Linux has grown from a project operating as an antithesis to greedy corporations to a burgeoning ecosystem with something for everyone. Still, the barrier to entry has stopped many users from even trying the OS. Linux has solidified its position as the go-to for enterprises operating servers and data centres, but consumers have become intimidated by the perceived dread of using the command line and not having a familiar GUI.
This week, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Assignments Editor Kristina Panos decided against using one of Kristina’s tin can microphones to record the podcast, though that might be a cool optional thing to do once (and then probably never again).
Proc file system (short for “procfs”, referring to “/proc” dir) is a virtual file system (not a real file system) that is mounted on system boot to store information related to running processes.
The proc file system stores useful information about the running process and also lets the kernel space and user space communicate with each other.
When you list the content of the “/proc” directory using the ls command, you will get a bunch of directories, and their names will be in integer format, where “integer” refers to a process identifier.
Compared to Windows and Mac, apps and programs are lightweight on Chrome OS. But if you have a low-end Chromebook, they can easily eat up your crucial resources. In addition, if you use Android apps, Chrome extensions, and Linux apps on your Chromebook, they can slow down your device over time. To avoid such a scenario, you can delete apps on your Chromebook. It will free up storage, CPU resources, and most importantly, memory. So if you want to uninstall apps on a Chromebook, including web apps, Android apps, Chrome extensions, and Linux apps, follow our detailed guide below.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to remove RPM packages on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) is a package management system used by Linux distributions such as Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora. It is designed to allow users to easily install, update, and remove software packages on their systems. RPM packages are files that contain software and metadata about the software. The metadata includes information such as the name, version, and dependencies of the package, as well as instructions for installing and removing the software.
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 RPM Packages on Linux.
:defined represents any element that has been defined. This includes standard elements and custom elements that have been successfully defined.
In a media query, it’s obvious what width means. It always refers to the width of the viewport. With size container queries it’s not that obvious.
This image is 299 by 400 pixels. Each pixel consists of three components, red, green, and blue. The brightness of each component is encoded as an 8-bit value, so each pixel contains three bytes of information. Multiply that by the number of pixels, and we get a file size of around 350 kilobytes. Yet the image shown above is actually only 43kB in size, just 12% of the value we just calculated. In other words, by encoding the image using the JPEG format, we can achieve a compression ratio of roughly 8:1. How does JPEG accomplish this astonishing feat? Let's dive in.
At the top level, systemd has a -.slice (the root slice or cgroup). Underneath that are up to three slices: user.slice, for all user sessions, system.slice, for all system services, and machine.slice, for your virtual machines that are started in ways that systemd knows about (for example, libvirt). You'll probably always have a system.slice and usually a user.slice if you're looking at a machine, but many of your machines may not have a machine.slice. There's also an init.scope, which has PID 1 in it, and possibly some essentially empty .mount cgroups that systemd-cgls won't bother showing you.
The question had once been valid, but it is no more. This is just one of those things which you should invest some reflection in, when you want to style HTML-documents to use certain fonts:
Web-Fonts are nowadays (2020) just fonts that you use on the Web.
What "they" want you to believe is that a Web-Font is a font which "works" on the web, in contrast to others which do not! While nobody can give you a list of fonts which do currently not work on the Web, they do have Web-Fonts to offer. And as you want to be sure that your documents are nice and readable.., you read on and do not take any decisions until you prove me right or wrong, at the end of this block-post and maybe some research and verification.
Valve put up a big list of all the top games on Steam for 2022, and they've given a breakdown across different categories like the Steam Deck. So here's what they listed as the most played, plus a note about the best reviewed games released playable on Steam Deck in 2022.
Act fast to claim a free copy of Daymare: 1998 on GOG that they're giving away as the final free game in their Winter Sale. Scroll down on the GOG home page when you're logged in, and you'll see the giveaway banner to claim it.
It came to my attention recently that there's a website out there selling different models of the Steam Deck, at a discount, along with Steam Accounts. Don't fall for the trap like accessory maker JSAUX did.
The newest beta of Haiku includes a preview of a redesigned, modern HTTP library as the initial part of an renewed Network Services Kit. The primary goal of including the library is to get developers to experiment with it and give feedback on how it works within their software. The secondary goal is to gather some feedback on the use of modern C++ and some additional experimental features. This article provides a background to the new kit, some pointers on how to get started, and some notes on experimental designs that utilize modern C++ features.
It has been two years now since Red Hat dropped the red letter for CentOS, and shifted focus towards CentOS Stream. The world has moved then to distributions like Rocky Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE and others.
