03.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

Links 17/03/2023: CentOS Newsletter and News About ‘Mr. UNIX’ Ken Thompson Hopping on GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • HowTo GeekThe System76 Meerkat Is a Tiny PC Built for Linux

        System76 is one of the few PC manufacturers with a focus on excellent Linux support, with a wide range of desktops and laptops. Now the company has brought back the “Meerkat,” a compact PC built for Linux.

        System76 first introduced the Meerkat in 2009, which was advertised as a “NetTop” (remember those?), and has gone in and out of production over the years with occasional hardware upgrades. The tiny PC is once again available for purchase, this time with your choice of 10th, 11th, or 12th Gen Intel Core processors. There are two sizes: a “short” model (1.42 inches tall) with only one M.2 drive slot, and the “tall” version (2 inches tall) adds a 2.5-inch drive bay for extra storage capacity. Both versions are 4.6 x 4.41 inches across.

    • Applications

      • Linux LinksExcellent Utilities: nvitop – GPU process management

        This utility is automatically installed with the NVIDIA drivers and lets users query and modify the GPU device state. While it’s probably the most well known NVIDIA monitoring tool, there are many other (and superior) tools available.

        nvitop is an interactive NVIDIA device and process monitoring tool and bills itself as “the one-stop solution for GPU process management”. Like nvidia-smi, nvitop is built on top of NVML, but the tool offers a lot more functionality. It’s free and open source software written in Python.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Leftovers

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • 2023-03-17 🔤SpellBinding: UFGHINC Wordo: CRORE
      • Playing cards with indicators along one edge

        Minimalists want indicators along as few corners as possible (if any… grumble grumble).

        Lefties want indicators in opposite corners so they can fan the cards in the opposite direction.

      • odd little film

        I was trying to find something worth watching on my neglected Tubi account and after some awful false starts (tip: much of Bryan Cranston’s early work is best missed, though it’s not his fault) I found a budget production called “Big Dark Energy” and was drawn in by the soundtrack (sounds like throat-singing in parts).

      • (privileged) work gripes

        I’ve been growing a little more unsatisfied with my work lately. I’ve been working there for nearly 2 years now, and generally, it is a comfortable job. Office job, home office 3x a week, lots of union protections and rights, flextime, nice coworkers, fair pay. I can call in sick for 3 days without a doctors note and only need one at the 4th. I get 30 days PTO a year and can take some over from the previous year, and we have no limited sick days. I have my own solo office – with walls, we do not have large offices with cubicles. We even have a sensible mission that I stand behind and my work actually leaves somewhat of a mark and ensures the safety of society in a specific way. I contribute my part to that.
        The work I get, what I actually get to see and handle, is very interesting to me. I enjoy seeing and reading it, and managing it.

      • Life’s Not Too Bad

        Since late last year life’s been going pretty well. Things that used to weigh heavily on my mind are no longer so burdensome. I’ve reclaimed my ‘live in the moment’ attitude and energy. I’m currently neck-deep in trying to start my career (again), and I’m uncharacteristically optimistic about how things will go over the next couple of months.

        I read this interesting article in Neuroscience News that talked about how our perception of time is directly linked to our heartbeat. I thought it was fascinating and that it totally tracks with my own lived experience.

        When I look back at times of stress and anxiety in my life, my perception of time was all over the place. Between feeling like I didn’t have enough time to accomplish what I needed to accomplish while also feeling like every day was a slog, it makes sense that my skewed sense of time could be linked to an erratic heart rate.

    • Technical

      • Would You Like an OpenTTD Save Game?

        This game really deserves more players. It’s absolutely amazing. OpenTTD owns my heart and soul nowadays.

        I’ve come to understand that most new players struggle to make a profit, and I assume some give up out of frustration and quit early on. When I started some 6-7 months ago I made a loss in my first game, but then read up a bit on how it works. I’m getting pretty good at it now.

        The least thrilling part of the game is that time between starting a new game and getting the finances going at a level where you can’t feasibly spend money as fast as it’s rolling in. I have no idea what the common length of that time is, but when starting in 1950 I usually make between $600k-$1000k in the year 1953. By 1955 I’m guaranteed to make more than a million per year.

      • Forced Obsolescence Hurts Security

        Project Zero at Google has reported a number of exceptionally severe vulnerabilities in Samsung’s modem stack, allowing remote code execution with no information other than a victim’s phone number.

