The PinePhone Pro began shipping to developers earlier this month. And soon it’ll be available for anyone to purchase.
Pine64 has announced that it will begin taking orders for the $399 Linux-friendly smartphone in late December or early January.
First announced in October, the PinePhone Pro is a smartphone with a 6 inch HD+ display, a Rockchip RK3399S hexa-core processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage. While those specs put the phone in mid-range territory, they aren’t the things that make the PinePhone Pro stand out.
Pine64’s new smartphone has a few features that seem like throwbacks in 2021… but in a good way. It has a removable 3,000 mAh battery, a headset jack, and a microSD card reader. The phone also has physical switches that allow you to disable hardware including the cameras, mic, headphones, and wireless features if you want privacy.
Developers looking for a unique Linux-based workstation may be interested to hear that SimulaVR, the startup behind its own open-source VR Linux distro, is creating a standalone VR headset that aims to offer just that.
Dubbed ‘Simula One’, the standalone VR headset isn’t meant for gaming, rather it’s targeting programmers, software engineers, developers—essentially anyone who uses Linux for work-related stuff.
For now, the company has mentioned basic features and has also shown off a prototype of Simula One. It’s certainly capturing the cool, retro vibe that’s ostensibly taking inspiration from early home computers such as Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600 and Apple II.
PersistentVolume (or PVs for short) are associated with Reclaim Policy. The Reclaim Policy is used to determine the actions that need to be taken by the storage backend on deletion of the PV. Where the reclaim policy is Delete, the expectation is that the storage backend releases the storage resource that was allocated for the PV. In essence, the reclaim policy needs to honored on PV deletion.
With the recent Kubernetes v1.23 release, an alpha feature lets you configure your cluster to behave that way and honor the configured reclaim policy.
Even for experienced Windows admins, the wide world of Linux can seem confusing and overwhelming when it comes to new and lateral entry. the iX-Workshop “Linux administration for Windows admins” teaches you the basics of the open source operating system in detail over five days. From the installation and the boot process to working on the command line to setting up the file system, user, software and network management and logging, the workshop covers everything that Linux admins can and need to know.
OpenStack has long been the foundation for open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Linux, of course, is the leading operating system for all clouds. And Kubernetes is the open-source software everyone uses to manage containers. Put them together, as the OpenInfra Foundation has, and you get LOKI: Linux OpenStack Kubernetes Infrastructure.
OpenInfra executive director Jonathan Bryce says that just as the "LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL, Python/Perl/PHP] stack became the standard for deploying web applications, LOKI helps operators identify successful patterns and combinations of technologies to build production infrastructure."
A Quick overview of Ubuntu MATE 21.10
"Yannis Weasel" isn't real, but his creations are. Craig is indispensable for multi-track voice channel recording on Discord, and Ennuicastr lets you record everything else online. On FLOSS Weekly, "Yannis" joins Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett to discuss these projects, the open source community around digital audio processing as well as the dreaded Log4j security flaw previously announced in open source news.
In this video, we are looking at Pop!_OS 21.10.
Today we are looking at Pop!_OS 21.10. It is based on Ubuntu 21.10, Linux Kernel 5.15, Gnome 40, and uses about 1.1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
I've been using LiberaPay for quite a while and it's an incredibly donation platform with offering a lot of things the other platforms will never touch but one problem it's had is it's only had the option to do private donations and nothing else.
On this edition of HEY DT...
At the end of October, Apple launched the next generation of Apple Silicon: M1 Pro and M1 Max. We got right to work on supporting these new machines, and after just a few days of work we were able to bring up Asahi Linux on them up to feature parity with the M1 machines! Going forward, we’ll be supporting these machines as well as the previous generation.
The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021.
Linux 5.17 brings more Apple M1 drivers but the state of affairs isn't yet ready for end-users. There has been a lot accomplished in recent months but among the work still to be tackled are CPU frequency scaling, system sleep and CPU deep sleep support, cleaning up their work-in-progress NVMe storage patches, rewriting their early WiFi driver patches, and getting GPU acceleration working. There have also been various firmware struggles to workaround.
Like Valve’s Steam Deck — an upcoming gaming handheld that also runs on Linux — the idea isn’t to abandon Windows games. Both the Steam Deck and Amazon’s seemingly new Luna initiative will still run Windows games, but both of them will do it through Valve’s Proton compatibility layer.
“[T]his role involves working with Proton - a compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux using Wine. Luna is committed to working with the open source community around Proton. This role will commit code to open source projects such as Proton and Wine in pursuit of running games in a stable and performant manner,” each of the three job descriptions reads.
The Google Stadia fiasco seemed to have left the way clear for Windows to be the server technology that would dominate video game services via streaming, especially seeing NVIDIA GeForce Now, Amazon Moon and obviously Game Pass bet on Microsoft technology. However, it seems that Amazon Moon could take a turn in the future, as the company founded by Jeff Bezos has published three offers (one, two Y 3) working for hire software engineers specialized in Proton, DXVK and Mesa.
At this point, it is not necessary to explain what each of the components are that those future Amazon employees would work on. Proton is the Wine-based, Valve-powered compatibility layer that makes it easy to run Windows video games on Linux and macOS. DXVK is the renderer used by default by Proton to translate DirectX 9, 10 and 11 instructions to Vulkan on the fly, while Mesa is the standard stack in charge of supporting the graphics API (OpenGL and Vulkan) in Linux. Although VKD3D is not mentioned, it will surely be among the technologies to cover seeing that it translates DirectX 12 to Vulkan.
The technologies mentioned in the job offers are C, C ++, Mesa, Proton, Wine, DXVK, Linux kernel, Windows kernel, DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL, that is, nothing really new, although obviously the level of knowledge required is high.
Amazon has explained that future employees will solve “Tough glitches on the Linux graphics stack, from Linux kernel to graphics libraries. You will work on graphics technologies such as DirectX, Vulkan, DXVK, and OpenGL. It will delve into graphics performance issues, provide solutions that allow Windows games to run on Linux, and make contributions to Wine / Proton open source. “.
Following yesterday's disclosure of four new X.Org Server security vulnerabilities that could lead to local privilege escalation, X.Org Server 21.1.2 is now available with those security fixes plus other changes.
Shortly after yesterday's security advisory for the xorg-server went public, XWayland 21.1.4 was issued with fixes to that component. Now X.Org Server 21.1.2 was prepped and introduced this morning.
This release fixes 4 recently reported security vulnerabilities and several regressions.
In particular, the real physical dimensions are no longer reported by the X server anymore as it was deemed to be a too disruptive change. X server will continue to report DPI as 96.
Below is a list of changes since 21.1.1:
Dave Airlie (1): dri2: add crocus to the list of va_gl users
Jocelyn Falempe (2): xf86/logind: fix call systemd_logind_vtenter after receiving drm device resume xf86/logind: Fix drm_drop_master before vt_reldisp
Jonathan Gray (1): glamor: fix free of uninitialised pointers
Matt Turner (1): test: #undef NDEBUG so assert is not compiled away
Matthieu Herrb (1): remove the PRE_RELEASE message.
Peter Hutterer (1): xkb: fix XkbSetMap check for the keytypes count
Povilas Kanapickas (7): Revert "hw/xfree86: Propagate physical dimensions from DRM connector" meson: Correctly set DDXOSVERRORF and DDXBEFORERESET on xwin record: Fix out of bounds access in SwapCreateRegister() xfixes: Fix out of bounds access in *ProcXFixesCreatePointerBarrier() Xext: Fix out of bounds access in SProcScreenSaverSuspend() render: Fix out of bounds access in SProcRenderCompositeGlyphs() xserver 21.1.2
Sam James (1): hw/xfree86: fix sbus build for SPARC
nerdopolis (1): xfree86: On Linux, while only seat0 can have TTYs, don't assmume all seat0s have TTYs
git tag: xorg-server-21.1.2
QEMU 6.2 is now officially available as the newest feature release for this widely used key open-source component to the Linux virtualization stack.