All of these distributions are fairly good alternatives for CentOS in the server world, and perhaps Rocky Linux is the best bug-to-bug alternative for it, thanks to its devs focusing on being an exact copy of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
But one could be wondering: Can Rocky Linux be used as a desktop Linux operating system instead of a server? After all, it does ship with a workstation installation option, and a normal GNOME desktop that can be used like any other distribution, so why not?
Open source projects thrive because of their communities. It makes sense that community management is a big topic on Opensource.com. This year, we had several good articles looking at different aspects of communities and how they’re started, protected, and nurtured.
On a recent Internet of Things Podcast episode, we took a call from our Voicemail hotline segment with a question about Matter over Thread devices. John called in to ask about the range of Thread devices in a smart home.
On one side of his house, he has a second-generation Google Nest Hub that will work as a Thread Border Router. And he has a Matter device that uses Thread one floor down on the other side of his house. John is wondering if and how those two devices will communicate with each other, given their locations and about a dozen walls between them.
Hialeah, Florida-based Allied Leisure was Atari's first arcade Pong licensee in 1973 (which they badged as Paddle Battle), but they had been producing games since at least 1968, making electromechanical attractions and eventually broadening into pinball. Some of this work was contracted to Universal Research Labs (unhappily for later Google searches abbreviated to URL) who fabricated the Paddle Battle circuit boards and produced their own paddle game, the similarly odd octagonal Video Action table. In 1974 Allied Leisure's production facility suffered a massive fire and the financial hit they sustained left URL with warehouses full of unsold components. URL turned these into the Video Action-II, which in 1975 was one of the earliest Pong systems to hit the home market.
The 80-column mode on my Commodore 128 from the imitable Screenbeard continues to produce no output, regardless of whether its involed with the 40/80 switch, or using GRAPHIC 5 in the functional 40-column mode. But I think I’ve made progress since blogging about it last year.
The German company “Scanntronik” offered a lot of high-quality hardware and software for the Commodore 64 series computers, most in the space of graphics and desktop publishing. They are well-known for their Pagefox and Printfox software as well as their Handyscanner 64 hardware.
Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using Matt’s “picopins” Linux bash script. The script displays the pinout in a color coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins.
Displaying the pinout of a Raspberry Pi Pico is possible using my “picopins” script. The script displays the pinout in a colour coded format showing the location of power, ground and GPIO pins. I find it useful if I’m coding Pico projects on my laptop or Pi 400 and need to check the location of a GPIO pin.
The bash script runs from the Linux command line and I’ve tested it on Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu.
As the Twitter exodus continues, there’s been a lot of talk on Mastodon about wanting to boost posts while adding a comment above them, like Twitter’s “quote tweet” feature.
Many people both supportive and fearful of adding quote toots are, in my view, overlooking a basic fact. Mastodon posts are just web pages, and a quote toot is just a link.
I lasted tweeted on Dec 22. (It was, unsurprisingly, a link to a blog post about Mastodon.) Today I wondered what percentage of the people who appear in my Mastodon timeline today also appeared on Twitter today.
So, any content that has been published, should, in theory, be considered out of your hands: with no way to remove it. In that sense, the fediverse adds nothing new. People can (and will) have screenshots, proxies can (and will) keep copies. Archivers have copies, search engines have it indexed, data-collectors have it collected, AI embedded in their models, and so on.
The ebook of OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems went to sponsors, Patronizers, and pre-order folks yesterday. It’s in my online bookstore today, and will appear elsewhere through the weekend as I upload to all the stores and all the databases churn.
If you allow Firefox to memorize your logins and passwords on web sites, by default Firefox will automatically pre-populate login forms with them. However, for years I've had this turned off, probably no later than when I read 2017's No boundaries for user identities: Web trackers exploit browser login managers. I was going to say that there's no Preferences option to control this, but it turns out that there is these days, in "Privacy & Security"'s "Logins and passwords" section as 'autofill logins and passwords'. This controls the about:config setting signon.autofillForms. If you untick this option (or set the value to false from the default true), you need to click or otherwise select the field before you'll get the option to autofill it.
As you might expect, we have been developing software all year. YottaDB r1.36 is released, a new GUI awaits your beta testing pleasure, and Octo continues to gain additional functionality.
YottaDB r1.36 is a major release, not because it has a common theme, but because of the number of enhancements that it includes.
have been working with a client with close to 600k images on their home page. The photos are tagged with multiple categories. The index API returns paginated pictures based on various sets of filters on classes.
Recently, they normalized their data, and every image was mapped to 4 different categories through join tables. So to load the home page, the app server used to join 8 tables on runtime and return the results.
