GNU/Linux

• Desktop/Laptop

  • The Dell XPS Developer Edition Will Soon Arrive With Ubuntu Linux 22.04 – Slashdot

    The Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition with Ubuntu 22.04 Long Term Support (LTS) will arrive on August 23rd. “This means, of course, Canonical and Dell officially have been certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS,” writes ZDNet’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols. “So if you already have a current XPS 13 Plus, you can install Ubuntu 22.04 and automatically receive the same hardware-optimized experience that will ship with the new Developer Edition.”

  • Linux Links ☛ Linux Around The World: Italy – LinuxLinks

    We cover events and user groups that are running in Italy. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

  • Slashdot ☛ Can a Fork Save Cutefish OS (or Its Desktop)? – Slashdot

    In April ZDNet called its beta “the cutest Linux distro you’ll ever use,” praising the polished “incredible elegance” of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like “Cutefish DE” desktop.

    But now CutefishOS.com times out, with at least one Reddit user complaining “their email is not responding” and seeking contributors for a fork.

  • Ubuntu Pit ☛ Google Chrome OS Flex: Breathe New Life Into Old Computer

    Google has announced a new operating system for computers which is called Chrome OS Flex. Basically, this is a new version of ChromeOS. In February of this year, Google began testing Chrome OS Flex for the first time. But now the beta mode is over, and ‍Google has finally fixed 600 bugs to make Flex available to everyone. Google Chrome OS Flex may be installed and used on older PCs and Macs.

    The last year’s December, Google bought Neverware. Google’s main purpose for acquisition of Neverware is to acquire Neverware’s product CloudReady. Basically, CloudReady allowed customers to switch their old PCs to Chrome OS.

    Now ChromeOS Flex replaces the services of CloudReady. It was released less than a year after Microsoft released Windows 11. We hope this development will reduce the hardware requirements because now old computers can upgrade with the latest OS.

  • System76’s Oryx Pro Linux 12th Gen Intel CPU Laptop Specification | Itsubuntu.com

    System76’s Oryx Pro Linux laptop is now available with 12th Gen Intel CPU. Let’s have a look into the full specification of System 76’s Oryx Pro Linux Laptop powered by 12th Gen Intel CPU.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Petros Koutoupis ☛ Reality 2.0 Episode 119: RapidDisk and Open Source Maintainership

    New episode of the Reality 2.0 podcast is uploaded and out today: Reality 2.0 Episode 119: RapidDisk and Open Source Maintainership. Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman talks to Petros Koutoupis about maintaining RapidDisk, his open source RAM disk software.

  • RapidDisk and Open Source Maintainership

  • Video ☛ Linux CLI in 60 Seconds – ls – Invidious

    Linux Commands in 60 Seconds is a YouTube shorts series that teaches you simple examples of common Linux commands.

  • Video ☛ How to install fonts on Linux QUICKLY! – Invidious

    Just a quick and simple recommendation to help manage fonts more easily on the Linux desktop.

  • Video ☛ Let’s compare the DAY ZERO Steam Deck to the Q3 Deck. – Invidious

    Valve’s already upgraded the Steam Deck and I’ve had a front-row seat! So here’s how Valve have already changed the Steam Deck.

  • Video ☛ “Hey, DT! Your Videos Are Part Of A Web Course.” (Plus Other Comments) – Invidious

  • Video ☛ The Star Trek Operating System – Invidious

    Want to live in LCARS operating system from Star Trek?

• Kernel Space

  • Make Use Of ☛ Understanding the Linux Kernel Versioning Scheme

    
    Each Linux kernel release has a different version number associated with it. Have you ever wondered how the Linux kernel version numbers are formed?

    If you’ve been a Linux user for a long time, you’d know that Linux distributions have unique versions and each version has a specific codename. The Linux kernel also has different version numbers, which act as an identifier for the series the kernel belongs to. However, there’s a difference between how kernel versions were formed earlier and how Linus Torvalds names them now.

    By the end, you’ll be more familiar with the Linux kernel versioning scheme and will feel more comfortable reading kernel version numbers and identifying the various features associated with a specific release.