Intel's stellar open-source graphics driver team sent in their latest batch of feature updates to DRM-Next for staging ahead of next month's Linux 5.17 cycle kicking off. Notable with this pull among other changes is initial support for next-generation Raptor Lake S graphics while Alder Lake P graphics are considered stable / promoted from being behind the experimental flag.
Intel 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" is the successor of Alder Lake and expected in 2022. Details are still light on Raptor Lake while the Intel open-source driver engineers have already been working on enabling the integrated graphics as well as other areas of the RPL platform.
Intel Linux engineers have posted a new set of patches enabling the Graphics Security Controller "GSC" support under Linux as a chassis controller for discrete graphics cards.
The Intel GSC is a Management Engine (MEI) device for their upcoming ARC discrete graphics cards. There is a firmware management interface exposed while the principal function of the GSC (references both to "Graphics System Controller" and "Graphics Security Controller" in different areas of the code) appears to be around media protection with exposing High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP 2.2).
Linux is an open-source, UNIX-like operating system that drives a large portion of the internet. The Linux kernel sits underneath many new technologies and platforms such as Android, SDN controllers, containers, and its services as a network OS and server. These high demands require the proper management, reliability, and availability of the hosted applications, websites, and underlying Linux OS.
The guide covers the best command-line Linux performance monitoring tools. Learn how these CLI tools can help resolve system, network, CPU, and disk bottlenecks.
PDF ( Portable Document Format) is a widely used document format used for creating documents. It’s a hugely popular format thanks to its portability, ease of use, and readability. The PDF format preserves all the aspects of the document such as Font size and color as well as other elements such as images, tables, and forms to mention a few. This makes reading PDF documents convenient across a wide range of devices since all the aspects of the document are unaltered.
Occasionally, however, you may want to alter a few aspects of your document. While this is totally possible by converting your document to a Word document ( you can do this online ) and later saving the document as a PDF document, it’s often tedious. In addition, this restricts you to the number of pages that you can convert.
Thankfully, there are a few PDF editing tools that you can leverage to make changes to your PDF documents. In this guide, we present some of the best PDF editors for Linux that you can use to make changes to your PDF documents.
PDF files are essential for both personal and professional documents. There are several command-line and GUI Linux tools you can use to combine multiple inter-related PDF files into a single PDF file.
The article is a step-by-step guide on merging multiple PDF documents or pages into one PDF without breaking the PDF content. The demonstration will use open-source, free, command-line, and GUI applications.
Merge Multiple PDF Files in Linux Command Line
Combining PDF files from the command-line is essential to system administrators who work on a server without a GUI. You can use several command-line tools such as PDFtk, Ghostscript, Convert ImageMagick Tool, and pdfunite.
Mycroft AI is a virtual assistant application that can respond to verbal requests and complete tasks such as searching the Internet for some information you need, or downloading your favorite podcast, and so on. It's a fine piece of open source software that, unlike similar software from companies in the business of harvesting personal data, provides privacy and platform flexibility.
Mycroft AI, written in Python, can install on many different hardware platforms. The famous Raspberry Pi board is a popular choice (but not the only one) to run the voice assistant. Conveniently, Mycroft provides an image for Raspberry Pi, which is called Picroft. Picroft is an excellent solution, but it does have some limitations, such as the lack of 64-bit support.
Between technology whitepapers, manuscripts, and RPG books, I deal with lots of PDFs every day. The PDF format is popular because it contains processed PostScript code. PostScript is the native language of modern printers, so publishers often release a digital version of a book as a PDF because they've invested in the time and effort to produce a file for print anyway. But a PDF isn't intended to be an editable format, and while some reverse processing is possible, it's meant to be the last stop for digital data before it's sent to the printer. Even so, sometimes you need to make adjustments to a PDF, and one of my favorite tools for that job is the pdftk-java command.
In the cloud-native era, your applications need to react to event-driven systems in scalable, flexible ways. Developers have increasingly turned to automated development and deployment processes to meet that need, using tools like Ansible and Helm to make it all possible.
A user outside of a Kubernetes cluster can utilize the Kubernetes API server proxy to connect to cluster IPs that would otherwise be unavailable. This, for example, enables access to a service that is only available within the cluster’s network. Between the user and the in-cluster endpoint, the apiserver works as a proxy and a bastion.
We installed Ubuntu 20.04 on our Linux operating system to run the instructions in Kubernetes. You can follow it. You must additionally install the Minikube cluster on your computer to run Kubernetes on Linux. Minikube makes testing commands and programs easy by allowing you to do so in a methodical manner. As a result, it provides the finest Kubernetes learning experience for newcomers. Initially, the minikube cluster must be started. Then, in Ubuntu 20.04, go to the newly installed command line terminal. You can do so by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut key or typing “Terminal” into the Ubuntu 20.04 system’s search box. Either of the aforementioned techniques will start the terminal. The minikube will be started after that. Type “minikube start” into the terminal to start the minikube. The Kubernetes cluster will be launched after a virtual machine capable of operating a single node cluster has been built. It’s also compatible with the kubectl environment. This will be used to communicate with the cluster at first.
Many projects (like melody) need to get audio notification which includes music and sound alert. In this logic, the most commonly used Arduino Uno device is the Piezo Buzzer
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use a piezo buzzer with Arduino Uno by using Arduino IDE software.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install IntelliJ IDEA on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, IntelliJ IDEA is a programming environment or IDE. It is widely used for the development of Java programs. It is developed by JetBrains. IntelliJ IDEA supports Java, Groovy, Kotlin, Scala, Android, JavaScript, SQL, and lots of other languages and frameworks. It offers instant and clever code completion, on-the-fly code analysis, and reliable refactoring tools.
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 IntelliJ IDEA on a Fedora 35.
Do you have Windows 11 installed on your PC but also want to dual-boot Arch Linux? This guide will show you how you can run Arch Linux alongside Windows 11.
This guide assumes you’ve already installed Windows 11 on your computer’s hard drive. Consider installing Windows 11 on one hard drive and dedicating a second hard drive for Arch Linux for best results.
Are you looking to get the latest release of Firefox on your Debian Linux system? Can’t figure out how to do it? We can help! Follow along as we go over how to install the latest Firefox on Debian.
First came a GNOME extension reimplementing wobbly windows, then we saw the return of the (very cool) 3D desktop cube effect — now comes the final part of the holy Compiz trinity: window fire.
For Linux users of a certain vintage over-the-top desktop effects were a staple part of the Linux desktop landscape, thanks in large part to Compiz. This boundary-pushing window manager made it easy for developers to create complicated composited desktop effects as ‘plugins’ leveraging 3D capable hardware.
While most Compiz effects were giddy, gaudy, and garish, they looked totally unlike anything Windows or macOS has to offer, making them not only a distinct visual differentiator but also a metaphor for how Linux ‘does things different’.
For those running Ubuntu on laptop or notebook, there’s an ‘Airplane Mode’ option available in Wi-Fi settings page. When it enabled, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile broadband are turned off to disable wireless signal transmissions.
It’s usually good when to turn on the airplane mode. But, when disable this mode, Bluetooth gets turned on while user may only need Wi-Fi. So, a Gnome Extension ‘Sane Airplane Mode’ is created and allows to choose which devices to re-enable when disable the airplane mode.
RPM Fusion is a repository of add-on packages for Rhel-type distributions and EL+EPEL that a group of community volunteers maintains. RPM Fusion is not a standalone repository but an extension of CentOS’s default packages that could not be included due to CentOS being bound by the same legal restrictions as Red Hat.
The RPM Fusion repository comes in two flavors, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which have mostly almost all free software but are closed source and mainly proprietary.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install RPM Fusion on your CentOS 8 distribution.
For those using CentOS 8 Stream, you might have noticed that installing Nginx directly from its Appresteam does not install the latest stable or mainline version. It is pretty far behind where Nginx is stable, and Mainline is at the current time of its development.