Suppose that I give you a set of reference strings (“ftp”, “file”, “http”, “https”, “ws”, “wss”). Given a new string, you want to quickly tell whether it is part of this set.
It seems like we'll want to do a little graph traversal here. My idea is: knowing how many turns we have left, find the valve we should open, or in other words, the valve that, once we travel to it and open it, will release the most pressure total.
If you’ve heard me on any podcasts recently, you might remember I’ve been talking about a Gesture Sensor as the follow up to our first Person Sensor module. One frustrating aspect of building hardware solutions is that it’s very tough to share prototypes with people, since you usually have to physically send them a device. To work around that problem, we’ve been experimenting with compiling the same C++ code we use on embedded systems to WASM, a web-friendly intermediate representation that runs in all modern browsers. By hooking up the webcam as an input, instead of the camera, and displaying the output dynamically on a web page, we can provide a decent approximation to how the final device will work. There are obviously some differences, the webcam is going to produce higher-quality images than an embedded camera module and the latency will vary, but it’s been a great tool for prototyping. I also hope it will help spark makers’ and manufacturers’ imaginations, so we’ve released it publicly at gesture.usefulsensors.com.
You don’t always need much to build an FPV rig – especially if you’re willing to take advantage of the power of modern smartphones. [joe57005] is showing off his VR FPV build – a fully-printable small Mechanum wheels car chassis, equipped with an ESP32-CAM board serving a 720Ãâ720 stream through WiFi. The car uses regular 9g servos to drive each wheel, giving you omnidirectional movement wherever you want to go. An ESP32 CPU and a single low-res camera might not sound like much if you’re aiming for a VR view, and all the ESP32 does is stream the video feed over WebSockets – however, the simplicity is well-compensated for on the frontend.
Electron is software for running web-written apps in the same way as native ones, and has gotten plenty of bad press for its RAM appetite around these parts. But while the execution might leave something to be desired, the concept itself is quite solid —€ if you’ve already got code written for the web, a quick and easy way to bring it over to the desktop would be very valuable.
In this post, which can be read as a follow-up to our guide about web scraping without getting blocked, we will cover almost all of the tools to do web scraping in Python. We will go from the basic to advanced ones, covering the pros and cons of each. Of course, we won't be able to cover every aspect of every tool we discuss, but this post should give you a good idea of what each tool does and when to use one.
Brazil has begun three days of national mourning to mark the death of the global soccer icon Pelé at the age of 82. Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé was a poor Afro-Brazilian who led the Brazilian national soccer team to its first World Cup title in 1958 at just 17 years old, and ultimately two more times in later years — more than any other player in history. Pelé was seen as a symbol of Brazil and played for 20 years in the country before retiring and becoming a global ambassador for the sport of soccer. He was also criticized for embodying the commercialization of the sport and was seen as complying with Brazil’s repressive dictatorship. Pelé later became a cabinet member in the Brazilian government in the early 1990s. We discuss the life and legacy of the soccer icon with Brenda Elsey, co-host of the feminist sports podcast “Burn It All Down,” co-author of “Futbolera: Women, Sports, and Sexuality in Latin America” and editor of the book “Football and the Boundaries of History.”
Long term readers of Techdirt know that, since 2008, I’ve written a final post of the year on reasons to remain optimistic. It started when some people kept telling me that when they read what I wrote I sounded angry and frustrated, but when they’d meet me in person, I always seemed optimistic about the prospects for the world. As I’ve noted, I don’t see this as a contradiction at all. I remain incredibly optimistic about the potential for innovation, and generally frustrated and angry at whatever is getting in the way of making that optimistic vision a reality.
On my website home page, I have a "sparkline" that shows all of my contributions to the IndieWeb wiki. The sparkline doesn't show any specific values. The goal is to show my activity and trends contributing to the wiki as opposed to showing exactly how many contributions I have made. I enjoy this visualization. Every time I go to my home page I get a quick reminder about how often I have contributed to the IndieWeb wiki. Sometimes I look and realise I contributed a lot; sometimes I see I contribute more in bursts.
CallMeKevin’s best video of the year wasn’t about a game he was playing, it was a heartfelt reflection on changes he made to his channel and life over the past year. He delivered it with his trademark honesty and good humour, and I have tremendous respect for him for doing so. Kevin is Good Civ.
All year long CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events—perspectives of those out of power, relevant but omitted history—important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting. But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that make it an unlikely arena for an inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter—that we need.
C-SPAN 2 will host ScheerPost columnist Chris Hedges on Jan. 1 to discuss and take calls about politics, war, incarceration in America and more.
