I've really been enjoying 120Hz Chromebooks, but as it was recently pointed out, this fantastic feature doesn't extend to the Android or Linux portions of ChromeOS quite yet.
While technologies such as Samba and NFS are very effective when you want to share files with other users, those solutions may not be best for those with simpler file sharing needs. In this video, sshfs is covered, which is a fuse-based solution that enables you to quickly share directories on your network. Note: sshfs no longer has a maintainer, so don't use this solution for confidential or proprietary files.
In the last few days, I've been spending a little time trying out KDE Bismuth, a tiling extension for the KDE Plasma desktop. And it's really nice. As a long time tiling window manager user, I feel quite comfortable using KDE Bismuth.
wayland-protocols 1.31 is now available.
This release introduces a new staging protocol: fractional scaling. Without going into details, this protocol allows compositor to communicate a scale with more precision than an integer. Clients can then use this together with the wp_viewporter protocol to allocate more appropriately sized buffers.
The other protocol related change in this release involves adding a new error enum value to xdg-shell.
Since the last release, a new member, Smithay/cosmic-comp, was added, represented by Victoria Brekenfeld. Some clarifications to the governence about about protocol ACKs requirements was also done.
Enjoy!
OpenRGB 0.8, the latest release for this vendor-independent RGB lighting control tool, is available nearly a year after its last update.
Many desktop computers now have RGB lighting with a variety of options. OpenRGB is a cross-platform open-source program that auto-detects and displays RGB-enabled devices and allows you to control them from a centralized interface.
Assume you’ve upgraded your PC with lighting from several vendors. In that case, you may have many third-party apps to control them. This is where OpenRGB comes in, providing you with a single app to rule them all.
A screencast is a digital recording of computer screen output, typically carrying audio narration. Screencasting software takes a series of screenshots of a running application, recording the user’s actions, and creating a video file. The movies can be output in a variety of different formats. This type of software was brought into prominence by the commercial Windows application Lotus ScreenCam in 1994, followed by TechSmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate.
Screencasts have a wide variety of uses. This type of software is also often used to demonstrate operating systems, software actions, website features, troubleshooting, and evaluating technical skills.
Things have moved on since we last covered screencasting software. The purpose of this article is to identify high quality open source screencasting software that makes it a breeze to create screencasts. Thanks to this software, anyone can make their own videos.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 9 slick Linux screencasting tools. All of these tools are released under a freely distributable license.
Most of us know how to type using a keyboard but still don’t have satisfactory typing skills. Actually, it is not that much easier to control the movement of all 10 fingers at the same time, even without looking at the keyboard. Only practice can help you in this case. And you must know how fast and accurate typing is essential in this technology-based era. However, I am here to help you increase your typing skill by recommending some useful typing tutor software for the Linux platform. Hopefully, these applications will help you to be a pro typist.
Over the years, and in particular with preparing videos of a conference for publication on YouTube, I have accumulated a few reminders how to do things with FFmpeg. It is such a fantastic beast full of features, that I will never run out of new things to learn.
something must have gone wrong during a apt update && apt upgrade…
Heroic Game Launcher is a helpful tool that lets you access gaming services such as Epic Games and GOG via a single app on platforms like Linux, Windows, and macOS.
It comes in handy to organize your game library and lets you install games that are not natively available for a platform.
Now, they have pushed a new version update v2.5.0, which they claim to be their biggest release in a long time.
Let me highlight the good stuff here.
We are getting closer than ever to releasing Godot 4.0. After years of development and countless hours spent by our contributors, we believe it’s finally ready for production use. But no matter the amount of time dedicated to testing and profiling — bugs and issues are inevitable. We believe that the Godot community understands this and expects as much. Still, we intend to quickly follow 4.0 with bug fix releases as we are dedicated to ensuring a stable experience as soon as possible.
As those of you following the beta posts know, the work to finalize Godot 4.0 prior to release is in full swing. We have been in feature freeze since mid-August and have been focused on fixing workflow breaking bugs since then (well, we have accepted some small features and enhancements on occasion).
KDE Plasma 5.26.4 comes three weeks after the KDE Plasma 5.26.3 update and further improves the Plasma Wayland session by fixing two crashes, one that occurred when tapping a touchscreen after disconnecting an external screen and another one when moving the cursor over a Plasma panel.
