Another 2 for 1 video, with a useful tool for people who like to create and edit code, and a small tip for people who may want to find out their motherboard serial number in case they need it.
joel watches dann ruin the show.
FreeBSD Foundation’s Software Development review of 2022, what can we learn from Vintage Computing, OpenBSD KDE Status Report 2022, a Decade of HardenedBSD, In Praise of Plan9, and more
As a developer, choosing the right library is always a tricky one. Not just because there are dozens of options, but also because many variables at play here. Most importantly, does the library features matches with your current project requirements or not.
Calendar libraries are demanded by many developers, here in the post, we offer you the best JavaScript based calendar library and projects.
Ping is the most commonly used command-line utility used by many sysadmins or network engineers to check whether a target machine is up or down in a given network.
We already discussed how this command works in a separate article; click here to read it. For a quick note, it sends ICMP requests to the target machine and waits for a response. Once the response is received, it’s concluded that the target machine is alive on the network.
This tool is supposed to show the status of a target machine on a given network, but many network intruders or hackers (especially newbies) use it to find active systems on the network to attack.
Now, if you’re worried about security, you can stop accepting ping requests (ICMP echo) from any system on the network by following the steps in this article.
This article shows you how to disable or enable ping ICMP requests on a Linux system, either temporarily or permanently.
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is a Linux security model where administrators can determine the access of the system for other users. SELinux defines access controls for the applications, processes, and files on Linux. It uses a set of rules or policies that tell SELinux what can or can’t be accessed. It was originally developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and was released to the open-source community in 2000. It was integrated into the upstream Linux kernel in 2003.
Use FleetDM to run queries across your Osquery-enabled hosts, aggregate the results for easier processing, and use policies to evaluate compliance with standards.
WSJT-X is an open-source software suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is used for weak-signal radio communications and is popular among amateur radio operators. To perform several modes of operation, WSJT-X includes programs such as JT65, JT9, FT8, and WSPR.
Debian is a popular Linux distribution known for its stability and security. The latest version of Debian, known as Bullseye, was released on August 14th, 2021, and offers several new features and improvements over the previous version, Debian 10 Buster. This article will guide you through upgrading your Debian 10 Buster to Debian 11 Bullseye.
Before you begin, it is essential to note that upgrading your Debian distribution can be risky. It is always a good idea to back up your important files and data before proceeding.
Do you know what the Get Kubernetes ingress log for debugging is? Networking problems are increasingly more challenging to diagnose as deployments grow larger and larger. This tutorial shows you how to use the ingress-nginx kubectl plugin to debug the access to your application through the ingress controller. Let’s first see the definition of Kubernetes ingress which is important to understand the main topic better.
On day 80, I’ve explained that we can check whether a container has a specific property and value assigned and apply additional styles based on this condition. On day 82, I’ve explained that the value of a property can come from different sources, undergo adjustments before it becomes the actual value, and take on different forms along the way. To use container style queries, it’s important to understand which value's being used in queries.
Usenet started in 1980, it uses the NetWork News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on TCP port 119. It is used for announcements and to have online discussions, in the form of postings into threads in topic-focussed news groups.
Gnus is mature, the first release was in 1987 and is still used a lot.
XWiki is an open-source wiki software written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. It runs on a Servlet Container such as Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, etc. Thousands of organizations are using this platform, making it the world’s leader in professional and collaborative Open Source solutions. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the installation of XWiki on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).
Are you an open-source enthusiast? If yes, then you must already be aware of LibreOffice, which is a widely used free office suite application in Linux and is also considered a good alternative to Microsoft Office suite.
Interestingly, the most recent major release LibreOffice 7.4 came with a number of new features such as support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files, a search field for the Extension Manager, and support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets.
If you’re not a terminal lover, you might not like using the popular command-line text editors Vi or Vim. Speaking of graphical-based, Sublime Text is one of the most preferred cross-platform proprietary-based text and source code editors, that natively supports various programming and markup languages.
Sublime Text 4 is the most recent version that supports important features like GPU rendering for fluid UI, tab multi-select, ARM64 Linux support, and rewritten auto-complete engine for smart completions.
The commands ran in a Bash shell are kept in the history file, allowing users to easily re-execute frequently used terminal commands or to troubleshoot issues that have occurred. This article explains how to clear the history of the commands you run in the terminal when using Bash shell, which is used by default on most Linux distributions.
The shell history for Bash is kept in a file called .bash_history in the home directory. When you exit Bash (e.g. when you close a terminal window), the commands you ran in that session are appended at the end of the Bash history file.
In this blog post, we are going to show you how to fix corrupted tables in MySQL.
MySQL is an open-source relational database management system written in C and C++. This management system is used widely and has a large community that is increasing on a daily basis. MySQL is a part of the famous LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack used in millions of websites today. Since it is used on a daily basis, the probability of some tables crashing and getting corrupted is very high. There are billions of transactions every second on every Linux server using MySQL.
In this blog post, we will install MySQL first and then explain the procedure to fix the corrupted tables. We will use Ubuntu 22.04, but you can choose any Linux distro. Let’s get started!
Docker is a DevOps project development platform that provides containers for development and deployment. It supports various utilities for providing services, such as Docker compose. More specifically, Docker-compose is a popular development tool or utility for creating, managing, and distributing multi-container programs and applications.
This post will describe why Docker is installed but not Docker compose.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Rust on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, Rust is a systems programming language that is designed to be fast, reliable, and concurrent. It is an open-source language developed by Mozilla, and it is known for its focus on safety and memory management.
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 Rust programming language on a Fedora 37.
In most cases, when you are working with a text file, it is likely to have some blank spaces. These blank spaces may range from a few characters to a number of lines that are empty or have no information. Keeping such files with unnecessary spaces can be time-consuming and inconvenient. There may be several reasons for keeping these files, but the best way of handling them is by deleting the lines that are empty. This article explores the Unix sed command and its usage in deleting empty lines in a file.
Swift is a powerful, high-performance programming language developed by Apple. It is designed for creating iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS applications. It’s now open-source and can be run on Linux and other non-Windows platforms. Swift is known for its fast execution, safety, and interactive development features. When incorporated into a Fedora Linux system, it can bring several benefits to developers. Here are some of the key features of Swift that make it a valuable addition to a Fedora Linux system.
NGINX is a widely-used open-source web server and reverse proxy known for its high performance and efficient use of resources. The Mainline version is the current, actively developed version of NGINX, maintained by the official NGINX team. This guide will cover installing the Mainline version of NGINX on openSUSE Leap and instructions for those who prefer using the latest stable version as an alternative.
Maintaining accurate time and date settings is critical for systems to run their applications, shell scripts, cron jobs, and any other tasks in a timely fashion. Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol that servers use to synchronize their time with a pool of online servers to maintain accurate time and date.
Chrony daemon (chronyd) has since replaced the default NTP daemon (ntpd) and can be configured to provide accurate time and date.
And just like ntpd, the chronyd can be configured as a client or server. Typical accuracy between systems synchronized over the Internet is within a few milliseconds; and on a LAN, the accuracy is in tens of microseconds.
Teleport is an open-source tool for providing zero trust access to servers and cloud applications using SSH, Kubernetes and HTTPS. It can eliminate the need for VPNs by providing a single gateway to access computing infrastructure via SSH, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud applications via a built-in proxy.
Netdata is a free and open-source distributed, real-time monitoring application that runs across various computing devices; physical servers, cloud servers, containers, and even IoT devices. It collects a great deal of data and visualizes it on sleek and interactive dashboards.
After following the above guide, you will be able to successfully restore the default repositories and resolve any repository-related issues that may have arisen in your system...
Adding comments to the UFW firewall can be a lifesaver if you manually configured networking and allowed ports to the specific services. It helps you understand why a particular rule was added to the firewall.
Here's an example of comments in the UFW firewall.
First, let’s talk about the traditional ping command, its shortcomings, and how fping can fill those gaps before discussing the fping command.
If you are only interested in knowing about the fping command, then click here.
So, let’s begin.
If you are using a Fedora Linux system, you may need to install missing Linux kernel headers to build and install specific software. This guide will show you how to install missing kernel headers on Fedora.
Learn how to install Discord on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish using official download, Snap method, GUI, and Flatpak.
As a system admin, you may frequently access your remote servers via SSH. In this brief guide, I am going to explain why and how to autostart Tmux session on a remote system when logging in via SSH in Linux.
In 2022, GNOME changed its default screenshot tool and built the screenshot function as part of the GNOME Shell. It's not a separate application anymore.
Hence, capturing screenshots with a delay in the new GNOME screenshot UI becomes much more challenging.
Here are some of the ways you can still use the older GNOME Screenshot tool and how to trigger the new screenshot UI manually.
If your business develops or sells software and services, chances are that you need to use a help ticket system. If you don’t, how will you keep track of issues, and how will you even allow users, clients, consumers or developers to submit issues regarding the software and services you create? That can be a real challenge.
Docker is a well-established open-source platform for developers to build, deploy and ship applications. The Docker community provides Docker Desktop as well as Docker CLI. Additionally, Docker CLI offered numerous useful commands to build, deploy, share the project publicly, and manage Docker components such as Docker containers, Docker images, Docker registries, and many more.
