The PlanetPC XR Series is a compact desktop computer with an ARM-based processor, Ubuntu Linux software, plenty of ports and storage options. There’s also an unusual touch panel on the front that can be used to control some of the PCs functions or display information.
There’s just one catch: it’s unclear if you’ll ever actually be able to get your hands on one. Planet Computers showed off prototypes of the XR Series at Mobile World Congress in February and launched a crowdfunding campaign to help raise the money to bring the PC to market. But only 14 people backed the campaign and it raised less than 1% of its funding goal.
There are several system manufacturers that sell Linux-powered systems. Dell and Lenovo are the mainstream vendors. Apart from that, there are a bunch of smaller but dedicated vendors who deal exclusively in Linux-based systems.
One such vendor is German-based TUXEDO Computers. They have built quite a name for themselves in the last few years.
They recently revealed the TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 16 - Gen7 Max Performance Edition, which is a beast in terms of specification and performance.
With the bamboozling quantity of open source software available to download, it’s really difficult to keep up with the cream of the cream. That’s where this compilation aims to help.
This article selects 100 awesome command-line interface (CLI) apps. The compilation mostly reflects software our volunteers use as their daily drivers. We try to select as wide a mix as possible, avoiding duplication wherever possible.
If you’re wondering why TUI apps are not present here that’s because they have their own apps article. If you’re looking for GUI apps, they also have their own dedicated apps article.
The Linux desktop has a lot of 'hidden in plain sight' features. One such feature adds easy-to-access bookmarks to the desktop menu and the file manager.
Chess is the original 4X RPG—giving you command of territory and an army, together with a mission to explore and expand across the board, exploit your enemy's weakness, and then exterminate your opponent.
While it's simple to play online chess in a browser, you can also stage a two-player chess game in your terminal, either with an opponent in the same room or via SSH, meaning your opponent could be anywhere in the world—or beyond. Here's how.
That’s right, this autumn we will enjoy another major release of the popular GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 45, which now has a release date “set in stone” for September 20th and an official release schedule that gives us details about the six-month-long development cycle.
The development cycle for GNOME 45 kicks off now, but the first testing version will be ready for public testing only in a few months from writing this article. Without further ado, here are the major milestones of the GNOME 45 development cycle.
4MLinux 42 arrives a little over four months after the 4MLinux 41 release and ships with the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series by default, alongside the Mesa 22.2.3 graphics stack.
New in this release is the raster graphics editor and Hex-a-Hop video game as downloadable extensions, AlsaPlayer, Baka MPlayer, GNOME MPlayer, GNOME MPV, and mp3blaster apps available out of the box, as well as XMMS as a default media player. This release also improves support for various image, audio, and video formats.
We are pleased to announce the official release of OpenBSD 7.3. This is our 54th release. We remain proud of OpenBSD's record of more than twenty years with only two remote holes in the default install.
As in our previous releases, 7.3 provides significant improvements, including new features, in nearly all areas of the system...
MySQL community server is a free open-source, popular, and cross-platform database management system, which supports both SQL and NoSQL€ and has a pluggable storage engine architecture. Additionally, it also comes with multiple database connectors for
...Canonical is also ready to bring open source into the landscape.
What happened was, last November, when Elon started showing his true face, I bailed out of Twitter. A few days before that I’d seen a post from Evan Prodromou: “Should we start a Canadian coop Mastodon service? There are going to be a lot of people who need accounts soon.” And I was so there, the moment I heard the idea.
[...]
Sustainability €· It’s not that hard to build a Mastodon instance. It’s not hard (with Elon’s help) to attract people to join it. But (pardon me for being crass) how you gonna pay that Cloud bill, and who will your mods and SREs be? The most popular answer, so far, has been “Patreon and volunteers”.
It’s pleasing that that happens, and it’s sustaining some pretty big instances as I write this. But once that Fresh Fediverse Flavor is no longer the new hotness, does it last? I mean, social media is a species of publishing, and the practice of publishing is full of chores that people have to do to keep the virtual presses spinning. It’s work, and people should be paid when they work.
As I reported during the beta phase, Firefox 112 is a pretty modest release and the biggest change appears to be the ability for Ubuntu Linux users to import their browser data from the Chromium web browser installed as a Snap package.
Chromium will now be listed as a supported web browser when trying to import browser data using the Import and Backup feature that you access under Bookmarks > Manage bookmarks (Ctrl+Shift+O).