For most, using the default Nginx that comes bundled with the CentOS App stream will be preferred. Still, the following tutorial will cover the steps needed to use newer versions for the latest features.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following guide, you will know how to install Nvidia drivers on your CentOS 8 Stream desktop.
Docker lets you package up software as self-sufficient containers that share their host’s kernel but look and feel like independent VMs. The software within runs with near-native performance. This makes Docker containers a great way to safely try out new packages without installing them “bare metal” on your machine. Here’s some of the techniques you can use.
Docker containers don’t see your system’s GPU automatically. This causes reduced performance in GPU-dependent workloads such as machine learning frameworks. Here’s how to expose your host’s NVIDIA GPU to your containers.
Docker containers don’t see your system’s GPU automatically. This causes reduced performance in GPU-dependent workloads such as machine learning frameworks. Here’s how to expose your host’s NVIDIA GPU to your containers.
Jack Wallen shows you how to install software with the help of Ubuntu Linux and a well-designed app store.
HAProxy is a free, very fast, and reliable reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is suited for very high-traffic websites and runs the most visited sites.
What is load balancing?
Load balancing ensures the availability, uptime, and performance of your servers, websites, and applications during traffic spikes.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install the latest HAProxy on our Ubuntu 20.04.
Configure MirrorMaker 2 and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka to synchronize messages between Kafka clusters deployed on Red Hat OpenShift.
This is our ongoing series of Linux commands and in this article, we are going to review lsof command with practical examples. lsof meaning ‘LiSt Open Files’ is used to find out which files are open by which process.
As we all know Linux/Unix considers everything as a file (pipes, sockets, directories, devices, etc). One of the reasons to use the lsof command is when a disk cannot be unmounted as it says the files are being used. With the help of this command, we can easily identify the files which are in use.
Mutt is the best open-source terminal-based email client used to send/receive emails from the command-line. While for sending email it uses SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) and for receiving it uses both IMAP/POP protocol.
GStreamer is a powerful multimedia framework with over 30 libraries and more than 1600 elements in 230 plugins providing a wide variety of functionality. This makes it possible to build a huge variety of applications, however it also makes it tricky to ship in a constrained device. Luckily, most applications only use a subset of this functionality, and up until now there wasn’t an easy way to generate a build with just enough GStreamer for a specific application.
Thanks to a partnership with Huawei, you can now use gst-build to generate a minimal GStreamer build, tailored to a specific application, or set of applications. In this blog post, we’ll look at the major changes that have been introduced in GStreamer to make this possible, and provide a small example of what can be achieved with minimal, custom builds.
Odoo (formerly known as OpenERP) is a suite of open-source business applications. The most used modules for Odoo include Point of Sale (POS), Inventory, CRM, Website, Live Chat, e-Commerce, Billing, Accounting, Warehouse, and others. The range of the modules that can be installed in one application makes Odoo very popular nowadays.
Let’s learn how to install and start using Odoo 14 on a Debian OS. Remember, if you want to skip this part and let others automate it for you, you can do so by subscribing to any Debian hosting plan and acquiring all the assistance you’ll ever need. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Odoo 14 on Debian 11 with Apache as a reverse proxy.
Finding files and directories in Linux is a very difficult task compared to Windows operating system. Especially if you are working on the server operating system without a Desktop interface. There are several ways to search files and directories in Linux. The simple and easiest way is to use the Linux terminal to search or locate files.
The find and locate are the most popular command-line tool used to search files and directories in Linux. The find command allows you to search for files and directories based on an expression. This way you can search files and directories based on their size, date, type, and ownership.
In this post, we will show you how to search files on the Linux terminal using the find and locate commands.
Spread the loveFinding files and directories in Linux is a very difficult task compared to Windows operating system. Especially if you are working on the server operating system without a Desktop interface. There are several ways to search files and directories in Linux. The simple and easiest way is to use the Linux terminal to […]
This article explains how to install Plex Media Server on Centos (version 7 and above). This is a self-hosted solution for watching and storing your own media.
Plex is a streaming media server that lets you organize your video, music, and photo collections and stream your media to your computer, phone, tablet, or TV at any time and from anywhere. Plex media server can be installed on all major operating systems and devices.
Hello! I’ve been thinking about how to explain DNS a bunch in the last year.
I like to learn in a very hands-on way. And so when I write a zine, I often close the zine by saying something like “… and the best way to learn more about this is to play around and experiment!“.
So I built a site where you can do experiments with DNS called Mess With DNS. It has examples of experiments you can try, and you’ve very encouraged to come up with your own experiments.
In this post I’ll talk about why I made this, how it works, and give you probably more details than you want to know about how I built it (design, testing, security, writing an authoritative nameserver, live streaming updates, etc)
Most of the time, you can just download an ISO and install a Linux distribution. On the server-side, the ISO file might become corrupted, resulting in errors when trying to install. Why would this happen?
The file on the remote server or torrent might get corrupted somehow. A man-in-the-middle-attack might have even replaced the ISO with a fake version that will compromise your computer when you install it, and you wouldn't even know until it was too late.
For these reasons, Linux distro makers and other open-source downloads will display a checksum in a text file that you can use to verify the integrity of your downloads and make sure they're exactly what you want. Other times, they'll just display the checksums on their website next to the downloads.
Cockpit is a powerful web-based GUI that makes managing your Linux servers considerably easier. With this tool, you can run upgrades, check logs, start/stop services, manage container deployments and more.
This guide will take you through how to integrate Osquery manager with ELK Stack. According to their Github page, osquery is a SQL powered operating system instrumentation, monitoring, and analytics framework. It is available for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD.
It allows you to query the operating system just like you would query any records from the usual relational databases thus providing you with visibility into your infrastructure and operating systems.
HAProxy is a free, very fast, and reliable reverse proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is suited for very high-traffic websites and runs the most visited sites.
What is load balancing?
Load balancing ensures the availability, uptime, and performance of your servers, websites, and applications during traffic spikes.
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install the latest HAProxy on our Debian 11.
It is now very possible for hackers to gain root access to Ubuntu systems by exploiting a double-free memory corruption bug in GNOME’s AccountsService component.
The bug, which was tracked as CVE-2021-3939, was discovered accidentally by security researcher Kevin Backhouse, who stated that the bug only affects Ubuntu’s fork of AccountsService. Affected versions include Ubuntu 21.10, Ubuntu 21.04, and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Valve yesterday introduced experimental Vulkan support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as an alternative to the long-standing OpenGL path for running CS:GO on Linux. Curious about the performance implications of CS:GO with Vulkan, here are some benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux with a variety of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
It is a legal client for Old School Runescape, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), it is a fantasy game with good and evil characters. If you wonder if the game is for you, please search for reviews online and decide for yourself.
One of often encountered traits of a hacker is an ability to build devices into places where they don’t belong. Perhaps, [sonictimm]’s self-descriptive WiiinToaster was somewhat of an inevitability. Inspired by the legendary Nintoaster project which used a NES, this is a modern take on the concept, putting a Wii inside what used to be an ordinary bread-making kitchen appliance. [Sonictimm] has taken care to make it as functional while reusing the user interface options commonly found in a toaster, with some of the Wii’s connections routed to the original buttons and the lever. It’s compatible with everything that the Wii supports in its standard, non-toaster form – the only function that had to be sacrificed was the “making toast” part of it, but some would argue it’d be a bit counterproductive to leave in.
Spiritfarer has not only hit over a million sales, it's been upgraded to the Spiritfarer: Farewell Edition free for everyone with new content. A "cozy management game about dying", it's easily one of the sweetest games released in 2020.
The Farewell Edition brings together the base game and all the additional content released to date, including the new Jackie and Daria Update, which has been added to the game today. Going off with a bang as the last update to the game it adds in a new island to explore, two new Spirits to befriend, a new event and more.
Feral Interactive has announced the final content update for Total War: ROME REMASTERED is out ending their main support of it for all platforms, although it may still get stability and compatibility updates "when required".