I posted about having students prioritize choices (Ranking The Bill of Rights). I’ve now created a Comic with instructions on how to do this. Although I’ve used the Bill of Rights, this could easily be done with a wide variety of topics.
My favorite illustration in the book shows Neil Armstrong walking on the moon — and then to the left of the image is the code that got him up there. Is there perhaps also a hopeful message in there — maybe a once and future hope, that if we innovated once, we can innovate again — now fore-armed with some knowledge about what could go wrong?
There’s an uneasy meeting in the world of audio between digital and analogue. Traditional analogue audio reached a level of very high quality, but as old-style media-based audio sources have fallen out of favor there’s a need to replace them with ones that reflect a new digital audio world. To do this there are several options involving all-in-one Hi-Fi separates at a hefty price, a cheaper range of dongles and boxes for each digital input, or to do what [Keri Szafir] has done and build that all-in-one box for yourself.
Have you tried your hand at circuit sculpture yet? Well, if you were waiting for the ideal first project with a great build video to go along with it, keep reading. [4dcircuitry]’s 555-based flashing circuit sculpture ticks all the go-for-it boxen for us — the component list is short, the final circuit looks cool, and well, there are blinkenlights.
Clean water advocates on Friday applauded the Biden administration for "resoundingly" rejecting the gutted regulatory framework left by former President Donald Trump as the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule restoring many water protections.
Global pharmaceutical giants plan to hike U.S. prices for hundreds of drugs next month in anticipation of the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act, which will allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of certain drugs starting in 2026, an analysis published Friday revealed.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford is hoping you'll see his health-care fight with Ottawa as just more federal-provincial mud wrestling, rather than as a battle for the country's heart and soul.
Lucky Luke debuted in 1946, and appeared smoking for 37 years. We're now 33 years away from when he stopped smoking, and many of his most visible cigarettes (i.e. the ones on the book covers) have been retroactively removed. Despite this, and the fact that I've officially read more stories of him not smoking than ones where he did, I can't shake the iconic image of Lucky Luke and his cigarette out of my head. That is some powerful imagery!
For a long time, it was not a big issue that Lucky Luke was a chain smoker. Morris countered his critics by explaining the cigarette was part of his character's profile. It took until the early 1980s, when the U.S. Hanna-Barbera Studios turned the comic into an animated TV series, before Luke's trademark shag was eventually removed. The comic book version followed the example of the animated Luke, and starting with the 1983 album 'Fingers', Lucky Luke chews on straws instead. On 7 April 1988, the initiative to remove all the smoking from his comic pages earned Morris an award from the World Health Organization.
Though cannabis possession and (limited) public consumption were OK’d for adults by the city last year, the first licenses took months to be awarded. This was partly because the state approached the new market from a social equity standpoint, giving first dibs to candidates who had either been directly affected by the war on drugs, or who were set up to give back to that community. So it made sense that longtime nonprofit Housing Works — which operates thrift and bookstores throughout the city, providing jobs and services to the unhoused as well as people suffering from addiction or HIV/AIDS — was responsible for opening the city’s first legal dispensary. “We see the effects of drug criminalization everyday,” Housing Works CEO Charles King tells Rolling Stone, adding that they plan to start a program to help “justice-involved” individuals with drug convictions get licensed for the new industry.
Since 2017, we’ve been carefully studying the progress of Google’s “Fuchsia” project, an effort to make an entirely new operating system and kernel, rather than relying on existing options like Linux. In that time, Fuchsia has steadily grown from an interesting experiment to become the foundation of Google’s Nest Hub smart display software. As we reported earlier this year, the next immediate frontier for the Fuchsia project is to run Google’s smart speakers, including the 2020 Nest Audio and new speakers likely to release in 2023.
Recently, Michael Tsai has compiled quite the list of issues he’s having with Ventura. While reading it, and while reading all the comments where other people chime in with additional problems, I wasn’t really surprised by the amount of issues taken as a whole — I and others have sadly observed the downward trajectory Mac OS has been following since Catalina (I’m being generous here: another popular opinion is that Mac OS has been getting worse since Mac OS X 10.7 Lion); thus, I kind of expected this bugfest from Ventura.
Even in a world where we use hardware tokens with asymmetric cryptography to obviate the need for passwords in modern authentication protocols, we’ll still need to include “something you know” for legal and political reasons.
In the United States, we have the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prevents anyone from being forced to testify against oneself. This sometimes includes revealing a password, so it is imperative that passwords remain a necessary component of some encryption technologies to prevent prosecutors from side-stepping one’s Fifth Amendment rights. (Other countries have different laws about passwords. I’m not a lawyer.)
