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● 01.07.22

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● Links 8/1/2022: Wine 7.0 RC5 and Kdenlive 21.12.1

Posted in News Roundup at 8:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Librem 14 is Ideal for Enterprise Linux – Purism

• While many people think of enterprise computers in terms of systems running Windows or MacOS, there have long been millions of enterprise users running a GNU/Linux-based enterprise Linux distribution and entire industries where all employees run Linux. While sometimes this is for philosophical reasons, often it’s also for practical reasons: a Linux desktop is the ideal development environment for instance, for writing software for the Linux servers that dominate the cloud.

• Picking hardware for the enterprise that runs Linux can be challenging for IT departments, but the Librem 14 is a drop-in replacement for any existing enterprise Linux laptop and makes deploying Linux in the enterprise easy. In this post we will outline some of the reasons why the Librem 14 is the ideal laptop for enterprise Linux.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Vim And Emacs Are The Most Important Skills You Should Learn – Invidious

• I often get viewers asking me about what skills they should learn to become a “power user” or “elite.” While there are so many important skills that one could learn, I think the two most important programs that every Linux user owes it to themselves to learn are Vim and Emacs.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux 5.17 GPU Updates: Raptor Lake, ADL-P Stable, Raspberry Pi 4K@60, AMD Seamless Boot – Phoronix

• While the Linux 5.17 merge window doesn’t open up until next week following Sunday’s Linux 5.16 stable debut, due to lead Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie going on holiday next week he has sent out the feature pull early. Here is a look at the many GPU/display driver updates for this next kernel version.

• Some of the Linux 5.17 graphics/display driver highlights in the DRM subsystem include Alder Lake P graphics being declared stable (ADL-S was marked stable in Linux 5.16), initial Intel Raptor Lake S graphics support, continued DG2/Alchemist bring-up, support for laptop privacy screens within the DRM code, the Raspberry Pi VC4 DRM driver can now drive 4K @ 60Hz, AMD Seamless Boot for new hardware, and a variety of other improvements.

Applications

=> ↺ More bug reports for LiVES video editor

• Just a couple of things to fix and intend to release EasyOS 3.2. One of those “things” is LiVES — I like it, very sophisticated, small because written in C++, gtk3-based, uses system libraries, doesn’t have rampant dependencies like some other video editors. However, it is buggy, for me anyway.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Upgrade to Linux Mint 20.3: The Right Way

• In this article, I will walk you through the steps needed to upgrade to Linux Mint 20.3 from 20.2.

• As we informed you previously, the stable version of Linux Mint 20.3 “Uma” is officially out. If you are using Linux Mint 20.2, then you should already receive notification for upgrade.

• The upgrade process for all three Linux Mint editions i.e. Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce is same. Before proceeding ahead, please ensure that the computer has a working internet connection.

• Here’s our Linux Mint 20.2 system before we start the migration process.

=> ↺ Install and Configure GitLab on Debian 11.

• This time you will learn how to install and configure GitLab on Debian 11.

• GitLab is an open source code repository and collaborative software development platform for large DevOps and DevSecOps projects, written in Ruby and Go programming languages. It is quite a popular alternative to GitHub providing wiki, issue-tracking, and continuous integration and deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc.

=> ↺ Lock your camera to a specific USB port in OBS | Opensource.com

• If you stream with OBS with multiple cameras on Linux, you might notice that cameras are loaded as they are detected during boot. You probably don’t give it much thought, normally, but if you have a permanent streaming setup with complex OBS templates, you need to know which camera in the physical world is going to show up in which screen in the virtual one. In other words, you don’t want to assign one device as Camera A today only to have it end up as Camera B tomorrow.

• To standardize a complex camera setup, you can impose some special rules on how cameras get assigned to locations in the Linux filesystem.

=> ↺ Writing Python applications, building Linux labs, and more tips for sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

• Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles of December to give you a chance to catch up on any of the great content you might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.