• Applications

  • Real Linux User ☛ Make color accurate prints in Linux with TurboPrint

    TurboPrint is a very complete printing solution for Linux. According to the manufacturer, the TurboPrint software can get you the highest possible print quality under Linux. The integrated color management settings and functionalities and the support for ICC profiles can result in color perfect results (if you are interested, read more about color management in Linux in my article How to color calibrate your monitor in Linux).

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The Register UK ☛ Getting Linux onto a non-approved laptop • The Register

    Some of the changes in modern kit, especially portables, seem to be intentionally obstructive to Linux users however you can mostly work around them.

    The Reg FOSS desk recently reported on this year’s Ubuntu laptop from Dell. It’s a good thing to have major vendors shipping kit that is approved and certified for Linux, but it doesn’t help if you have a non-approved model. We recently battled with such a machine – this is the report from the front line. For reference, it’s a Dell Latitude 5420, UEFI, Core i5, SSD only, USB-C, and USB-3.

    We are going to assume that your laptop comes with Windows pre-installed, simply because most of them do. Apple laptops are a whole other world of suffering, and since the Intel ones are on the way out and the sole distro for Arm-powered kit isn’t quite there yet, we’ll leave that for another day.

    The first few things you should do are easier under Windows, though, so don’t wipe it just yet. In fact, we suggest that you don’t wipe it at all. As a general principle, unless you’re very short of space, we recommend dual-booting. You can shrink a Windows C drive down quite a lot, and having a fallback OS to hand can be handy in emergencies.

    Secondly, if it’s a company machine, check with the IT department that you’re allowed to do this. Many won’t let you, and it’s not worth losing your job.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Install Tilix Terminal Emulator 1.9.5 in Ubuntu 22.04 via PPA | UbuntuHandbook

    For those who want to install the latest Tilix terminal emulator 1.9.5 in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. You can now get it from PPA repository.

    Tilix is a popular tiling terminal emulator, that allows to split terminal window horizontally and/or vertically, and drag and drop re-arrange them. It also has many other great features including sync input between terminals, background images, quake mode (drop-down terminal), and custom hyperlinks.

  • MakeTech Easier ☛ How to Customize Your Linux Terminal Prompt Using Starship – Make Tech Easier

    Starship is a cross-shell prompt build using rust language. This is a very minimal and blazingly fast terminal prompt. The key reason for its popularity is its customizability. You can easily customize it using a TOML config file. If you are shifting to a different device or different shell, just move the config file to the appropriate location, and automatically your beautiful-looking shell becomes ready.

  • AddictiveTips ☛ How to play Apex Legends on Linux

    Starship is a cross-shell prompt build using rust language. Here we will show you how to customize your LInux terminal prompt using Starship.

  • Linux Made Simple ☛ How to install Sonic and The Fallen Star (Release V1) on a Chromebook

    Today we are looking at how to install Sonic and The Fallen Star (Release V1) 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.

  • Tips On UNIX ☛ How To Install And Configure Prometheus Tool On Linux Systems | Tips On UNIX

    This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to Install and configure Prometheus tool on Linux systems (ie) Ubuntu , Rocky Linux , Fedora , AlmaLinux and Linux Mint.

  • Pragmatic Linux ☛ How to do a GIT export like SVN export – PragmaticLinux

    Wouldn’t it be great if GIT supported a command like “svn export”? Developers that made the switch from Subversion to GIT can relate to this question. With the “svn export” command, you can obtain a clean directory tree of your repository. That means without any version control related files. Think .git directory or those .gitignore files. Unfortunately, no “git export” command exists. This article presents a few different approaches that resembles what “svn export” does, but then using GIT.

  • Trend Oceans ☛ How to Check Graphics Card in Linux System – TREND OCEANS

    The graphics card (also referred to as a GPU or video card) has become one of the most important parts of today’s computing technology.

    The most widely known graphics card manufacturers are Nvidia, Radeon, and Intel, whose products are assembled into major desktop and laptop systems.