TL;DR: It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Mike Hansen, creator of Rhasspy, has joined Nabu Casa to lead this effort. We’re starting off by building a collection of intent matching sentences in every language.
Some room-temperature takes on yesterday's not-quite-RCE vulnerabilities in OpenSSL 3.0, and on what there is to learn about safe cryptography engineering.
Abstract: Eavesdropping from the user’s smartphone is a well-known threat to the user’s safety and privacy. Existing studies show that loudspeaker reverberation can inject speech into motion sensor readings, leading to speech eavesdropping. While more devastating attacks on ear speakers, which produce much smaller scale vibrations, were believed impossible to eavesdrop with zero-permission motion sensors. In this work, we revisit this important line of reach. We explore recent trends in smartphone manufacturers that include extra/powerful speakers in place of small ear speakers, and demonstrate the feasibility of using motion sensors to capture such tiny speech vibrations. We investigate the impacts of these new ear speakers on built-in motion sensors and examine the potential to elicit private speech information from the minute vibrations. Our designed system EarSpy can successfully detect word regions, time, and frequency domain features and generate a spectrogram for each word region. We train and test the extracted data using classical machine learning algorithms and convolutional neural networks. We found up to 98.66% accuracy in gender detection, 92.6% detection in speaker detection, and 56.42% detection in digit detection (which is 5X more significant than the random selection (10%)). Our result unveils the potential threat of eavesdropping on phone conversations from ear speakers using motion sensors.
The Kazakhstani government has deported a Russian Federal Protective Service officer for crossing illegally into the country from Russia. Like hundreds of thousands of other draft-eligible Russians, Major Mikhail Zhilin fled abroad earlier this year after President Putin announced a widescale mobilization to reinforce Moscow’s invasion forces in Ukraine. According to Zhilin’s wife, her husband was not extradited at Russia’s request but deported for a border-crossing violation. Nevertheless, he is charged in Russia with felony counts of illegal border crossing and desertion — offenses with maximum penalties of two years and 15 years in prison, respectively.
As Kyiv prepares to persecute the souls of its own people, it seems we are about to witness just how inhumane this project has been from the outset.
But Ramona Bolla, a spokesperson for DIICOT, refuted that the pizza boxes had anything to do with Tate’s arrest. Bolla told the Associated Press the rumor was “funny, but no.” Prosecutors said that Tate and his brother had been under criminal investigation since April, according to Reuters, when Tate’s Bucharest mansion was searched by police in connection with human trafficking allegations.
Still, that didn’t stop the misinformation from taking over Twitter and becoming fodder for memes.
Supporters of climate leader Greta Thunberg cheered late Thursday into Friday after Andrew Tate, the latest right-wing influencer to attack Thunberg online, was arrested in Romania after bragging to the activist about owning dozens of emissions-heavy vehicles.
Environmentalists and rights advocates around the world are celebrating Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's selection of Marina Silva and Sônia Guajajara to serve as the nation's environment and Indigenous ministers, respectively.
The north-westerly gale billows and shakes the heavy white PVC of the marquee on the Portsoy harbourside, Aberdeenshire. At one end of the tent, a wall is taken up by a row of roller banners printed with text and logos, maps and images.
In the shift away from fossil fuel energy sources, there has been a huge expansion in solar power. We’ve seen solar thermal plants in the desert and photovoltaic panel farms covering huge areas of land, but perhaps the most potential comes from placing the panels on rooftops. In some parts of the world this is encouraged through a system of subsidies, as is the case in Italy. But what if your building is part of a protected world heritage site such as the Roman city of Pompeii? The answer comes in the form of traditional roof tiles that hide their photovoltaic elements under a polymer skin that looks for all the world like a traditional Roman pan tile. As is so often the case with such products, the manufacturer’s description page is cagey about the details in the name of protecting their invention. What they do tell us is that the tile uses conventional solar cells mounted underneath the polymer layer, which is described as “opaque at the sight but translucent to sun rays“. This sounds like an inherent contradiction, so naturally, we’re intrigued as to how it works.
Environmentalists in Alaska and beyond pointed to the oil and gas industry's lack of interest in a Friday lease sale for nearly a million acres of seafloor as the latest evidence that the U.S. must move beyond fossil fuels and protect the Cook Inlet.
When important parts of the cryptosphere collapse, such as Terra/Luna or FTX/Alameda, people often ask "is this the end of [cryptocurrency]?". The answer so far is no. But as the "[cryptocurrency] winter" continues, and contagion spreads from exchanges to miners and their financiers, the number of important parts still standing is decreasing.
