Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 09/08/2022: Kali Linux 2022.3 and Alpine 3.13.12/3.14.8/3.15.6/3.16.2



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • 9to5LinuxSystem76 Refreshes Its Affordable Galago Pro Linux Laptop with Alder Lake CPUs

        Galago Pro remains System76’s most affordable Linux-powered laptop featuring a gorgeous 14.1-inch Full HD (1920×1080) matte display, optional NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics, up to 64GB dual-channel DDR4 3200MHz RAM, up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage, multitouch clickpad, backlit chiclet keyboard, light and durable chassis, 53 Wh Li-Ion battery, and the latest Pop!_OS Linux or Ubuntu operating system.

      • LiliputingSystem76 Galago Pro 14 inch Linux laptop now available with 12th-gen Intel chips for $999 and up
        The System76 Galago Pro is a thin and light laptop that weighs about 3.2 pounds, measures 0.72 inches thick, and ships with a choice of Linux distributions including Ubuntu or Pop!_OS.

        It’s also the latest laptop from Linux PC company System76 to feature 12th-gen Intel Core processors. The new model is now available for $999 and up.

      • LiliputingSystem76 Galago Pro 14 inch Linux laptop now available with 12th-gen Intel chips for $999 and up - Liliputing

        The System76 Galago Pro is a thin and light laptop that weighs about 3.2 pounds, measures 0.72 inches thick, and ships with a choice of Linux distributions including Ubuntu or Pop!_OS.

        It’s also the latest laptop from Linux PC company System76 to feature 12th-gen Intel Core processors. The new model is now available for $999 and up.

      • System76 Galago Pro Linux Laptop: Price & Specification [Ed: Probably a copy-paster]

        System76 Galago Pro Linux Laptop: Price & Specification

        System76 affordable Galago Pro Linux Laptop is now available. The refreshed Galago Pro is powered by 12th Gen Intel “Alder Lake” processors (Intel i5-1240P and Intel i7-1260P). Let’s have a look into the full tech specs of the Galago Pro.

      • Make Use Of6 Important Factors to Consider When Choosing a Linux Distro

         Linux is a modern operating system that shares many similarities with Unix. Linux is fast, reliable, and very stable. It is also easy to use and is suitable for both home and professional usage.

        With hundreds of Linux distros available online, it is not always easy to find the perfect distro that fits your requirements and needs. Here are some factors that you should consider when choosing a Linux distribution for yourself.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • Linux Links9 Best Free and Open Source Linux Renderers

         There are three main computational techniques used by rendering software: scanline, raytracing, and radiosity. Rendering is a CPU-intensive process, so some software also makes use of the Graphics processing unit (GPU) to speed up the process. Images can be rendered by a single computer or with a network of computers that work on a different part of the image.

        There is a large selection of open source rendering software to download. To provide an insight into the quality that is available, we have compiled a list of our favorite rendering software. We give our strongest recommendation to Blender, LuxCoreRender, Cycles and appleseed. But there’s lots of other good open source software available if they don’t meet your specific requirements.

      • Linux Links14 Best Free and Open Source Remote Display Software

         This article also examines the best free Linux terminal servers available. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client (also known as an X terminal) handling input and output. With a Linux Terminal Server and thin-clients, a business can remove many of the costs associated with maintenance, support, and licensing of countless desktop PCs.

        To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 14 impressive remote desktop software. We cover remote desktop applications which use the RDP and VNC protocols. We have also included software which employs the SSH protocol which together with X11 forwarding allows encryption of remote X windows traffic.

      • DebugPointTop 10 Great Ubuntu Apps for Everyone [Part 4]

        This article gives you the top 10 great Ubuntu apps in 2022 (part 4) that you may use for your daily workflow.

      • MedevelBeeRef: A Floating Open-source Simple Reference Image Viewer for Artists

        BeeRef is published under GNU General Public License v3.0.

      • MedevelFityk is A Multi-platform Open-source Data-analysis Package for Scientists

        Fityk [fi:tik] is an open-source program for data processing and nonlinear curve fitting, that works for Windows, Linux and macOS.

      • MedevelButterfly: Note-taking with a Style

        Butterfly is a note app where your ideas come first. You can paint, add texts and export them easily on every device.

        It is written in Flutter and the Dart programming language, and it comes with dozens of features and colors options especially for creative people who like to take handwritten notes.

        [...]

        The project is released under the AGPL-3.0-only License.