It might be difficult to manage the degree of privileges that are provided to each Pod and container in a Kubernetes container. We may utilize the Kubernetes SecurityContext capabilities to add or delete the Linux capabilities from the Pod and Container to increase the security of the container. This article focuses on using the securityContext to implement a simple example of adding and deleting capabilities. The configuration of a yaml file to delete all capabilities and add just one capability to a container is provided in the sample example. In this article, the proc and capsh commands are used to display the container’s capabilities.
In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave browser on KDE Neon.
Secure Shell, commonly known as SSH, is a protocol for secure data communication, remote shell services, or command execution, as well as other encrypted network services between two-networked PCs that it connects through a secure channel over an insecure network. It ensures a secure communication link between two systems using a client-server architecture and permits users to log into server host systems remotely. Contrary to other communication protocols like Telnet, rlogin, or FTP, SSH encodes the login session, making the connection challenging for intruders to collect encoded passwords.
This protocol specification distinguishes two major versions, referred to as SSh-1 and SSH-2. It was explicitly designed as a replacement for Telnet and other insecure remote shell protocols like the Berkely rsh and rexec protocols, which transfer info, notably passwords, in plaintext, rendering them susceptible to interception and disclosure using packet analysis. The encryption utilized by SSH is intended to give confidentiality and integrity of data over an unsecured network, like the internet.
The SSH program is intended to replace old-fashioned, less secure terminal apps used to log into remote hosts, like Telnet or rsh. An interlinked program called SCP(secure, contain, and protect) replaces bygone programs that copy files between hosts, like RCP(remote procedural call). Since these older versions of apps don’t encode passwords transmitted between the client and the server, avoid them whenever possible. Using secure approaches to log into remote systems lowers the risk for both the client system and the remote host.
Fedora comprises the general OpenSSH package, the OpenSSH server, and client, openssh-clients packages. Remember, the OpenSSH packages need the OpenSSL package openssl-libs, which sets up a couple of important cryptographic libraries, enabling OpenSSH to offer encoded communications.
Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is a powerful, open-source code editor that can significantly benefit developers working on their daily projects on OpenSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed desktop. VSCode offers a range of features and tools that can help increase productivity and streamline development. It has a user-friendly interface and is highly customizable, making it an excellent choice for developers of all skill levels. VSCode also offers support for extensions, which can further enhance its functionality and customize it to the user’s needs.
. Rocky Linux is a worthy successor of CentOS and thanks to the latter we can have at our disposal many packages and tools to monitor the system. Today, for example, you will learn how to install BpyTop on Rocky Linux. This simple resource monitor can get you out of a bind occasionally.
Today we are looking at how to install Google Earth Pro on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This article explains how to list all serial ports on a Linux system. Typically a filename in the format of /dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyACM0.
Can Nagios monitor docker container? Yes, in this tutorial, you will learn how to monitor Docker containers using Nagios.
Between 2023-01-11 and 2023-01-18 there were 25 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 250 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 10 % of total released titles.
Well, that's a nice surprise isn't it. Ubisoft did something good. They released a tiny patch, that enabled Easy Anti-Cheat so The Division 2 now works on Steam Deck and Linux desktop.
Nice to see more publishers taking a direct interest in Steam Deck. Assemble Entertainment recently sent out an email to talk up their games on Valve's handheld. One of which,€ Endzone - A World Apart, I just covered in an article and video.
Gentlymad Studios and Assemble Entertainment recently released an upgrade for Endzone - A World Apart, helping out anyone playing it on Steam Deck. This is part of a wider Steam Deck push from€ Assemble, that I'll be noting in an article to come.
AYANEO, maker of some pretty popular gaming handhelds, announced that their own Linux operating system for their devices will be released this year. While we've seen others looking to the public release of SteamOS 3 that powers the Steam Deck (like GPD and OneXPlayer), AYANEO seem to want to "do a Valve" and have that extra level of control directly.
Today we are bringing you the preview version of KDE's Plasma 5.27 release. Plasma 5.27 Beta is aimed at testers, developers, and bug-hunters. As well as our lightweight and feature rich Linux Desktop this release adds a Bigscreen version of Plasma for use on televisions.
To help KDE developers iron out bugs and solve issues, install Plasma 5.27 Beta and test run the features listed below. Please report bugs to our bug tracker.
The final version of Plasma 5.27 will become available for the general public on the 14th of February.
DISCLAIMER: This release contains untested and unstable software. It is highly recommended you do not use this version in a production environment and do not use it as your daily work environment. You risk crashes and loss of data.
The KDE Project released today the beta version of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop environment series for public testing and for anyone who is willing to give it a try and give feedback to the developers.
The biggest new features of the KDE Plasma 5.27 desktop environment are a new Plasma Welcome app to help you configure your Plasma desktop more thoroughly, a new Flatpak Permissions Settings module in System Settings to let you more easily control the permissions of Flatpak apps, and tiling support for those with large monitors.
We are already past two weeks into the new year, and I wanted to start it with optimizing my new brushes, clean the thumbnails and remove the double. I collected this way this pack of 38 brushes. I'm sharing them today.
You might find that some of these brushes are similar to official default brush of Krita: their aspect, their usability and their thumbnail design. That's because I designed the default brush of Krita and even if my taste evolves a bit, my classic and way to solve problems remains the same.
The goal of this list was for me to reduce the selection of the brush to a more compact set. I selected the one I daily use to fit into two columns on my quadHD monitor. I also wanted to them to be organised by group of colors to pick them faster and take better decisions while painting. I have now a group dedicated to "details", a group specialized into "glazing", "texturing", etc...
In August 2022, GNOME developed a tool that let users provide anonymous insights about their system configuration, extension, and GNOME-tuned settings.
This was meant to help GNOME learn more about its users' preferences and to make better decisions based on analyzing the data.
Allan Day, a member of the GNOME design team, shared the collected data in a recent blog post. It contains some interesting insights and findings.
Let me take you through it.
In 2023, we will make the mobile version of Sculpt OS fit for end users, unleash advanced hardware features of Intel platforms, switch to C++20 by default, and run the feature-complete PC version of Sculpt OS on Genode's custom-tailored microkernel.
After having enabled all hardware features of the PinePhone that are fundamental for a mobile phone over the course of the past year, the project now aims at getting the mobile version of Sculpt OS into the hands of end users. Throughout the year, there will be multiple rounds of field tests within the community, allowing us to reach the desired state of maturity and usefulness in an iterative way.
On PC platforms, Genode will increasingly address advanced platform features like the distinction between power-efficient and high-performance cores, the management of temperatures and frequencies, or the practical use of suspend/resume. By the end of the year, we envision the PC version of Sculpt OS running on Genode's custom-tailored microkernel leveraging all those aspects of modern PC hardware.
There are many ways to get serious about securing Linux on a container. Heck, Microsoft has one, Common Base Linux (CBL)-Mariner. Others include Alpine Linux, Flatcar Container Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS), and RancherOS. The name of this game is to shrink down Linux to the smallest possible size so that its attack surface is tiny. Then, there's Chainguard's Wolfi. Here, there's no Linux kernel at all.
How do they manage that? Simple. Wolfi relies on a kernel being provided by an underlying container runtime. Secure that, and you're safe from most kernel-based attacks.
Chainguard CEO and founder Dan Lorenc told me at Open Source Summit Europe in Dublin, A Linux container is "a distro that boots up on hardware and gets you to a container runtime. Alpine is probably the most heavily used such distro. Wolfi is the opposite of this. It's distroless. It's minimal to the point of not even having a package manager." It has just enough to run your containerized application, and that's it.
Filling key IT roles is tough these days, especially in the cybersecurity area. Cengage CTO Jim Chilton shares valuable advice on overcoming top challenges.
Chief technology officer is a role that won’t always be consistent across every organization. While CPOs, CFOs, and even CEOs generally have similar roles and responsibilities, the CTO’s job can vary widely depending on how much they participate in product development, R&D, and selling the business as a whole.
At highly technical startups, a CTO will be expected to work closely with the product, taking technical responsibility for its development and success. At less technical startups, this type of hands-on leadership is less important. The head of product and CTO can be two different people. The same applies to R&D: At some startups, the CTO will report to the VP of R&D; at others, one person handles both jobs.
The recording of the January CentOS Board meeting is now available.
Open Cluster Management (OCM) was accepted to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in late 2021 and is currently at the Sandbox project maturity level. OCM is a community-driven project focused on multicluster and multicloud scenarios for Kubernetes applications. This article shows how to bootstrap Open Cluster Management and handle work distribution using ManifestWork. We also discuss several ways to select clusters for various tasks using the ManagedClusterSet and Placement resources.
Hi all,
=== bookworm Transition and Toolchain freeze ===
We're pleased to announce that the freeze for Debian 12 'bookworm' has begun. On January 12th we stopped accepting transition requests and we are working to complete the transitions in progress. We ask the maintainers of packages that are part of the toolchain to stop uploading those packages [1] without prior approval from us. We remind everybody to stop uploading large or disruptive changes to unstable, from here on experimental is the place to do that.
Further details of the freeze are available in the freeze policy [2]. The freeze contains 3 more milestones: * 2023-02-12 - Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze no new packages, delayed migration * 2023-03-12 - Milestone 3 - Hard Freeze - key packages and packages without autopkgtests need a manual unblock for migration * TBA - Milestone 4 - Full Freeze all packages need a manual unblock for migration
=== RC bugs ===
The current list of Release Critical bugs for bookworm [3] is progressively looking better. Thanks to everybody who is helping out. That said, we're not there yet, ideally the number of RC bugs goes down to zero. And autoremoval has done it's job, there's a large set of packages that are currently *not* in bookworm, so this is your last chance to bring them back.