This final content upgrade version 2.0.4 focused on modders by expanding what they can do with it, so it feels like a fitting send off for the revamp that made a popular classic newly accessible to modern audiences. Feral said it includes the removal of limits to the number of possible cultures, building types and factions and that they worked directly with a number of modding teams during the update.
"Supporting Linux was easy. We already had a sizeable chunk of the game working and tested on Linux for our dedicated servers, so development was mostly focused on the visual and input side of things..."
As we suggested it would be, Valve has announced that experimental Vulkan support for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO) has landed and can be tried out right now. This is available only for Linux too.
Coming in a small update on December 14, the only other change was a fix for "input delay after closing radial menu".
You don't need to opt into any Beta, as it's in the main game client. All you need to do is add -vulkan as a Steam launch option for the game. Do so by right click -> properties and then enter it in the text box.
We all know that no other game can be more interesting than the classic board games when we enjoy it in person. But we can only cherish our nostalgia of enjoying the board games with our childhood friends but never get the opportunity to do so. It’s because of our busy schedule and not being near our friends. However, if you are very much fond of those classical multiplayer online board games, you can still enjoy them in different ways. Different online board game launchers have their own websites to enjoy these games, just like you did years back.
Kdenlive 21.12 release brings major updates and new features. We take a look at those and give you installation details.
Kdenlive is one of the best free non-linear multi-purpose video editing software. Non-linear means that editing can be done in any order without the original media files to be overwritten. It provides support for dual video monitors, a multi-track timeline, clip list, customizable layout support, basic effects and basic transactions.
Kdenlive is very easy to use even by users who do not have much knowledge about video editing. Most of the video processing is done by the MLT Framework, which relies on many other open source projects like FFmpeg, frei0r, movit, ladspa, sox, etc.
Now the last release of Kdenlive for this year is out and brings some long awaited features like Multicam Editing and Slip trimming mode.
It has been repeated so many times, not just in that forum thread, but elsewhere in the forum, that it is easier to extract vmlinuz, *.sfs and initrd files from an iso than it is from an img file.
I have replied no, that is wrong. It is just as easy to open up an image file as it is an iso or sfs -- you just click on it. It is just a matter of implementing click-on-an-img file in the pups.
It is theoretically possible to click on an .img.gz (compressed img file) and extract the contents without uncompressing it. However, in EasyOS I implemented the simpler way, which is one click to uncompress the file, another click to open it.
With help from Alfons, some samba problems were fixed; however, still not working in Easy 3.1.15.
If you click on the "share" icon on the desktop, then click the "Samba" checkbox, then click on the "Samba Setup" button, there is a "SAMBA OFF" red button -- click that, starts the samba daemon and the button becomes green and text in the button changes to "SAMBA ON".
Do you veer toward the over-cautious when it comes to your privacy? Do you loathe the idea that you're being tracked by third-party cookies, and standard browsers and operating systems aren't capable of doing enough to keep you safe? At the same time, are you too busy to learn a new operating system?
If that sounds like you, there's an operating system, created by a single developer (although it's based on Ubuntu), that goes out of its way to be the exact OS for such a use case. The platform in question is Kodachi Linux, and it has your back.
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A quick test (using whatsmyip.com) and the Dashboard information was spot on. What's even better is that I didn't notice the slightest slowdown in network traffic. So, if you're concerned the cost of this level of privacy is speed, fret not. And because Kodachi leaves absolutely no trace, you can be certain nothing will be able to track you (even on a command-line level).
The desktop in use is Xfce and is configured such that it includes a left edge panel and a bottom centered dock. With this setup, anyone should be right at home with the interface. The only trick might be how the dock launchers are arranged in folders. However, all one has to do is hover the cursor over one of the folders to reveal what it contains (Figure C).
The first point release of UCS 5.0 brings further important features and tops off the major release from May. The announced Light Theme is now available as an alternative for the user interface. There were improvements in the UCS Portal and App Center, and a number of other apps are now also available for UCS 5.0.
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With the release of UCS 5.0, we already announced a Light Theme as an alternative to the Dark Theme configured by default and released it as an errata update in mid-September. Administrators can enable the Light Theme globally for all users on a UCS system via UCR variable. Details and help for switching the theme for the UCS web interface can be found in the UCS manual.
We made it through another year of mostly virtual meetings. The virtual fatigue was real, but so were the achievements in open source in 2021.
In April and June, we staged our 22nd overall and second fully virtual Red Hat Summit. While we missed gathering in person, 43,712* session views from around the globe prove that virtual conferences can provide greater reach and easier access—and that's a win for everyone involved.
In August, open source enthusiasts celebrated 30 years of the Linux kernel and the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2). Without GPLv2’s tenets, it’s unlikely Linux would have made it all the way to Mars.
Back on planet Earth, climate change was a hot topic in 2021 (pun very much intended). In September, Red Hat joined OS-Climate, an open source project that aims to build the tech and data platforms needed to better assess climate risk and opportunity as elements of financial decision-making.
October brought another all-virtual conference in AnsibleFest, which included the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2. And while we’re on the subject of product announcements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 made its debut in November.
While POWER CPUs have generally been well received by the free software community for being open-source friendly especially with the OpenPOWER Foundation, IBM's latest-generation POWER10 processors are continuing to be an upset.
In particular, not all of the POWER10 firmware is open-source and there are no indications of that changing in the near-term. There are firmware blobs still necessary for POWER10 when it comes to the DDR memory support and PCI Express, which obviously are crucial with today's systems.
Red Hat has announced updates throughout its portfolio of application services to deliver a more seamless and unified experience for application development, delivery, integration, and automation across hybrid cloud environments.
The modularity of the Red Hat Application Services portfolio contributes to a unified environment for application development, delivery, integration, and automation. The combination of the Quarkus platform with the connectivity capabilities of Apache Camel, the intelligent decisioning of Kogito, API management with Red Hat 3scale API Management, and the power of Red Hat OpenShift enables Java developers to fully embrace cloud-and Kubernetes-native development.
Lior Kaplan is the developer who attended the controversial FOSSCamp with the Albanians in 2017. Did he meet this woman from another community there and vouch for her to attend DebConf?
On the left of Lior, there are three women who participated in Google Summer of Code during 2018. That was their qualification for a ticket to DebConf. They are Enkelena (1), Diellza (2) and Elena (3). Enkelena (1) is the woman who struck up a relationship with an Ubuntu employee, Lukas Kanashiro.
The woman who Kaplan is holding in this photo was subsequently employed by GNOME Foundation. She joined at exactly the same time as Molly de Blanc, former girlfriend of the Debian leader Chris Lamb.
The photo was taken on the DebConf18 day trip. DebConf18 finished on 5 August 2018. Mr Pocock heard about these relationships at DebConf and on 27 August 2018 he publicly resigned as mentor and administrator in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. His resignation is written diplomatically to protect the privacy of the people with conflicts of interest. Jonathan Carter, Sam Hartman and Chris Lamb have created a series of false accusations that have forced widespread discussion of these photos.
Pop! _OS 21.10 It is the new version of the System76 distribution, the best-known Linux machine builder and with little that you have followed its development, you know what to expect: derived from Ubuntu with GNOME more and more personalized, which, however, is dated expiration date… But let’s start at the beginning.
And the beginning of Pop! _OS 21.10 It is none other than its own release, whose version number does not deceive and comes to say that we are facing one of the derivatives of Ubuntu 21.10, but with nuances, since System76 applies customizations that go from the inside out, including kernel, graphic drivers and environment desktop and applications.
Thus, Pop! _OS 21.10 arrives with a more recent kernel version than Ubuntu’s; specifically, the latest version that has seen the light, updates included: Linux 5.15.5. The same for NVIDIA graphics drivers (AMD and Intel are integrated into the kernel and Mesa itself).
Ubuntu Cheat Codes, Boot Options and kernel parameters to help you boot Ubuntu from a USB flash drive on different machines. To append cheat codes, during bootup simply press the ESC key. Then proceed to add one or more of the following Boot options to your existing boot string, and press ENTER to boot.
