privacy that Tor users come for.
Servers added to the Tor network typically must have contact information included in their setup, such as an email address, so Tor network administrators and law enforcement can contact server operators in the case of a misconfiguration or file an abuse report.
Since 2017, someone is running about a thousand — 10% of the total — Tor servers in an attempt to deanonymize the network...
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (nss), Debian (roundcube and runc), openSUSE (aaa_base, brotli, clamav, glib-networking, gmp, go1.16, hiredis, kernel, mozilla-nss, nodejs12, nodejs14, openexr, openssh, php7, python-Babel, ruby2.5, speex, wireshark, and xen), Oracle (kernel and nss), Red Hat (kpatch-patch, nss, rpm, and thunderbird), SUSE (brotli, clamav, glib-networking, gmp, kernel, mariadb, mozilla-nss, nodejs12, nodejs14, openssh, php7, python-Babel, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (busybox, mariadb-10.3, mariadb-10.5, python-django, and samba).
All information products included in https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ics are provided "as is" for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within. DHS does not endorse any commercial product or service, referenced in this product or otherwise. Further dissemination of this product is governed by the Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) marking in the header. For more information about TLP, see https://us-cert.cisa.gov/tlp/.
All information products included in https://us-cert.cisa.gov/ics are provided "as is" for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within. DHS does not endorse any commercial product or service, referenced in this product or otherwise. Further dissemination of this product is governed by the Traffic Light Protocol (TLP) marking in the header. For more information about TLP, see https://us-cert.cisa.gov/tlp/.
Since our last report for the month of November, IFF has filed 37 RTI requests and 1 first appeal. Here, we give you an overview of the requests filed and an analysis of the responses we have received from the different public authorities. This report highlights why demanding transparency and accountability from Government authorities is one of the key elements in our fight to protect digital rights.
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The Right to Information (RTI) Act is thus one of the most important tools at the disposal of the public to engage with, and demand transparency and accountability from, the Government. We use the Act to routinely extract information about various ongoing policies and projects that the Government launches. In the month of November, we have filed 37 RTI requests and 1 First Appeal electronically with authorities at the Central level as well as through speed posts with relevant authorities at the States’ levels, concerning the various issues on which we engage with the Government.
Note: The number of RTI requests are calculated from the date of the previous report. While we try to make this a monthly report, some RTI requests from the previous month that were filed after that month's report may be included in the present report.
Spotify offers a little picture that, when scanned, opens almost anything searchable with Spotify. Several lines are centered on the Spotify logo with eight different heights, storing information in octal. Many visual encoding schemes encode some URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) that provides a unique identifier for that specific song, album, or artist when decoded. Since many URIs on Spotify are pretty long (one example being spotifyââ¬â°:show:3NRV0mhZa8xeRT0EyLPaIp which clocks in at 218 bits), some mechanism is needed to compress the URIs down to something more manageable. Enter the media reference, a short sequence encoding a specific URI, generally under 40 bits. The reference is just a lookup in a database that Spotify maintains, so it requires a network connection to resolve. The actual encoding scheme from media reference to the values in the bars is quite complex involving CRC, convolution, and puncturing. The CRC allows the program to check for correct decoding, and the convolution enables the program to have a small number of read errors while still having an accurate result. Puncturing is just removing bits to reduce the numbers encoded, relying on convolution to fill in the holes.
Thanks to the Music Modernization Act passed by US Congress in 2018, all sound recordings prior to 1923 will have their copyrights expire in the US on January 1st.