Don't forget to organize your bug squashing parties: https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/ There's one planned in Switzerland later this month.
=== release notes ===
We like to draw your attention to the release notes. We have hardly received any proposals (or even ideas), don't forget to file things worth mentioning against the release-notes pseudo package in the bts or prepare your MR on salsa [4]. The release notes editors will be helping you to shape the text, so don't be shy and submit those rough ideas already.
=== testing upgrades ===
If you are in the position to already upgrade some hosts from bullseye to bookworm, we like to hear from you if you run into issues. If you don't know which package is to blame, please don't be shy and report it against the upgrade-reports pseudo package and people following that package will try and help find the right package (help wanted for the triaging).
=== your packages ===
Please take this opportunity to check packages are in their final shape and stay vigilant for release-critical bugs.
On behalf of the Release Team, Paul
[1] https://release.debian.org/testing/essential-and-build-essential.txt [2] https://release.debian.org/testing/freeze_policy.html [3] https://udd.debian.org/dev/bugs.cgi [4] https://salsa.debian.org/ddp-team/release-notes/
The schedules are out, and evidently, I could not find anywhere to have a plocate talk; the only devroom I could find that was remotely relevant (Distributions) didn't include me (perhaps because I was a day or so after the submission deadline?), and when I moved to lightning talks, evidently that didn't fit either.
Are you running out of disk space on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux then this tutorial post is for you as we will show you the method to know which installed Debian or Ubuntu packages occupy the most disk space.
Based on my own research, it seems that the tool Debmirror is the most simple and straight-forward way to create a local Ubuntu mirror with a reasonable data footprint of about 480 GB (2023) for both Jammy AMD64 (22.04) and Focal AMD64 (20.04).
Based on on your needs, you can further finetune Debmirror to only download the pacakges that you need for your environment.
The new module is pin-to-pin compatible with earlier “VAR-SOM Pin2Pin” modules based on NXP i.MX 6 or i.MX 8 processors. Variscite provides Linux support with Yocto, Debian, and Boot2Qt for the Cortex-A55 core(s), and FreeRTOS for the Cortex-M33 real-time core. You should eventually find more details about the software in the wiki, but it’s currently under construction with very limited information.
The company also offers the VAR-SOM-MX93 Evaluation kit based on the Symphony carrier board with an LVDS interface, capacitive and resistive touch panel interfaces, dual Gigabit Ethernet, two audio jacks, on-board digital microphone, CAN Bus, microSD card socket, and so on. A 7-inch WVGA display with a capacitive touchscreen is available as an option.
AMD in partnership with Optomotive presented yesterday an industrial smart camera featuring the Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC-based Kria K26 System-on-Module (SoM). The SMILODON 10G EVO features a 25MP image sensor from Gpixel in addition to up to 48x LVDS interfaces and support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
The Raspberry Pi is the foundation of many IoT camera projects, but enclosures are often something left up to the user. [Mare] found that a serviceable outdoor enclosure could be made with a trip to the hardware store and inexpensive microscopy supplies.
XCY-X66 is a tiny (75 x 75 x 52mm) mini PC based on Intel Celeron N5105 Jasper Lake and equipped with four 2.5GbE ports using Intel i225V controllers that should make it suitable for a range of networking applications.
The microcontroller is supported in FreeRTOS real-time operating system and is designed for IoT devices, wireless devices, and TV/STB dongles. I’m not quite sure what the latter means in this context, or they just mean some advanced WiFi or Bluetooth remote controls.
The machine had 32MB of RAM, a 15" colour LCD and a dedicated "Rotational Hand Controller." The software was NASA's own Shuttle Engineering Simulator (SES), ported to SPARC from the Control Data Corporation Cyber 180 Model 962 (an upgraded version of the RISC Cyber 180-960) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and ran on OS/MP 4.1A, Solbourne's equivalent of SunOS 4.1.1. Its motherboard was most likely a Solbourne "pizzabox" IDT logic board, the same one used in the S3000, S4000 and S4100 which directly competed with O.G. SPARCstations, making the reported speed of 40MHz suspect since the Panasonic MN10501 KAP (short for "Kick-Ass Processor" — yes, really) was notoriously unstable above 36MHz. A suspiciously similar laptop called the Matsushita P2100 was announced in 1992 but by then Sun was making moves to freeze SPARC clone makers out of the market, particularly Solbourne who had cornerned the more profitable upper tiers, and refused to license Solaris to anyone like they did SunOS. (Apple later pulled this same stunt with the Mac clones and Mac OS 8.) The P2100 doesn't seem to have been ever released, and while a few PILOT examples were likely fabricated, no one so far has found one. PILOT was eventually replaced by various IBM ThinkPads which went on to have a well-known and illustrious career in space.
If you’re ever tried to capture some macro photographs (very close-up pictures), you’ve probably noticed that it is difficult to get proper focus. Because the depth-of-field (DoF) for macro lenses is so small, you can only keep a narrow range of distance in focus at any given time — everything else is blurry. One solution is “focus stacking,” in which you take many photos and then mash them together in software. Curious Scientist designed a macro photography focus stacking device that makes this technique easier.
The focus stacking technique requires several photos, each with a slightly different area of the subject in focus, until you’ve covered the entire subject. Then you can use photo editing software, like Photoshop, to blend the pictures together. The result is a macro photo where the entire subject is in focus. You can perform that process without any special equipment, but it is tedious and difficult to achieve consistent focus changes. Curious Scientist’s device speeds up the process and has perfect consistency.
We all know the wonders of rooting and what magic it can bring to our boring phone device, it is used to enlarge the number of options one can get to customize and utilize the device at the admin level. Smartphone device becomes smarter with rooting it. Now you might wonder how this happens. It can all be done easily with Android Debug Bridge otherwise known as ADB. The page provides you with all of the ADB and Fastboot commands in a list format along with a PDF file that is the Cheat Sheet.
Long before there was open-source software, there was Dungeons and Dragons (D&D). And, I was there from almost the beginning. I started playing D&D in 1975. Years later, open source came along and changed the world. While we think mostly of how it's transformed software development, it also changed gaming. Or, to be more exact, it did.
In 2000, the prominent gaming company Wizards of the Coast, publishers of D&D and Magic: The Gathering, released the Open Gaming License (OGL) 1.0a. This license, which was spearheaded by Ryan Dancey, gave game designers and publishers the right to use some processes and materials found in D&D 3rd edition.
When I was a kid, my dad was a TV repairman. Thanks to that, I grew up with an oscilloscope probe in one hand and a soldering iron in the other. You could say I was raised from the beginning to work on technology. Since then, I've worked as a network manager, developer, and system administrator. Along the way, I found that while I was good at working with technology, I was even better at explaining it to people. So, for the last 30-plus years--yes, I've been at this for a while--I've been a technology and business journalist.
Along the way, I've spent most of my time covering Linux and open-source software. I've been at this since Linus Torvalds was a graduate student, and open source--and free software, for that matter--was a thing. Why? Because I started in the Unix world, where much of the software was what we'd now call free software. And, as I learned more about both, I realized something very simple: They work.
I recently studied some research by Dave Logan, Bob King, and Halee Fischer-Wright, who looked at what I call productive and counterproductive communities. Community is an important open organization principle. These researchers define it as a group of 20 to 150 people who know each other enough to say hello on the street and influence or impact each other. They give suggestions on guiding people out of counterproductive communities and relationships and into productive ones through introductions to people who have gone through that process.
Their study suggests many of the same collaboration concepts I talked about in my article on the book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. The context between the two studies is very different, but they both come to similar conclusions about the flow of communication (here again, the open organization principle is widely applied).
The researchers believe that cultures determine a common dominant language, topics of conversation, feelings, and behavior. It's what determines the environment you live and work in. You are either energizing or draining people of their energy (consuming their energy and motivation). A group eventually expels those that speak a different language or behave unacceptably.
According to the researchers, the effectiveness of a community is based on five stages of culture:
Open Source Charlotte, the newest addition to the All Things Open network, will host its first one-day event on January 26 at 6:30 pm EST, a Meetup that will feature a talk by Charlotte resident Mike Bifulco, who will give a talk titled “Unlocking The Power of Open Source to Launch Your Startup and Career.” The free event will take place at the Dubois Center on the UNC Charlotte Center City campus.
Bifulco most recently worked for Google, where he spent 1 1/2 years as manager and tech lead for the advocacy team behind Google Assistant, and at Stripe, where he was a developer advocate. He also heads Craftwork, a general contracting startup that uses technology to simplify repair and renovation projects for homeowners. In addition, he’s co-founder and co-host of the APIs You Won’t Hate podcast, and is also a host on the Software Engineering Daily podcast.
The Linux command line, also known as the terminal or shell, is a powerful tool for interacting with your computer and managing your files and programs. It allows you to perform various tasks, such as creating and editing files, running programs, and managing your system, all without the need for a graphical user interface (GUI). In this article, we will explore the basics of the Linux command line, including some common commands and their uses, as well as some tips and tricks for working with the terminal.
Linux is a powerful and versatile operating system that has been around for decades. It is an open-source platform that is free to use, modify, and distribute. One of the greatest things about Linux is the wide variety of “distributions,” or “distros,” that are available. A distro is simply a version of Linux that has been customized and optimized for different users and purposes.