  • HowTo Forge ☛ How to Install Mattermost Team Messaging System on Ubuntu 22.04

    Mattermost is an open-source messaging platform used for chatting, file-sharing, project management, and workflow orchestration. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Mattermost Team Messaging System on a Ubuntu 22.04 server.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Install OpenLiteSpeed with PHP 8 on Rocky Linux 8 / AlmaLinux 8

    This guide will walk you through installing OpenLightSpeed Web Server with PHP 8 support on Rocky Linux 8 or AlmaLinux 8.

    OpenLiteSpeed (OLS) is a high-performance, lightweight, open-source HTTP server that helps your website to load faster than ever before. It is a powerful, modular HTTP server and can handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections with low resource usage.

    With its extensive feature set and easy-to-use web administration console, OpenLiteSpeed will help you have an efficient web hosting infrastructure for your needs.

  • Vitux ☛ How to Kill Zombie Processes in Ubuntu

    A zombie or a defunct process in Linux is a process that has been completed, but its entry still remains in the process table due to a lack of correspondence between the parent and child processes. Usually, a parent process keeps a check on the status of its child processes through the wait() function. When the child process has finished, the wait function signals the parent to completely exit the process from the memory. However, if the parent fails to call the wait function for any of its children, the child process remains alive in the system as a dead or zombie process. These zombie processes might accumulate, in large numbers, on your system and affect its performance. In that case, you might have to kill these zombies manually through the ways and commands described in this tutorial.

  • nixCraft ☛ How to convert JSON to CSV using Linux / Unix shell

    Today I will talk about a common problem faced by many Linux or Unix sysadmins and developers. Typically modern apps and security devices heavily depend upon APIs and lists that feed data in JSON format. For example, a list of spamming or VPN CIDRs or a good list of verified bots’ IP CIDRs is in JSON format. If they accept JSON format, you can take this list and upload it to your router or WAF. Unfortunately, not all devices accept JSON format. Hence, we can take JSON format and convert it to CSV format per our needs.

  • Own HowTo ☛ How to install Vivaldi Web Browser on Linux Mint, Ubuntu and Debian

    Vivaldi is a popular web browser that uses Chromium as web engine, it offers a lot of features such as : Built-in ad blocker, tracking protection, tab grouping, built-in mail client and lot more. While Vivaldi is not fully open source, well let’s call it partly open source as only the UI of the browser is closed source, the other parts of the code are open source and you can download it from https://vivaldi.com/source/ in case you want to audit the code.

    In this tutorial you will learn how to Install Vivaldi web browser on Linux Mint, Debian and Ubuntu.

  • H2S Media ☛ 2 Ways to install AnyDesk on Oracle Linux 8 – Linux Shout

    Learn how to add the repository to install AnyDesk on Oracle Linux 8 for connecting and assisting remote systems with the help of the internet.

    AnyDesk is freemium software just like Teamviewer for allowing users to access remote computers and mobile devices for maintenance. It allows access to computers or servers from anywhere in the world via the Internet.

    The software is available for the operating systems Windows, macOS, Linux as well as iOS and Android. Data is transmitted using the TLS 1.2 (Transport Layer Security) encryption standard. This technology is recommended by the Federal Office for Information Security.

  • ID Root ☛ How To Install Metasploit on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Metasploit on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Metasploit is an open-source framework used to perform deep system security auditing as well as penetration testing to unearth, exploit and validate every other would-be vulnerability. Metasploit generally offers a community and open source version of Metasploit Framework but it also has commercial versions like Metasploit Pro and Metasploit Express.

    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 Metasploit framework on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Fedora and Red Hat

  • Make Use Of ☛ What Is Oracle Linux? The Powerful, Free RHEL Alternative Explained

    
    Oracle Linux is an enterprise-grade Linux distro with no licensing fee, unlike RHEL. Here’s everything you need to know about it.

    If Red Hat’s “change in direction” regarding CentOS left you scrambling for a replacement, or perhaps you want an enterprise-grade Linux distro to learn on but don’t want to deal with Red Hat’s restrictions, consider transitioning to Oracle Linux.