Our on-going documentation transformation project aims to make our documentation the best it can possibly be – an exemplar of excellence for the industry. We’re working on four distinct pillars of documentation to achieve this. The first of these pillars is direction. It defines what is quality in documentation, and answers the question: what makes documentation good?
Canonical and Advantech have collaborated to help enterprises accelerate Edge AIoT Applications with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS certified on the EPC-U3233, powered by an 8th Gen Intel€® Coreâ⢠i series processor. This compact fanless embedded PC facilitates data-intensive computing in IoT edge applications. By certifying the Advantech’s EPC-U3233 for Ubuntu 20.04, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, guarantees 5-years of maintenance updates and 5-years of extended security maintenance (ESM) to give enterprises a stable and secure IoT platform for AI application and edge computing.
VIA’s “Mobile360 M800 Video Telematics System” for ADAS and fleet management runs Linux on an AI-boosted dual-core Cortex-A7 SoC. The IP67-protected system is accompanied by driver-facing and front-facing cameras.
VIA Technologies has lately been focusing on its Mobile360 in-vehicle systems for ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). Its new VIA Mobile360 M800 Video Telematics System enables fleet operators to add “cutting-edge collision alert and driver monitoring capabilities to buses, trucks, and other large vehicles,” says VIA.
The Mobile360 M800 comprises an ultra-compact IP67-rated system, a front-facing ADAS camera, and an interior-facing driver camera. The in-vehicle system can detect potential dangers on the road, as well as signs of driver distraction, drowsiness, smoking, and smartphone usage.
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The 194.6 x 178 x 53.8mm system is equipped with 1GB DDR3, 512MB SPI NAND, and a microSD slot for up to 512GB. The IP67-protected computer offers M12 connectors for 10/100 Ethernet, DIO (for debug), CAN/COM (TX/RX for RS-232), and a combination 9-36VDC input and CAN interface with ACC/IGN with support for OBDII and J1939 telematics protocols. A J1939 cable is included.
Aaeon has launched a $219-and-up “UP Squared 6000” SBC and “6000 Edge” mini-PC that runs Linux or Win 10 on Elkhart Lake. Specs include up to 8GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC plus 1GbE, 2.5GbE, SATA, HDMI, DP, 2x USB 3.2 Gen2, and 3x M.2.
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They all support Ubuntu 20.04, Yocto 3.1, and Windows 10 and 10 IoT Core.
It’s dangerous for a hardware hacker to go into a second-hand store. I was looking for a bed frame for my new apartment, but of course I spent an age browsing all the other rubbish treasures on offer. I have a rough rule of thumb: if it’s not under a tenner and fits in one hand, then it has to be exceptional for me to buy it, so I passed up on a nice Grundig reel-to-reel from the 1960s and instead came away with a folding Palm Pilot keyboard and a Fuji 8mm home movie camera after I’d arranged delivery for the bed. On those two I’d spent little more than a fiver, so I’m good. The keyboard is a serial device that’s a project for a rainy day, but the camera is something else. I’ve been keeping an eye out for one to use for a Raspberry Pi camera conversion, and this one seemed ideal. But once I examined it more closely, I was drawn into an unexpected train of research that shed some light on what must of been real objects of desire for my parents generation.
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So do I have any guilt in tearing apart an 8 mm camera for a Pi conversion? If it were a rare or high performance camera then perhaps to do so would be a minor crime, but for a plentiful and mass-produced consumer grade item, and particularly one whose film hasn’t been made for years, there’s little chance of it being anything but a paperweight otherwise.
So with this one I’ll need to stop the shutter in its open position and remove enough of the film gate and pressure plate assembly to fit one of the smaller Pi cameras with its lens removed. There’s plenty of space for a modern battery in the handle, and I’m considering whether I can 3D print a facsimile of a Single 8 cartridge to house both Pi and sensor, thus minimising the dismantling required. These lenses give the same vintage home movie quality to digital images as they did to the 8 mm film when they were new, so I hope any videos I make will be suitably distinctive.
State of the Word 2021, the annual keynote from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, happened on December 14. The hybrid event took place in New York City with a small audience (proof of vaccination required). As Matt said, “we had people join by plane, train, and automobile.” Those who didn’t make the trek to the live event watched the livestream from wherever they call home, all around the world.
It was an exciting moment for the WordPress community which also celebrated its first in-person WordCamp in Sevilla, Spain, after a lengthy hiatus for in-person events.
You can view the full recording, complete with captions and transcripts on WordPress.tv.
It was thrilling to see so many meetup organizers host watch parties worldwide. Twenty-six watch parties were held across 11 countries, with more than 300 RSVPs.
Citus Con: An Event for Postgres is free, virtual, and global developer event happening Apr 12-13, 2022.
I have uploaded a set of new packages for Chromium 96.0.4664.110. The package updates for chromium-ungoogled will follow shortly, they are still compiling.
“With today’s vote, the European Parliament sends the clear signal that gatekeepers must not undermine merit-based competition. The EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) gives consumers and businesses more freedom to deploy and use a variety of non big-tech software that can shape our lives in pivotal ways. We stand ready to support EU lawmakers in getting this ambitious new regulatory standard over the line.
People deserve a variety of products that are personalised to their preferences and localised to their communities. When it comes to software products, people should have the ability to simply and easily try new apps, delete unwanted apps, switch between apps, change app defaults, and expect similar functionality and use. The same is true of operating systems and online marketplaces—developers and merchants should be empowered to offer their products to consumers on an even footing with gatekeepers. This means gatekeepers must respect consumer choice and make space for competitors. A software war is still taking place and tech giants control the space. We look forward to European authorities enforcing these rules – with strength.” – Mozilla
For decades users have been pressing Ctrl+C or relying on copy buttons. All these tricks and shortcuts to speed up text processing have become natural and intuitive to us. We do not pay attention to what is happening to copied information besides the fact that we can paste it. It’s safe to assume that most of us consider the clipboard as temporary data sharing. Once you copy something previous data in the clipboard will be overwritten. People rely on this assumption when they copy sensitive information such as passwords.
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Starting with Firefox 94 and ESR 91.3, your browser keeps the temporary and local promise of clipboard in certain places where users expect privacy, and will not share that data with either Clipboard History or Cloud Clipboard. This protects users when they copy passwords and usernames from the Passwords page, and will protect everything people copy to the clipboard from a Private Browsing window.
Embedded objects in Writer consist of a native data part and a preview part. Until now, there was no way to force the update of the preview part in case it was empty.
Now the Tools ââ â Update ââ â Update all menu item updates such previews as well. This is especially useful if you manipulate the ZIP/XML document directly to insert native data, then load it into Writer to generate a preview.
TDF Membership Committee announces the PRELIMINARY results of the elections for the next Board of Directors at The Document Foundation.
The number of TDF Members who voted is 120, from a total amount of 211 eligible voters. This means that 91 TDF Members did not vote. The Membership Committee would like to thanks all the voters, as the elections are the most significant time of the year for TDF Members, because they can decide about the project’s governance.
A couple of weeks ago, the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) filed suit against television maker Vizio, alleging that Vizio took advantage of open source software without playing by open source rules. It’s a shame that SFC had to take this step, but I think it’s a milestone moment that underscores the value of open source software to our society and how we must vigilantly and proactively protect the rights of the both the user/consumer and those who have contributed code in good faith. Please read my blog that explains the lawsuit and its constructive benefits, and let me know your thoughts.
Flexera, the company that helps organizations maximize business value from their technology investments, today announces that it has achieved the status of FinOps Certified Platform by the FinOps Foundation. FinOps Certified Platform (FCP) is a pre-qualified tier of vetted technology providers that offer software solutions which enable their customers to successfully adopt cloud financial management practices.
