In this video I'll be taking a look at PeppermintOS based on Devuan, It looks to be be an exact copy of the Debian Based PeppermintOS minus the ability to install Snap Packages which I believe need SystemD to work. During this look around I take a closer look at the Peppermint tools which you will find in both builds and the choices made by the community for their purpose. Hope you enjoy the video.
Vulkan 1.3.226 was released yesterday and it finally includes the cross-vendor VK_EXT_mesh_shader extension. This has definitely been an important moment for me. As part of my job at Igalia and our collaboration with Valve, I had the chance to work reviewing this extension in depth and writing thousands of CTS tests for it. You’ll notice I’m listed as one of the extension contributors. Hopefully, the new tests will be released to the public soon as part of the open source VK-GL-CTS Khronos project.
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Both Timur and myself have submitted a couple of talks to XDC 2022 which have been accepted and will give you a primer on mesh shading as well as some more information on the RADV implementation. Do not miss the event at Minneapolis or enjoy it remotely while it’s being livestreamed in October.
Back in 2020, we started work on a new implementation of the Tor protocols in the Rust programming language. Now we believe it's ready for wider use.
In this blog post, we'll tell you more about the history of the Arti project, where it is now, and where it will go next.
Arti is a reimplementation of the Tor server in Rust; version 1.0.0 has just been released and proclaimed ready for production use.
Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical naming system that stores critical domain name information. The DNS resource records also contain other information related to the records. If you have configuration or connectivity issues with a DNS server, then use the dig command to query DNS records.
Hello, friends. In this post, I will show you How to get and change PDF metadata on Linux using the terminal. So, you can quickly use it for a specific case or several files. You can even include it in scripts.
If you're satisfied with running something no more often than once a minute, /etc/cron.d entries are the easiest approach and what I use. But today I wound up wanting to run something more frequently. While there are various ways to do this with various degrees of hackery, it seemed like a good time to try out systemd timer units.
MPV is a highly versatile media player that supports various video and audio codecs. It has comprehensive playback, audio, and video control options, as well as support for different input URL types for reading input from a variety of sources other than disk files. MPV is available on Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD operating systems and is often used to play YouTube videos or be a client for streaming services such as Twitch.tv. Thanks to its wide range of features and compatibility with many different operating systems, MPV has become one of the most popular media players available today.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install mpv Media Player on Linux Mint 21 LTS using three different methods using the command line terminal.
This guide shows you how to set up your LEMP (Nginx, MariaDB, PHP) stack easily and quickly using Docker Compose.
When it comes to application development, containers are now the standard approach. They are popular among software developers due to their flexibility and portability.
The LEMP stack is an open-source solution used to develop web applications. It is an acronym representing Linux, Nginx, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP. In addition, it is widely popular and well-supported among the Open Source community.
Today we are looking at how to install J-Stars Victory Vs Mugen on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Thunderbird on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Thunderbird is a free and open-source email client developed by Mozilla Foundation. It offers support for multiple email accounts, a personal address book, and built-in search tools to help you find messages quickly. This application can also be used as a chat client, RSS, and news client app.
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 a Thunderbird on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
The first RFCs for PXE, or preboot execution environment, showed up in June 1981 and it’s still a popular tool today. It enables computers to boot up and download some software that runs early in the boot process.
From the late 1980s through the early 2000s, Silicon Graphics, inc. (or just SGI as they were typically called) produced the IRIX operating system for their line of high performance, multi-media workstations.
IRIX was (really is) pretty darn cool. Based on UNIX System V (plus BSD extensions), IRIX is where OpenGL was created. Along with the XFS file system. High performance, and highly scalable (up to 1024 processors).
KDE Plasma, the popular desktop environment, has been receiving some major updates and tons of fixes over the last five months.
The previous release—Plasma 5.25—saw many new features and improvements, especially to the user interface and experience, and the next release sounds even more exciting.
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Just like the last release, Plasma 5.26 brings in numerous refinements and how you interact with the UI. You will find subtle changes, and tweaks to give more information to the users while interacting/searching for things on KDE Plasma 5.26.
For instance, the Settings pages for “Format” and “Language” pages have now been merged to give you a cleaner look and get rid of some usual bugs associated with it.