    Let’s discuss Oracle Linux in detail along with reasons why you might want to install it.

  • Rocky Linux 9 Kernel Panic on Packer Launched qemu-kvm

    Rocky Linux 9 is out, therefore it’s time to build new Packer images.

  • Fedora Project ☛ Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-29 – Fedora Community Blog

    Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!

  • Red Hat Official ☛ Modernization: Making a business case

    In the previous articles we discussed how to assess, from a high level, whether a modernization effort made sense in your enterprise. We also covered the attributes a successful modernization team should have, and some team characteristics that might cause problems. At this point you might be thinking that starting a modernization project is a no-brainer. However, there is still one more bridge you need to cross.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Community News: What is the price of a Debian domain name?

    We will shortly provide details to help people continue to access uncensored news about Debian.

    We are currently deciding whether to appeal the decision of the panel. However, we believe it is more important to focus our energy on research into the Frans Pop suicide and the risks to other volunteers.

    We want to offer hope to many of the low-level volunteers and interns who have been sucked in by Debian conspiracies. The legal action at WIPO does nothing to prevent us publishing the same information on other web sites. The Debian cabal took no action to take responsibility for these scandals, they only seek to hide the domain name. They don’t care if the same names and photos are published on other web sites. They don’t care if they pissed off all the women in Kosovo because they can just go and find some more women in Brazil or another destination. We do care and we want to offer hope: if the Debian cabal admits there was favoritism in the travel budget and if they stop defaming volunteers, we will have no more reason to continue publishing hard evidence about the intern relationships.

  • Debconf 22 photos | Aigarius Blog

    Finally after a long break, the in-person Debconf is a thing again, this time Debconf 22 is happening in Prizren, Kosovo.

    And it has been my pleasure to again be here and take lots of pictures of the event and of the surroundings.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Yocto training course updated to Kirkstone release – Bootlin’s blog

    Back in May 2022, the Yocto Project published the Kirkstone release, the latest Long Term Support version of the popular embedded Linux build system. See the release notes of this 4.0 release.

    For many years, Bootlin has helped plenty of engineers around the world get started with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded thanks to our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded development training course, whose training materials are freely accessible, to everyone.

  • CNX Software ☛ Acromag XMC-7A50-AP323 – An XMC module based on AMD Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA – CNX Software

    Acromag XMC-7A50-AP323 is an XMC (Switched Mezzanine Card) module based on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA with 48 TTL I/O channels plus a 16-bit ADC for 20 differential or 40 single-ended analog inputs.

    Designed for commercial off-the-shelf (COSTS) applications, Acromag XMC modules are RoHS compliant, and suitable for automation applications, scientific development labs, as well as aerospace and military applications.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Ghacks ☛ Media Player VLC 3.5 for Android has been released – gHacks Tech News

  • Hacker News ☛ Google Bringing the Android App Permissions Section Back to the Play Store

  • Computer World ☛ 3 little-known location tricks for Google Assistant on Android | Computerworld

  • Android Central ☛ Google expands its ARCore certification list with dozens of new Android phones | Android Central

  • 3 Best Ways to Download YouTube Videos on Android [in 2022] – TechPP

  • Gizmo China ☛ MIUI 14 based on Android 13 emerges on codebase, to launch soon

  • Android Police ☛ YouTube Music update makes it fully compatible with Android 13′s new media controls

  • Android Police ☛ Android 12-based LineageOS 19 arrives for OnePlus Nord N200, Redmi 7, and FairPhone 3

  • Notebook Check ☛ LG G8X ThinQ receives final OS upgrade with Android 12 and June 2022 security patch update – NotebookCheck.net News

  • Geeky Gadgets ☛ Honor Pad 8 Android tablet unveiled – Geeky Gadgets

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ Microsoft FOSS Fund Winner: curl [Ed: Microsoft keeps bribing Daniel Stenberg in all sorts of ways for Curl to remain a prisoner of Microsoft GitHub, and to keep users/contributors too prisoners of such proprietary software; "Microsoft FOSS Fund" = bribery program to interfere with Free software communities, keeping them captive]

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Firefox Presents: A nerdcore rap artist defying expectations [Ed: Mozilla's blog is totally out of touch with tech]

      She credits the internet for expanding her world outside Taipei, and later, Berkeley, California, where she attended college, saying that “you don’t realize how limiting your locale is until you get on the internet and realize that there are so many people all across the country, all across the world, doing similar things.”