      • MedevelUsermode FTP Server is an Open-source Multi-platform FTP Server

        Access your files directly with many file browsers' builtin FTP support: Windows File Explorer, Thunar, Gnome Files, Dolphin and many more!

      • MedevelTrilium Notes is An Open-source Personal Knowledge base App and Evernote Alternative

        Trilium Notes is a free open-source hierarchical note-taking application with focus on building large personal knowledge bases.

        It comes packed with dozens of useful future to aid all kind of users. As its primary goal to build a knowledge base, it can be used by creative writers, to write novels, librarians, developers and and editors.

      • PostgreSQLPostgreSQL: pgFormatter v5.3 released

        Version 5.3 of pgFormatter, a free and reliable tool used to format SQL and PLPGSQL code, has been officially released and is publicly available for download. A demonstration site is available online at http://sqlformat.darold.net/

        pgFormatter is the most advanced SQL and PlPgsql code formatter and beautifier dedicated to PostgreSQL. It is provided as a CLI or a CGI program.

      • GNUa2ps 4.14.91 released [alpha]
        This alpha release marks the return of GNU a2ps to the Translation Project.
        
        

        Some other minor issues have also been fixed.

        Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature: https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/a2ps/a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz.sig

        Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

        Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

        36c2514304132eb2eb8921252145ced28f209182 a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz 1LQ+pPTsYhMbt09CdSMrTaMP55VIi0MP7oaa+zDvRG0 a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz

        The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.

        Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

        gpg --verify a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz.sig

        The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

        pub rsa2048 2013-12-11 [SC] 2409 3F01 6FFE 8602 EF44 9BB8 4C8E F3DA 3FD3 7230 uid Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> uid keybase.io/rrt <rrt@keybase.io>

        If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

        gpg --locate-external-key rrt@sc3d.org

        gpg --recv-keys 4C8EF3DA3FD37230

        wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=a2ps&download=1' | gpg --import -

        As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU keyring:

        wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify a2ps-4.14.91.tar.gz.sig

        This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.69 Automake 1.16.1 Gnulib v0.1-5347-gc0c72120f0

        NEWS

        * Noteworthy changes in release 4.14.91 (2022-08-08) [alpha] * Build: - Re-add a2ps to the Translation Project, and remove po files from git. * Bug fixes: - Remove reference to @COM_distill@ variable in a2ps_cfg.in. * Documentation: - Format --help output consistently to 80 columns. - Fix a couple of message typos.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • VituxHow to Install Debian on Virtual Box

        The document will show you the step-by-step installation process of Debian 10 on Virtual Box. Virtual box is greatly recommended for IT users, students, and even professionals who have to work on multiple operating systems at once. Instead of installing different operating systems on your machine according to work requirements which involve complex setup process, frequent restarting of PC, data overwriting, and infected disk space. Therefore it is highly recommended to have Virtual Box Software in your machines that enables to you create as many VMs as you want according to work/task specifications.

        Debian 10 is Linux operating system distribution, which is free and open-source software. Also, Debian 10 has further extended versions of it.

      • dwaves.deGNU Linux vm dedicated server webserver – how to automate bash terminal automate wordpress updates (core, plugins, themes) and enhance security
      • Petros KoutoupisRapidDisk Tutorial – Episode 3: The Daemon and the API – Random [Tech] Stuff

        RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives. Access those drives locally or export those volumes across an NVMe Target network.

      • ID RootHow To Install ExifTool on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ExifTool on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ExifTool is a free program built on Perl for reading, modifying, and manipulating images and audio or video file formats. The software also offers robust features that allow you not only to view but also edit metadata, including the date taken or original resolution info about videography footage.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the ExifTool on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • MakeTech EasierHow to Install And Configure DaVinci Resolve In Linux - Make Tech Easier

        If you are a content creator, especially a video editor, then you have heard about DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve is known for its color correction capabilities in large film studios. It also comes with a powerful video, audio editor and a composer like adobe after effects. That makes it a go-to creative software among Linux creators. Unlike other creative software, DaVinci Resolve supports the Linux platform. Therefore you don’t need any windows API translation layer like wine to install DaVinci Resolve.

      • Ubuntu HandbookHow to Restore Alphabetical Order of Show Applications App Grid in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

        Messed up the app list in ‘Show Applications’ menu in Ubuntu 22.04? It’s easy to restore the original alphabetical ordering.

        In Gnome, user can either click the 3×3 9-dots icon on dock or press Super (Windows logo key) + A on keyboard to open the ‘Start Menu’.