The Plasma X11 session has been improved as well for those who don’t or can’t use Wayland. This release addresses an issue that caused empty areas to appear around Plasma panels when disabling compositing.
Tuesday, 29 November 2022. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.26.4.
Plasma 5.26 was released in October 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
It’s fall, the leaves are on the ground, there are pumpkins on the table (and my local vegetable farm has blogged that the seasons are so screwed up due to climate change that it is no longer predictable which veggies show up when) and so, stew and hearty soup season is upon us.
“If I was to become a vegetarian, what kind of stew would we eat?” was a question kid[1] (the only one still at home) put to me. Good question. I have vague ideas about lentils and celery root and beans and tahin, but nothing as concrete as my beef stew recipe (1 chunk of cow, 1 bottle of beer, 6 onions, 1 potato and seasoning). It bears investigating.
Linux has been around since 1996 and has, over the years, been maligned as being too difficult for average users. In some cases, there were claims that Linux was simply too challenging for anyone who wasn't a developer. When I first started using Linux (back in '97), it was very challenging -- beyond the grasp of average users and even some advanced Windows users.
Some of the newly implemented features and updates:
Based on Debian 11.5 "Bullseye", but using a Linux kernel 5.15 or 5.19 as opt-in, and ZFS 2.1.6; Ransomware Protection - new chapter in documentation; Pruning namespaces - the prune job system now also takes namespaces into account, with fine-grained control; Support for sending metrics to InfluxDB; Tape backup: 'inventory' command allows restore of the catalogs of backups stored on tape; Proxmox Offline Mirror tool: keep air-gapped nodes up-to-date and running Several GUI enhancements; Countless general client and backend improvements and much more...
Gunnar Hellekson draws on passion for Linux and public sector expertise to run Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux
[...]
Red Hat’s RHEL strategy for the edge is also closely linked to its Ansible Automation Platform. In May, the company strengthened its edge focus with a series of updates for Ansible and OpenShift that included a new automated mesh element for edge environments. By automating edge workloads and moving them closer to devices, Red Hat believes this will appeal to enterprise customers seeking to simplify IT tasks and lower operational costs.
CACI International Inc has joined the Red Hat Embedded Partner Program. Through this program, CACI and Red Hat will collaborate to deliver an enterprise scalable, Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) mobility solution using CACI’s Archon product line with Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a foundation to provide a sophisticated customer experience. As both a CSfC Trusted Integrator and CSfC Solution Provider, CACI’s Archon offers capabilities that enable secure remote access to classified environments with turnkey onboarding and administration.
Various parts of Ubuntu's cancelled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.
UBports is edging closer to moving to a different LTS – except on the PinePhone, which is going its own way. It's nearly six months since Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 appeared, and the UBports community have announced the next version, OTA-24. As the Reg noted last year, though, this release is still based on Ubuntu 16.04. We suspect that is because this was the last LTS release before Ubuntu cancelled the fondleslab version the following year, before the next LTS version, 18.04.
As such, UBports is going to skip 18.04. The days of "Bionic Beaver" are numbered anyway: its official end of life is next April. Instead, soon, Ubuntu Touch will switch its base OS to Ubuntu 20.04, whose codename is "Focal Fossa."
Plus, the Linux-based projector supports HDR10 and Dolby Atmos technologies.
While our philosophy is all about the democratization of technology, we are well aware that businesses and professional users have specific needs: that’s why our Pro business unit is entirely focused on catering to them, with dedicated solutions that meet the strictest requirements for performance and security.
And after growing our Arduino Pro hardware portfolio with over a dozen new components in the past few months, we are happy to announce a major software advancement in our ecosystem: the Arduino Cloud for Business offers unique benefits for companies and industrial clients wanting enhanced features in terms of device management, RBAC, fleet management and safe remote access.
Similar to the questionnaires about LibreOffice Draw (see first and second blog post) and LibreOffice Calc (see this post) we now run a survey on LibreOffice Impress to learn how the program is utilized, what features are used most frequently, and what users see as positive and negative and what they expect of the future.
It was announced a couple of hours ago, Emacs 29’s branch is now cut from the master branch! This means the emacs-29 branch will from now no longer receive any new feature, but only bug fixes.
So, what’s new with this new major release? I skimmed over the NEWS file, and here are the changes which I find interesting and even exciting for some.
