We cover events and user groups that are running in Greece. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
For a long time, like most people, I used Windows, the most ubiquitous operating system in the world. My interest in Linux began when I first got into programming, and even then, inertia made switching difficult. It did not help that Mac computers, the mainstream alternative to Windows, were prohibitively expensive.
Over time, I found myself increasingly disappointed with my Windows experience. I wanted a computer I had more control over, one that offered more than just utility. The more I researched, the more apparent it became that Linux was my best option. I loved that it was free and open-source, a cause I passionately admired, which meant there would be little buyer’s remorse should it not work out. It was also lightweight and, depending on the configuration, would have been perfect on my old machine. Its modular nature stood out as well, and I could choose from multiple distributions for a relatively secure and custom experience.
If you're used to using the Linux terminal for everything, you'd already be familiar with Newsboat, a simple RSS feed reader for the Linux terminal.
An RSS feed reader is an indispensable tool for most of us. It aggregates feeds from various websites to make it easy for you to keep track of their latest updates.
Depending on how you like these updates served, you may choose a graphical or CLI-based feed reader. While the former offers convenience and a ton of features, the latter brings speed and provides a seamless experience to those who work from the terminal.
Newsboat is one such CLI-based feed aggregator for Linux. Let's jump in to explore it in more detail.
I picked up a cheap external USB Blu-ray drive recently with the aim of watching my Doctor Who ‘The Collection’ Blu-rays — WhoRays, if you will— in bed, on my laptop1 (which runs Ubuntu, obviously).
Thing is you can’t just stick in an official Blu-ray disc and watch what’s on it, not in Linux, not on macOS, and not even on Windows. You need additional software, usually paid, that provides the license required to ‘decrypt’ Blu-ray content and throughput it to yo’ eyes.
Truth be told: Blu-ray is awkward, it’s obtuse and, to my mind, it’s a text-book example of how not to design a media format.
However, I did manage to get everything working — smoothly — and I didn’t have to pay for anything.
I figured I’d pass on the knowledge so that anyone else out there who wants to watch Blu-rays in Ubuntu (or on another Ubuntu-based Linux distro) can follow my steps to satisfy their content-craving.
[...]
MakeMKV is proprietary, paid-for software — and it’s at this point some of you will nope-out. Personally, I reason that BluRay is a proprietary format to start with, and since I already use lots of closed-source software for entertainment purposes, e.g., Steam, Netflix, Spotify, etc… Why not!?
But while MakeKMKV is technically software you have to buy all of its features (including the stuff that lets you play BluRays WITH menus in VLC) is “free” while the app is in beta.
WireGuard is an open-source, free, ultra-modern, and quick VPN server with cutting-edge encryption. It is often quicker, easier to deploy, and has a lower footprint than other popular VPN options, including IPsec and OpenVPN. It was initially published for the Linux kernel.
However, WireGuard is gaining cross-platform support for FreeBSD and other major operating systems such as macOS, Android, and Windows. This guide details the installation and configuration of WireGuard VPN on a Debian 11 Bullseye Linux server.
WireGuard is a peer-to-peer VPN that does not operate on a client-server basis. Depending on the setup, a peer can function as a typical server or client. It operates by establishing a network interface on every peer device that serves as a tunnel. In the SSH paradigm, peers authorize each other by sharing and verifying public keys. The public keys are associated with a list of IP addresses permitted in the tunnel. UDP is used to encapsulate VPN communication.
This article guide tutorial will demonstrate how to configure your own WireGuard VPN server on Debian 11 Bullseye. WireGuard was designed exclusively for the Linux kernel. It operates within the Linux kernel and enables the creation of a quick, contemporary, and secure VPN connection.
Golang, alias Go is a cross-platform and open-source programming language that can be set up on several operating systems like Linux, Windows, and macOS. The language is well-built to be used by professionals for application development purposes. Go is simple to build and manage, making it an ideal programming language for creating efficient software. It is reliable, builds fast, and has efficient software that scales fast.
Go code syntax resembles C’s, but the language provides enhanced features, including memory safety, structural typing, garbage college, and much more. This open-source language was designed by Google’s engineers, Robert Griesemer, Ken Thompson, and Rob Pike. Go is statistically typed and produces compiled machine code binaries, making it well-known among developers because they don’t need source code compilation to create an executable file.
Another great thing about Go is the concurrency mechanisms that make writing programs that fully capitalize on multicore and networked PCs stress-free. At the same time, its novel-typed systems allow flexible and modular program constructions.
Volcanoids is a base-building open-world survival game developed and published by Volcanoid. It was released for Windows. However, it is possible to play on Linux with some tweaks. Here’s how you can play Volcanoids on your Linux PC.
When you dual-boot a Linux distro alongside Windows, the installer sets up a bootloader, generally GRUB, to ensure there are no conflicts between the two operating systems during the boot-up processes.
While GRUB is a versatile and easy-to-use bootloader, you might want to switch to using the Windows Boot Manager as your default. Let’s learn how you can use Windows Boot Manager instead of GRUB.