      • H2S MediaSolve:€ Legacy trusted.gpg keyring - APT Key ‘apt-key’ Deprecation on Ubuntu€ 

        Solve APT key warning on Ubuntu 22.04 or in other latest versions: Key is stored in legacy trusted.gpg keyring (/etc/apt/trusted.gpg), see the DEPRECATION section in apt-key(8) for details.

        If we want to install some software on Ubuntu Linux that is not present in the official repository, then we need to use the repository or binary of that tool. However, the repository method is preferable because of future updates. To add any third-party repository we also need to add a new GPG key / public key issued by the developers of the packages we want to install. It helps the system to confirm the packages we are receiving are the same as those published by its developers. Otherwise, the system would not have a relationship of trust – the installation of packages from untrusted sources would be rejected

      • Install Blender 3.2.2 On Ubuntu / Linux Mint

        This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install blender 3.2.2 On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Pop_OS 22.04, and Linux Mint 20.3.

      • Continuous Delivery with Octopus and Kubernetes - Octopus Deploy

        This training series provides a step by step walk-through building multi-environment deployments with Octopus and Kubernetes.

      • HowTo GeekHow to Type Less and Work Faster in the Linux Terminal

        Using Linux means—sooner or later—using the command line. But typing commands in the terminal window can be slow and repetitive. These keyboard tips will turbo-charge your terminal window experience.

      • Linux Made SimpleHow to run Windows Applications on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to run Windows Applications on a Chromebook. We will be looking at 5 different methods. Please take note that not all Windows applications work with them all, but many do.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Nate GrahamNext week in KDE: mentioning fewer microscopic bugfixes – Adventures in Linux and KDE

          I’ve started to worry that mentioning really small weird bugfixes week after week gives the impression that KDE software is buggier than it really is. The truth is that all responsibly maintained projects are constantly landing these kinds of maintenance bugfixes, so it’s probably a bit misleading to be talking about them all the time.

          Instead, I’m going to try only mentioning the big, consequential bugfixes: the ones for bugs marked HI or VHI priority, that have with multiple duplicates, that are really significant in effect, etc. Hopefully this should improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the blog posts.

        • GSOC Update 2

          Hello and welcome to my second GSOC update! I think I these last few weeks have been really productive in fixing some issues with my code and getting some direction in the next steps for my project. If you remember last time we had just figured out how to get the SVG option to appear in Krita so we can start testing out saving a test SVG file. We were getting a few errors actually trying to use that option and save the file but those should be all fixed now.

          Firstly we were getting a Permission denied: Krita is not allowed to read the file. error when actually trying to save with SVG. At first I thought this was due to how I was trying to use the svgWriter class. The svgWriter assumes that we are only getting to export one layer (the current one) so I thought by trying to save in the context of the whole file, that was tripping it up somehow. After doing some investigation and tracing all the steps in the code this didn’t seem to be the issue.

        • GSoC Mid-term evaluation: Week 8

          The major purpose of the mid-term evaluation during the Google Summer of Code program is to ensure the contributor’s progress for their committed timeline for both coding and communication.

          My progress till mid-term

          During the coding period, I started with “ten’s complement,” and after a thorough discussion among the mentors, we decided to divide the activity into three sub-activities. The details for all the sub-activities can be found here. At the time of mid-term evaluation, all these three sub-activities were functional, and the improvements were left, but the basic functioning and the dataset were present. Although, I was one week late to my timeline, which I proposed. I planned to complete “ten’s complement” by mid-term, but nonetheless, the activities are towards their completion now. I’ve added the to-do for this activity under the task. (here) But one thing I realized, and my mentors told me too, is that the small things require more time. One of the reasons why I was unable to complete the activity before mid-term was the incorrect estimation of time and work. And initially, the college was going to open a month later, but it started in the month of July itself. Due to this, I couldn’t provide much time for a few days.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • ZDNetMX Linux has an old-school look and feel. Here's why it's so popular | ZDNet

      MX Linux is currently listed as the most downloaded Linux distribution on Distrowatch. This might come as a surprise to a lot of people, especially given it ranks above Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, and Ubuntu. For those who've never heard of MX Linux, it's based on Debian's stable branch as a cooperative venture between antiX and what's left of the MEPIS Linux communities. With Xfce as its default desktop (you can also download spins with either the KDE Plasma or Fluxbox desktops), it's a user-friendly, fast operating system that is a great option for those new to Linux and even those with years of skill under their belt.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • GNU Projects

      • Cirugía Solidaria chooses GNU Health | MeanMicio

        The GNU Health community keeps growing, and that makes us very proud! This time, the Spanish non-profit organization Cirugía Solidaria has chosen GNU Health as their Hospital and Lab Management system.