I don't really have prior experience with color management, Cairo internals or the like. I did not even look at the existing patchsets for this. They are fairly old so they might have bitrotted and debugging that is not particularly fun. This is more of a "the fun is in the doing" kind of thing. What follows is just a description of things tried, I don't know if any of it would be feasible for real world use.
[...]
There are two things that I personally care about: creating fully color managed PDFs (in grayscale and CMYK) and making the image backend support images in colorspaces other than sRGB (or, more specifically, "uncalibrated RGB which most of the time is sRGB but sometimes isn't"). The first of these two is simpler as you don't need to actually do any graphics manipulations, just specify and serialize the color data out to the PDF file. Rendering it is the PDF viewer's job. So that's what we are going to focus on.
This Saturday (3 December 2022 at 20:00 UTC), Vadim Belman will be giving the first online class about Rakudo core development (/r/rakulang comments). Requirements are a working knowledge of the Raku Programming Language, use of git and Github, and a willingness to self-learn things. It will be a kind of seminar where things may significantly divert from the initial plan.
If the words "experimental operating system" don't scare you off, Redox OS is an impressive demonstration of both homegrown OS development and the Rust language itself.
Redox OS version 0.8.0 arrives some seven months after version 0.7.0 in April. That seems to indicate that the cadence of new releases is accelerating – it's about three years since The Reg looked at Redox 0.5, and it's coming along quite well.
Saying that, though, it's not quite ready to host itself. In other words, you can't build Redox OS on Redox OS just yet. The Rust compiler rustc is working, but according to lead developer Jeremy Soller, the cargo build system and package manager isn't yet.
The main focuses in this version are to get the OS working on real hardware – there's a handy list – as opposed to just inside VMs. It now has audio support (IntelHD and AC97), and can boot on both BIOS and UEFI PCs. There are both i686 ("32-bit x86 from the Pentium II and up") and x86-64 versions, plus preliminary support for 64-bit Arm: it can boot to a login prompt inside QEMU.
We're very excited to announce that The 8472 has joined the Library team!
The 8472 has been working on many optimizations and other improvements to the standard library, is involved in many library-related changes and discussions, and regularly reviews pull requests.
Congratulations The 8472, and thanks for everything you do!
Stumped for ideas what to blog about? Not sure what people would want to read that would be worth writing about? Here’s 25 prompts to get you started (some tweaking may be required).
Yesterday I wrote about the 100 days of blogging challenge. A friend of mine asked if I had a good source of prompts for folks interested in doing something similar. Truth is, I hadn’t thought much about that.
Part of being a writer and editor for many years, or having jobs that depended on writing and editing, means that I’ve got the opposite problem: I see ideas for articles and blogs everywhere. My problem has been to carve out the time, pick one, and do it.
THE VACUUM-TUBE TRIODE wasn’t quite 20 years old when physicists began trying to create its successor, and the stakes were huge. Not only had the triode made long-distance telephony and movie sound possible, it was driving the entire enterprise of commercial radio, an industry worth more than a billion dollars in 1929. But vacuum tubes were power-hungry and fragile. If a more rugged, reliable, and efficient alternative to the triode could be found, the rewards would be immense.
The market will be divided into various categories, with foods relegated to some alleyways, and gifts and other items in others.
Senate Square is adjacent to city landmarks including the Lutheran Cathedral, Government Palace, the University of Helsinki's main building, as well as the oldest building in the capital, Sederholm House.
Due to the Covid situation, the Christmas market was held online in 2020 and in 2021 the event was hosted at the nearby Market Square, due to lighting renovation work at Senate Square.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (frr, gerbv, mujs, and twisted), Fedora (nodejs and python-virtualbmc), Oracle (dotnet7.0, kernel, kernel-container, krb5, varnish, and varnish:6), SUSE (busybox, python3, tiff, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz).
Bill C-27, the government’s privacy and artificial intelligence bill is slowly making its way through the Parliamentary process. One of the emerging issues has been the mounting opposition to the AI portion of the bill, including a recent NDP motion to divide the bill for voting purposes, separating the privacy and AI portions. In fact, several studies have been released which place the spotlight on the concerns with the government’s plan for AI regulation, which is widely viewed as vague and ineffective. Christelle Tessono is a tech policy researcher based at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She was one of several authors of a joint report on the AI bill which brought together researchers from the Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Toronto Metropolitan University, McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, and the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Christelle joins the Law Bytes podcast to talk about the report and what she thinks needs to change in Bill C-27.