      • Setting up GNU Emacs for Speedata Publisher

        If you follow my “Pebcak’s diary” you already knew that I am trying to learn these high-level TeX implementations, such as ConTeXt and Speedata Publisher.

        The latter is especially challenging since works exclusively with “XML Schema” and I found very few native opensource editors able to work with this XML variation.

      • The Grand Code Restructuring

        In general I don’t like to fuss over code, but this is exactly what I’ve been doing in preparation of the NLnet funded work. I’ve spent the last month restructuring Marginalia’s code base. It’s not completely done, but I’ve made great headway.

        Things got the way they got because in general for experimental solo-development projects, I think it makes sense to be fairly tolerant of technical debt.

        Since refactoring is something that is extremely difficult to break up into parallel tracks or do in small iterations, the cost of refactoring is effectively multiplied by the number of people that could be working on the code.

        It’s a bit like Amdahl’s Law applied to project management. When leaning into this, it allows smaller solo projects to be be extremely nimble compared to larger projects. Refactoring is very cheap when you’re working alone because there is no resource contention. This may seem a weird notion if you’re coming from working mostly on large projects where any technical debt is nearly irreversible, but that’s mostly a problem of large scale software development.

      • Programming

        • Rainy

          I found a CodePen the other day that showed a method for a rain effect on a web page. I like it a lot, so I’ve modified it to work without a pre-processor, and included instructions for how to add it to a Midnight page (or any other, for that matter). There are, of course, plenty of other ways to play with it. I’ve tried to make it as simple as possible to customize the basics, but going beyond that will require at least some knowledge of JavaScript and/or CSS.

        • Man. We _really_ don’t know git.

          I read through this and couldn’t help but just shrug and say, “same.” My college education never mentioned git. Ever. I wound up in some advanced classes early on, and wound up doing some actual programming with open-ended results (not workshop “program this thing the instructor said to do” kind of drivel). I was working with classmates older both in terms of their progress toward degrees and in chronological age.

          **Nobody else knew how git worked.** And the only reason I did is having fallen down the Linux rabbit hole years prior to that, and wound up picking up some _very_ basic (read: I didn’t even branch things properly or grasp what atomic commits were and how awesome they are) skills with source control in general.


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DecorWhat Else is New


  1. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 09, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 09, 2023



  2. Links 10/06/2023: libei 1.0.0 and Qt Creator 11 Beta

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  3. Jim Zemlin Boasting in 2022: Linux Foundation Has Revenue of Over 200 Million Dollars; IRS in 2022: Linux Foundation Has Revenue of 139 Million Dollars

    As noted here months ago, the Linux Foundation is run by a lying, manipulative charlatan who merely milks the brand “Linux” to enrich himself; where is that anomaly coming from?



  4. 'Linux' Foundation: Spendings on Salaries Increased More Than 20% in One Year

    As per the document just published after it had been submitted 7 months ago, salary-related expenditures rose from 49,386,990 to 59,791,694 in one year



  5. Links 09/06/2023: JDBC FDW 0.3.1 and Godot 4.1 Beta

    Links for the day



  6. Gemini Links 09/06/2023: Thoughts on Flatpak and Apple Cultists

    Links for the day



  7. Trying to 'Finish the Job' of Bully de Blanc and Deb Nicholson by Rewriting History (and Even Terms) for Microsoft

    Heather J. Meeker is trying to rewrite history and now we can see who her financial masters and hosts are (lots of Microsoft); The media portrayed her as some kind of historian for Free software a few months ago (as funding had been secured), but she already outsources everything to proprietary software controlled by Microsoft. This will be corporate revisionism; moreover, there’s employment history with Microsoft. As an associate put it: “The employment history with Microsoft is a dead give away that she will only spew lies and disinformation” (using books and such; the revisionism is well funded); the latest blog from the OSI is also sponsored by Microsoft (both the blog post and the person who wrote it)



  8. Links 09/06/2023: Tor Browser 12.0.7 and Many Linux Devices

    Links for the day



  9. Linux Foundation Demotes Mr. Linux, Linus Torvalds, to Third (in Salaries), Only Uses Him for the Name

    The Linux [sic] Foundation‘s tax filings (divulged by the Nonprofit Explorer) show that it now pays “CHRIS ANISZCZYK” and “JAMES ZEMLIN” more than it pays “LINUS TORVALDS”, sans bonuses. Torvalds fell to third place already. Mr. Zemlin pays himself over $1.2 million a year. He doesn’t even use Linux. He lacks credentials and accomplishments (except for selling out to companies like Microsoft), but he keeps pandering to power and money (Bill Gates). It should be noted that the Torvalds bonus was added only after backlash had erupted.