        Cirugía Solidaria was born in 2000 by a team of surgeons, anesthetists and nurses from “Virgen de la Arrixaca Hospital”, in Murcia, Spain, with the goal to provide medical assistance and to perform surgeries to underprivileged population and those in risk of social exclusion. Currently, Cirugía Solidaria counts with a multi-disciplinary team of health professionals around Spain that just made its 20th anniversary of cooperation.

      • Taler2022-9: "Zero-Knowledge Age Restriction for GNU Taler"

        We propose a design for a privacy-friendly method of age restriction in e-commerce that is aligned with the principle of subsidiarity. The design is presented as an extension of a privacy-friendly payment protocol with a zero-knowledge scheme that cryprographically augments coins for this purpose. Our scheme enables buyers to prove to be of sufficient age for a particular transaction without disclosing it. Our modification preserves the privacy and security properties of the payment system such as the anonymity of minors as buyers as well as unlinkability of transactions. We show how our scheme can be instantiated with ECDSA as well with a variant of EdDSA, respectively, and how it can be integrated with the GNU Taler payment system. We provide formal proofs and implementation of our proposal. Key performance measurements for various CPU architectures and implementations are presented.

    • Programming/Development

      • The Register UKGitLab won't slay those zombie repos, but a problem remains ● The Register

        GitLab is chewing on life's gristle. The problem, we hear, is that deadbeat freeloaders are sucking up its hosting lifeforce. The company's repo hive is clogged with zombie projects, untouched for years but still plugged into life support. It's costing us a million bucks a year, sighed GiLab's spreadsheet wranglers, and for what?

        $1 million is certainly a lot to be wasting on a fossil collection, and is a full quarter of the company's total hosting costs. Who wouldn't want to spend it on something more fun? One answer is to cut 'em loose, which was what GitLab was expected to do from September. In an attempt to forestall the inevitable tsunami of techiness, the GitLabbers set very generous rules – a project has to be untouched for a year, there'll be plenty of warning, and the merest brush of a code fairy's gossamer wings will reset the clock.

        But that was never going to quell the outrage. Some of this is entitlement bias, but a lot of it is because of the harm done to open source when stuff just vanishes from places where it was once assured a safe harbor. Last week, just hours after The Reg exclusively broke the story, the org made a quick U-turn.

      • Descriptors are hard

        Over the weekend, I asked on twitter if people would be interested in a rant about descriptor sets. As of the writing of this post, it has 46 likes so I’ll count that as a yes.

        I kind-of hate descriptor sets…

        Well, not descriptor sets per se. More descriptor set layouts. The fundamental problem, I think, was that we too closely tied memory layout to the shader interface. The Vulkan model works ok if your objective is to implement GL on top of Vulkan. You want 32 textures, 16 images, 24 UBOs, etc. and everything in your engine fits into those limits. As long as they’re always separate bindings in the shader, it works fine. It also works fine if you attempt to implement HLSL SM6.6 bindless on top of it. Have one giant descriptor set with all resources ever in giant arrays and pass indices into the shader somehow as part of the material.

        The moment you want to use different binding interfaces in different shaders (pretty common if artists author shaders), things start to get painful. If you want to avoid excess descriptor set switching, you need multiple pipelines with different interfaces to use the same set. This makes the already painful situation with pipelines worse. Now you need to know the binding interfaces of all pipelines that are going to be used together so you can build the combined descriptor set layout and you need to know that before you can compile ANY pipelines. We tried to solve this a bit with multiple descriptor sets and pipeline layout compatibility which is supposed to let you mix-and-match a bit. It’s probably good enough for VS/FS mixing but not for mixing whole materials.

      • Barry KaulerPicscale package removed

        I experimented with an older version of bacon in OE, picscale compiled ok, but there is a segmentation fault when try to use it.

      • MakeTech EasierRegular Expressions Cheatsheet - Make Tech Easier

        If you work with text, you’ll appreciate how useful regular expressions are. These are small characters of text which allow you to create elaborate rules on what a word looks like. These rules can either be as simple as matching a single letter in a document or something complex such as looking for every word that begins in “a” and “c” but ends in “ism.”

      • Python

        • Venture BeatNNAISENSE announces release of EvoTorch, a rare open-source evolutionary algorithm library | VentureBeat

          EvoTorch is built on top of the open-source PyTorch machine learning library.