Waterfox is a web browser that is designed for privacy and security. It is made for 64-bit processors but runs on ARM devices like smartphones or tablets. It can be found across multiple platforms, including classic desktop systems and recent ones such as Mac OS X/ Linux interfaces. Waterfox provides features that are not available in other browsers, such as private browsing, security settings, and ad blocking. It also has an interface similar to Firefox, making it easy to use. Waterfox is an excellent choice for those who want to maintain their privacy and security online.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Waterfox Browser on Linux Mint 21 LTS series using the command line terminal with tips about maintaining and removing the browser versions.
When you are learning networking or troubleshooting it, you would need to know the MAC address.
A computer can have more than one MAC address. It is because the MAC address is a core part of networking, and each networking peripheral device has its own MAC address.
So, your WiFi card has a MAC address, and so does the Ethernet (LAN) port. Even the Bluetooth has one.
The MAC address, also known as the physical address, is a 12-digit hexadecimal code (48-bits) and is represented as MM:MM:MM:SS:SS:SS
In this tutorial, I’ll share the steps for finding the MAC address of your desired networking interface in Linux. I’ll show both command line and GUI methods.
Recently I wanted to estimate how much the clocks on our servers drift over time (to give me a quick comparison to how BMC clocks drift).
[...]
These days we have a Grafana Loki installation in addition to our long standing central syslog server, so rather than write some awk I decided to use Loki's LogQL query language to answer my question, and then mentioned it on the fediverse with the final query. Today I want to run down how this query is put together, along with a less obvious version that tells me how frequently our different NTP servers are used as a time source by ntpdate.
One of the traditional and old problems with UEFI booting on servers is that it had a bad story if you wanted to be able to boot off multiple disks. Each disk needed its own EFI System Partition (ESP) and you either manually kept them in synchronization (perhaps via rsync in a cron job) or put them in a Linux software RAID mirror with the RAID superblock at the end and hope hard that nothing ever went wrong. To my surprise, the state of things seems to be rather better in Ubuntu 22.04, although there are still traps.
Modern Linuxes don't put much in the ESP, and in particular even Fedora no longer puts frequently changing things there. In Ubuntu 22.04, what's there in the EFI/ubuntu subdirectory is a few GRUB binaries and a stub grub.cfg that tells GRUB where to find your real /boot/grub/grub.cfg, which normally lives in your root filesystem. All of these are installed into /boot/efi by running 'grub-install', or into some other location by running 'grub-install --efi-directory=/some/where'.
Audacity is a free and open source cross-platform audio editor. Professionals use it for the tone of features it provides in such a small package.
You don’t have to be a professional and use all of its features. You can use it to record audio from your microphone and do some basics like background noise removal.
I will show you how to do that in this tutorial.
Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL distributed database management system. Cassandra can be scaled horizontally by adding more nodes across which data is replicated automatically. Nodes can be added or removed without any downtime. The nodes can be organized logically as a cluster or a ring and set up across multiple data centers to improve speed and reliability for high-performance applications.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Apache Cassandra on a Single-node Ubuntu 22.04 Cluster.
Linux command line offers a lot of tools that help you know more about processes that are currently active in your system. One such utility is pmap, which reports the process memory map. In this tutorial, we will discuss the basics of pmap using some easy-to-understand examples.
But before we do that, it's worth mentioning all examples here have been tested on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS machine.
Vaultwarden is an unofficial port of Bitwarden server written in Rust language. It is compatible with the official Bitwarden clients and is less resource-heavy than Bitwarden. It implements almost all features of Bitwarden barring a few. It uses the Bitwarden API to provide features like organization support, attachments, authenticator, U2F, Yubikey, Duo support, and support for email alias services.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up your copy of Vaultwarden on a Ubuntu 22.04 server.
The nmcli is a command-line tool that can be used for controlling NetworkManager. This tool will help you to display network device status, create, edit, activate/deactivate, delete network connections and also troubleshoot networking in your Linux system. It is very useful for servers and headless machines to control system-wide connections.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the nmcli command to control network connections with examples.
Grafana is a free, open-source, and feature-rich metrics dashboard and data visualizing tool. It is designed for Graphite, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB to monitor metrics from a web-based interface. It is a multi-platform and has over 100 plugins for data collection, storage, visualization, and sharing. It allows you to create alerts and notifications for your data and make collaboration with your teammates easier via sharing features.
This tutorial will explain how to install Grafana 8 on Ubuntu 22.04.
Darktable is a free and open-source photography application program and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image post-production. In addition to basic RAW conversion, Darktable is equipped with various tools for basic and advanced image editing. These include adjustment of white balance, exposure, tone curve, color management, luminance, and saturation levels, cropping and straightening, retouching (including clone tool and heal Selection tools), and the ability to merge multiple images into a single composite photo. Darktable also offers a wide range of filters that can be applied to individual and group photos. These filters can mimic the look of traditional film photography effects, or they can create entirely new and unique looks. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting started in photography, Darktable has something to offer everyone.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install Darktable on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series desktop using the command line terminal using three methods: the default apt repository, flatpak, or a launchpad ppa.