“The FinOps practice has experienced rapid growth within the industry,” said Brian Adler, Senior Director, Cloud Market Strategy. “Earning this certification from the FinOps Foundation increases Flexera’s leadership position in helping companies save money through providing insights into optimizing their cloud spend. Ultimately, this helps us better serve our customers.”
Copyright and licensing can be difficult, especially when reusing software from different projects that are released under various, different licenses. REUSE was started by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to provide a set of recommendations to make licensing your Free Software projects easier. Not only do these recommendations make it easier for you to declare the licenses under which your works are released, but they also make it easier for a computer to understand how your project is licensed.
After many iterations and amendments, the European Parliament adopted the Digital Markets Act by 642 votes in favour, 8 votes against, and 46 abstentions. With this vote the principle of Device Neutrality is introduced. At the same time, the Parliament missed the chance to introduce strong requirements for interoperability based on Open Standards.
"We strongly believe the digital markets will benefit by facilitating access to Free Software in devices. Device Neutrality translates in the DMA as stricter consent rules for pre-installed apps, safeguards against vendor lock-in, and real-time data portability. Interoperability of services was also introduced, but not with the requirement to be based on Open Standards. This is a lost chance to leverage competition with accessible and non-discriminatory technical specifications. Open Standards are an important element for innovation by allowing market actors to innovate on top of technical specification standards and build their own services.", says Lucas Lasota, the FSFE's Deputy Legal Coordinator.
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The FSFE has been working for two decades empowering people to control technology in their devices.
GNU nano 6.0 is here to introduce various new features and improvements to the popular command-line text editor, including a new --zero option for hiding the title bar, status bar, and help lines, and using all rows of your terminal emulator as the editing area.
This release also introduces 14 new color names, including crimson, beet, brick, brown, ocher, plum, rosy, sage, sand, sea, sky, slate, tawny, and teal, as well as the ability to specify colors as three-digit hexadecimal numbers, in the rgb format.
Making cross-cutting changes over a large code base is difficult, but it's occasionally necessary if we are to keep the code base tidy and malleable. With almost 800K source lines of code, Guix can reasonably be called a large code base. One might argue that almost 80% of this code is package definitions, which “doesn't count”. Reality is that it does count, not only because those package definitions are regular Scheme code, but also they are directly affected by the big change Guix has just undergone.
This post looks at what’s probably the biggest change Guix has seen since it started nine years ago and that anyone writing packages will immediately notice: simplified package inputs. Yes, we just changed how each of the 20K packages plus those in third-party channels can declare their dependencies. Before describing the change, how we implemented it, and how packagers can adapt, let’s first take a look at the previous situation and earlier improvements that made this big change possible.
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This big change, along with countless other improvements and package upgrades, is just one guix pull away! After months of development, we have just merged the “core updates” branch bringing so many new things—from GNOME 41, to GCC 10 by default, to hardened Python packages and improved executable startup times. This paves the way for the upcoming release, most likely labeled “1.4”, unless a closer review of the changes that have landed lead us to think “2.0” would be more appropriate… Stay tuned!
Intel's CM Compiler for their "C for Metal" programming language has been updated for various new GPU targets, including not only Xe HPC "Ponte Vecchio" but also a Ponte Vecchio XT variant.
Intel on Tuesday released CM Compiler 1.0.119 as their LLVM-based open-source compiler implementing their C for Metal programming language. The CM Compiler goes back to their HD graphics days for offering a new GPU kernel programming language. If the C For Metal compiler doesn't ring a bell for you among all the different GPU computing efforts these days even within Intel alone, the former 01.org project page describes it as "a programming language that allows for creation of high-performance compute and media kernels for Intel€® GPUs using explicit SIMD programming model. CM is based on restricted C++ specification, with extensions to support new SIMD constructs and data types, inline assembly, and access to architecture-specific hardware features."
Programming can be a frustrating endeavor. Certainly we’ve all had moments, such as forgetting punctuation in C or messing up whitespace in Python. Even worse, an altogether familiar experience is making a single change to a program that should have resulted in a small improvement but instead breaks the program. Now, though, there’s a programming language that can put these frustrations directly into the code itself into a cathartic, frustration-relieving syntax. The language is called AHHH and it’s quite a scream.
While it may not look like it on the surface, the language is Turing complete and can be used just like any other programming language. The only difference is that there are only 16 commands in this language which are all variants of strings of four capital- or lower-case-H characters. The character “A” in the command “AHHH” starts the program, and from there virtually anything can be coded as a long, seemingly unending scream. The programming language is loosely related to COW which uses various “moos” to create programs instead of screams, and of course is also distantly related to brainfuck which was an esoteric programming language created in order to have the smallest possible compiler.
Another (minor) nanotime release, now at version 0.3.5, just arrived at CRAN. It follows the updates RDieHarder 0.2.3 and RcppCCTZ 0.2.10 earlier today in bringing a patch kindly prepared by Tomas Kalibera for the upcoming (and very useful) ‘UCRT’ changes for Windows involving small build changes for the updated Windows toolchain.
nanotime relies on the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it has benefitted greatly from a rigorous refactoring by Leonardo who not only rejigged nanotime internals in S4 but also added new S4 types for periods, intervals and durations.
Developers, cybersecurity specialists and other skilled tech professionals are proving particularly elusive for hiring managers, largely as a result of the ramped-up demand for software and IT solutions prompted by the pandemic.
The latest Tech Jobs Report by recruitment agency Dice sheds light on exactly where this demand lies in the latter part of 2021. In Q3, job listings in the tech industry suggest that organizations are on the lookout for technology professionals "who understand the core concepts of software development and project management" and possess technical skills in Linux, as well as programming languages Java, Python and SQL.
None of The Qt Company products are affected by the Apache Log4j vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228).
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 2.3.
Another day, another small addition to KDToolBox, KDAB’s collection of miscellaneous useful C++ classes and stuff.
In this post, we’re going to talk about KDFunctionalSortFilterProxyModel, which is a convenience subclass of QSortFilterProxyModel.
Greetings! It has been a cold and wet month here in Amsterdam, much like the rest of them, as another period of FOSS progress rolls on by. I have been taking it a little bit easier this month, and may continue to take some time off in the coming weeks, so I can have a bit of a rest for the holidays. However, I do have some progress to report, so let’s get to it.
In programming language progress, we’ve continued to see improvement in cryptography, with more AES cipher modes and initial work on AES-NI support for Intel processors, as well as support for HMAC and blake2b.
Version 1.0 of the mold linker has been released.
Glibc 2.35 is introducing the new tunable glibc.malloc.hugetlb that can help with improving system performance for some workloads making use of this tunable, depending upon your kernel's hugepages configuration.
The GNU C Library has landed huge pages support on Linux for mmap and arenas code that can be enabled with a new glibc tunable. That same tunable also allows enabling madvise support for transparent huge pages (THP).
Santa didn’t know if he should be worried or angry, and that made him angry.
Unbeknown to the world he had been outsourcing a lot of the production of Christmas gifts to low cost countries like China. The elves had not liked it. They had threatened to unionize and bring the whole operation to a halt. At a non-specified future date. December 24th was explicitly not mentioned, but one of the senior elves had said €«ho, ho ho€» in a menacing tone of voice. The memory made Santa shudder.
But the elves were not the problem. He had bought them off with fancy titles. CTO (Chief Transportation Officer) was easy. The next hundred or so, not so bad. But the rest of them had been a struggle. He was not particularly proud of D1C (Dispatch team 1 Coffee maker). But as they say, somebody has to make the coffee.
The problem was shipping. The pandemic had caused problems for everybody, and the shipping companies answered “Force Majeure” when asked what they intended to do about the inevitable delays. The problem was the sheer amount of goods. Whereas normal companies measured the goods in terms of containers, he measured them in terms of whole ships.
This is a perfect case where we could showcase the use of grammars in Raku. However, we have a much simpler solution: the EVAL routine will evaluate (i.e. compile and execute) an input string as a piece of Raku code and return the result. So we will use here this simpler solution (but will provide below an example of implementation with a grammar).