          Timothy Atkinson, research scientist at NNAISENSE, explained that EvoTorch has several components, including a collection of evolutionary algorithms and logging capabilities so a data scientist can track machine learning experiments in real time.

          “The main idea is that you can take anything that you have built in PyTorch and immediately optimize it with EvoTorch,” Atkinson said.

          NNAISENSE has also integrated EvoTorch with the open-source Ray framework that is used for scaling Python and AI applications. Atkinson said that if a data scientist builds a problem as a PyTorch function to optimize on EvoTorch, it’s possible to scale to thousands of CPUs and hundreds of GPUs.

          “We’ve built EvoTorch in a very sensible way on top of the Ray library, which means that it can scale as much as you can afford,” Atkinson said.

      • Java

        • Eric HameleersSlackware: OpenJDK11 has been added to my repository

          For ages, I have had Java 7 and Java 8 packages in my repository. I compile these versions of Java from the OpenJDK sources and using the icedtea framework.

          People have been asking about more recent versions of Java, in particular Java 11 and Java 17 are required more and more by software projects. So far, I have been hesitant, since icedtea still only supports Java 7 and 8. Writing a new build script from scratch is a lot of work and Java gives little reward.

          Eventually, I have decided to build Java 11 packages regardless, main reason being that LibreOffice seems to need it to enable functionality in Base. Therefore expect the next update of my LibreOffice packages to have been compiled against OpenJDK11.

          Note that I will not be creating separate JRE (Java Runtime Environment) packages. The JDK (Java Development Kit) is what you’ll get from me. It contains everything you need to compile and run Java programs. Don’t forget to logout and login again after installing openjdk11, since it installs a profile script which is sourced during login.

        • Ubuntu PitTop 10 Best Java Frameworks For Web Development in 2022

          Java is one of the most used object-oriented languages due to its versatile usability and easy implementations. Many corporate IT sectors rely heavily on Java, and Java developers are in high demand. So you can only imagine how popular Java frameworks are as they make working with Java faster and easier in real-world scenarios.

          That said, you might not even notice that Java plays a significant role in the software you regularly use, such as Spotify, Twitter, Opera Mini, and much more. Hence, if you intend to set up a career in Java-related web development, learning the proper usage of popular Java web frameworks and staying up-to-date with the most exciting ones is a must.

        • OpenSource.comA guide to JVM interpretation and compilation | Opensource.com

          Java is a platform-independent language. Programs are converted to bytecode after compilation. This bytecode gets converted to machine code at runtime. An interpreter emulates the execution of bytecode instructions for the abstract machine on a specific physical machine. Just-in-time (JIT) compilation happens at some point during execution, and ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation happens during build time.

          This article explains when an interpreter comes into play and when JIT and AOT will occur. I also discuss the trade-offs between JIT and AOT.

      • Rust

    • Standards/Consortia

      • The Next PlatformCXL Borgs IBM’s OpenCAPI, Weaves Memory Fabrics With 3.0 Spec [Ed: IBM-sponsored puff pieces without disclosure from the author or the publisher]

        When the CXL protocol is running in I/O mode – what is called CXL.io – it is essentially just the same as the PCI-Express peripheral protocol for I/O devices. The CXL.cache and CXL.memory protocols add caching and memory addressing atop the PCI-Express transport, and run at about half the latency of the PCI-Express protocol. To put some numbers on this, as we did back in September 2021 when talking to Intel, the CXL protocol specification requires that a snoop response on a snoop command when a cache line is missed has to be under 50 nanoseconds, pin to pin, and for memory reads, pin to pin, latency has to be under 80 nanoseconds. By contrast, a local DDR4 memory access one a CPU socket is around 80 nanoseconds, and a NUMA access to far memory in an adjacent CPU socket is around 135 nanoseconds in a typical X86 server.

        With the CXL 3.0 protocol running atop the PCI-Express 6.0 transport, the bandwidth is being doubled on all three types of drivers without any increase in latency. That bandwidth increase, to 256 GB/sec across x16 lanes (including both directions) is thanks to the 256 byte flow control unit, or flit, fixed packet size (which is larger than the 64 byte packet used in the PCI-Express 5.0 transport) and the PAM-4 pulsed amplitude modulation encoding that doubles up the bits per signal on the PCI-Express transport. The PCI-Express protocol uses a combination of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and three-way forward error correction (FEC) algorithms to protect the data being transported across the wire, which is a better method than was employed with prior PCI-Express protocols and hence why PCI-Express 6.0 and therefore CXL 3.0 will have much better performance for memory devices.