=> ↺ Vimtutor – make VIM lot easier to Learn for newbies – TREND OCEANS

• Enable Sysadmin wrapped up 2021 with a strong December. During the month, we published 24 new articles and received more than 691,000 reads from more than 470,000 readers across the site. For the full year, we achieved nearly 95% more page views compared to 2020, which we hope means that we’re providing more sysadmins the information they need to do their jobs well.

=> ↺ Top 10 container guides for sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

• Each year, I get the opportunity to write a brief piece about the top container articles of the year that were published on Enable Sysadmin. It is a great opportunity to review and reread the articles. I am happy to see that a couple of mine made the cut.

=> ↺ Three Ways To Connect Phone And Desktop! ~ The Linux Ecosystem ~ – Kockatoo Tube

=> ↺ Wireless network does not auto-reconnect in KDE

• Here’s an interesting, annoying little problem for you. Say you run a Linux machine, with the Plasma desktop as your UI of choice. You connect to a Wireless network, no sweat. But then, on reboot you discover that your system will not reconnect. The password is fine, and if you manually initiate the connection, everything works. Similarly, when you wake your machine (laptop) from sleep, there is no automatic reconnection to the access point. Manually, no problem.

• I discovered this issue in MX Linux MX-21 KDE recently. This is not something I’ve faced before, and I found this to be an unnecessary hurdle in an otherwise truly fine testing session. So I started looking through the system menus, and I soon found a rather simple, almost innocent and thus infuriating fix to this problem. Let’s see what gives.

=> ↺ How to View WebP Images on Ubuntu and Linux Mint

• If you’ve searched for images on Google (or any other search engine), you’ve probably come across WebP images at some point but were perhaps hesitant to download them because of potential compatibility issues.

• Fortunately, though, there are workarounds to view WebP images on a computer. If you’re on Linux, you can do this in a few different ways.

• In this guide, we’ll explain WebP and walk you through the steps to view WebP images on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How to Create a Kubernetes Cluster with AWS CLI

• Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is a managed Kubernetes service that is hosted on AWS.

• The main reason for using EKS is to remove the burden of managing pods, nodes, etc. Running Kubernetes in AWS currently requires a great deal of technical expertise and often falls outside the wheelhouse of many organizations. With EKS, the required infrastructure is managed by Amazon’s “in-house” team, leaving users with a fully managed Kubernetes engine that can be used either via an API or standard kubectl tooling.

• EKS will support all Kubernetes features, including namespaces, security settings, resource quotas & tolerations, deployment strategies, autoscalers and more. EKS will allow you to run your own control plane, but also integrates with AWS IAM so you can maintain your own access control to the API.

=> ↺ How to install Webull Desktop on a Chromebook with Crossover

• Today we are looking at how to install Webull Desktop on a Chromebook with Crossover 21. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

=> ↺ Classic SysAdmin: How to Check Disk Space on Linux from the Command Line – Linux Foundation

• Quick question: How much space do you have left on your drives? A little or a lot? Follow up question: Do you know how to find out? If you happen to use a GUI desktop (e.g., GNOME, KDE, Mate, Pantheon, etc.), the task is probably pretty simple. But what if you’re looking at a headless server, with no GUI? Do you need to install tools for the task? The answer is a resounding no. All the necessary bits are already in place to help you find out exactly how much space remains on your drives. In fact, you have two very easy-to-use options at the ready.

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ WineHQ – Wine Announcement – The Wine development release 7.0-rc5 is now available.

=> ↺ Wine 7.0-rc5 Released With Another 30 Bugs Fixed – Phoronix

• Wine 7.0-rc5 is available for testing while the stable release of Wine 7.0.0 will be popped soon.

• The weekly release candidates of Wine 7.0 continue until being deemed in good enough shape for releasing v7.0.0 this month. In Wine 7.0-rc5 are another 30 bug fixes corrected this week.