Linux is a popular open-source operating system that is widely used in various industries and fields. The operating system is known for its flexibility, stability, and security, which makes it a great choice for many users. However, like any other operating system, Linux also has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Linux, along with examples and sub-headings.
Today I wanted to share a simpler approach to all of this, which is running your web browser, typically Firefox, under a very restricted environment using Firejail. Firejail is an open source project, probably available from your package manager, that uses Linux namespaces, seccomp-bpf and capabilities to restrict what your web browser can do and access. Notably, it ships profiles for multiple applications either based on blocklists or, in the case of Firefox (the main use case), allowlists. When you run Firefox through Firejail, for example by running firejail firefox, the resulting Firefox process will be restricted in several ways and will not be able to access most of your home directory, except for the ~/Downloads directory and its own configuration and data directories. If, on top of that, it’s running under Wayland, it will not be able to spy on your screen and other windows unless there’s a second vulnerability available in the Wayland compositor.
Sometimes, developers add features to an application not necessarily to improve performance but rather to remove clutter. By doing so, they improve the user experience and make the tool more pleasant to work with.
One thing that has always bugged me about some browsers is how extensions are accessed and displayed on the toolbar. Pin too many extensions to the interface and it can get very cluttered.
Pin too few extensions to the toolbar and you might find them a challenge to access.
No one ever wanted to say “tech-savvy toddler” but here we are. It’s not like you just walked into the kitchen one morning and your kid was sucking on a binky and editing Wikipedia, right? Wait, really? It was pretty close to that? Well, for years there’s been an ongoing conversation on internet usage in families’ lives, and in 2020, the pandemic made us come face-to-face with that elephant in the room, the internet. There was no way around it. We went online for everything from virtual classrooms for kids, playing video games with friends, conducting video meetings with co-workers, and of course, streaming movies and TV shows. The internet’s role in our lives became a more permanent fixture in our family. It’s about time we gave it a rethink.
There may come a day when the humble web browser – having already yielded enterprise grade server side technologies like Firecracker, Isolates and Node.js – has nothing of interest left for the industry to extract. But that day has certainly not arrived yet, as the increasing chatter around WebAssembly (WASM) proves.
The fact that people are talking about WASM is not new. Nor is the fact that it has people excited. WASM has been a topic of discussion for years as the industry pondered a larger role for a technology originally designed to run binary code within the context of the browser.
What has changed, however, is the volume of conversation about WASM. As WASM has taken the initial steps towards a potential role as a critical piece of enterprise infrastructure, discussion of the technology has spiked both in the community at large and within the conversations RedMonk has with its participants.
I've been working on Socorro (crash ingestion pipeline at Mozilla) since the beginning of 2016. During that time, I've focused on streamlining maintainence of the project, paying down technical debt, reducing risk, and improving crash analysis tooling.
One of the things I identified early on is how the crash ingestion pipeline was chaotic, difficult to reason about, and difficult to document. What did the incoming data look like? What did the processed data look like? Was it valid? Which fields were protected? Which fields were public? How do we add support for a new crash annotation? This was problematic for our ops staff, engineering staff, and all the people who used Socorro. It was something in the back of my mind for a while, but I didn't have any good thoughts.
A simple logic behind SQL database relies with his name Structured Query Language, where SQL manage to reform data efficiently into a specific structure e.g., rows and columns and store them into a database. Different databases have been introduced for multiple OS, but the one that supports SQL database on Raspberry Pi are presented in this article for user’s easiness.
We already discussed the simple primary keys on this website. This article focuses on DynamoDB partition keys. The sections that we cover include the definition of a composite key, the best practices for creating composite keys, and how to create a composite key for your table.
Database servers mostly use sockets to connect with client systems like using a consistent TCP/IP protocol that helps them to listen and respond. Just like many other databases, MongoDB’s default protocol for the transport layer is the TCP. As all the databases listen to a specific port, MongoDB also does that. The default port for MongoDB connection is “27017”. There is a leeway to come across situations where MongoDB does not work well or get connected. The reason could be anything like the default port is already occupied and we need to change the default port for MongoDB at such a moment. The process of changing a default port for MongoDB consists of some steps needed to take very safely. So, we are going to discuss those simple yet important steps to change a MongoDB port in this guide.
Sad news from the Hispanic LibreOffice community. Carlos Parra Zaldivar, a long-time collaborator in the community, member of The Document Foundation and advocate for Free Software, passed away on November 20th.
Happy January! Below, we share a list of upcoming conferences that either focus on the R programming language or showcase its use in the field. If we have missed your conference, please leave a comment with the details. We will update our list as we receive more information.
We have updated the Makulu Max development notes with highlights from the last time we updated ( October ), The highlights now show all development notes up until 07 January 2023. We will continue to update the notes until Max is ready for Public release.
Some time ago we released some QML components as part of the Qt6 which was well received. However, this led the Qt5 users not having them as Qt5 cannot have new APIs without extra magic. So, as some of you already saw, we removed the prices of the marketplace items that this is about.
So, unless you have not done it, now is good time to enhance your Qt5 environment with modules like TreeView, CalendarView and Multieffects. If you are not familiar with these, here's a small recap:
After hacking the Intel media-driver and ffmpeg I managed to work out how the anv hardware mostly works now for h264 decoding.
I've pushed a branch [1] and a MR[2] to mesa. The basics of h264 decoding are working great on gen9 and compatible hardware. I've tested it on my one Lenovo WhiskeyLake laptop.
Indeed, there is an old joke about consultants (or whizkid new workers) who come into a shop, rewrite everything using the coolness-of-the-week, get it halfway working, then move on to the next shop, leaving dozens or hundreds of workers spending the rest of their careers trying to clean up. It's funny because it's true. The overwhelming majority of work in our field might best be described as cleaning up after somebody else who never knew how to end a project.
Game of Trees 0.80 has been released (and the port updated).
What are those elements? It seems obvious that the classification structures of objects ought to be high on the list. Namespaced function libraries like java.lang.Math are another obvious choice. In the one case we have a batch of functions that manipulate an internal data structure. In the other case we have a batch of functions that manipulate an external data structure.
The essential charachteristic of these elements, these batches of functions, is that they are internally cohesive. That means that all the functions in the batch are strongly related to each other because they manipulate the same data structures, whether internal or external. It is that cohesion that drives the partitioning of a software design.
Like last time, I’ve written some example programs to demonstrate these problems. I’ve tried to use a variety of languages in the examples (Go, Javascript, Java, and C) to show that these problems don’t just show up in super low level C programs – integers are everywhere!
Also I’ve probably made some mistakes in here, I learned several things while writing this.
In other words, the point of natural selection is to act as a preservative around important functions of the organism. Sure, some degree of improvement happens the way I used to think; some random mutations are actually good. But these are usually smaller, incremental improvements. Here’s the trick: changes to inconsequential functions aren’t obviously bad, so they might survive. The largest number of mutations happen in functions with low utility.33 And indeed, biologists measure the utility of a function by its rate of mutation. Inconsequential functions can still change quite a bit, because natural selection does not guard them as jelously.
It is looking good as a GUI toolkit for the initrd, so embarking on analyzing how it works. There is no documentation and just one example, 'example.c'. The file 'gui_engine.c' provides functions that an application can call.
Split pandoc-server, pandoc-cli, and pandoc-lua-engine into separate packages (#8309). Note that installing the pandoc package from Hackage will no longer give you the pandoc executable; for that you need to install pandoc-cli.
During the 2022 Perl Advent, in particular the entry for December 06; Perl Advent fans were introduced to a little module called Util::H2O.
A lot has already been said about Util::H2O, and this author uses it a lot in client and production code because it helps produce very clean and maintainable HASH reference heavy code. So much so, that he created the Util::H2O::More module to encapsulate some common tasks and additional capabilities for working between pure Perl data structures and blessed objects that have real data accessors, in a natural and idiomatic way.
Python is a versatile and widely used programming language for developing various useful applications in the field of robotics, IoT, Big Data, and Machine Learning. People mostly used this programming language to develop websites, applications, automate tasks and perform data analysis. This language is the official language of the Raspberry Pi system, thus, it’s fair to say that it plays an important part for the users using the Raspberry Pi OS GUI version on their device. However, the question needs to be asked whether there is a possibility to program the Raspberry Pi with Python over SSH. The reason is most people preferred accessing the Raspberry Pi terminal over SSH.
This article is a detailed guide for those users who want to learn Python on Raspberry Pi through SSH.
If you use Python, you may have encountered the IndexError error in response to some code you've written. The IndexError message in Python is a runtime error. To understand what it is and how to fix it, you must first understand what an index is. A Python list (or array or dictionary) has an index. The index of an item is its position within a list. To access an item in a list, you use its index. For instance, consider this Python list of fruits:
This list's range is 5, because an index in Python starts at 0.
Suppose you need to print the fruit name pear from this list. You can use a simple print statement, along with the list name and the index of the item you want to print:
My first languages were IBM 360 Assembler and C. I've always been fond of low-level languages. If I were going to become a developer today, my first choice would be Rust. The language has already become a critical system-building language for the Linux kernel, Windows, Chrome, and Android. But, as a young language, it still needs help moving forward, and that's where the Rust Foundation’s Community Grants Program comes in.
These provide funds to Rust developers and others in the community to support the work of Rust’s hardworking maintainers and leaders. It consists of financial awards ranging from $2,500 to $15,000 USD that fund short-term Rust-related projects, carried out by both individuals and organizations.