Since the year got started, we are bombarded with the news of layoffs, job loss, company's planning for cost-cutting and whatnot. There are no stopping layoffs at the Indian startups and so far, it has been reported that around 24,250 employees have lost their jobs in their homegrown start-up ecosystem.
According to the latest data from leading startup coverage portal Inc42, 24,256 employees have been laid off by 84 startups to date.
Western countries have become increasingly wary of sharing technology with China, with the US and Netherlands recently imposing new restrictions on exports of semiconductors and the equipment used to make them. Meanwhile, Chinese companies are rising up the list of the world’s biggest spenders on research and development — a sign that perhaps they won’t need that Western technology much longer.
Industry giants like Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have collectively laid off more than 1,50,000 workers with the backdrop of recession risks globally. Rising inflation, geopolitical tensions, overzealous hiring amidst the pandemic are some of the estimated reasons making the ‘IT layoffs’ the new normal.
Global shipments of personal computers slumped by nearly a third in the first three months this year, with Apple dropping the most among the market heavyweights as the industry struggles with a slowdown in consumer spending following the pandemic.
In separate reports, market research firms IDC and Canalys blamed weak demand, excess stocks, and a bleak economic outlook for the shipment declines of 29% and 33%, respectively.
"Most of the issues that plagued the industry in the second half of last year have extended into the start of 2023," Canalys analyst Ishan Dutt said.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openimageio and udisks2), Fedora (chromium, curl, kernel, mediawiki, and seamonkey), Oracle (httpd:2.4), Red Hat (httpd and mod_http2 and tigervnc), SUSE (ghostscript and kernel), and Ubuntu (irssi).
Southern California’s San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said it experienced a “network disruption” to its electronic systems last week and has referred the problem to the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
The sheriff’s department said the problem occurred Friday, but officials declined to explain what the disruption entailed. The disruption has not impacted the agency’s operations, the department said in a statement Saturday.
The story began last month when someone offered to sell data on 55 million Thai citizens on BreachForums. Days later, and before there was any evidence of any sale, BreachForums was taken offline after police arrested the forum’s owner, “Pompompurin.”
A breach that exposed the names and Social Security numbers of current and former Elmbrook School District employees continued even after the district was aware of the problem.
The district learned its system had been compromised on Aug. 23, 2022, according to Elmbrook School Chief Strategy Officer Chris Thompson. Files were removed from Aug. 23-27, 2022, an investigation revealed.
“These were professional cyber criminals. This is not something your antivirus software cleans up. I cannot comment on the efforts required to secure our network," Thompson said in a text message to a reporter asking why the breach continued even after the district was aware of the problem.
German biotech Evotec is on high alert after a late-week cyber attack prompted the company to shut down its network.
Evotec says that unusual activity was noticed on its IT systems on April 6, prompting the company to take its digital infrastructure offline. A forensic examination of the breach is underway to learn the extent of the attack and relevant authorities have been notified, according to an update posted Monday. Evotec says that “business continuity is upheld” across the company’s sites but that systems remain unconnected and there may be delays or slower responses to partners.
China’s state-sponsored payments association is warning against the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The Payment & Clearing Association of China on Monday (April 10) said that technology like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could pose “risks such as cross-border data leaks,” Reuters reported.
“Payment industry staff must comply with laws and rules when using tools such as ChatGPT, and should not upload confidential information related to the country and the finance industry,” said the association, an arm of the People’s Bank of China.
The warning comes as AI tools find themselves at the center of a global battle, with President Joe Biden meeting with a council of science and technology advisers last week to discuss the risks and opportunities that AI could pose for both individual users and national security.
Nori, a Seattle startup that sells carbon credits to individuals and businesses to offset carbon emissions, laid off 10 employees last week, co-founder and CEO Paul Gambill confirmed.
The cuts represent 37% of Nori’s team, leaving the startup with 17 employees.
“This was not done lightly, and, like many companies right now, was done solely for planning for changing market conditions,” Gambill told GeekWire. “I wish we could have kept everyone.”
The layoffs, led mainly by the technology and financial sectors, are a signal that U.S. employers are paying attention to the Federal Reserve Board’s efforts to tame inflation by cooling the economy through interest rate hikes.
Around 131,000 workers in US-based tech companies have been laid off in mass job cuts in 2023, according to Crunchbase tracker. Pitchbook data shows that venture capital (VC) in the United States fell for the fifth quarter straight. Even the few glimmers of hope seem to be vanishing now.