  • Leftovers

    • Peter 'CzP' CzanikDiscogs | Random thoughts of Peter 'CzP' Czanik

      Last week I became a Discogs user. Why? I have been browsing the site for years to find information on albums. Recently I also needed a solution to create an easy to access database of my CD/DVD collection. Right now I am not interested in the marketplace function of Discogs, but that might change in the long term :-)

      [...]

      For many years when I searched for an album, the first few hits were from YouTube and Wikipedia. Nowadays the first few results are often from Discogs. While Wikipedia sometimes provides some interesting background information about the creation of an album, Discogs has more structured and uniform information about albums. It also lists the many variants of the same album. Even for artists where I thought that I have all albums in my collection (like Mike Oldfield), I can find albums I have never heard about before. It is also easy to see who a given artist was working with and using TIDAL I can instantly listen to some really interesting (or awful…) music right away.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Bunnie HuangHydroponics: Growing an Appreciation for Plants €« bunnie's blog

        I once heard a saying – “Don’t feel pity on plants because they can’t move. Feel pity on us, because we have to”. I really didn’t have an appreciation for what this meant until the COVID pandemic hit, which restricted my movement for a couple of years, and I decided to spend some of my new-found time at home learning how to raise plants in my little flat in central Singapore. The result is a small hydroponics system that now lines the sunny windows of my place, yielding fresh herbs weekly that I incorporate into my dishes.

        For me, hydroponics really drove home how remarkable plants are: from a bin containing nothing but water and salts, a fully-formed plant emerges. No vitamins, amino acids, or other nutrients – just add sunlight, and the plant produces everything it needs starting from a single, tiny seed. The seed encodes every gene it needs to survive and reproduce – our basil plant, for example, is tetraploid, which means it has four copies of every gene. Perhaps this somewhat explains the adaptability of plant clones – it is almost as if every branch on our basil bush has a separate character, each one trying a different angle at survival. Some branches would grow large and leafy, others small and dense, and if you propagate by a cutting, the resulting plant would inherit the character of the cutting. Thus, a lone plant should not be mistaken as lonely: it needs not a mate to create diverse offspring. Every tetraploid cell contains the genetic diversity of two diploids (whereas a human is one diploid), allowing it to adapt without need of sex or seedlings.

    • Linux Foundation

      • Linux Foundation's Site/BlogDelta 2.0 – The Foundation of your Data Lakehouse is Open [Ed: It says "join our community [sic] today through many forums, including [PROPRIETARY] GitHub, [PROPRIETARY] Slack, [PROPRIETARY] Twitter, [PROPRIETARY] LinkedIn, [PROPRIETARY] YouTube, and [PROPRIETARY] Google Groups." Openwashing.]

        There have been a lot of new features released in the last year between Delta Lake 1.0, 1.2, and now 2.0. This blog will review a few of these specific features that are going to have a large impact on your workload.

      • Linux Foundation's Site/BlogLFX’22 Mentorship Experience with Open Horizon [Ed: LF "Open Horizon" is proprietary Microsoft GitHub, i.e. the opposite of what it's called. 'Linux' Foundation in recent years has been a force of occupation against the Linux community. Corporate occupation for Microsoft et al.]
    • Security

      • LWNSecurity updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (gnutls28 and unzip), Fedora (dovecot and net-snmp), Red Hat (kernel-rt and vim), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-good1.0).

      • PR NewswireSandfly Security Expands Leadership Team, Formally Launches Commercial Operations with Release 4.0 of Agentless Linux Security
      • Bleeping ComputerNew GwisinLocker ransomware encrypts Windows and Linux ESXi servers [Ed: With Linux you need some way in; with Windows there are back doors, so there's no parity here, just spin from a Microsoft site]

        A new ransomware family called 'GwisinLocker' targets South Korean healthcare, industrial, and pharmaceutical companies with Windows and Linux encryptors, including support for encrypting VMware ESXi servers and virtual machines.

      • Cloud-Native Collision: Security and Cloud Center of Excellence [Ed: Lots of "clownwashing"; not much substance]

        The migration of enterprise applications and infrastructure to cloud-native architectures is a hot topic—and a very complex one. While we may want to believe digital transformation efforts and cloud migration projects have already pushed large numbers of teams to build new apps and rearchitect existing apps as cloud-native, built using microservices and running on platforms like Kubernetes, the reality is that most organizations are still in the early stages of becoming cloud- and cloud-native-proficient.

      • USCERTCISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog [Ed: This post is about Microsoft and about Windows. But it does not mention either "Microsoft" or "Windows". Typical CISA.]

        CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the "Date Added to Catalog" column, which will sort by descending dates.   

      • LinuxSecurityThe Story Behind the Linux Security Quick Reference Guide [Ed: The story behind a site called "Linux Security" that actually promotes anti-Linux FUD in order to make sales. While no platform is perfect (either site or OS), it is wrong to give a platform to Microsoft disinformation against Linux.]
      • Istio / Support for Istio 1.12 has ended

        As previously announced, support for Istio 1.12 has now officially ended.

        At this point we will no longer back-port fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.12, so we heartily encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.14.3) if you haven’t already.

      • CISAAdobe Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

        Adobe has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

      • CISAVMware Releases Security Updates | CISA

        VMware has released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities in vRealize Automation. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • India TimesData protection Bill wasn’t perfect but new one shouldn’t be opaque

          India is the second worst-hit country by data breaches, and the third most impacted by network attacks. There has been increasing disquiet amongst Indians around both private sector data practices and government data collection, with controversies like Cambridge Analytics and the Pegasus Project being high-profile moments amid a steady drip of near monthly data incidents. There is universal recognition that a data protection law is long overdue in India. That wait now appears to have been indefinitely extended.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • AccessNow#KeepItOn in Libya: authorities must ensure internet connectivity in Tobruk, across nation - Access Now

        Controlling and restricting internet access violates human rights. Against a backdrop of alleged internet shutdowns in Libya, Access Now is calling on authorities at all levels to ensure free and open access to the internet in the city of Tobruk and across the country at all times, and to provide information around the recent alleged disruptions that occurred during critical moments in national politics.

        “Authorities in Libya cannot use their power to assert dominance over freedom of speech and access to information across the country,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “The #KeepItOn coalition is outraged by the reports of internet shutdowns over the last few months — these acts of censorship are unacceptable.”

        Yesterday, Monday, August 8, as Khalifa Haftar, Commander-in-Chief of the Libyan Armed Forces, visited the eastern Libyan city of Tobruk, #KeepItOn partners documented an internet shutdown for at least five hours. The reason for the shutdown is unclear and authorities have not provided any public information. During the visit, Khalifa Haftar met with mayors, representatives of civil society organizations, and tribes from the Butnan District of Eastern Libya. There was a recorded drop in internet traffic to Tobruk from 15:08 to 19:52 local time.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

    • Politics

      • More OnlyFans BBC Paid Media Ads



        The article follows a similar format to the original. It suggests an enticing 'lower limit' of income (€£200 to €£400 per month), and continues with an 'expected' income of more than €£3000 per month.

        Yet none of it makes sense. Their example, a girl referred to as Alexia, works 9 to 5 in an office, five or six days a week. She talks about OnlyFans being 'hard work' and that she can spend 17 hours a day on it. How many hours does she have in her days?

        Maybe it was meant to imply her OnlyFans work is limited to weekends - that income of more than €£3000 per month is only from weekends.

    • Technical

      • Using iGPU with NVIDIA on Wayland

        One of the things I debated trying was making my iGPU the primary card and NVIDIA selectively for CUDA and GPU intensive programs. Note that I'm on a desktop and not a laptop, where most usecases target laptops. Because this is a pain to setup on X11 and there's tons of articles on Prime, Bumblebee, Optimus, etc. I expected this to be a pain in the ass.

        I left the NVIDIA drivers installed (and apparently already had some intel drivers installed, so no change needed there) then plugged my DVI monitor into the iGPU slot while keeping my HDMI monitor plugged into NVIDIA. I went into the BIOS, enabled my iGPU, booted into GNOME and...everything works out of the box? What?

      • Check out my BBS

        It'd be nice to put a game on it, but I haven't figured out what. It does feature a gopher client that links to my own site, however. My gopher server is actually a bridge from gemini pages. There is also a random gopherhole feature. There is also a fortune cookie and a couple of other goodies.

        The BBS uses UTF-8 encoding. Don't use syncterm, which will give rubbish output. I figured that since everyone has telnet, it was a good option.

      • gemini protocol
      • Fetch TLS(gemini) using Racket



        How to download a file over TLS using the Racket programming language. It is surprisingly straightforward. As with the Go example I gave earlier I have ignored verification of certificates. It looks a job of work.

      • Players balancing encounters

        Ah, Discord. Like IRC: everything can be rehashed forever and nothing is ever collected in blog posts. Or is it? I'm going to put my answer on this page!