      In addition to other Bay Area musicians like spoken word artist Watsky and Daveed Diggs of “Hamilton” fame, Liu is inspired by the South Korean singer Psy.

      “He embraced what made him unique and doesn’t conform to what people expect K-pop to be,” Liu said. “He’s middle-aged, not a perfect Ken or Barbie, but an amazing dancer and rapper with incredible charisma and star power. He turned his ‘Gangnam Style’ internet moment into a long-lasting global career.”

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Apache Blog ☛ Announcing Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13 : Apache OpenOffice

    Apache OpenOffice, a leading Open Source office document productivity suite, announced today Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13, as usual available in 41 languages for Windows, macOS and Linux.

    Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13 is a Security release incorporating bug fixes and other enhancements. All users of Apache OpenOffice 4.1.12 or earlier are advised to upgrade. You can download Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13 here. Windows 10 and 11 users can now also get Apache OpenOffice for selected languages in the “Microsoft Store” App.

    It is recommended to make a backup of the Apache OpenOffice users profile before installing AOO 4.1.13. It is especially important for users who use the Master Password functionality and may decide to use an older version later. There is a change in the encoding of stored passwords in this 4.1.13 release that may make your user profile unusable for previous versions.

    In general, it is always a good idea to do a backup of important and personal data, so we recommend to always backup your OpenOffice user profile before doing an upgrade to a newer release.

• Programming/Development

  • Remi Collet: PHP version 8.0.22RC1 and 8.1.9RC1

    Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot Engine – Release candidate: Godot 3.5 RC 7

    The upcoming Godot 3.5 is now considered feature complete, and has received a lot of bugfixes and improvements over the past weeks thanks to all the testers and developers who reported and fixed issues. We are now at the Release Candidate stage, finalizing everything so that we can release 3.5-stable for all users.

    At this stage we need people to test this release (and potential follow-up RCs) on as many projects as possible, to make sure that we catch non-obvious regressions that might have gone unnoticed until now. If you run into any issue, please make sure to report it on GitHub so that we can know about it and fix it!

  • DEV Community ☛ 9 useful code snippets for everyday JavaScript development || Part 1 – DEV Community

    Welcome to this JavaScript snippets post, In this post we will look at some of the most common JavaScript snippets which will help you with your everyday JavaScript development.

    You can always use 3rd party utility libraries, but knowing these vanilla JavaScript snippets is always beneficial.

  • Python

    • Mozilla ☛ This Week in Data: Python Environment Freshness – Data@Mozilla

      When was the last time you remade your local Python environment? One month ago? Six months ago? 1997?

      Wait, please, don’t leave. I know, I might as well have asked you when the last time you cleaned out the food trap in your dishwasher was and I apologize. But this is almost as important. Almost.

      If you don’t recall when, go ahead and check when you made your currently most used environment. It might surprise you how long ago it was.

Leftovers

• Tedium ☛ SharkWire: The Nintendo 64’s GameShark-Operated Online Service

  One thing that should be clear from a close reading of Tedium’s archive is that tech ephemera springs eternal. There are always new things around the corner, somehow weirder then the last thing. Over the years, we’ve highlighted early attempts at turning game consoles into computers, working around official license schemes, adding cheat codes to games, and giving consoles internet functionality. But never have we highlighteda platform that somehow managed to do all of these things at once. Until now. And it is a weird one, involving a well-known game brand used in an unexpected context. Today’s Tedium talks about the time that the company behind the GameShark created a web-browsing cartridge and keyboard for the Nintendo 64. Really.