I'm writing this article to fulfil my role as a PNG evangelist, spreading the joy of good-enough lossless image compression to every corner of the internet. Similar articles already exist, but this one is mine.
I'll be referencing the Working Draft of the PNG Specification (Third Edition) released in October 2022 (!), but every feature I mention here should still be present in the 1.0 spec. I'll aim to update this article once the Third Edition releases officially.
It’s quite incredible that the money and power birthed through the advent of the web haven’t yet been able to completely overtake this “mashup art experiment” medium which “gives consumers all the power”.
The carrot basically is: if you have a well-behaved feed reader, you will continue to be able to discover a new post on my feed in a reasonable amount of time. This is most people. Most people do it right. Thank you for that.
The stick is: if you do not, you will not. It will take considerably longer to notice something's different out here.
The third Monday of January is celebrated as a national holiday to honor the memory of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man whose legacy is larger than life and whose work benefitted all of humanity.
Yes, he led the successful struggles that achieved landmark civil rights and voting rights legislation.
In another part of the experiment, the researchers also analyzed a database with over 450 recordings of jazz soloists, including performances by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Joshua Redman and Charlie Parker. They found that almost all of them were using tiny downbeat delays relative to the rhythm section. "There were very few exceptions," Geisel says.
Ever since the rise of capitalism and corporations, the manipulation of science has been at the centre of the endeavours of big companies and corporations – like those related to tobacco, asbestos, chemical, pharma, sugar, fast food, and oil and gas. This is a threat to human existence as well as planet earth.
For decades, large profit-making corporations have been very busy in obscuring the harm they and their products cause to human health and to our planet.
Hundreds of University of Illinois Chicago faculty members went on strike Tuesday after nine months of deadlocked contract negotiations over pay and student mental health resources.
Some schools that removed police on campus following the 2020 uprisings are now asking for them to be reinstated.
Although things became complicated later, HDDs started out having a specific physical spot for each and every block (and even today most HDDs mostly have such a thing). You could in theory point at a very tiny spot on a HDD and correctly say 'this is block 5,321 and (almost) always will be'. Every time you wrote to block 5,321, that tiny spot would get new data, as an in-place update. SSDs famously don't work like this, because in general you can't immediately rewrite a chunk of flash memory that's been written to the way you can a HDD platter; instead, you need to write to newly erased flash memory. In order for SSDs to pretend that they were rewriting data in place, SSDs need both a data structure to map from logical block addresses to wherever the latest version of the block is in physical flash memory and a pool of ready to use erased flash blocks that the SSD can immediately write to.
For my work at Prehensile Tales I frequently have to build the Godot engine to debug problems. Godot is a large C++ code base which can take quite a while to compile. Due to the problems I work on I, often end up having to do a full rebuild.
Aside from work for my company, I also help maintain the Godot buildroot and Godot build containers. Both of these also have me build massive amounts of code. Both the buildroot and the containers require having to build things like gcc, glibc, mono, and other heavy dependencies. Often times for multiple CPU architectures and multiple operating systems.
It is not uncommon for me to need to test Godot, the containers, or the buildroots on various platforms using virtual machines. Godot being a game engine, I need to be able to run a VM with a dedicated GPU as a virtual GPU generally doesn’t cut it. This all boils down to the following list of requirements: [...]
[Petteri Aimonen] created an omnidirectional LED safety light to cling to his child’s winter hat in an effort to increase visibility during the dark winter months, but the design is also great example of how to use the Microchip MCP1640 — a regulated DC-DC step-up power supply that can run the LEDs off a single AAA cell. The chip also provides a few neat tricks, like single-button on/off functionality that fully disconnects the load, consuming only 1 €µA in standby.
As much as Big Ben steals the spotlight when it comes to big public clocks, the Berlin Uhr is a much beloved digital communal timepiece. [RuudK5] developed their own 3D printed replica of this 1980s German icon.
Surface mount components have been a game changer for the electronics hobbyist, but doing reflow soldering right requires some way to evenly heat the board. You might need to buy a commercial reflow oven — you can cobble one together from an old toaster oven, after all — but you still need something, because it’s not like a PCB is going to solder itself. Right?
In the 1970s, 8-track audio players were very popular, especially in cars. For a couple of bucks, you could have the latest album, and you didn’t have to flip the tape in the middle of a drive like you did with a cassette. We’ve seen plenty of 8-tracks and most of us a certain age have even owned a few players. But we couldn’t find anyone who would admit to owning the Bearcat 8 Track Scanner, as seen in the 1979 Popular Electronics ad below.
Artist and self-described “maker of objects” [Daric Gill] is sharing some of the world’s most pleasing and acoustically interesting soundscapes with museum patrons in his latest work, ‘The Memory Machine: Sound‘.
It is no secret that semiconductor junctions change their behavior with temperature, and you can use this fact to make a temperature sensor. The problem is that you have to calibrate each device for any particular transistor you want to use as a sensor, even if they have the same part number. Back in 2011€ 1991, the famous [Jim Williams] noted that while the voltage wasn’t known, the difference between two readings at different current levels would track with temperature in a known way. He exploited this in an application note and, recently, [Stephen Woodward] used the same principle in an oscillator that can read the temperature.
People are now explicitly banned from smoking in outdoor public places such as parks, town squares and beaches as well as offices, hotels, restaurants, schools, stadiums, shopping centers and entertainment arenas. Smoking is already banned in many of the aforesaid indoor spaces.
The anti-smoking law also prohibits all forms of advertising and promotion of cigarettes including sponsorship arrangements involving tobacco companies. Retailers such as the ubiquitous convenience store Oxxo are no longer permitted to stock tobacco products in open view of customers.
Organic farming advocates on Wednesday cheered the United States Department of Agriculture's publication of new regulations aimed at stamping out "organic fraud" in supply chains.
Appearing at a press conference with two of his allies who have consistently spread Covid-19 misinformation, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday unveiled a proposal to permanently ban masking requirements, vaccine mandates, and other pandemic mitigation measures in his state.
The growing problem of crushing medical debt was raised by Senator Bernie Sanders in a national address Tuesday on the American working class. We hear from patients and discuss the fight to stop hospitals from suing patients, garnishing wages and putting liens on homes of people facing medical bills they can’t afford. We are joined by Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of Health Initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and co-founder of the Health Care for All New York campaign.
Neil interviews John on a wide range of topics. Neil is an archeologist, author and broadcaster.
In a blog post, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company was seeking to align its cost structure with projected revenues and where customer demand remained the strongest.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the layoffs in a memo to staff Wednesday, which the company disclosed in an SEC filing. The job cuts will occur through the end of Microsoft’s third quarter of fiscal 2023, which ends March 31. Some employees are being notified today that they’re losing their jobs, Nadella wrote.
In addition to the layoffs, Microsoft is taking other cost-cutting actions, including making “changes to our hardware portfolio” — which it didn’t detail — and consolidating building leases “to create higher density across our workspaces,” the company said in the SEC filing. All together, Microsoft said the moves will result in a charge of $1.2 billion for the December 2022 quarter, representing a 12 cent/share hit to diluted earnings.
The cuts, which affect less than 5% of the company's workforce, come as Microsoft customers pull back on spending, Nadella said. He added that the company is also looking to expand in new areas, including artificial intelligence.
Microsoft had reported its slowest growth in five years for the first quarter of its fiscal 2023, due largely to a strong US dollar and an ongoing decline in personal computer sales, causing net income to fall by 14% to $17.56 billion from this time last year.
Microsoft has looked at adding to its $1-billion stake in OpenAI, the startup behind the Silicon Valley chatbot sensation known as ChatGPT, which Microsoft plans to soon market through its cloud service.
Microsoft Corp said Wednesday it will cut 10,000 jobs this year, or about 5% of its workforce, which will result in a $1.2 billion charge in the fiscal second quarter. Chief executive officer Satya Nadella said in a blog post and internal email to employees that the company will continue to hire in “key strategic areas.”
The phenomenon of job losses in the tech sector has global reach but has been keenly felt in Silicon Valley and other West Coast tech hubs in the United States. The website layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the tech industry, has identified well over 100 tech firms announcing layoffs since January 1 across North and South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. In all, the website has counted more than 1,200 firms making layoffs since the beginning of 2022.
Microsoft is also seeking to become a major player in advertising and is Netflix’s global ad sales and technology partner.
The data theft in question is the now-infamous Microsoft Exchange attack in which Hafnium exploited four zero-day vulnerabilities in the email platform to steal data from US-based defense contractors, law firms, and infectious disease researchers.
Still, to me the golden era of the Mac will always remain the years between 1998 and 2012. During that time, purchasing a Mac — for me at least — was always a thrilling experience. It never felt something coldly planned beforehand or laboriously calculated by comparing prices and poring over tech specifications. Sure, there were considerations related to costs and needs, but there also was a fun, whimsical component. Macs were fun, powerful enough for their time, with unique designs and quirks, with an amazing operating system that felt truly integrated with and optimised for the hardware it was running on. Today it’s all boring clinical performance, an OS that doesn’t feel capable and as fun to use as it once was, and every purchase essentially feels like writing down a costs/benefits table and little more.
The company is performing the usual denials and deflections...
A source code audit has revealed two critical vulnerabilities affecting git, the popular distributed version control system for collaborative software development.