Azul, a provider of OpenJDK (Java runtime) builds, has introduced a "Cloud Native Compiler" which offers remote compilation of Java to native code, claiming it can reduce compute resources by up to 50 per cent.
When a Java application runs, a JIT (Just-in-time) compiler, usually the OpenJDK JIT called HotSpot, compiles the Java bytecode to native machine code to optimise performance. It is a highly optimised process – but Azul reckons it can improve it further by removing that responsibility from the VM or container where the application is running.
"The problem with [local compilation] is that you're constrained by local machine resources," Azul CEO and co-founder Scott Sellers tells The Register. "There is no sharing of information between one instance of the Java runtime and the next. So everything is very siloed and rigid. The Cloud Native Compiler is about offloading the compilation process, taking it out of the JVM [Java Virtual Machine] and instead putting that into a cloud service."
Is it really efficient to have a Java application send its bytecode over the network to another service that compiles and sends back the results to be executed?
Google Maps isn’t a public service, but we’re all treating it as such. It’s a private for-profit enterprise, and it wants you to work for it for free. So, should you help improve Google Maps for your community?ââ¬Å —ââ¬Å or not?
Some months ago, I visited the eye clinic at the Oslo University Hospital. The clinic is located at a big hospital campus with buildings laid out like a maze.
Before going, I visited the hospital’s website to find out where I should go. It had embedded a Google Maps view with a red marker to indicate the building. Except, Google placed the pin on the wrong building. It was pinned in an administrative building some 550 meters away from the eye clinic.
The eye clinic building is facing away from the rest of the campus, and it’s non-obvious where its main entrance is. I updated the eye clinic’s listing on Google Maps to point at the correct building and dropped the marker on its main entrance. I got an email from Google thanking me for updating the map and confirming that they’d accepted the change.
Was life ever normal? Getting back to normal after 2020 was probably an impossible task, something proven by the many nuances of 2021, which started with a fraught political conflict, continued with a whole lot of misinformation, and ended with me adding a new notice on the Tedium contribute page. And as those nuances are largely in the rear-view mirror at this point, that means one thing: It’s last-minute gift guide time! Since 2015, we’ve recommendedfoned nuts for family and friends. If you’ve ever tried them, you’re most assuredly not on the “people you barely know” list.) One thing we’re doing differently this year: As we no longer run Amazon affiliate links in the email version of newsletter, we’re setting up an Amazon Idea List to feature this year’s many strange items; being straight-up, buying from that list helps us produce more Tedium. (The links will still be there on the web, and we will offer up an equivalent link on eBay for each item if you really want to get risky.) If something on this list strikes your fancy, visit this page and purchase it for your loved ones. Maybe even consider buying all of them and then try to explain that you really got into Tedium this year. We won’t judge. — Ernie @ Tedium
Typically, to improve one’s eyesight, we look to tools like corrective lenses or laser eye surgery to improve optical performance. However, [Casey Connor 2] came across another method, that uses light exposure to improve color vision, and set about trying to achieve the same results at home.
A recent study published in Nature showed that a single exposure to 670 nm light for 3 minutes lead to an improvement in color perception lasting up to a week. The causative method is that cones in the eye get worse at producing ATP as we age, and with less of this crucial molecule supplying energy to cells in the eye, our colour perception declines. Exposure to 670 nm light seems to cause mitochondria in the eye to produce more ATP in a rather complicated physical interaction.
For [Casey’s] build, LEDs were used to produce the required 670 nm red light, installed into ping pong balls that were glued onto a pair of sunglasses. After calculating the right exposure level and blasting light into the eyes regularly each morning, [Casey] plans on running a chromaticity test in the evenings with a custom Python script to measure color perception.
Among brain researchers there’s a truism that says the reason people underestimate how much unconscious processing goes on in your brain is because you’re not conscious of it. And while there is a lot of unconscious processing, the truism also points out a duality: your brain does both processing that leads to consciousness and processing that does not. As you’ll see below, this duality has opened up a scientific approach to studying consciousness.
Starter motors aren’t typically a great choice for motorized projects, as they’re designed to give engines a big strong kick for a few seconds. Driving them continuously can often quickly overheat them and burn them out. However, [Austin Blake] demonstrates that by choosing parts carefully, you can indeed have some fun with a starter motor-powered ride.
[Austin] decided to equip his drift trike with a 42MT-equivalent starter motor typically used in heavy construction machinery. The motor was first stripped of its solenoid mechanism, which is used to disengage the starter from an engine after it has started. The housing was then machined down to make the motor smaller, and a mount designed to hold the starter on the drift trike’s frame.
Notice: no vintage Hewlett Packard test equipment was harmed in the making of this overly complicated Nixie clock. In fact, if anything, the HP 5245L electronic counter came out better off than it went into the project.
It’s a constant of writing for Hackaday, that whenever a project appears using a 555 timer, someone will say “You could have used a microcontroller to do that!”. It’s something that [Shranav Palakurthi] has approached with the ATTiny555, a project that emulates an entire 555 by making clever use of the humble and ubiquitous microcontroller chip. We’ve all been guilty of it at some time, but now at last the ATTiny85 enthusiasts have conclusive proof that their favourite piece of cheap silicon can prove its mettle.
Over the years we’ve seen a number of hackers generate VGA with 74xx logic chips, but they’ve generally not been the most practical of builds. Often put together as part of a competition or purely for the challenge, these circuits are usually implemented in a mass of jumper wires and often take up multiple breadboards. Not exactly something you can toss in a drawer when you’re done with it.
But the Vectron VGA Plus, created by prolific hacker [Nick Bild] manages to improve on things considerably. Designed specifically to be smaller and simpler than its predecessors, the custom PCB contains far fewer chips than we’re used to seeing for this kind of thing. At the same time it provides a handy header row along the bottom that allows the user to connect whatever they’re working on, from microcontrollers to retro computers.
Bench DC power supplies are usually adjusted with some buttons and rotary encoders, but RIDEN RD6012P DC power supply can be controlled from your PC via USB, and there’s RD6012P-W model that adds a WiFi module to adjust parameters from a smartphone running Android or iOS.
We all make mistakes, and there’s no shame in having to bodge a printed circuit board to fix a mistake. Most of us are content with cutting a trace or two with an Xacto or adding a bit of jumper wire to make the circuit work. Very few of us, however, will decide to literally do our bodges inside the PCB itself.
The story is that [Andrew Zonenberg] was asked to pitch in debugging some incredibly small PCBs for a prototype dev board that plugs directly into a USB jack. The six-layer boards are very dense, with a forest of blind vias. The Twitter thread details the debugging process, which ended up finding a blind via on layer two shorted to a power rail, and another via shorted to ground. It also has some beautiful shots of [Andrew]’s “mechanical tomography” method of visualizing layers by slowly grinding down the surface of the board.
Jeremy Loffredo joins Whitney to discuss the vaccine inequity argument common among the left as it relates to Africa and how Covid-19 is being used as cover for Western militarism and imperialism on the continent.
In light of persistent and ongoing cyber threats, CISA urges critical infrastructure owners and operators to take immediate steps to strengthen their computer network defenses against potential cyberattacks. CISA has released CISA Insights: Preparing For and Mitigating Potential Cyber Threats to provide critical infrastructure leaders with steps to proactively strengthen their organization’s operational resiliency against sophisticated threat actors, including nation-states and their proxies.
Gumtree claims to take user security and privacy seriously. They hide your surname and use an internal messaging system to allow buyer/seller communication, without revealing user’s email addresses. It’s a huge site that until recently was owned by eBay, so they must be pretty secure…. right?
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (libopenmpt), openSUSE (icu.691, log4j, nim, postgresql10, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (idm:DL1), SUSE (gettext-runtime, icu.691, runc, storm, storm-kit, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-18.04, xwayland).