For whatever reason Steam Deck pretty much has two default browsers: Google Chrome in Game Mode and Firefox in Plasma aka. Desktop Mode. Firefox is absolutely unusable in Game Mode. Chrome (probably most other Chromium variants as well, I’ve only tried a handful) work okay-ish – at least they don’t go ballistic on touch events but they are not a truly nice experience either.
Readers of Planet KDE probably already know that some KDE applications have convergent GUIs thanks to Plasma Mobile, including the Angelfish web browser. It took some fiddling but after a while I managed to get it into a shape that’s very usable in Game Mode. Without any tweaks Angelfish defaults to use its desktop GUI and thereby runs just fine in Plasma Desktop, perhaps docked to a monitor.
Here’s a quick guide on how to install the latest LibreOffice version in Ubuntu and other Linux.
The free and open-source office suite LibreOffice comes with two versions. The Community and Enterprise version. The “community” version is for early adopters who want the latest bleeding-edge software tech. And the “enterprise” version is more stable, and it may not include all the latest features but is ideal for the production environment and professional work.
Timeshift is a potent open-source program that may assist you with data security. It enables incremental snapshots of your filesystem, which may be seen using a file manager. In BTRFS mode, snapshots are taken using the built-in characteristics of the BTRFS filesystem if you’re searching for a dependable method to back up your data.
Timeshift should be considered by all users since it is useful when you need to restore, which occurs often while learning Linux, amongst other situations.
You will learn how to install TimeShift on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal in the following guide.
This guide explains how you can install the latest Xfce desktop in Arch Linux. The guide explains the steps for the latest Xfce 4.16 release. However, it works for any Xfce version as well.
The first part of the guide explains the steps for installing the base Arch system. The second part is installing the complete Xfce desktop on Arch Linux.
The VLC media player is a powerful, open-source, cross-platform software that can play almost any type of multimedia file. It can also be a streaming media server, providing access to video and audio content across various devices. In addition, VLC can be extended and customized with a wide range of plugins. As a result, it is an incredibly versatile tool for both consumers and professionals. Whether you’re looking to watch a movie on your laptop or stream audio to your home theater system, VLC is an excellent choice.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VLC Media Player on Linux Mint 21 LTS release series with multiple installation methods available with APT or Flatpak package manager using the command line terminal.
FFmpeg is a popular tool among those who work with videos on a regular basis. If you haven’t used it before, FFmpeg is a free and open-source program that includes a collection of libraries for transcoding music, video, and other multimedia files/streams. It supports a variety of audio/video codecs, including H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9, AAC, OPUS, and others, as well as MP4, FLV, MKV, TS, WEBM, and MP3 file formats and HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, UDP, RTMP, RTSP, and HLS streaming protocols.
The Kernel 5.19 release contains several features and improvements, one of the most notable being support for Run-Time Average Power Limiting (RAPL) on Intel’s Raptor and Alder Lake processors. RAPL is a power management technology that allows processors to throttle their performance to limit power consumption. This can be useful in several scenarios, such as when running on battery power or when thermal limits are reached. The new Intel IFS driver support included in this release brings a useful feature that helps to detect hardware issues such as CPU faults at the circuit level at an early stage of deployment of the processors. This can save a lot of time and money for businesses and organizations that use these processors in their servers and other equipment. Overall, the Kernel 5.19 release provides significant improvements and additions that users of all types will welcome.
LibreOffice, used by millions of users worldwide, is the most popular free office suite today. It consists of a spreadsheet program (Calc), document processor (Writer), presentation (Impress), drawing (Draw), and Math module to help you with most of the office, business, academic, and day-to-day work.
LibreOffice can act as an excellent replacement for paid Microsoft Office suite due to its compatibility with proprietary file formats such as DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX. It is a fork of the Apache OpenOffice productivity suite and is actively developed by thousands of global contributors.
The Steam Deck continues to get a lot of attention from Valve, in the form of firmware updates and more validated games. We will touch upon the estimated market share and number of units on the market too, for good measure.
[...]
So we also have some indication of how many Steam Decks may be out there at the moment – SteamOS Holo which is probably only used by the Steam Deck and maybe a few other hobbyists who test the same image on other AMD hardware, is at about 7.60% of the share of Linux gamers on Steam.
“Star Trek: The Next Generation” introduced a custom user interface for their computer systems known as LCARS — the “Library Computer Access/Retrieval System”.
Originally designed by Michael Okuda — It was a somewhat bizarre system, with a unique style, workflow, and color theme that became almost instantly iconic. It looked almost nothing like traditional computer window managers and desktops.
[...]
Now: The LCARS DE is not perfect. It doesn’t perfectly recreate an LCARS system… but it gets very, very close and does a surprisingly good job of finding ways of making traditional desktop components (like the status bar display) look like it would fit on the bridge of the Enterprise next to Mr Data.
Also worth noting… LCARS DE can be a little finicky to install. I’ve found the installation instructions do work. But not always consistently on all systems. I’ve hit scenarios where I’ve really borked up my install and needed to start over. Functional. But… like I said. Finicky. That finicky-ness has not been, in my experience, consistent. Which is funky. Funky finicky. For sure.
For users of Krita digital painting software, there’s a bad news that the Krita Lime PPA is abandoned. The repository page is even removed!