As more devices and services migtate to Linux, malware has become more and more prevalent on the OS. Despite Linux’s reputation as the most secure operating system, it is not immune to malware.
In fact, Linux malware has become increasingly prevalent in recent years as more and more devices and servers run on Linux operating systems.
According to data analysed by Atlas VPN based on malware threat statistics from AV-ATLAS, new Linux malware threats hit record numbers in 2022, increasing by 50% to 1.9 million.
TuxCare, a global innovator in enterprise-grade cybersecurity for Linux, today announced the launch of its TuxCare OEM Partner Program that aims to easily arm OEM partners with its award-winning KernelCare Enterprise and LibCare solutions.
A surprisingly hard, and widely misunderstood, problem with SSL certificates is figuring out what organization (called a certificate authority, or CA) issued a certificate. This information is useful for several reasons: [...]
Although we’re mainly an Apple HomeKit home, we do have a few Google Nest smart displays in the house. I added the Govee Smart Gooseneck Kettle to our Google Home account using the “Works with Google” device setup process. You can also use this kettle with Amazon Alexa for voice commands.
I was a little flustered after the Google Home setup. It worked well when asking Google what the kettle temperature was. However, I couldn’t get Google to turn the kettle on to heat up water. The Govee app specifically notes you can say “Hey Google, turn (device) on/off.”
A couple of years before criticism of Israel-based NSO Group reached critical mass, the malware merchant was sued by WhatsApp. According to the messaging service (now owned by Meta), its servers were used (without its permission and in violation of the terms of service) to deliver powerful spyware to targets of NSO Group customers (which included a disturbingly large number of habitual human rights abusers).
A recent guest essay in the€ New York Times€ (12/28/22) concluded a searing takedown of “our technology overlords” with the sentence: We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance puts us all at […]
There are lots of ways facial recognition tech can be misused. Since it’s far from infallible, the most common misuse of the tech is accepting matches as statements of fact. What should be considered, at best, an investigative lead, has instead been used to wrongly arrest people for crimes they didn’t commit.
ChatGPT could automatically compose comments submitted in regulatory processes. It could write letters to the editor for publication in local newspapers. It could comment on news articles, blog entries and social media posts millions of times every day. It could mimic the work that the Russian Internet Research Agency did in its attempt to influence our 2016 elections, but without the agency’s reported multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees.
Wagner mercenary group founder Evgeny Prigozhin said Wednesday that YouTube will soon be banned in Russia.
Eight draftees from the Kaliningrad region have been charged with “armed desertion in wartime,” a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison under the Russian criminal law.
If U.S. Congress is going to form a special subcommittee looking at government overreach and illegality, then it should do exactly that.
In a January 18 meeting with World War II veterans and Leningrad siege survivors, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia had launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine to stop the war that went on there since 2014.
The regional court of Bryansk sentenced the 22-year-old Saratov resident Kirill Belousov to five years in a high-security penal colony, on charges of joining an illegal military formation.
Makeshift memorials are springing up in Russian cities as locals commemorate the victims of a January 14 missile strike on a nine-story apartment building in Dnipro, which killed at least 45 civilians, including six children.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been going on for almost 11 months. The number of prisoners of war (POWs) held by both sides is still unknown. Experts believe there are thousands. Ukrainian servicemen have spoken repeatedly about torture, beatings, and violence in Russian captivity. Russian officials have not responded to such claims. Ukraine, unlike Russia, has granted the UN access to POWs and has launched investigations into known cases of mistreatment. Most Russian prisoners of war are held in special camps in Ukraine, which are visited by representatives of international human rights organizations. Meduza managed to see one of the camps in western Ukraine, where prisoners who fought in the Russian army — as well as in formations controlled by the self-proclaimed LNR and DNR — are being held. This is a photo report from the camp.
The Russian Embassy in Estonia has temporarily stopped accepting applications for citizenship renunciation, according to its official website. The online announcement doesn’t give a reason for the pause or a timeline for when applications will be accepted again.
CODEPINK’s Marcy Winograd, Chair of the US-based Peace in Ukraine Coalition, interviewed Yurii Sheliazhenko, Executive Secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, about the war in Ukraine and military mobilization against the Russian invasion. Yurii lives in Kyiv, where he faces routine electricity shortages and daily air raid sirens that send people running to subway stations for shelter.
Inspired by pacifists Leo Tostoy, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Indian and Dutch non-violent resistance, Yurii calls for an end to US and NATO weapons to Ukraine. Arming Ukraine undermined past peace agreements and discouraged negotiations to end the current crisis, he says.
Berlin has still seen no real snow – but instead – lots of€ € “mist.” In German “Mist” means manure, BS, or, to quote Google: “crap, sh-t, dammit!”). Some suggest it derives originally from visiting American basketballers a century ago who, when a shot failed, said “Missed” – and were misunderstood.
True or not, dammit, we were hit by it. In September 2021, in a complicated election, the Berlin minister in charge screwed up; ballots were wrongly delivered, polling stations lacked ballots, voters waited in long lines (like certain areas in US cities) to elect each district’s national Bundestag delegate, its city council delegate and its borough council delegate, each on a separate ballot requiring two X’s each (for person and for party), then dropped into the boxes (no machines). And also a Yes or No vote on a referendum to “Confiscate Deutsche Wohnen,” Berlin’s biggest owner (and exploiter) of Berlin apartment houses. The courts finally ruled that (except for the referendum) the vote must be completely repeated, so thousands of new posters with smiling faces and empty words now decorate lamp poles all over town – until the repeated election day on February 12th.
Behold last January 8th’s mob assault on Brazil’s top government offices by “protesters” claiming that their nation’s most recent presidential election was “stolen” from its last chief executive Jair Bolsonaro. The rioters hoped to provoke the Brazilian military into intervening to carry out a coup that would put Bolsonaro, “the Trump of the Tropics,” back in power. The parallels with the United States’ January 6, 2021, Capitol Riot are eerily stark:
+ An election lost the previous fall by an eco-cidal and pandemicist€ fascist€ incumbent (Donald Trump in 2020 and his tropical counterpart Bolsonaro in 2022) who is habitually and moronically called a “populist” by journalists and academics.
The policymaking apparatus behind the AUKUS security pact was shoddy from the start. It has raised questions about the extent US power will subordinate Australia further in future conflicts; it has brought into question Australia’s own sovereignty; and it has also raised the spectre of regional nuclear proliferation via the use of otherwise closely guarded propulsion technology.
The other feature of this whole enterprise, as it always is regarding the procurement of submarines, is their rate of production.€ The US Navy’s fast attack submarine program, the Virginia-class, is under pressure.€ A mere 1.2 vessels have been delivered, on average, per year over the last five years.
Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023.€ That’s far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans’ care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don’t even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country.
The assumption is that when it comes to spending on the military and related activities, more is always better.
Another lesson is that intelligence agencies should accord more weight to open-source data, and the means to mine and interpret it. OSINT was once a sideline that supported intelligence collected by clandestine methods. Now the roles are reversing. Human, signals and geospatial intelligence help make sense of the mass of public data. In the run-up to the invasion last year open-source analysts saw Russia’s military build-up. The difference between America and Britain, which predicted an attack, and France and Germany, which did not, was their spooks’ methods. Should President Vladimir Putin consider using a tactical nuclear weapon, only intelligence agencies could hope to detect the telltale warning signs.
For nine months, The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial analyzed scientific studies of Verra, "the world's leading carbon standard" in a voluntary global offset market worth $2 billion annually and growing. Verra's customers include major multinational corporations, and the analysis' findings cast doubts over the carbon offset credits the companies buy in order to label their products as "carbon neutral" or assure customers that they can consume their products or services without worsening the climate emergency.
Climate activists with Extinction Rebellion on Wednesday gathered in canary costumes and doused a U.K. government building with black paint to protest the recent approval of the country's first new deep coal mine in three decades.
Shell Canada is going out of its way to assure the public that it cares deeply about fixing the climate emergency.€
The oil and gas major paid late last year for an advertising feature in the Globe & Mail touting its commitment to a “net-zero” economy where humankind is no longer releasing atmosphere-warming emissions. “We’re recognizing we have to be a force for good for the community,” Susannah Pierce, who became the president of Shell Canada in 2021, says in the feature.
When I thought it was an Internet outage, I cursed myself for not adding a 4G USB dongle to my router. That would have allowed me to see whether it was the ISP or the electricity which was the issue. It would also have helped with: [...]
Around 38% of American households have gas stoves, although that varies among states. Proponents say that they are cheaper and more efficient than electric alternatives—and even that food cooked on them tastes better. The gas industry has good PR. “Cooking with gas”, an advertising slogan from the 1930s, is baked into the American psyche. The American Gas Association, a trade group, publishes recipes on cookingwithgas.org. In sponsored social-media posts, influencers rave about their gas stoves. But the appliances, which emit nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter and other pollutants, also carry environmental and health risks, including asthma. The dangers can be mitigated with good ventilation, yet indoor pollution is not heavily regulated. Burning gas also releases greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane.
A social media campaign this week added to pressure on oil and gas companies, promoting a "cease and desist" notice sponsored by Thunberg, Nakate, Neubauer and Gualinga through the non-profit website Avaaz.
The call, which has garnered more than 850,000 signatures, demands that energy company CEOs "immediately stop opening any new oil, gas, or coal extraction sites, and stop blocking the clean energy transition we all so urgently need.”