  10. HMRC is Just Taking Taxpayers' Money and Not Enforcing the Law (or Selectively Enforcing It for the Political Masters)

    What we've been demonstrating or highlighting so far this year is a defunct system of accountability, wherein the government officials and their associates are essentially above the law; can they endure the negative press that entails?



  11. GNU/Linux Decade in India: From 1.5% to 13.5%

    The world's largest population is quick to move away from Windows; not many adopt Apple (Indians don't care for overpriced junk), so GNU/Linux is growing fast



  12. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 08, 2023

    IRC logs for Thursday, June 08, 2023



  13. Links 09/06/2023: Microsoft's 'Online' ("Clown"/OneDrive) Storage Goes Down Again, Files Cannot be Reached

    Links for the day



  14. What Will Happen After All Major News Sites Die Isn't Pretty

    With webspam, chaff, sponsored puff pieces and worse things being presented as "the news" we're running out of actual purpose for the World Wide Web



  15. HMRC 3 Weeks Later: No Action, Same as 'Action Fraud' (Your Tax Money 'at Work')

    When people need police enforcement against a crime it turns out that police is “MIA” (missing in action); it might matter that Sirius worked with the British government, so there’s a reduced incentive to affirm crimes were committed and then arrest the perpetrators



  16. Links 08/06/2023: Istio 1.18 and FreeIPMI 1.6.11

    Links for the day



  17. Gemini Links 08/06/2023: Sourcehut, Gemini Identity, and BBS Comments on Cosmos

    Links for the day



  18. IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 07, 2023

    IRC logs for Wednesday, June 07, 2023



  19. The Need to Evolve on the Internet

    Tux Machines is one year away from its twentieth birthday and its increased focus on protocols aside from HTTP/S is paying off; Tux Machines also weaned itself off all social control media, including Mastodon and Diaspora (they're not the future, they're the past)



  20. EPO Management is Still Bullying the Staff (While Breaking the Law and Violating the European Patent Convention)

    Overloaded or overworked EPO workers are complaining about further deterioration at the workplace and their representatives say "this management style may well contribute to feelings of disengagement, depression, or even burn-out"



  21. His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) Not Responding After 20 Days (Well-Founded Report of Tax Fraud) and British Police Pretending Not to Exist

    The crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ have helped unearth a profound problem in the British law enforcement authorities; What good is a monopolistic taxman (called after the British Monarchy even in 2023) that cannot assess its own tax abuses? Or abuses connected to it via a contractor? Meanwhile, as per what I was told, the police is not responding to my MP and that’s ANOTHER scandal (police not only refusing to act against crimes, committed against many people, but moreover not responding to elected politicians)



  22. Links 08/06/2023: Cinnamon 5.8 and Leap 15.5 Release Mature

    Links for the day



  23. Gemini Links 08/06/2023: Emacs and Thoughts on Bubble

    Links for the day



  24. Links 07/06/2023: Reddit Layoffs and OpenGL 3.1 in Asahi Linux

    Links for the day



  25. Gemini Links 07/06/2023: Jukka Charting Geminispace

    Links for the day



  26. IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 06, 2023

    IRC logs for Tuesday, June 06, 2023



  27. NOW LIVE: Working for the Public — Universities, Software and Freedom - a Talk by Richard Stallman at Università di Pisa (Italy)

    As noted a few hours ago, Richard Stallman is delivering a talk at Università di Pisa this morning



  28. Richard Stallman's Talk is in Two Hours and There's a BigBlueButton Livestream

    Dr. Stallman is in Italy to give talks at universities this week; he will soon give a live talk, accessible in his site or directly at the source



  29. Links 06/06/2023: Angie 1.2.0, New EasyOS and EndeavourOS Released

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  30. Gemini Links 06/06/2023: OpenKuBSD, GrapheneOS, and More

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