• Security

  • Help Net Security ☛ Atlassian fixes critical flaws in Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket and other products, update quickly! – Help Net Security

    Atlassian has fixed three critical vulnerabilities and is urging customers using Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket, Crowd, Fisheye and Crucible, Jira and Jira Service Management to update their instances as soon as possible.

    There is no mention of these vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, but flaws in Atlassian Confluence are often leveraged by attackers.

  • USCERT ☛ Atlassian Releases Security Advisory for Questions for Confluence App, CVE-2022-26138

    Atlassian has released a security advisory to address a vulnerability (CVE-2022-26138) affecting Questions for Confluence App. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information. Atlassian reports that the vulnerability is likely to be exploited in the wild.

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

    Security updates have been issued by Fedora (gnupg2, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, suricata, and vim), Oracle (java-11-openjdk), Slackware (net), and SUSE (kernel, nodejs16, rubygem-rack, and webkit2gtk3).

  • Forbes ☛ Second July Google Chrome Security Update Lands On Windows, Mac, Linux

    Google has just confirmed the second clutch of security updates for the Chrome browser in July. Version 103.0.5060.134 for all Windows, Mac, and Linux users will become available in the coming days. While this update will roll out automatically, users who don’t restart their browser regularly are advised to check manually and force the security patch activation.

  • Microsoft Office flaws exploited in nearly 80% of malware attacks – Atlas VPN

  • CISA ☛ Apple Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

    Apple has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in multiple products. These updates address vulnerabilities attackers could exploit to take control of affected systems.

  • CISA ☛ Cisco Releases Security Updates for Multiple Products | CISA

    Some of these vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to execute take control of an affected system.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Lex Gill Appears before Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence – The Citizen Lab

      In law schools, we talk to students about “dialogue theory.” This is the idea that the courts and the legislature are in a constant and self-conscious conversation about the scope of government power and its limits in a free and democratic society. The idea is that sometimes the courts need to draw a constitutional line—and when they do, Parliament listens, adjusts, and reworks the law to better tailor its objectives and better respect Charter-protected rights.

      The government now finds itself faced with over a decade of Supreme Court jurisprudence—Morelli, Vu, Fearon, and others—to the effect that our digital devices contain more information than could have ever been amassed about a person previously in human history. These devices know more about us than our lovers, than our best friends. In Pike, Justice Harris wrote that “A search of the data in a personal digital device…digs deep into the heart of who we are.” (par. 53)

• Environment

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Watch a Deep-Sea Squid Carry Hundreds of Pearl-Like Eggs | Smart News| Smithsonian Magazine

      Footage taken 56 miles off California’s coast documents rarely-observed brooding behavior

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Victoria’s Secret – Angels and Demons

    Truth is not what it seems; as the underworld of fashion, the billionaire class, and Jeffrey Epstein are revealed to all be inextricably intertwined with the rise and fall of this legendary brand.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Uber Leak Exposes the Global War on Workers

  • Driverless Robotaxi Fleet Paralyzed for Hours in San Francisco – The Last Driver License Holder…

Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal

  • Kafkaesque or how to book a simple appointment

    I received a text saying I needed a health check.
    It said I needed to go to the doctors to get a form to phone a number to get a test and then phone another number to get another appointment
    So
    I went to the doctors and went to reception and asked for the form to get the test but there wasn’t a form. Cos they heard my name wrong. So they got my date of birth and found my name but couldn’t find the form because the text message was inaccurate.
    To get the form I need to book an appointment with a doctor.
    But I couldn’t book an appointment while I was at the doctors.
    To book an appointment I had to go online. Do I need to register to book online to get an appointment?

  • SpellBinding: GHIYSUL Wordo: VANES

• Technical

  • Copying Pass Git Repo to PinePhone

    I use pass (Linux Password Manager) with a git repository encrypted by gpg. I like the simplicity and feel confident in the security of gpg. I also have my own remote git repo on a raspberry pi so I don’t have to worry about using a questionable 3rd party host.

    [...]

    I don’t add my password repo to new systems frequently so when I wanted to add it to my phone, I realized after several failures that I needed to make notes on the simple steps so I don’t forget the next time.