Krita Lime PPA was the ‘official’ (definitely not, but maintained by volunteer) package source in Krita’s website until the app switching to AppImage. It maintained the most recent packages for Ubuntu users who are sticking to the native .deb package.
The PPA recently announced the deprecation note: “The Krita Lime PPA has been deprecated. Please use official AppImage packages from the official Krita site instead“, and completely removed the PPA page.
Kiki (the Krita’s mascot), but in my style.
It's the topic of the contest of the monthly Krita-Artist art contest. That's also for my future mega tutorial for this summer.
I recorded it this week; commenting everything and I'm right now derushing 6h of talk and screenrecord to crush that to a "smaller" 1h40 video. It will be my second "from A to Z" big video friendly for beginners. The artwork was done for the needs of the video with a Krita without preferences, from stock install and with only default brushes.
I'm back at video editing it! I hope Kdenlive will be able to render this huge monster.
The monthly KDE Frameworks release cycle continues and KDE Frameworks 5.97 is here to add more new features and enhancements, such as the implementation of support in KWallet for the org.freedesktop.secrets standard, which enables compatibility with third-party credential storage methods in most KDE apps.
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.97.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
While testing my merge request, Tobias spotted that NeoChat was making multiple requests to the /hierarchy API endpoint. The requests were actually being spammed to the server.
So I was suggested to separate the Space hierarchy caching functionality to a separate class itself.
The work was mostly about refactoring. Code was already existing in a different class. I moved it to the new SpaceHierarchyCache class and edited it to glue in properly.
getRoomListForSpace() in SpaceHierarchyCache accepts a space id, and returns a list of rooms id that belong to the space. This function is exposed in QML and used to populate SortFilterRoomListModel:: m_activeSpaceRooms whenever user clicks a Space icon.
Tobias texted that the SpaceHierarchyCache class worked as expected. So I added that to the open merge requst.
After years of using tablets with Android based operating systems such as LineageOS, I got tired of not receiving updates after some time. Why should I throw away working hardware just because there is no software support anymore? So I went looking and finally got me a Microsoft Surface Go 2 to install Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma on. A Microsoft device for Linux? It's a better match than you might expect.
So here's what I've found.
We give you details about GNOME’s new default text editor – the Gnome Text Editor.
A text editor is an essential tool for any Linux distribution or desktop. You use it almost daily for small to complex tasks while working, studying, etc.
Most mainstream Linux desktops have a text editor that integrates well. For example, KDE has Kate or KWrite, and GNOME has Gedit.
So, Why a new Text Editor for GNOME?
GNOME 42 version onwards, Gedit is replaced with a new editor – Gnome Text Editor. So the distributions which are based on GNOME should not have the new editor. The old Gedit may co-exist with this new editor until users are comfortable.
You might ask why.
An easy guide on creating your custom light and dark wallpaper for the GNOME desktop.
GNOME 42 introduces the much-awaited light and dark theme to GNOME Desktop. It also brings the light and dark version of wallpaper, which automatically changes when you switch between light and dark themes.
So, by default, GNOME gives you a few sets of pre-configured light and dark wallpapers.
But what if you want a different wallpaper that changes automatically when the theme changes?
Here’s how to configure and create your custom wallpaper for light and dark themes in GNOME.
Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2022.3, the latest version of its popular penetration testing and digital forensics platform.
ExTiX 22.8 LXQt – Build 220814
I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 22.8 LXQt Live DVD. (The previous LXQt version was 21.11 from 211030). ExTiX 22.8 is based on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)! Ubuntu 22.04 will be supported until 2027. The best thing with ExTiX 22.8 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Snapshot (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system. So easy that a ten year child can do it! One other very good thing with this version of ExTiX is that it is quite light. The ISO file is of only 1820 MB, which means that you can run the system super fast from RAM. When the boot process is ready you can eject the DVD or USB stick. Use Boot alternative 3 or Advanced options… >> load to RAM.
FreeBSD moved to git starting in 2019. I miss and prefer svn, but I empathise why it was necessary. In some alternate universe, Linus moved to it instead of building git, just as he adopted BSD instead of writing the Linux kernel. One can dream.
Censors, funded by Debian, have recently shut down one web site with critical information about Debian itself.
Personally, I found some of the things on the former site very disturbing and I would never host such content myself.
On the other hand, the suicide of Frans Pop was a critical piece of information that can't be ignored. 16 August is Debian Day, the anniversary of the Debian operating system. Frans Pop resigned from Debian the night before Debian Day. I can't shake the feeling that Debian worked this volunteer to death. In fact, that is what he wrote in many emails that are yet to emerge from debian-private.
The LXQt desktop has been updated up to version 1.1.0.
Make sure, it was tested on Sparky testing (7) / Debian testing “Bookworm” amd64 only.
A new Sailfish OS Community Update, a PINE64 Community Q&A, and a look back at the JingPad.
These days I'm having to deal with a steadily increasing number of commands that either output JSON only or where JSON is their best output option, and I want to reformat some of that JSON to a more useful or more readable text-based format. The obvious tool to do this with is jq, at least for simple reformatting (I think there's some things that are too tangled for jq). However, every time I need to do this, I keep having to look up how to format text in jq. Jq has a very big manual and a lot of features, so here's some notes to my future self about this.