We’re getting close to the Plasma 5.26 beta and plenty of features have landed before the soft feature freeze–the point at which new features need discussion before being merge-able. Many are mentioned below! But now, the idea is to focus on bugfixing and UI polish for the next six weeks before the final release of Plasma 5.26, and assistance is greatly appreciated. If you’re a developer who’s excited about Plasma, the time to fix bugs is now! Which bugs? These bugs! Pick a bug and fix it!
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On System Settings’ Night Color page, you can now set a day color in addition to a night color for maximum flexibility...
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.8.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
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Rendez-vous in a few months for the new major digiKam 8.0.0 release.
GNOME Web 43 Tab View looks awesome and its going to change your workflow.
Our beloved GNOME Web (Epiphany) becoming more and more intuitive in every passing day – thanks to the developers.
Recently, it has been ported to GTK4, libadwaita which brings the nice looks overall and some cool new features. All of these changes arriving on GNOME 43 release due in a few weeks.
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In my opinion, the most cool feature of GNOME Web 43 is the Tab view.
Today T2 SDE Linux 22.9 was released. Another major milestone update with latest and greatest GCC, LLVM / Clang, X.org, Mesa3D, Glibc and more. Improved security, as well as SMART and whole-program LTO optimizations.
As technology snapshot a pre-built binary ISO is relased for high-performance x86-64-v3, and of course all other architectures, including: alpha, arc, arm, arm64, avr32, hppa, ia64, m68k, mipsel, mips64, nios2, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc, sparc64, superh x86, x86-64 and x32 can be rolling release updated thru the scripted build system from source – optimized for the native system.
There were 1450 changesets with 2378 lines of commit messages. Approximately 1918 packages got updates, 122 issues fixed, 1918 packages or features added and 47 removed. Around 15 improvements have been committed.
Deepin is the top Linux distribution from China, devoted to providing a beautiful, easy-to-use, safe, and reliable operating system for global users. (Global Ranking)
In deepin 20.7, we have developed and integrated a great number of practical functions based on the community users' feedback, synchronized with the upstream kernel version, fixed underlying vulnerabilities, upgraded the Stable kernel to V5.15.45, added the HWE 5.18 kernel to be compatible with more devices, and further improved system compatibility and security. Welcome to try it!
Today’s earlier item about iPhone usage share overtaking Android in the U.S. led to an interesting thread on Twitter regarding the seemingly curious large differences in iPhone/Android share between different countries. The iPhone is particularly popular in the U.S. and Japan, and in English-speaking countries (Canada, United Kingdom, Australia) in general. Android, for obvious reasons, is overwhelmingly popular in poorer countries. But there are wealthy countries like Germany and France where Android is more popular by roughly 3 to 1 margins. I suspect there is no simple answer to this, and that it comes down to nuanced but significant nation-by-nation cultural differences.
At the EEX, German baseload electricity futures for the year 2023 trade at a price of 950 Euro / MWh and peak load futures at 1275 Euro / MWh. Future prices for France are even higher. (Prices were looked up on 2022-08-28).
Today we have another huge addition of books to the library, now consisting at 350 R programming books! Thanks to Gary and Abraham for the additions!
When it comes to machine learning (ML), sometimes every problem looks like it needs a neural net, when in fact it just needs some statistics. This is especially true when it comes to running algorithms on microcontrollers and for industrial use cases such as predictive maintenance, according to Bernard Burg, director of AI and data science at Infineon.
I focus a lot on using machine learning at the edge — specifically the idea of running machine learning models on microcontrollers, known as TinyML — because there are clear benefits for the IoT. By analyzing incoming data where that data is created, engineers can reduce latency, lower bandwidth costs, and increase privacy while also saving on energy consumption. But one doesn’t always need TinyML. Sometimes using linear regression or anomaly detection will do.
pkgdown is a great tool for generating a website with documentation for an R package.
Unfortunately, pkgdown uses CDNs (content delivery networks) like Cloudflare to embed often used JavaScript libraries into the generated website.