Earlier this month, the news broke that an unknown assailant used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware tool to target the phones of nine U.S. State Department employees. This breach is only the latest in a series of revelations on hacks into the personal devices of journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and high-level government officials across the world. The spyware firm’s tools have enabled authoritarian regimes and other bad actors to strip away their victims’ privacy and violate their rights, with few restraints, while the company profits.
To evade accountability, NSO has long claimed to have control of who uses its spyware, meanwhile arguing that it doesn’t have insight into what clients do with it. But now, after years of research, reporting, and global activism, as well as the brave efforts of victims coming forward, we are securing tangible victories in the fight against NSO and spyware worldwide. Like other countries, the U.S. is finally stepping up to curb use of NSO’s technology that violates human rights.
CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.
Nation-state cyber threat groups and ransomware attackers are moving in to exploit a critical flaw found in the seemingly ubiquitous Apache Log4j open-source logging tool, as attacks spread just days after the vulnerability that could affect hundreds of millions of devices was made public late last week.
Microsoft researchers reported that the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability is being exploited by nation-state groups associated with China, North Korea, Iran and Turkey, with the activity that includes “experimentation during development, integration of the vulnerability to in-the-wild payload deployment, and exploitation against targets to achieve the actor’s objectives.”
The vulnerability can be abused to enable an attacker to gain control of a targeted system.
The broader software problem the Log4Shell vulnerability reveals, and the story of how Chris lit his Coder robe on fire... While wearing it.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday renewed its campaign to convince Google to listen to criticism of the tech goliath's plan to overhaul its browser extension platform and to make changes while there's still time.
In the advocacy organization's latest broadside against Google's three-year-old extension renovation effort, EFF technologists Alexei Miagkov and Bennett Cyphers take the search biz to task for limiting innovation, crippling capabilities, and hindering performance by forcing Chrome extension developers to adopt a revised set of application programming interfaces (APIs) known as Manifest v3.
"According to Google, Manifest v3 will improve privacy, security and performance," said Miagkov. "We fundamentally disagree. The changes in Manifest v3 won’t stop malicious extensions, but will hurt innovation, reduce extension capabilities, and harm real world performance."
In a win that elevates human rights over government spying, the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, has opened an investigation into the European Commission’s support for African countries to develop surveillance capabilities.
“With little regard for the real-life consequences that surveillance technology poses to human rights, the EU has funded and supported unregulated, state-sponsored surveillance across Africa,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “We welcome the European Ombudsman’s investigation into these confounding arrangements, and will continue to direct the public’s eye towards government-support of the global surveillance industry.”
The investigation, opened on November 30, comes in response to a complaint filed by Access Now, Privacy International, Sea-Watch, BVMN, Homo Digitalis, and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) calling for an inquiry into the EU’s financial and logistical support of intelligence gathering and surveillance, as well as wiretapping tech and biometric ID systems to non-EU intelligence and security agencies as part of migration control and surveillance programs.
Suppose your neighbor’s security camera recorded your private conversation. Is that an invasion of your privacy?
A U.K. judge recently ruled that, by using the Amazon Ring video doorbell, a homeowner violated data laws and his neighbor’s privacy. This decision could have significant implications for how manufacturers design smart security cameras and comply with human rights and data protection laws. At the very least, it continues an ongoing conversation about our attitude towards domestic surveillance in the United States and how normalized Ring doorbell cameras have become in our communities.
Below, we’ll unpack how Ring video doorbells can violate human rights and what you can do to protect your privacy (hint: don’t buy into the security hype).
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Ring-police partnerships pose a severe threat to human rights, particularly the right to privacy, freedom of expression, and association. Law enforcement has already used the technology to monitor political activity and protests. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department used Ring cameras to monitor Black Lives Matter protests. Ring-police partnerships provide police with a much more expensive surveillance system than they could build themselves. The partnerships also create incentives to place products, like Ring’s doorbell cameras, in already overpoliced minority neighborhoods. While law enforcement requests are public, Amazon hasn’t placed any restrictions on police sharing footage with third parties or limits on how long law enforcement can hold the footage.
Within the last year, posts on the Ring Neighbors app demonstrate the role of anti-Black citizen vigilantism in expanding law enforcement’s capacity to monitor and track Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). The previously mentioned VICE Motherboard investigation exposed the prevalence of discriminatory and racist comments and assumptions among people using the Neighbors app. Out of more than 100 user-submitted posts over two months in the New York City area, those the app users most commonly reported as “suspicious” were people of color. In one instance, commenters encouraged a user who posted a video to call the NYPD and suggested (without evidence) that a group of young “suspicious” Black boys planned to smoke crack. We know that calling the police excessively results in fatal outcomes for Black and Brown people. The murder of Trayvon Martin demonstrates the darker side of neighborhood watch programs and the citizen vigilantism we should avoid empowering.
The egregiously lax oversight, lack of transparency, and scant limitations on Amazon Ring’s data collection practices are a recipe for disaster. Amazon is not forthcoming about what biometric data it collects, especially in regards to face data, as evidenced by the Illinois class-action suit. Facial recognition technologies have significant flaws in their current forms, such as their racial and gender biases. Facial recognition tech has already led to wrongful arrests of multiple Black men in the United States, undermining the right to privacy, due process, and freedom of movement.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 6.8% year over year in November 2021, the highest headline inflation figure of the 21st century and a figure not seen since the Volcker-era disinflation of the early 1980s. Given inflation’s high profile, it is important to remember that inflation is not uniform across goods and services categories. Energy prices increased 30% and gas prices in particular rose 50% from November 2020 to November 2021, whereas digital goods and services have tended to reduce inflationary pressures. In fact, economists have long recognized that digital goods and services typically reduce both actual and measured inflation.
Digital technology tends to counter inflation for a number of reasons: First and most straightforwardly, digital goods and services tend to be less expensive than, and increase in price more slowly than, their offline counterparts. As consumers use more digital goods and services, they pay lower prices than they did previously, and they experience smaller price increases going forward, so inflation is reduced. Second, because digital services, platforms, and marketplaces tend to facilitate price comparisons and transparency to consumers, increased use of digital tools by both consumers and producers tends to put downward pressure on prices by enhancing competition. Third, digital tools are often prerequisites for productivity enhancements, supply chain improvements, and cost reductions on the supply side that result in reduced prices for consumers.
Ethiopian authorities must immediately and unconditionally release all journalists held in custody for their work and should refrain from using the country’s state of emergency law to imprison members of the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.
Ethiopian authorities have arrested at least 14 journalists since declaring a state of emergency on November 2 as part of the government’s response to a year-long civil war against rebel forces allied with the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front (TPLF).
Those detained include two former reporters at the Tigrigna-language radio service of the state- owned Ethiopia Broadcasting Corporation (EBC), the editor-in-chief of the YouTube channel Ubuntu TV, an editor at the Terara Network, the co-founder of Roha TV, a freelance video journalist accredited with The Associated Press, a cameraperson, and a journalist with the state-affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corporation. CPJ previously documented the arrests of six other journalists under the state of emergency,
It’s been a year of extremes for internet technology. On the one hand, you have the mostly unproven hype of “Web3” and Facebook’s pivot to the metaverse. But on the other hand, there have been solid — and at times spectacular — advances on the internet platform. This post is going to celebrate the latter; the actual working, non-vaporware technologies that are moving the internet forward. In four of the five cases, these technologies bring web development back to the fore — notable, because there was a time not so long ago when mobile application development dominated. My list also includes one metaverse technology, although (sorry Zuck) it isn’t Meta’s.
End-of-year “best of” lists are always subjective, of course. But I have drawn on all of the columns I’ve written this year, and also reviewed what I tracked on Twitter over 2021, to come up with the five technologies below. I also ran my list past multiple software experts, whose feedback and insights helped immensely.
So, let’s get to it. The list is in no particular order, but I will start with what most of you will agree has been the standout internet technology this year…
It’s time for end-of-the-year roundups, and this article by Richard MacManus celebrates various technologies that are moving the internet forward. These technologies reflect solid advances on the internet platform and bring web development back to the fore.