Our last posts were on SHAP, one of the major ways to shed light into black-box Machine Learning models. SHAP values decompose predictions in a fair way into additive contributions from each feature. Decomposing many predictions and then analyzing the SHAP values gives a relatively quick and informative picture of the fitted model at hand.
In their 2017 paper on SHAP, Scott Lundberg and Su-In Lee presented Kernel SHAP, an algorithm to calculate SHAP values for any model with numeric predictions. Compared to Monte-Carlo sampling (e.g. implemented in R package “fastshap”), Kernel SHAP is much more efficient.
Installing R packages from source can be a slow process. This is compounded by the challenge of making sure you have all the right system libraries and compilers installed. CRAN eases the burden on most desktop R users by providing pre-built binary packages for both Windows and MacOS, but Linux users (or anyone using a Linux-based environment like Docker) are still expected to build from source.
July 25 – 28 2022 saw thousands of people attend rstudio::conf(2022) both in-person in Washington D.C. and virtually from all over the world, including a few of us from Jumping Rivers. Here’s a recap of the big news, and a few of our personal highlights from the conference!
It is with a mix of pride and joy, but also some genuine astonishment and amazement, that we can share that the counter of reverse dependencies at CRAN for our RcppArmadillo package for R just crossed 1000 packages [1]:
Conrad actually posted this a few weeks ago, by my count we were then still a few packages shy. In any event, having crossed this marker this summer, either then or now, and after more than a dozen years of working on the package is a really nice moment. Google Scholar counts nearly 500 citations for our CSDA paper (also this vignette), and that ratio of nearly a citation for every two packages used is certainly impressive. We have had the pleasure of working with so many other researchers and scientists using RcppArmadillo. Its combination of performance (C++, after all, and heavily tuned) and ease-of-use (inspired by ‘another popular flavour for matrix computing’ that is however mostly interpreted) makes for a powerful package, and we are delighted to see it used so widely.
Nim is a systems programming language, introduced a few days ago...
Well, that was a short retirement! It was only a few days ago, announced that utilities written in the BaCon language are no longer in EasyOS...
This is fun, just wanted to see the size of binary executable generated by V, Nim and BaCon. In all three, it is a one-line program. Firstly, the results, stripped by "strip --strip-unneeded"...
Believe it or not, today python is considered one of the most powerful programming languages, and it’s spreading at a mass level. We have witnessed a surge of Python developers in the past couple of years at a whopping rate of 27% YoY (Year on Year). Last year python marked 30 years of success and it is clearly a sign that it is going to disrupt the market in the upcoming few years.
On IRC deoac wished to know how to print the name of a variable. This question is ambiguous. To get the name of the container is easy.
Just two days after Meta released its most advanced AI chatbot to date, BlenderBot 3 is repeating election-denying claims and antisemitic stereotypes to users who interact with it.
The machine learning technology — launched to the public on Friday — crafts responses by searching the internet for information and learns from conversations it has with human users.
A way to expand training data sets for manipulation tasks improves the performance of robots by 40% or more
Podcasting "So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me": On the joys of writing to find your people, rather than pleasing a hypothetical audience. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading
A double exit-door, open to reveal a Matrix-style code waterfall. Over the door is a green exit sign with a green halo.
Podcasting "So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me" (permalink)
This week on my podcast, I read "So You’ve Decided to Unfollow Me," my Medium describing the joys of writing to attract the audience of people who want to read what you want to write.
https://doctorow.medium.com/so-youve-decided-to-unfollow-me-7452c96b4772
I've been blogging for more than 20 years, but I've been writing for publication for even longer than that, so I can remember the emergence of blogging and what it meant for magazine writers. The point of magazines, broadly, was to identify a demographic that advertisers wanted to reach and hire writers who'd produce material to entice those people to become readers.
By contrast, the point of blogging was to produce the idiosyncratic, personal mix of topics, formats and styles that the writer enjoyed, in hopes of attracting readers whose preferences overlapped with the writer's. Blogging wasn't just about becoming widely read – it was about finding your people.
When advertising came to blogging, it was grounded in this ethos: "Here is a writer who has attracted an audience who share a sensibility and a collection of interests that are otherwise hard to reach; if that's who you want to reach, you can buy ads on this publication."
The promise back then was that the "long tail" of interests and publications enabled by blogging would be matched with a long tail of advertisers who – like pre-blogging writers – had been hamstrung by the difficulty of reaching their own niche audiences.
Computers can be trained to better detect distant nuclear detonations, chemical blasts and volcano eruptions by learning from artificial explosion signals, according to a new method devised by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist.
The work, led by UAF Geophysical Institute postdoctoral researcher Alex Witsil, was published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Witsil, at the Geophysical Institute’s Wilson Alaska Technical Center, and colleagues created a library of synthetic infrasound explosion signals to train computers in recognizing the source of an infrasound signal. Infrasound is at a frequency too low to be heard by humans and travels farther than high-frequency audible waves.