The R Consortium recently interviewed Szilard Pafka with the Real Data Science USA R Group (formerly known as the Los Angeles R User Group). The former Los Angeles R useR Group had been based in Los Angeles for more than 10 years, but after organizer Szilard moved to Texas, he kept the group going and even expanded!
This is the third part of a series of blog posts we are publishing, mostly around recent developments with respect to PowerDNS Recursor. The first blog post was Refreshing Of Almost Expired Records: Keeping The Cache Hot, the second Probing DoT Support of Authoritative Servers: Just Try It.
In PowerDNS Recursor the actual resolving is done using mthreads: a lightweight cooperative thread switching mechanism. This allows us to write the resolving code in a straightforward manner, we can program it as if we are resolving in a synchronous way. The mthreads abstraction takes care of running another mthread when the resolving process for a particular query has to wait for incoming data from the network. Mthreads are mapped to Posix threads, the thread abstraction the C++ runtime provides. Typically a handful of Posix threads run many mthreads, one for each query in-progress. Mthread switching happens only at specific points in the resolving process, basically whenever I/O is done.
Generalised linear models with a gamma distribution and log link are frequently used to model non-negative right-skewed continuous data, such as costs [1].
Ironically, it’s qr objects which don’t get that benefit. On the machine I’m typing on, the following benchmark…
The join method makes it easy to combine multiple strings stored within an iterable such as tuples, lists, sets, and dictionaries. In addition, you can set characters to be used as a separator, such as a space or a dash.
There are many more methods that you can use to manipulate strings within Python. For example, you can use the split method to split a string based on a specified separator.
The tutorial below will touch on the syntax of the join method and the various iterables you can use with join. For example, we will touch on using a join with a list, dictionary, set, or tuple.
This update to jpegdump.py, my tool to analyze JPEG images, brings 2 small changes:
Data between segments can be selected with suffix d. Like this: -s 10d
This means: select the data between segments 9 and 10.
Recently I wrote a series on using Groovy scripts to clean up the tags in my music files. I developed a framework that recognized the structure of my music directory and used it to iterate over the content files. In the final article of that series, I separated this framework into a utility class that my scripts could use to process the content files.
This separate framework reminded me a lot of the way awk works. For those of you unfamiliar with awk, you might benefit from Opensource.com's eBook, A practical guide to learning awk.
I have used awk extensively since 1984, when our little company bought its first "real" computer, which ran System V Unix. For me, awk was a revelation: It had associative memory— think arrays indexed by strings instead of numbers. It had regular expressions built in, seemed designed to deal with data, especially in columns, and was compact and easy to learn. Finally, it was designed to work in Unix pipelines, reading its data from standard input or files and writing to output, with no ceremony required to do so—data just appeared in the input stream.
To say that awk has been an essential part of my day-to-day computing toolkit is an understatement. And yet there are a few things about how I use awk that leave me unsatisfied.
Probably the main issue is that awk is good at dealing with data presented in delimited fields but curiously not good at handling comma-separated-value files, which can have field delimiters embedded within a field, provided that the field is quoted. Also, regular expressions have moved on since awk was invented, and needing to remember two sets of regular expression syntax rules is not conducive to bug-free code. One set of such rules is bad enough.
Could spoiling a joke be an accessibility issue? You better believe it.
Since the day I visited the Denver Museum of Natural History and saw a giant whale skeleton, I’ve been fascinated by whales. There’s just something inherently fascinating about whales that captures the imagination. There’s also a natural beauty to them that is hard to define. Similarly, robots and animatronics have always been a subject of fascination for me as well. When I read an article in an old art magazine from the 90s highlighting depicting whales in art, it got me thinking about animatronic whales and how they might change the world for the better–not to mention having a fascinating history. In today’s Tedium, we’re bringing you one whale of a tale about animatronics and art in the cerulean world.
Now unless you have been living under a rock cave, I am sure you know who Mr. Tolkein is. Apparently, the gentleman passed away on 2nd September 1973 at the sprightly age of 80. And this gives fans like me to talk about fantasy, fantasy authors, and the love-hate relationship we have with them. For a matter of record, I am currently reading Babylon Steel by Gaie Sebold. Now while I won’t go into many details (I never like to, if I enjoy a book, I would want the book to be mysterious rather than give praise, simply so that the next person enjoys it as much as I did without having any expectations.) Now this book has plenty of sex so wouldn’t recommend it for teenagers but more perhaps to mature audiences, although for the life of me couldn’t find any rating on the book.