On November 28, U.S. House Representative Donald McEachin passed away at the age of 61. Representative McEachin had represented Virginia’s 4th District since 2017. He was a champion of the public interest in Congress and was critical in passage of important legislation to help close the digital divide and to promote digital equity and inclusion efforts while serving as a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The following may be attributed to Public Knowledge President & CEO Chris Lewis on behalf of Public Knowledge...
Victims of spyware and a group of security experts have privately warned that a European parliament investigatory committee risks being thrown off course by an alleged “disinformation campaign”.
The warning, contained in a letter to MEPs signed by the victims, academics and some of the world’s most renowned surveillance experts, followed news last week that two individuals accused of trying to discredit widely accepted evidence in spyware cases in Spain had been invited to appear before the committee investigating abuse of hacking software.
There is “no timeline” for restoring internet access to Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region, a senior government official said Tuesday.
The restoration of Tigray’s internet service will be carried alongside the resumption of its phone and electricity services, though no date has been set for those goals, Ethiopia’s Minister for Innovation and Technology Belete Molla said.
He was speaking at the U.N.’s annual Internet Governance Forum being held this week in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
“The government of Ethiopia is designing a package that is not only about internet resumption but the resumption of everything, because this is what we need as a people, as a government,” Belete said of the internet shutdown in Tigray. “There is no timeline.”
New information raises further concerns about the politicisation of the WikiLeaks founder’s legal case.
Under the current administration, the U.S. antitrust agencies, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), are taking a more aggressive approach to merger enforcement and have outlined strategies that seem to move away from traditional merger review tools and principles. In October and November, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) co-hosted with Competition Policy International (CPI) a series of panel discussions on the most pronounced challenges to the current antitrust framework in a changing economic environment. On November 16th, CCIA and CPI completed the final event of the four-part series, focused on current challenges in merger enforcement and expectations regarding the new merger guidelines.
Before the main panel began, the event featured a brief conversation between Bloomberg reporter Leah Nylen and Richard G. Parker, Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. In his talk with Nylen, Parker made two key points. First, he underscored that the recent swell of activity at the antitrust agencies in regards to adjudication must be tempered with data. Rather than presenting speculative theories on antitrust, the agencies are going to have to recognize that they can’t bring cases without solid facts, economic evidence or legal groundwork. He stated that “people who are deciding the cases want more facts and less fancy theories on antitrust.” Second, Parker commented on the expectation that the FTC and DOJ will release an overhaul of their merger guidelines by the end of this year. He emphasized that any new guidelines must follow in the footsteps of the 2010 guidelines, remaining politically neutral and grounded in factual analysis.
Ilene Gotts, Partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz LLP, moderated the panel featuring Mark Meador, Deputy Chief Counsel for Antitrust and Competition Policy to Senator Mike Lee, Bernard (Barry) Nigro, Partner atFried Frank LLP, and Karen Kazmerzak, Partner at Sidley Austin LLP. The panel discussion revolved around the evolving regulatory landscape and the increase in Congress’ attention on antitrust. Mark Meador discussed the House Antitrust Subcommittee Investigation, which launched a flurry of legislation focusing on self-preferencing and trust-busting. Meador briefly covered a number of bills and explained that Congress has recently been focusing on AICOA and the Open App Markets Act.
We recently wrote about the preliminary decision of Advocate General Szpunar, an advisor to the EU’s Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), concerning geoblocks. The same Advocate General (AG) has come out with another opinion, this time concerning important questions of copyright and privacy. The basic issue is whether EU Member States can require Internet Service Providers to allow copyright companies to access information about the IP addresses of users.
For most people, and I’m not an exception, a conflict usually feels even worse when the other person doesn’t even acknowledge or seem to understand what they did wrong. It’s adding insult to injury, it feels like they’re doubling down on their own bad behavior.
But I’ve been in so many situations where it’s me that just don’t genuinely understand where I messed up. Once the other person calms down and explains it, I’m like “Ooooh! Yeah, now I get it, you’re absolutely right, I could see what I did was awful”, or maybe it’s a misunderstanding ("You thought it sounded like I said 'jerk'? I said 'work'!") or maybe I do double down because I can be kinda stubborn but at least then I’m actually doubling down and it’s not just the illusory “you should know what you did wrong” that feels like a doubling down but most of the time is just genuine Hanlon’s law confusion.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.