    Most of the instructions and tutorials on the web for setting up pass as a password manager are for setting it up on a single computer, not adding an existing repository to a new system.

  • Indexed Colour Workflow

    I’ve started to chase down a workflow for asset creation [for the EH500] and it’s turned out to be more of a faff than I expected. Probably because I’ve been messing about with the Amiga lately and, er, completely forgot how the future works.

    My ideal would be to use Aseprite to create the individual sprites/tiles and animations. Then use Texture Packer to generate the packed texture pages; one for each tilemap buffer, and one for the sprites.

    It should, in theory, also be possible to script this, so I could run a shell-script to build a “Cartridge” – a zip file, containing all the files the game needs, in a specific layout – that I can distribute separately from the EH500. (Separate distribution’s not a requirement, but it’d be nice to have. The Pico8 carts are great.)

  • Search Engine Dilemma Bias VS Accuracy

    One problem with the 3 current major Gemini search engines (GUS, Kennedy and TLGS) is the accuracy of their results. Searching anything too specific and they fail. I saw a lot of people writing about this frustration. “Fine, I’ll bring bigger guns out” I thought. After days of reading on arXiv and other sources. I wasn’t sure how to improve accuracy without some sort of compromise. Gemini itself also has other issues, you might want to read my other gemlog about this.

    [...]

    I assume most users of Gemini are FOSS enthusiastics and freedom lovers. Just like the case of RMS, this doesn’t put us anywhere on the political spectrum. It simply means most of us are very familiar with computers and want absolute control over programs we run – there’s shall be no human component in our code – that effects which algorithms is used for searching. Currently TLGS runs on PostgreSQL’s full text search ranking and an old link analysis algorithm called SALSA.

    One (relative) easy way to improve search accuracy being, instead of just relying on a full text search to bring up pages. We can introduce the BERT model to extract context representation vectors of articles and match that with the query vector. However I’m hesitant to do this.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Now Initializing Gemlog

      Greetings Gemiverse! I’ve decided to give blogging^Wgemlogging a go. I hope to create an interesting capsule for others to visit. I have various (sometimes esoteric) interest, thus I may write about a wide range of topics. Including, but not limited to: Linux, bicycling, baking, weight training, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, science fiction, and anything else that piques my interest.

    • MoonGem 2.2 – Script Mode

      I added this feature in order to simplify testing. Previously if I wanted to test a dynamic page, I’d have to generate a cert, start MoonGem on a background process, call a command-line client like gmni, look at the results, and kill the server. Now I can test scripts with a single command, no other steps required.

      In addition to facilitating testing, being able to generate a dynamic gemtext doc from the command-line could be used for certain server-side use cases.

    • My incomplete bilingual Capsule

      Technically it is quite easy to make a biligual site. Well, there is one obstacle: Unlike HTML, where metadata like language, encoding and even redirects can be added into the header section of every html-file, the .gmi files by design contain only content. Nevertheless, metadata is handled in the Gemini protocol, so the server have to implement something to deal with it. The Gemini server I use, agate, brings a very basic but easy to implement functionality: You can add a file called “.meta” in every directory, in which you define metadata for all the files in this directory (and also for subdirectories). I use these files very extensively.

    • I love email

      When I was younger I always found it funny how my dad would send me an email instead of just texting me. Being a silly, tech-savvy teenager, I found his use of such an antiquated and unintuitive method of communication as a sign of his use of technology primarily being in the professional world. I agreed with my teenage assessment until probably about 6 months ago.

      I was needing someone to send me a picture but they had an iPhone and were used to being able to send uncompressed images to people over text. On their end the image appears uncompressed, but when I receive it, due to the limitations of SMS, almost any detail is lost to compression. I then needed to explain to them that it compresses images and that it would be better just to email me with the images as an attachment. I just gave them my email address and within seconds I got what I needed instead of needing to figure out if they had a telegram or other messaging service that allows the sending of images.

      [...]

      Email is private. Email is not defacto controlled by any one company. Email is time tested. Email is powerful. I love email!