I came across Brian Baking’s “Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs” which led me to Luke Harris’ stats page which motivated me to finally make something similar of my own.
I’ve written previously about enumerating the external and internal links on my blog. I’ve also written previously about graphing my blogging goals. All of these are different forms of representing stats about my blog, so really this was an exercise in making all these disparate statistical representations accessible in one central place: my /about page.
Loihi is said to consume far less than 1 watt of power compared to the tens to hundreds of watts that standard CPU and GPU solutions consume, so this type of neuromorphic AI accelerator may eventually bring the power of datacenter hardware to robots, autonomous vehicles, and so on, and deliver similar performance at much lower power consumption and latency since the processing can be done on the device itself. Lower-end neuromorphic chips will leverage SNN’s efficiency in battery-powered sensors with built-in AI instead.
Back in early 2021 I wrote about my impressions of NVMe versus SATA (or SAS) SSDs for basic servers. At that point I didn't expect us to get NVMe based servers any time soon, especially for servers not focused on fast storage. Well, times change, and we now have a number of 1U servers with U.2 NVMe drives. These aren't really "basic" servers in our usual sense; instead they tend to be pretty powerful compute servers. But they're still 1U servers and in theory there's nothing to stop people from having lower end ones with NVMe SSDs. Our experiences with these servers have been positive, in that everything works as we expect and basically how things would be if these were SATA SSDs instead.
(Obviously the U.2 NVMe drives are a lot faster and have lower latency, but these servers mostly don't put any real stress on their storage.)
We didn't get these servers with NVMe disks instead of SATA (or SAS) disks because we had some attraction to NVMe; if anything, we prefer SATA SSDs to U.2 NVMe SSDs because it's much easier to get spares and replacements (SATA SSDs are commodity items; U.2 NVMe SSDs are more expensive and harder to find). Instead, we got these servers with U.2 NVMe drives because that's the configuration they really wanted to come in. All of these servers have four hot swap drive bays (taking their own proprietary drive carriers), although we normally only use two (for a mirrored pair of system disks), and we opted to get them with four U.2 NVMe drives each in order to build up a pool of spares.
That is to say, when zdb prints ZFS DVAs it is not showing you the actual on-disk representation, or a lightly decoded version of it; instead the offset is silently converted from its on-disk form of 512-byte blocks to a version in bytes. I think that this is also true of other pieces of ZFS code that print DVAs as part of diagnostics, kernel messages, and so on. Based on lightly reading the code, I believe that the size of the DVA is also recorded on disk in 512-byte blocks, because zdb and other things use a similar C macro (DVA_GET_ASIZE()) when printing it.
Screening chat messages, scanning private photos: For the German ministries led by the liberal FDP, the plans for chat control by the EU Commission crosses “red lines” in many places. An internal document shows that the federal government is not united on the issue.
The FDP-led federal ministries are apparently putting internal pressure on the federal government, because the EU Commission’s plans for chat control go too far for them. This becomes clear from a list of “red lines” that the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Digital Affairs have sent to the SPD-led Ministry of the Interior, according to Tagesspiegel Background. (We publish the list in full text.)
Chat control refers to plans by the EU Commission to combat the spread of recordings of sexualised violence against children. The Commission presented a draft in May which demands far-reaching obligations for tech companies. Among other things, they are to automatically recognise known and previously unknown depictions of sexualised violence against children, even in private chats. The plans have been met with scathing criticism, including warnings from the EU data protection authorities of unnecessary mass surveillance.
The German government also criticised the planned measures. In a letter, it badgered the EU Commission with more than 60 questions, some of them very pointed, including the importance of encrypted communication or the error rates to be expected when recognising such images. Now a letter shows that the critical attitude within the German government is apparently not consistent. As Tagesspiegel Background reports, in the letter the ministries of justice and digital affairs address the ministry of the interior (BMI) led by SPD minister Nancy Faeser, the ministry in charge of the matter.