Below the fold I explain why [cryptocurrency] will effectively end when there are no large, liquid exchanges, and look at the possibility that failures of major exchanges might happen.
"It was sunny and it was windy," Johnson says. That meant a lot of wind and solar power to help meet the surging demand. And the cold front was moving, which meant by the time the coldest temperatures hit the southeast, the middle of the country had some extra power to spare.
Between abundant wind and solar power, sharing energy as the cold front moved, and having plenty of natural gas to supply the functioning power plants, most of the nation's grid managed to avert a profound crisis.
It's no reason to be complacent, Johnson says.
Hash rate is a measure of the overall computational power to carry out transactions on the blockchain and execute mining activities. It is determined by how many guesses are made per second, which happens via a mammoth global network of mining machines. It must be noted that each machine has to make millions of guesses per second, requiring a lot of electricity.
Interestingly, Bitcoin miners consume around 129 Terawatt-hours of energy, which is around 0.6% of the world’s total, according to The University of Cambridge’s Bitcoin electricity consumption index.
Iranian officials have repeatedly blamed unlicensed cryptocurrency miners for using vast amounts of electricity -- draining the power grid and raising air pollution levels in many cities.
The operations are an enormous energy drain because they use banks of high-powered computers to try to unlock complex numerical puzzles related to international financial transactions.
Bitcoin currently consumes as much electricity as a small country thanks to the huge amounts of processing required to verify transactions. What’s worse, the bulk of this number crunching is dedicated to churning out strings of digits with no practical use.
These were found during a 30-man joint operation by the Department of Electrical Services (DES) on Wednesday (Dec 28). Joining the operation were Royal Brunei Police Force (RBPF), Fire and Rescue Department (FRD) and Autoriti Elektrik Negara Brunei Darussalam (AENBD).
Just before Christmas, much of the United States was hit by an extraordinary weather event: Winter Storm Elliott. In Chicago, we saw temperatures that dipped down to -10 degrees Fahrenheit with windchills that hit below -40 on the backs of 40-mile-per-hour winds. Such weather is dangerous to everyone,but it is particularly dangerous to people experiencing homelessness on our streets. Regardless of how good a person's tent, gloves, hat and coat are, it is impossible to stay safe and warm in those conditions for more than a few minutes. Add in that many people experiencing homelessness are dealing with health issues due to limited access to regular health care, and we have incredible cause for concern.
Corporate Scrooges in the UK have boasted about donating as little as 0.007% of their cash to charities at Christmas, analysis by openDemocracy has revealed.
After a protracted legal fight and relentless obstruction by the former president, the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday finally released six years of Donald Trump's individual and business tax returns.
Donald Trump, like many of us, likes to use holidays as an excuse to become more exuberant and expressive. On Christmas Eve, the former president wrote a Truth Social post airing his year-end grievances. Even by Trumpian standards, the statement was extravagantly baroque in its bile: “Merry Christmas to EVERYONE, including the Radical Left Marxists that are trying to destroy our Country, the Federal Bureau of Instigation [sic] that is illegally coercing and paying Social and LameStream media to push for a mentally disabled Democrat over the Brilliant, Clairvoyant and USA LOVING Donald J Trump, and, of course, the Department of Injustice, which appointed a Special ‘Prosecutor’ who, together with his wife and family, HATES ‘Trump’ more than any other person on Earth. LOVE TO ALL!’”
I learned a few important lessons during my experience with short-term accommodation. First, never trust a visa estimate and don’t make any plans until you have the actual visa in hand. This mistake was entirely my own and I regret it deeply. Second, living in a hotel is not enjoyable. Being unable to cook or clean for oneself is miserable. Third, Airbnb is no longer a reliable option for reasonable, short-term accommodation. Even via other avenues, most landlords are hesitant to rent out their properties for a short, undefined period. Fourth, I learned that it is not advisable to rely solely on a smartphone for technology, as I was without a computer for the first eight weeks and had to purchase a laptop. Finally, it is important to be prepared for unexpected events, such as the death of a monarch, which can have an impact on the availability and cost of accommodation.
We look at a remarkable film that follows how acclaimed playwright Liza Jessie Peterson gave a mesmerizing performance of her one-person play “The Peculiar Patriot” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola, before authorities stopped it halfway through. “Angola Do You Hear Us? Voices from a Plantation Prison” has just been shortlisted for an Oscar, and Peterson and the film’s director, Cinque Northern, join us to describe how they hope to raise awareness about conditions inside the infamous prison.