Dan Scarfe, the founder of a new company that has found a way to unlock conversation for deaf and hard of hearing people, says the idea dawned on him over Christmas with his family last year.
Scarfe witnessed his 97-year-old hearing impaired grandfather struggling to engage with the rest of his family, and was inspired to find a solution so that he could participate in conversations in real-time.
“It's just so difficult when there are so many people around you and you're trying to keep track of the different conversations which are going on,” Scarfe told Euronews Next.
“It’s got to the point now where he literally just sits in silence. And I thought, well, hang on a second. He watches TV all the time with subtitles. Why can't we subtitle the world?”
Patches the size of a postage stamp stuck to your skin can provide continuous ultrasound imaging of internal organs for 48 hours. This can reveal details such as the human heart changing shape during exercise, or the stomach expanding and shrinking when a person eats or drinks.
“Welcome to the era of ‘wearable imaging’,” says Xuanhe Zhao at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Many researchers have been trying to develop wearable ultrasound devices made of flexible materials. But they have found it challenging to create flexible devices that remain stuck to the skin for more than a few hours while also enabling high-resolution ultrasound imaging.
Quantinuum, a leader in the nascent field of quantum computing, said Thursday it advanced a key technique for correcting errors in calculations done by the advanced machines, a development essential for them to fulfill their revolutionary potential.
A Broomfield, Colorado-based team improved its handling of qubits, the machines' fundamental data storage and processing elements. Last year, they linked multiple ordinary qubits into a group called a logical qubit that's more reliable. This year, they got a pair of logical qubits to perform calculations, said David Hayes, leader of the company's theory group.
The work was notable because Quantinuum's error correction technology keeps logical qubits stable longer than conventional qubits, and that's key to coaxing useful work out of quantum computers.
The July 12 release of the images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captivated and excited everyone from schoolchildren to space buffs, thanks to the vivid colors and crisp captures of the distant reaches of space. The images from the telescope, which is the largest, most complex and powerful space telescope ever constructed, brought into focus thousands of galaxies, both known and unknown, as well as so-called "cosmic cliffs" of dust and gas, and even a dying star.
The telescope detects near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths, the light beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, which allows otherwise hidden regions of space to be captured. Infrared light can uncover and reveal new details in images, based on the object. For example, bodies of matter such as young planets that are cool and do not emit much energy or visible brightness, still radiate in the infrared. Similarly, visible light's short wavelengths often can be obscured by space dust or a dense nebula (a group of interstellar clouds), keeping their images from being captured by telescopes that only detect visible light, such as the Hubble telescope. Infrared light, with its longer wavelengths, can penetrate through dust more easily, and infrared-based telescopes can detect lower-energy objects that often form within nebulae, such as brown dwarf stars and newly forming stars. Thus, the JWST can reveal objects that previously were hidden from view.
Earlier this year, when I built my all-AMD gaming PC, I decided to stick with AMD's stock CPU cooler. After all, if they include a particular cooler with the Ryzen 5 5600x, I should assume that cooler is adequate, right?
Ctrl-Alt-Del — also known as “The Three Fingered Salute” — is among the most recognizable key commands in the entire computer world. Restarting, or logging into, countless computers since the 1980s.
But how did it come to be?
Let’s take a tour through this history of this loved / hated / mocked key combination.
A BMC is an extra embedded computer on your server motherboard (as opposed to the extra CPU that's embedded in your CPU or chipset). As separate computers running a separate operating system, BMCs keep time independently from your server's time (the host time, reusing terminology from virtualization), and this time is visible in places like the IPMI event log (as well as just asking what time the BMC has via IPMI).
The unprecedented challenges of the last couple of years have presented opportunity for supply chain organizations to create value, Kalidindi says.
It has been a couple of months since I’ve worked on my Amiga 1000. In that time I had an interesting conversation with Darren Gurney on Discord who generously offered to 3D print the missing covers for my Amiga 1000. This week they arrived!
The two sections that needed covering were the front RAM panel and the side slot. It is clear from the motherboard edge connector wear that this Amiga had some kind of side expansion and that is why that panel was missing. I’m also guessing the front panel breaks off easily as I see many Amiga 1000s with that part missing.
Luckily there are 3D printable parts available for both holes to cover them. Darren has a 3D printing filament called “Jessie” which is a colour-match to an Amiga 500. This is good because the Amiga 1000 and 500 are the same colour.
Rice bioscientists use mixed-reality headset, custom software to measure vegetation in the field
In another sign of Dotcom Bubble 2.0, adtechs are laying off, according to layoffs.fyi and the New York Times.
We’re definitely seeing echos of the Dotcom Bubble collapse, even though most consumer-facing news is trying to spin things to suggest the lowest unemployment rates ever. A lie that Vice-President Kamala Harris repeated only the other day.
Most Americans are terribly concerned with inflation and losing their jobs, but the CNNs and CNBCs still project denial. What rags!
Burying your head in the sand hasn’t ever helped anyone solve a problem. These folks want you to subscribe to the religion that as long as “consumer confidence” remains high, it does not matter how much toxic sludge is swirling around in the system. There’s a lot of toxic sludge, that’s for sure. When is the last time anyone asked how confident YOU were as a consumer? Yeah, me neither.