      • Announcements

        • Introducing AuraGem Ask

          AuraGem Ask is a Gemini-first Question and Answer service, similar to Quora and StackOverflow. It allows users to submit questions and answers via textual input or a url to a gemlog. One can also use Titan to upload longer-length content.

          If one chooses to upload text, the text is stored in AuraGem's database. Optionally, one can also submit a URL to a gemlog that answers a particular question, and a link to that gemlog will be listed in the answers section. AuraGem Ask will also cache the content of the gemlog in case the gemlog goes down for any reason.

      • Programming

        • Impedance Mismatch in Bindings

          I love working Common Lisp. Instead of compiling stuff and trying it out, I can dynamically change things -- often while the code is running -- to see how things would look in a game, for instance. Compare that to compiling a few dozen times just to get the layout of something right.

          There are many C libraries which may be usable in Lisp via foreign-function-interfaces or bindings. The quality of the bindings varies with the abilities of the coders writing the bindings, and the level of understanding of the overall system, especially the C end of it.

          Unfortunately, the issue I call 'impedance mismatch' for the lack of a better term, comes up often when using FFIs.


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



Recent Techrights' Posts

Drew's Development Mailing Lists and Patches to 'Refine' His Attack Pieces Against the FSF's Founder
Way to bury oneself in one's own grave...
The Free Software Foundation is Looking to Raise Nearly Half a Million Dollars by Year's End
And it really needs the money, unlike the EFF which sits on a humongous pile of oligarchs' and GAFAM cash
What IBMers Say About IBM Causing IBMers to Resign (by Making Life Hard/Impossible) and Why Red Hat Was a Waste of Money to Buy
partnering with GAFAM
In Some Countries, Desktop/Laptop Usage Has Fallen to the Point Where Microsoft and Windows (and Intel) Barely Matter Anymore
Microsoft is the next Intel basically
[Meme] The Web Wasn't Always Proprietary Computer Programs Disguised as 'Web Pages'
The Web is getting worse each year
Re-de-centralisation Should Be Our Goal
Put the users in charge, not governments and corporations in charge of users
Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Rain Music, ClockworkPi DevTerm, and More
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, November 18, 2024
Links 18/11/2024: Science News and War Escalations in Ukraine
Links for the day
Gemini Links 18/11/2024: Degrowth and OpenBSD Fatigue
Links for the day
Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part VII
By Dr. Andy Farnell
BetaNews is Still 'Shitposting' About Trump and Porn (Two Analysers Say This 'Shitposting' Comes From LLMs)
Probably some SEO garbage, prompted with words like "porn" and "trump" to stitch together other people's words
Market Share of Vista 11 Said to be Going Down in Europe
one plausible explanation is that gs.statcounter.com is actually misreporting the share of Vista 11, claiming that it's higher than it really is
Fourth Estate or Missing Fourth Pillar
"The term Fourth Estate or fourth power refers to the press and news media in explicit capacity of reporting the News" -Wikipedia on Fourth Estate
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, November 17, 2024
LLMs Are Not a Form of Intelligence (They Never Will Be)
Butterflies are smarter than "chatGPT"
Business Software Alliance (BSA), Microsoft, and AstroTurfing Online (Also in the Trump Administration Groomed by BSA and Microsoft)
Has Washington become openWashington? Where the emphasis is openwashing rather than Open(Source)Washington?
Windows at 1%
Quit throwing taxpayers' money at Microsoft, especially when it fails to fulfil basic needs and instead facilitates espionage by foreign and very hostile nations
Links 17/11/2024: Pakistan Broke, Tyson 'Crashes' or Knocks Over Netflix
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/11/2024: Nachtigall Planned, Exodus at Twitter
Links for the day
Links 17/11/2024: China's Diplomacy and Gazprom Setback
Links for the day
Sudan Has Reached a State of Android Domination (93% Market Share, All-Time High According to statCounter)
countries at war buy fewer laptops?
[Meme] Just Do It?
'FSF' Europe (Microsoft) and FSF
Microsoft Front Groups Against the FSF, Home of GPL, GNU, and Free Software
Much of the money (not all of it) comes from the criminals at Redmond
Centralisation is Dooming the Web, RSS is One Workaround (But Not "Planets")
At least Gemini Protocol rejects centralisation
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, November 16, 2024
Links 17/11/2024: Wars, Bailouts, and Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/11/2024: Changing Interests and HamsterCMS
Links for the day