This small article is based on the contention that the primary agenda driving the world in the early 21st C. at a deep state level of geolitical unipolarity is that of reducing human population thru a population reduction program (PRP) as a responsibility to protect (R2P) the planet. This hideously atrocious as necessarily hidden agenda based on 99 and 44/100% pure absurdity to employ a Corporatist slogan under irony is without doubt the greatest threat which mankind has ever faced in the course of history by way of Eros being ‘fluxed over’ as to an enantodromiata of entropy accelerated. In the 17th Century Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ as to a remarkable metapolitical perspicacity and metaphysical flight of imagination articulated described such entropy accelerated as a ‘frith narrowed’ under satanic determination and concerning hatred of, and rage against Life as God created.
Apologies to Heraclitus for the use of the phrase ‘fluxed over’ as a play on words in the above.
When Jennifer Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Energy, posthumously restored the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer this week, she revealed little that had not been known about the “father of the Atomic Bomb”, and more about the culture of secrecy that surrounds the history of nuclear weapons.
Testimony in secret committee hearings about Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, declassified after sixty years, attested to Oppenheimer’s patriotism, his singular contribution to the development of the fission bombs that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his ardent support for tactical nuclear weapons defending Europe against Soviet invasion.
In a remarkable development, New York Democrats look likely to defeat Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s nomination of Hector LaSalle to be the state’s next chief judge, after progressives raised concern about his conservative judicial record and anti-abortion, anti-labor and anti-bail reform positions. “We have a situation here in New York where we have an opportunity to shift the highest court in a progressive direction, and the governor is completely fumbling that opportunity,” says Jabari Brisport, a Democratic Socialist state senator in Brooklyn who was one of the first to oppose LaSalle’s nomination.
Iran has already executed two people involved in unrest that erupted in September after the death in custody of Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by morality police enforcing the Islamic Republic's strict dress code for women.
Amnesty International has said Iranian authorities are seeking the death penalty for at least 26 others in what the campaign group has said is a push to intimidate protesters.
Citing planned maintenance work, a performing arts theater in St. Petersburg has canceled a January 4 performance of a play starring Liya Akhedzhakova following criticism from Moscow City Council officials regarding Akhedzhakova’s opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
"She always had to wait to ask the fourth question, because the men in charge wouldn't let her ask first but she just pushed ahead and she always asked the smartest questions," Mitchell said.
The two decades between 2003 and 2022 were "especially deadly decades for those in the service of the right to inform," said the Paris-based media rights campaigners.
Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader laments the deterioration of the once great newspaper of record in recent years.
Give the New York Times its due. Its teams of reporters produce more investigations of wrongdoing by entrenched vested interests than does the entire recess-rich, Tuesday-to-Thursday U.S. Congress with all its Committees and Subcommittees. The Times should promptly publish some of its exposes as small books. Their on-the-ground series on the burning Amazon Forest and their series on expanding sports gambling corruption and addiction exemplify great reporting.
In 2022, more jails in the United States became death traps, as people faced inhumane conditions in overcrowded facilities amid a lack of mental healthcare, housing and backlash against bail reform. Most of those who died were incarcerated pretrial, and activists say this number is heavily underreported. From New York City to Houston, Texas, jail deaths have reached their highest levels in decades. We get an update from Krish Gundu, with the Texas Jail Project, and Keri Blakinger, investigative reporter with The Marshall Project. Blakinger is the organization’s first formerly incarcerated reporter, and her memoir, “Corrections in Ink,” was banned from prisons in Florida this week. She also discusses a new searchable database of which books prisons don’t want incarcerated people to read.
Arizona Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs is taking the state’s child protective services agency in a radically different direction in the wake of a ProPublica-NBC News investigation into the racial disparities that have plagued the child welfare system here.
This week, Hobbs, a Democrat, announced that she has selected Matthew Stewart, a Black community advocate, as the new head of Arizona’s Department of Child Safety. Stewart previously worked at DCS as a case manager and training supervisor for a decade before quitting in 2020, later saying he was ashamed by the racial disproportionality he was seeing in his work.
The state plans to invest €6 million on bodycams over the next five years. In the bill's explanatory memorandum, the government argues the bodycams are there to protect police officers in situations where they risk being attacked, or if they later have to prove the legality and legitimacy of their actions following an operation.
Human rights defenders on Thursday condemned a decree by Italy's far-right government limiting the operations of migrant rescue ships, warning that the new restrictions would add to a refugee death toll that's already in the tens of thousands.
This trend did not happen overnight, but rather developed over more than a decade. Fixing it will take years. But the opportunity to address this problem now sits before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which was tasked by Congress with a new law to to end discrimination in broadband access.