It threatens legal action and more protests if they fail to comply.
Demonstrations have been ongoing at the mine and around the village for days, the Washington Post has reported, with thousands of people joining protests on Saturday, January 14. According to the Associated Press, police used water cannons and batons to push protestors from entering the village of Luetzerath, which has now been evacuated and sealed off, during the Saturday protests.
I was happy to see this segment of Ezra Klein’s show (hosted by Rogé Karma) which featured an interview with Columbia University Law Professor Katharina Pistor. Pistor is the author of The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
I’ve not yet read the book, but got the gist from the interview. Pistor is arguing that we have structured the market in ways that generate enormous inequality. In the interview, she presents several ways in which the law has been written that facilitate the accumulation of wealth by a small group of people. These include rules on property in land, intellectual property, and the creation of corporations as distinct entities with an existence independent of their owners.
Sen. Bernie Sanders demanded in a letter to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on Wednesday that the company immediately end its "ruthless union-busting campaign" as the coffee giant's employees continue to face obstruction and retaliation while trying to organize—and win their first contract.
Much of what we know about the global hidden wealth system comes from leaks from within the wealth defense industry, the wealth managers and tax attorneys that facilitate the wealth vanishing act for their billionaire clients. As I wrote in my book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions, this enabling class has helped sequester trillions of dollars in trusts, anonymous shell companies, and offshore tax havens.
Frustrated with federal inaction in the face of soaring inequality, Democratic lawmakers in seven states across the U.S. are teaming up this week to simultaneously introduce wealth tax bills targeting the fortunes of billionaires and other rich individuals who have seen their net worth explode in recent years.
Every January, the deep pockets of our world who see themselves as deep thinkers gather high up in the Alps to contemplate the world’s most pressing problems at the annual Davos World Economic Forum.
A group of more than 200 millionaires from 13 countries published an open letter Tuesday calling on world leaders gathered in Davos to tackle skyrocketing inequality by taxing rich people like themselves, warning that extreme concentrations of wealth at the top are "unsustainable."
Why are America’s plutocrats funding efforts to weaken our democracy and replace it with plutocracy and oligarchy? Is it just about money? Or is there something much deeper that most Americans rarely even consider?
“Crime in America is rampant,” the editors wrote. “And Congress needs a muscular police response to bring it under control.”
“But, as with any threat to the public order, first Congress needs to understand the contours of the problem.”
A new convention for the prosecution of online crimes is to include the ââ¬Å¾spreading of false information“ if this could trigger ââ¬Å¾social unrest“. States are therefore to make provisions to be able to uniformly prosecute calls for ââ¬Å¾subversive or armed activities“ on the [Internet].
A lawyer for Tesla investors told a nine-person jury that Musk “lied” when he sent the Aug. 7, 2018 tweet, costing investors money while its share price fluctuated as Wall Street digested the information. Ultimately, the company remained publicly traded.
“Millions of dollars were lost when his lies were exposed,” said attorney Nicholas Porritt, who represents the investors.
Progressive lawmakers and rights advocates in New York celebrated Wednesday after the state Senate Judiciary Committee voted against Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul's nominee to serve as the state's top judge, Justice Hector LaSalle—whose rulings regarding abortion rights, labor, and criminal justice made his nomination "an absolute disaster," according to one critic.
In 2020, during his campaign for president of the United States, Joe Biden pledged to make Roe v Wade “the law of the land”. While the 1973 landmark ruling that legalized abortion nationwide was of course technically already the law of the land, its protections had been successively sabotaged in accordance with the national predilection for trampling on human rights.
This Sunday marks what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. But the landmark decision was overturned by the ultraconservative Supreme Court just over six months ago in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. The court’s removal of the right to safe, legal abortions has led to total abortion bans in 12 states. Meanwhile, the push to ensure access to abortion has spurred new legal challenges and greater reliance on the abortion pill mifepristone, as medication abortions account for more than half of all U.S. abortions. We get an update from Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent at The Nation, whose most recent piece looks at how cities and states are acting to limit the damage from Dobbs. “There are an untold number of people staying pregnant against their will, despite the best efforts of activists,” she says.
São Paulo—“€¡Sem Anistia!” The short refrain, “no amnesty,” reverberated down Avenida Paulista last Monday as hundreds of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets here and across the country in an emotional rejection of the Jair Bolsonaro–inspired assault on the nation’s democratic institutions the previous day in Brasília. The simple phrase—chanted, painted on signs, and projected onto the looming facades of the storied modernist avenue—represented both an immediate demand for accountability, and a potentially fleeting rallying cry for unity in a politically fractured nation.
In the last few weeks I’ve written about how Elon Musk’s “changes” to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I’ve also noted how many more people (including myself!) are realizing how much better social media can be when it’s decentralized, rather than owned and run by a single entity. And I say that as someone who has advocated for more decentralized social media for many years.
The Ukrainian government has appointed Ihor Klymenko, the head of the country’s National Police, as provisional head of the Internal Affairs Ministry, reports Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.
Valery Fadeyev, chairman of Russia’s Presidential Council on Human Rights requested that the Prosecutor General review the validity of the detention of journalist Alexandra Bayazitova, reports a Human Rights Council press service.
Draftees from the Yaroslavl region fighting in Ukraine released a video, in which they say their superiors are trying to accuse them them of deserting, when they left their combat positions on the orders of the company commander. The local publication Pro Gorod posted the soldiers’ video.
On January 7, 2022, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev made a shocking statement on Twitter: he said that in the preceding days, 20,000 foreign-trained terrorists had attacked the country. As a result, he claimed, it was necessary for him to order a “counter-terrorist operation to eliminate the national security threat and protect the lives and property of the citizens of Kazakhstan.” That same day, he announced in a televised address that he had ordered police and the army to “shoot to kill without warning.”
We speak with philosopher OlúfẹÃÂmi O. Táíwò, who has recently written two widely acclaimed books: “Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)” and “Reconsidering Reparations,” which focuses in part on the climate crisis. He says identity politics is a concept that was stripped of its radical power to build solidarity and is now weaponized to split people into ever narrower categories that hamper movements for racial and social justice. “Elite capture is what happens when the advantaged few in a group steer the resources and political direction of organizations or movements or parts of our social structure like the justice system toward their narrower interests and aims,” TaÃÂiÃÂwoÃ⬠says.
When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of€ a vast, diabolical cabal€ to censor conservatives. The AG lawsuit filed last March pulls out the traditional “Conservatives are being censored” victimization complex:
“Politics,” the writer Auberon Waugh liked to say, “is for social and emotional misfits.” Its purpose is “to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power.” You could accuse old Bron of painting with a rather broad brush, and you would be right. But he plainly understood the likes of Kevin McCarthy. As the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus observed last week, two aspects of McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker of the House stand out. First, that he “seems to crave power for power’s sake, not for any higher purposes.” And second, that he “is willing to debase himself so completely to obtain it.”
Biden left out the fact that one of those imprisoned people is WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, and that he is languishing in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison in London because the U.S. government wants to make an example of him.
Assange was indicted by the Trump administration in an aggressive, precedent-shattering move that was widely condemned by journalists and human rights groups. President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have had almost two years to do the right thing and drop this dangerous prosecution.
They have failed to deliver.
As President, I will restore a relationship with the independent press that is grounded in mutual respect, even — and especially when — they critique policies or positions of my administration. In a Biden White House, there will be no bullying of the media from the press room podium or by tweet. We will have regular, fact-based briefings across my Administration’s major departments and agencies. We must return to civility and transparency in America’s civic discourse.
Mammadli said a driver hit the vehicle that he was a passenger in, and that police who were in the area filmed an argument that followed.
"I told the person hitting my car to leave. It is seen in the video that he attacked first, he hit us. But they accuse me of intentionally fighting with them, preventing them from leaving, beating them without any motive and then sending [them] away," Mammadli said.
While Mammadli acknowledges the disagreement took place, he says he believes the video is being used as an excuse to bring charges against him in retaliation for critical reporting.
FEMA fired the California company hired to translate the documents once the errors became known, but the incident was an ugly reminder for Alaska Natives of the suppression of their culture and languages from decades past.
FEMA immediately took responsibility for the translation errors and corrected them, and the agency is working to make sure it doesn’t happen again, spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg said. No one was denied aid because of the errors.
Federal safety inspectors have concluded that the twisting, bending and long reaches that Amazon warehouse workers perform as much as nine times per minute put them at high risk for lower back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders and constitute an unacceptable hazard.
As part of a larger investigation into hazardous working conditions, the Occupational Safety and and Health Administration announced on Wednesday it has cited Amazon for failing to keep workers safe at warehouses in Deltona, Florida; Waukegan, Illinois; and New Windsor, New York.
"These records paint a damning portrait of government overreach."
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said late Tuesday that her government will "inevitably" challenge the United Kingdom in court after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative government vetoed a recently passed LGBTQ+ rights bill—a move that critics say will harm both the LGBTQ+ community and the state of democracy across the United Kingdom.
What do anti-union "right-to-work" laws, public disinvestment, over-incarceration, and abortion bans have in common?
Nurses at 55 National Health Service facilities across England launched a two-day strike on Wednesday after the United Kingdom's right-wing government, led by Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, refused to open formal negotiations over pay and patient safety.