“Are tech unions even a thing?” A coworker asked me this after myself and thousands of others had been laid off. Rocked by the storm, dozens of us had landed in an online organizing space.
Social justice activism at big tech companies is evolving into union organizing. This brutal round of layoffs may be remembered as a catalyzing event, or it may be a setback. But many tech organizing groups are popping up, maybe you’ve found yourself in one as well. Most tech workers aren’t knowledgeable about unions because the existing unions failed to organize tech decades ago. To best understand why unions in tech are necessary, it’s important to consider why this is all happening.
The explosive allegation is tucked away in a federal court document filed by the banking giant asking a judge to dismiss Staley’s request for a separate trial after JPMorgan sued him personally for his role in the Epstein trafficking operation.
A few weeks ago a well announced storm front crossed the country. It hit the office building at $dayjob some time after lunch. The storm came in fast, rattling at the large office windows while spilling loads of water over them. For me this turned out to be a magic moment. I watched the rain drops, the bending trees, the lack of daylight, and more. It made me feel small, a small being protected from the outside by a sheet or two of glass. Of course, nature will get along just fine without me watching the show.
Our school's submission system takes some time to automatically grade the submission, usually less than 30 seconds, however, it has an automatic reload after that time. Nice loading bar to watch, and there's a specific group of people I've convinced to not reload the page and just, enjoy the 30 seconds of time they have to themselves. Since there's not enough time to do much else, and the time just slowly ticks, some have described it to me as a calming zen moment for them. Which seems better to me than just reloading and reloading.
I'll miss pens when they go. I like how they feel. I like that handwriting is almost impossible to fake. I like that when I receive a letter, I can tell who sent it just from how they write the address. But it all has to go.
Pens have some advantages over computers. One can generally access a pen-record faster - just open the notepad and it's there. Modern software is so badly programmed that it's often easier to find a page in a notepad than to open a text document. And it's resilient - even if rain doesn't do paper any favours, anyone can still read a page which has been rained on. Taking out a computer in the rain is just madness.
The little free time I've had on weeknights last month was largely taken up by reading. I was a huge fan of Star Wars growing up, but I didn't delve into the Extended Universe (now Legends) very much. Just this afternoon I completed the last book of the "Black Fleet Crisis" trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell. The series was highly entertaining, but I'm ready to switch back to pure fantasy for a while. Next on my list is "Well of Ascension" by Brandon Sanderson.
I like going out for walks late at night.
Well really I don't have much of a preference as to when I go for my walks, but I don't like running into people all that much. It's not really that I don't want to see people, it's just that there's this little song and dance of walking around the other person or people that I'd just rather not deal with. Also the darkness of night is somewhat comforting, knowing that I'm not easily seen. I sometimes like to play with my imagination somewhat, creating little worlds in my head and somewhat acting out interactions or the sounds of the environment. The thing is I look like a lunatic doing it, waving my hands about, making hums and brrs, so the darkness gives me a chance to act it all out without bothering anyone. That is, if I don't run into anyone.
I am currently trying again to get a better relationship with food. Since 2020 I struggle with anorexic and orthorexic behaviour with some recovery months inbetween.
The orthorexic stuff is especially hard to beat because it is usually not even based on any delusions or wrong beliefs. My orthorexic behaviors are not only about how processed a food is or how much sugar it and carbs it has, but also about how much packaging it has and how recyclable it is and how much plastic it contains, what the companies stand for, and if it's organic and vegan or not. These are simple facts a food has that aren't wrong, and it is also a fact that certain food components can be harmful, or that we should reduce packaging and plastic use, that animal ag is harmful for the planet and not in alignment with how I see animals, and people everywhere make the choice to boycott certain companies like Nestle.
I've been gone for a while, but kept thinking about Gemini and what it may mean to write here compared to write somewhere else.
There's an influence war out there. Everyone (brands, influencers, even individuals with an opinion) want a piece of your attention.
You have to infer the incentives for every statement you read online.
I've been doing a lot of computing using my Pinephone for the past year, or more. I've lost track! The Pinephone works pretty well with a dock, hooked to a monitor.
I've had to learn to scale down the apps I use for doing, well, what I do! The Pinephone isn't great at running Manuskript, and completely blew up running LibreOffice. So I have been doing my writing with Emacs. Firefox? The Pinephone would launch it, but FF was seriously slow on the Pinephone. So for the web, I used lynx. Etc.