Carriers aren’t the only source of location data: While cell phone carriers do track a users location and will share it with law enforcement when presented with a warrant, not every cop needs to get one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has discovered that police agencies across the country have contracted with a company called Fog Data Sciences to buy location information gathered from 250 million devices. The location data is often gathered from applications that people download onto their phones. Those app developers then take the location data and sell it to data brokers and companies like Fog Data. The EFF says Fog Data lets law enforcement subscribe to a service that lays out the location of these devices on a map that officers can use to see what devices are in the vicinity of a crime or follow specific devices as they roam about a city. Officers don’t need a warrant for this, although some do get one. This is terrifying and should be clearly disclosed to users. It probably should also be illegal or at least inadmissible in court. (EFF) — Stacey Higginbotham
Online anonymous platforms such as forums enable freedom of speech, but also facilitate misogyny, extremism, and political polarisation.
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Far-right extremism has been associated with a growing number of mass killings, overtaking Islamist terrorism in about 2018. Examples include the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting (2012), the riots in Charlottesville (2017), the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting (2018), the Christchurch mosque shootings (2019), the US Capitol riots (January 2021), and recently the Buffalo shooting (May 2022). Misogyny has been explicitly linked with terror attacks including the Isla Vista killings (2014), the Toronto Van attack (2018), the Hanau shootings (early 2020), and most recently, the Plymouth shooting in the UK (August 2021).
Sounds similar to my recent proposal. A difference to my main proposal is that the EU does not want to reduce the spot market prices, but suggests that governments rather collect the difference between a technology’s price cap and the actual spot market as a tax that can be used to finance other support measures (e.g. lump-sum transfers to consumers).
What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence.
Earlier this week, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather called on all 338 Members of Parliament to say something about the need to combat anti-semitism and to express concern about the government’s funding of an anti-semite as part of its anti-hate program. At that point, there were few MPs who had spoken publicly, leaving the issue largely to Jewish MPs to express concern. As I noted in a post reflecting on the issue, the message in the silence is that anti-semitism is a Jewish problem, not a broader societal concern. While I realize there is something performative about issuing a statement via tweet, elected officials do this all the time as a signal of their priorities or interests and to amplify their message.
Yet days later, the message has not been amplified and it would appear that the issue is not a priority. As of last night, I could find that only 1/3 of the cabinet has said anything about this issue in the weeks since it emerged: 11 cabinet ministers by tweet or retweet, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in two press conferences, and Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez in a statement provided in response to a journalist query (but, to date, no actual statement has been publicly released).
I'm feeling a bit more at ease today with regards to web browsers.
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A small step, but probably cathartic and long overdue. I have so many photos from the last... almost 20 years? Crikey, how old am I now :X I found pictures of people who are no longer in my life, for sad reasons as well as reasons I'm very thankful for. I found pictures of the person I used to be, who I'm gladly not anymore. It's really nice to be 15kg heavier, stronger and more at ease with life*.
This series is thought provoking in a way that I have only other encountered in one other novel: Seveneves. Incidentally, that is also a Neal Stephenson book. This guy is good. There are also heavy elements of humor within; I laughed out loud several times at the audacity of some of the characters and their situations throughout time (intentionally being vague here, avoiding spoilers). If you want details with the spoilers, see the bottom of this post.
Like, we'd expect people to have develop good communication skills amid the boom of mobile phones, email and later on social media and intant messaging. But no. I've seen way too many people who expect others to instantly understnat what they are thinking.
I'm not a consumer of proprietary social networks, but sometimes I have to access content hosted there, and in that case I prefer to use a front-end reimplementation of the service.
These front-ends are network services that acts as a proxy to the proprietary service, and offer a different interface (usually cleaner) and also remove tracking / ads.
In your web browser, you can use the extension Privacy Redirect to automatically be redirected to such front-ends. But even better, you can host them locally instead of using public instances that may be unresponsive, on NixOS it's super easy.
We are going to see how to deploy them on NixOS.
Yesterday I wrote on my blog about setting up `powerline` in bash, vim, and tmux. This is the only amount of "rice" I have in my computer, and it was actually prompted (hehe) by adding `starship` to the terminal of my work computer.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.