In the New York Times article I just linked to, Marc Andreeson, one of the early Web pioneers (Netscape, Sun, etc.) and an active “Venture Capitalist” today, says that “good big tech companies” are overstaffed by 200% and “bad big tech companies” are overstaffed by 400%.
(By good and bad, he means as investments, of course. And, relatively speaking.)
So it falls somewhere in-between with Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Uber where in the 200-400% range they actually are.
In America after the end of Roe v. Wade, one brave source, on the record, is often the best we are going to get. Countless other stories will never be told.
On our recent IoT Podcast, we took a question that Andrew left on our IoT Voicemail Hotline. Andrew had been using a device from SmartDry to know when his laundry was dry. Unfortunately, SmartDry announced earlier in June that it would be shutting down. So Andrew wants to know what that means for his device.
The FT’s paywall confuses meââ¬â°—ââ¬â°I can read this article but I’m not sure if you’ll be able to.
Heer raises too many good points and includes too much research to summarize. Just read it. It’s so thoughtful, and it gets to a point I tried, but I think largely failed, to make on Dithering two weeks ago regarding Facebook’s declining numbers.
To wit, that maybe Facebook’s problem isn’t really ATT, but rather that Facebook’s entire business, from when it first started selling ads through today, has been about offering the hot new thing to the ever-desirable “young demographic”. Let’s call them “20-somethings”, or, if you prefer, “18-to-34-year-olds”. That product, at one point, was Facebook itselfââ¬â°—ââ¬â°a.k.a. the blue app. If you’re old enough, you will remember that it was, originally, hard to get a Facebook account. It was like an exclusive club. You had to be a student at Harvard. Then you had to be a student at any Ivy League college. Then you just needed a .edu email address. Eventually, of course, you just had to be breathing. But make no mistake, the Facebook of Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 movie The Social Network was the hot new thing for the 20-something demographic.
For the last decadeââ¬â°—ââ¬â°the 2010sââ¬â°—ââ¬â°that hot new thing for the 20-something demographic was Instagram, which Mark Zuckerberg had the remarkable prescience to acquire in 2012ââ¬â°—ââ¬â°such early days for Instagram that the acquisition came just weeks after Instagram had launched its Android app.
About a month ago, iRobot CEO Colin Angle mentioned something about sharing Roomba mapping data in an interview with Reuters. It got turned into a data privacy kerfuffle in a way that iRobot did not intend and (probably) did not deserve, as evidenced by their immediate clarification that iRobot will not sell your data or share it without your consent.
Data privacy is important, of course, especially for devices that live in your home with you. But as robots get more capable, the amount of data that they collect will increase, and sharing that data in a useful, thoughtful, and considerate way could make smart homes way smarter. To understand how iRobot is going to make this happen, we spoke with Angle about keeping your data safe, integrating robots with the future smart home, and robots that can get you a beer.
First, I agree that Amazon sharing footage without permission is sketch. And I expect them to fix that. Soon.
But when I hear something new is bad, I don’t just jump on with everyone else. First I ask how things are currently going. So how about it?
This week’s show kicks off with our discussion of Amazon’s planned acquisition of iRobot, the maker of Roomba robotic vacuums for $1.7 billion. We then talk about a survey from Parks Associates that indicates almost a third of people using AirTag-style trackers to track people without their knowing and why users and companies must focus on consent. Then we hit on another ethics issue associated with a connected Epson printer that stops working after a set period of time, also unbeknownst to the user. In non-ethics news, Feit has purchased LIFX assets, Energous got FCC approval for sending up to 15 watts of power over the air for wireless charging and Qualcomm signed a deal with Global Foundries to ensure its chip supply through 2028. While on the topic of chips, we talk about software that runs on existing ESP32 that uses Wi-Fi for person detection and sensing, and future Apple products for the smart home. We end with a listener question about whether he should buy a new DIY hub and devices, or wait for Matter gear.
Well I think in what you just wrote today you made it all clear. There’s really no practical effect of what she did, so why should China have actually done something military and then something provocative. What Pelosi did is a public relations ploy, she wanted to get more votes in California, and one third of California are Chinese and she thought that that would help. So why should China react materially to something that is just a stunt, and I think you’re quite right, best to wait and see what the outcome of this is. We have no idea … midnight there, so we don’t know what is happening or will be happening. We don’t know what the Chinese will do, especially seeing that the downward direction of US relations with the rest of the world is, it’s bungling everything clumsily so you don’t want to interrupt it while it’s doing that. Let’s see where it goes.
Ethereum is planning to move from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake next month. As someone who has participated in large open-source projects before, it's impressive that the developers were able to make such a drastic shift to the network. Here's what you need to know.
The SEC released a list of sanctioned Ethereum addresses and the smart contract Tornado Cash, a program that allows users to mix (i.e., launder) crypto. Blockchains make all transactions public (see tradeoffs), so mixers obfuscate the sender, recipient, and values of transactions.
There are legitimate users of these services that value privacy, but there are also bad actors – state-sponsored hackers like the Lazarus Group (North Korea) and other hackers.