For over 20 years, every Monday afternoon, I’ve stood with like-minded concerned citizens on Rt. 15 on Deer Isle, Maine—members of our Island Peace & Justice group—standing in objection and in witness to the acts of our government. Each week, I reflect on just why I am there and each week I arrive unavoidably at the conclusion that the U.S. is the scourge of the planet, a rogue nation.
It’s hard to find people who care less about the law than law enforcement. Most traffic stops are pretextual. A real (or fake!) moving violation is an opportunity to go fishing for bigger fish. Conversations with drivers move from the standard requests for licenses and registrations towards anything that might broaden the scope of the stop. Travel plans are queried. People are asked if they’re carrying any contraband. Windows are peered through. Drug dogs are brought to the scene.
For years now we’ve written about the problems of the UK’s latest (in a long line) of attempts to “Disneyfy” the internet with its Online Safety Bill. While the bill had faced some hurdles along the way, made worse by the ever-rotating Prime Minister position last year, there was talk last week that some more hardline conservatives wanted to jack up the criminal penalties in the bill for social media sites that don’t magically protect the children. And, while new Prime Minister Rishi Sinak had pushed back against this, in the end, he caved in.
While the streamer is increasingly focusing on revenue as a key performance metric, unveiling in October that it would no longer provide quarterly subscriber guidance, the Street is for now keeping a close eye on subscriber trends. Netflix added 2.4 million users in the third quarter to hit 223 million overall, turning around customer declines in the two previous quarters. In its final user forecast, Netflix also projected it would add 4.5 million subscribers during the fourth quarter.
The bottom line, though, is this is bad news if you’re a system builder or enthusiast, a fan of Windows 10 and someone who doesn’t want to upgrade to Windows 11. Soon, you’ll have even less choice about which operating system you’ll use.
Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system requires a heretofore little-known PC security feature, the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). It could be cause for concern if you're looking to build your own Windows 11 PC, or upgrade one running an earlier version of Windows.
The other key change is TPM 2.0, although if you've got a supported processor, you should have TPM 2.0. It's been a requirement for new PCs since Windows 10 version 1607. You can check and see if your PC has it, and if not, you might even be able to enable it in the BIOS.
I didn't see this coming. But, then, I'm a baby boomer white guy, so I was born with blinders on. So, I didn't see Natives in Tech's protest against the Apache Software Foundation's (ASF) name coming. I get it now.
According to Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane, the ASF appropriated indigenous culture for branding purposes by using the name Apache.
In particular, this naming "threatens critical rights around Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and respect."
Personally, I'd always thought that the name had little to do with the Apache tribes and everything to do with a joke. That shows how much I know. The story, as I heard it, was that since the "Apache HTTP Server grew from patches applied to the NCSA Server, a pun on the name quickly spread amongst members of the community, with the rumor being that 'Apache' actually stood for 'a ‘patchy’ server.'"
The Natives in Tech group has called on the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, saying the “frankly outdated spaghetti-Western” representation is “as ignorant as it is offensive.”
In a blog post, the group urges the foundation “to take the necessary steps needed to express the ally-ship they promote so deeply on their website, to act in accordance with their own code of conduct, to “be careful in the words that [they] choose,” and change their name."
A group representing Indigenous people in technology is calling on the Apache Software Foundation to change its name, based in part on the foundation's code of conduct.
Nonprofit group Natives in Tech writes in a blog post that while many organizations have appropriated indigenous culture, "none of them are as large, prestigious, or well-known as The Apache Software Foundation is in software circles." The organization takes issue with Apache co-creator Brian Behlendorf's explanation for why he suggested the name and its "Spaghetti Western" tropes, as well as the Foundation's feather logo and its stated "reverence and appreciation" for a singular, broadly described "Apache" identity.
Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct.
In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes.
In January 2022, Activision filed a copyright and unfair competition lawsuit against cheat maker EngineOwning. Activision says the cheat maker trafficks in circumvention devices but the defendants now want the entire case thrown out. In a motion to dismiss, EngineOwning reveals that Activision sued them in Germany over two years ago and the lawsuit is still ongoing.
This forgotten monograph puts forward a novel theory: that frost is able to make “ice photographs”, expressing the form of objects near it.
[...]
During the Great Arctic Outbreak of 1899, which plunged North America into record lows, Alberg was eating at his favorite German restaurant. Looking up, he saw the outlines of ferns, celery stalks, and a withered geranium etched in ice upon the window. Although most of the celery on his table had been consumed, leaving only undesirable leftovers — stalks that were “thin and small and without scarcely any leaves, mere tufts being suffered to remain” — their images appeared in frost as the “most vividly depicted stalks of celery with sprigs and leaves”, proof that “no other plant [is] endowed with such an extraordinary powerful vitality”.
After his supper, Alberg proceeds to conduct an “espionage into this secret branch of nature”. He finds tropical plants reproduced on the frosted glass of a saloon serving punch made from coconut and sugarcane; pineapples in the windows of a Greek fruit dealer; cereals, vegetables, and even a shopgirl’s lace apron on the panes of a Swedish restaurant; and, at a small grocery, celery stalks are again cast across the glass. Writing during a decade in which celery tonics dominated the patent medicine trade, Alberg takes this last apparition as proof that “‘Jack Frost’ therefore seemingly most emphatically endorses celery as a conserver and restorer of vitality”.
-My partner took me out to breakfast at my favorite coffee shop -Opened presents with my parents on Facetime. -Hung out at home & did some digital painting. -Played a solo game of DnD (which was actually a modified version of *Mork Borg*) and died to a fire demon twice.
I've arrived at my destination! What a nice time on the train. I felt the gentle rocking motions of the train last night as I fell asleep; there is nothing as wonderful as sleeping on board the train. When I awoke I took a quick shower, and while cold, it still felt refreshing. I had some eggs for breakfast and drank some decent coffee. I did some work in the observation car and reconnected with a fellow I had met at the origin of the train. He and I talked about spirituality for a while. I think he had some crazy ideas about multiple dimensions and 'programming the physical world', but ultimately I think he is looking for the truth (I guess we all are in some way.) Miaopinie, li bezonas iri al ortodoksa kirko por Ãâ°eesti la Sankta Liturgio.
After that long long discussion, I went back to my compartment and did some work on a document I'm preparing. I watched the snow fall on the mountains and the red-brown earth pass by.
> With this Nicias concluded, thinking that he should either disgust the Athenians by the magnitude of the undertaking, or, if obliged to sail on the expedition, would thus do so in the safest way possible. The Athenians, however, far from having their taste for the voyage taken away by the burdensomeness of the preparations, became more eager for it than ever; and just the contrary took place of what Nicias had thought, as it was held that he had given good advice, and that the expedition would be the safest in the world. All alike fell in love with the enterprise. The older men thought that they would either subdue the places against which they were to sail, or at all events, with so large a force, meet with no disaster; those in the prime of life felt a longing for foreign sights and spectacles, and had no doubt that they should come safe home again; while the idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment, and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future. With this enthusiasm of the majority, the few that liked it not, feared to appear unpatriotic by holding up their hands against it, and so kept quiet.
As an American born and raised, this isn't too far off. I remember seeing tombstones from the Revolutionary War era (I think this instance was 1784 or 1783), and thinking "Man. This graveyard has existed in some form or another for two and a half centuries. Wow! This is about as old as it gets!"
This fairly myopic sense of "oldness" comes easily, especially since the western US doesn't really -have- "American" history up until the mid 1800's, if that; native histories and traditions abound and ostensibly go back many hundreds of years, but don't leave nearly as many visible traces as you might see of indigenous or previous civilizations in Europe. You've got the original 13 Colonies area of the United States, all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and that's as old as we get. At all. Any earlier French or British history around Canada, or Louisiana, or along the Mississippi, was subsumed into the history of the United States and doesn't carry much gravitas at all.
Something that's plagued me for my entire career has been the idea of the hobby project, and helping friends with theirs.
In college, a group of friends ran a fork of an OSS application for our campus. And they asked me for help. My roommate who was involved in it heavily, was a math major with an IT minor. Programming was a very minor aspect of their classwork. For me, a CS major, was the bulk of my time. If not directly writing code, all the heavy lifting that comes with it.
Above is the post for those that want to read what prompted this.
I guess my response to it will be pretty short and to the point, in stating this little idea I've come up with.
Laws, in terms of the sciences, are loosely defined as mathematically provable and consistent statements of our reality.
Over the last few weeks my obsession with text based applications has really ramped up! I'd always loved them of course. Even as far back as the late 80s when I'd call BBSs on my Amstrad DOS machine with its 2400 baud modem. These days its a terminal window running on my desktop MacPro.
Today I discovered a Python based app called "tg". It has a brew tap which makes it easy to install on MacOS X. Connecting with my existing telegram account was a breeze. I supplied my number and then an authorisation code was sent to my phone. Reasonably secure.
Sorry for making you feel uncomfortable. But guess what: You don't have to fiddle with my proposal anyway.
You sound like I made a proposal for changing and extending the gemini protocol specification. No I didn't. I just proposed an optional mechanism on top of it to solve a specific problem. Nothing breaks if you don't implement it. In your case it is even better: It makes no difference whether you implement it or not, even if search engines would adapt my proposed mechanism one day
To be a little bit more specific: Your capsule is compliant with the default assumption, that a capsule is equal to a domain. Therefore, it wouldn't change anything if you added a .dock.gmi to your site. It would be relevant for the use cases I mentioned in my article.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.