Enormous government efforts to end the digital divide have begun. These include EFF’s supported infrastructure law in California. Congress also passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that includes a € national broadband infrastructure plan. One key provision that made it through Congress, despite last ditch efforts by big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to remove it, was a ban on discrimination in broadband deployment. This is otherwise known as the digital discrimination rule. If implemented fully, it will transform broadband into a utility akin to water and electricity by prohibiting profiting from discrimination.
At the start of the pandemic, EFF predicted that legacy networks that lack fiber infrastructure would suffer from the increased usage, driven by remote uses such as education. Legacy networks have a physical limit on how much traffic they can handle and are more expensive to maintain. Ask any school district in areas the federal government considers “fully served” (an exceedingly low bar to hit) and they will share countless stories of low-income families with inferior access unable to obtain remote education.
Up until the mid-1980s, connecting a computer to a phone line was tricky: many phone companies didn’t allow the connection of unlicensed equipment to their network, and even if they did, you might still find yourself blocked by a lack of standardized connectors. A simple workaround for all this was an acoustic coupler, a device that played your modem’s sounds directly into a phone’s receiver without any electrical connection. Modem speeds were slow anyway, so the limited bandwidth inherent in such a system was not much of a problem.
TLDR: Amazon pays roughly 70% of retail price for books priced up to $9.99, and 35% for books $10 and over. Amazon is the only retailer that does this. Other retailers, I make somewhere around 65%-70% no matter the retail price. Everything follows from that math, but if you want the details read on.
Russian technology entrepreneur and Yandex founder Arkady Volozh has finally, formally informed staff that he’s left the company completely. In a message posted today on an internal company portal, he announced his departure and thanked long-time colleagues for helping to build “the best technology company in the country,” according to The Bell. “All these 30 years, we’ve been doing this together,” Volozh wrote. “From nothing, amid global competition, we endeavored to operate openly and honestly.”
The Australian Government will conduct a review of current copyright enforcement measures in 2023, to ensure they remain "appropriate, effective and proportionate." The Attorney-General's Department has released an issues paper for public consultation, the first step towards determining whether Australia's existing enforcement regime is fit-for-purpose.
'House of the Dragon' is the most-pirated TV show released on torrent sites in 2022. The popular 'Game of Thrones' prequel dethroned 'Wandavision', which topped the chart last year. Amazon's 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' takes the second spot at a respectable distance.
The sky appeared to be clear when I peeked outside about 8pm AKST, and there was a bright waxing moon, just a little past first quarter, so it seemed like a good opportunity for moongazing. I used the 60AZ-M telescope, and tried out the 25mm, 12.5mm, and 6mm eyepieces, along with the neodymium filter. The view was mostly good, except there was a noticeable amount of rippling and some occasionally blurriness. I'm not sure if that was turbulence in the upper atmosphere, or maybe turbulence inside the telescope since I hadn't given it much time to reach thermal equilibrium. The 25mm and 12.5mm eyepieces worked pretty well, but the refraction (color bending) was very noticeable when using the 6mm.
My wife bought me a neat little book called the National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky (ISBN 978-0-679-40852-9). The material is a bit old (1991) but it includes some great maps of the lunar surface, with a map for each phase along with a matching photo.
I grew up riding bikes, living at the edge of a city and beginning of the suburbs. I was lucky to grow up near extensive woods with lots of both urban riding as well as offrode forest riding in an urban area. In college I biked with friends who were more enamored with bikes, organizing rides and silly races (and a root beer keg). They really got me excited for mountain biking, and after college I continued to ride as my main form of transportation, mostly on a singlespeed mountain bike for a few years, but later on a stable of bikes.
we live in a world where the cloud rules, where digital books wear out faster than physical books€¹ and where encryption makes content unreadable (without decryption) regardless of whether or not it's vulnerable. what do we have to show for all our work, all our memories? at this point in history it's next to nothing, even though our potential to preserve is at a maximum. i am not against preservation and archiving using technology. i simply want to bring one of our biggest overlooked problems into the light; our behaviors which are turning this era into an inevitable digital great unconformity€²...
I hadn't posted in a while before yesterday and after I did so, I discovered my gopher server was not running. I'm not even sure for how long it had been down.
I have two Asus X551 laptops that are about 8 years old. One my wife uses as her primary computing device, and one I keep for when I have to travel (which admittedly has not been much the past few years). They both have failed batteries and probably soon-to-die hard drives, but the displays are still fine.
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It has Slackware 14.2 on it now
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.