If you use OpenBSD and administrate machines, you may be aware that packages can install new dedicated users and groups, and that if you remove a package doing so, the users/groups won't be deleted, instead, `pkg_delete` displays instructions about deletion.
In order to keep my OpenBSD systems clean, I wrote a script looking for users and groups that have been installed (they start by the character `_`), and check if the related package is still installed, if not, it outputs instructions that could be run in a shell to cleanup your system.
As opposed to RedHat 7.3, the OpenBSD update process is pretty trivial, and there is not a whole new operating system to learn, one that invariably breaks all your KickStart configurations and who knows what else. There are of course gotchas (like is there enough disk space to hold the upgrade sets) but I've seen worse in computing. Mostly worse.
I've built Delorean, a Wayback Machine for Gemini. The archive contains content from Dec 2021 to today. Not only gemtext, but plain text, images, PDFs, binary files, really any content under 10 MB in size and that's not excluded by robots.txt. Seriously, I pulled some Amiga m68k binaries out of it yesterday!
Finally indeed! The move took a long time, with a lot of back and forth trips… A few very short nights and a lot of stuff to put in boxes and then put them in their new place. Nothing unusual for a move like this. I had to be back to Paris after the move of all the furnitures (except a convertible couch, a fridge and a microwave…) for a few days for family reasons… That was hard to be in an almost empty apartment but now I'm finally home in Toulouse. Even though we started renting the new apartment earlier in March, I can finally call it home since only a couple of days.
For the first time in a month, my desk setup is fully back as before, with all my screens and my mechanical keyboard (even though the frame.work laptop keyboard is a great nice replacement on the move!).
I wake, and enter my algorithm-free RSS feed. It is perfect and pure.
I see a list (in the order I select) of everyone I want to follow. YouTube channels show up just like everything else, and I see only the name. With a quick shortcut-key, I tell the computer I want to watch the video later.
Onto the next feed, I find a news article. I open the blog in w3m, the CLI browser, sidestepping all JavaScript.
"Not today, Five Eyes!", I chirp while downloading a podcast as an mp3 file. Then to Mastodon, to check out suggested blogs, from everyone I want to follow, feed produce in chronological order, just like the days of the TV guide.
I would add that the hand curated lists like gemini.susa.net have been abandoned. That's understandable, because such a list is a lot of work.
Gemini capsule on v4
Swedish summer time just started. Ugh... They stole an hour of my life! Can we just stop this madness, please? It's difficult as it is to get up in the morning.
Work is quite intense. The web shop should have opened on March 23 but it isn't open yet. I've been going back and forth to Gothenburg every week for a while.
Wednesday last week I worked to ~23. Thursday to 0:30. I was quite tired on Friday and promptly went to sleep on the train home from Gothenburg. The mood last weekend wasn't great and started to think that maybe computers were a mistake?
This week I've been back in Gothenburg again, working late most evenings. Unfortunately I missed an interesting RISC-V meetup in Gothenburg where Joachim mentioned Tillitis and TKey several times.
[...]
My Gemini capsule is now on both IP v4 and v6 instead of being v6-only. I also moved the Gemini server to my main server in colo instead of a box at home.
There were several discussions about the boringness of the Gemini. [The famous] and not-so-famous ones. People are complaining that is too much, or too less, technical, or nontechnical content. That there is not much content at all. That it will be great to come back with more people. That It isn’t the same as one or two years ago when all Gemini projects started from scratch.
We can observe the Geminispace from the inside and the outside world. Sometimes external observer is looking only through a hole created by a graphical browser. And he can only see the top of that universe. Because text presentation of data, observed most often inside a complete-graphical environment or web proxy, is only the one outer layer of that complex and strange efflorescence. We shouldn't understand Geminispace as a catalog of text data. And we shouldn't measure it by an occurrence that or these topics. If Geminispace can tell me a pancake with strawberries recipe? Maybe it never will do so.
Wow that's a mouthful! I'll have to come up with a more streamlined title formula for this! This is a new format for me - mostly taking my notes and first impressions and bringing sharing them with you all here!
Like a few other reviewers over on 1001albumsgenerator, it's 'The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore' that really cemented this as an excellent album. As a whole, it's a very approachable intro to an artist who has such a strong following that it can be daunting to decide where to start. At its worst it's still catchy indie with interesting lyrics, and at its best its so much more.
I use the grep command on Unix for a long time already. Nevertheless I found out that I missed something it can do.
Maybe I never looked hard enough, maybe I never really needed this: Looking for files which do not contain a certain string.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.