Australia has a government loan system where the Commonwealth pays for your tertiary education, and you pay it back once you reach an income threshold. You either pay it as part of tax, or you can have it withheld from your salary.
It’s a flawed system; education should be free. Even the fiscally conservative acknowledge that qualified people tend to earn more and pay more tax, even if they don’t buy altruistic arguments that everyone should be given an opportunity. Lower-income earners are also far more likely to spend whatever extra money they receive, so it’s better for the economy not to be garnishing this.
Australia is awash with dirty money. Go undercover with financial crime expert Nathan Lynch as he delves deep inside this hidden world to explain how dark money has infected the lives of ordinary people and tainted Australian democracy.
In my neck of the woods, in Illinois, the rent is soaring.
In much of the country, it’s the same story.
It’s soaring because there are no apartments available. As soon as they’re listed, they’re gone .
I’ve been watching in horror as our landlord keeps jacking up the prices of all of his units across town. They’re not exactly the most upscale units, and the price has gone up roughly 11% in the past 8 or 9 months.
It seems like the worse things get, the worse things get.
I figure he’ll probably hike ours at least this much and it’s just going to have to be another winter without heat.
LabCorp spends 6 months threatening to send us to collections over a bill our insurance should have paid, and then refunds my payment.
I’d like to give a shout-out to LabCorp for being up there with Quest Diagnostics..
I think that Satan himself runs both of their billing departments.
When I had to file bankruptcy back in 2020, Quest Diagnostics kept trying to collect on my lab debts. Every time I sent them proof that I had filed bankruptcy and that those bills had been discharged, they claimed they never received the paperwork and that I was supposed to send it to another address, until I got ahold of the Illinois Attorney General. When they got a letter on state letterhead with a copy of my discharge letter, the next thing I got from Quest was a notice that they were “setting my account balance to $0.
My spouse has Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois health and dental. Every time we go to his dentist, they say there’s something wrong with the claim. I have to spend hours on the phone, and eventually they pay it.
Sometimes it happens with lab bills too. Unfortunately, Quest and LabCorp don’t care what your insurance company is up to. They attempt to bill it once and if it gets kicked back, they start threatening you.
Quest Diagnostics sent some of my spouse’s bills to collections while I was still arguing with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois about payment. I eventually had to spend dozens of hours on the phone and then with credit reporting bills disputing them as “insurance has paid this” to get them to come off, but they finally did.
TikTok has established itself as one of the top online platforms for U.S. teens, while the share of teens who use Facebook has fallen sharply
If you could play any part you wanted in any film or series of your choice, what would you play?
I wouldn't go for any sort of main character. No. My goal would be different, and might be described as more ambitious.
I'd wanna play an innocent murder suspect in a as many crime series as possible. Specifically the same character in all of them. Just a random dude who happens to be suspected of a murder but is ultimately not guilty. Over and over again.
I was never much of a foreign language person. In school I excelled in literally every subject but the various foreign languages I was forced to take (german and spanish). Frankly, learning different languages never came naturally to me and I considered it a waste of my time. Just one of those things that never meshed that well with me.
I first discovered esperanto proper about a month ago. It had gently floated into my subconcious through @martin's subtle indoctrination tactics of mentioning it every once in awhile on station. A few gemnaught-esperantist made a buzz a bit ago on various aggregation feeds which helped too.
And is pretty conservative, as I see it. All modern remotes, fridges, ovens, wireless keyboards, etc. are very likely to contain a microprocessor.
My air conditioner has at least two - one in the remote and one in the main unit. I know because I could connect it to WiFi -- if I was insane!
Headphones that do bluetooth and USB, especially noise-cancelling kind, are very likely to have a CPU. Those with google or alexa, definitely.
A USB memory stick is very likely to have at least one ARM core on it. Decades ago manufacturers found it cheaper than running exhaustive memory tests on each device and locking out broken parts. The ARM chip manages the memory array, hiding defects and wear leveling and whatnot. Also, any memory devices - microSD, whatever is in your camera or tablet or phone...
As mentioned previously, defrag breaks up reflinks. On a system with little to no reflinks, this will result in neglible space increase. However, recently I started using snapshots and noticed significant space increase with defrag.
At first, I was confused. defrag should not descend into subvolumes and find -mount can further be used to avoid descending into mountpoints. I knew that subvolumes save space by shared extents, yet it didn't click into my brain until later that defragging completely broke those shared extents. With a lot of snapshots..you can see where this is going.
I am doing some more work to update the SEOSAW database[1]. When we measure the growth and mortality of trees to monitor biomass dynamics, it is important to have a consistent way of recording mortality. For trees, especially trees with multiple stems, the concept of "death" is not as simple as for animals. We generally classify a tree as dead if all the above-ground tissue on the tree appears to be dead, i.e. has no living leaves or buds, and no sap below the bark. Sometimes though, a single stem on a multi-stemmed tree will die, but the rest of the tree continues to live. Sometimes a stem or tree may appear dead, but comes back to life later. In savanna systems especially, it's fairly common for trees to partially die, or to resurrect after a disturbance event like a drought or a fire.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.