• Among the fixes this week are for Roblox Player, Tropico 2, Logos Bible Software, Dying Light, Fallout 2, Cygwin, MSBuild, and a variety of other Windows games and applications.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Reunited after a decade – Kai Uwe’s Blog

• It’s been more than ten years since Dolphin, KDE’s versatile file manager, introduced its own custom QGraphicsView-based view engine. With that came more detailed view modes with grouping support, animated transitions, and a new places panel with sections. Unfortunately, it is all based on a now long-abandoned “Itemviews NG” project, and is inherently incompatible with Qt’s traditional model-view code used elsewhere in KDE.

=> ↺ KDE Plasma will put the turbo to finish implementing Wayland

• The project KDE has lived a very busy year 2021 due to the endless migration of Kwin to Wayland, the graphical protocol that has become the greatest eternal promise of the Linux desktop. But new years, new goals (or maybe not so much), so Nate Graham has posted on your blog a summary or part of the roadmap of KDE Plasma by 2022.

• To begin with, from the desktop environment they will continue polishing on those fronts where they still have to put things in order. For example, Nate Graham has recognized that language and format settings has so far been problematic because of overlap. Luckily, contributor Han Young is working to merge both sections and make appear on a single page. In this way, it would be clearer what is established in the system and, at the very least, it would make the possibility of incompatible configurations more difficult.

• Another point that will be renewed are the Breeze icons, Breeze in English. Designer Ken Vermette is working on modernizing and enhancing the Color Breeze icon theme to round out and soften them, as well as removing ugly and old elements like long shadows. On the other hand, the monochrome icons will also be renewed, all with the intention that both icon themes look better combined with the colors of the system and therefore polish the aesthetic finish.

=> ↺ Maui Report 17 – MauiKit — #UIFramework

• Today, we bring you a new report on the Maui Project’s progress.

• Maui 2.1 was released almost two months ago, and since then new features, bug fixes, and improvements have been made to the Maui set of apps and frameworks; the following blog post will cover some of the changes and highlights from the last month of development.

=> ↺ Kdenlive 21.12.1 released | Kdenlive

• The first maintenance release of the 21.12 series is out with fixes to ripple mode, project archiving and multiple bins. This version also enforces to transcode footage with variable framerates to a standard framerate value.

=> ↺ Wallpaper Livestream (Part 2, Sunday January 9th)

• For everyone who didn’t have a chance to attend, in the last livestream we started with the above sketch done in Krita and experimented with a new method on-the-fly where we leaned into Inkscapes snapping features to create a 3D mesh by hand, with the plan to use the built-in “Restacking” tool to enable hand-drawn polygons with “perfect” edges. While the mesh method was a rousing success and testing the restack feature gave ideal results, near the end of the stream it was realized that watching me draw triangles for several hours was not a hip idea, so I decided to take the remainder of the more tedious work offline.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Felix Häcker: #25 The Big 1.0

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 31 to January 07.

• We wish everyone a Happy New Year! The new year starts right with a “Big 1.0”, Libadwaita – an important cornerstone for GNOME apps, had its first stable release!

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Makulu Droid new Build is Live !

• Added GTK4 support.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Cinnamon overview | Sleek, modern, innovative – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Cinnamon and some of the applications pre-installed.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ KDE Plasma Application Update » PCLinuxOS

• The KDE Plasma Desktop application packages have been updated to 21.12.1. This is a service release update.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/01 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

• First off, welcome to twenty-twenty-two, the year of the Linux desktop (wasn’t it?). The year is kicking off strong with openSUSE Tumbleweed – but not with daily snapshots: openQA did not agree with some of the changes (i.e one snapshot caused all non-x86_64 architectures to fail to boot, one snapshot had a broken virtualization stack, and of course, none of that made it to you, our users). Despite all that, we published 4 snapshots during this week: 20220101, 0102, 0103, and 0106.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ My Docker packages for Slackware-current

• I have been using Docker for a while now, it’s being used to provide services to friends and family. I was always intimidated by the large amount of packages that were needed to get Docker and docker-compose up and running, and I did not have experience with Docker at the time (almost two years ago) so I decided to go the easy route and use the SlackBuilds.org scripts when I first needed to run a Docker container. I wrote a blog about that even, it explained how to run an Outline server to allow journalists to do their work in repressive countries but the article also shares the details how to build the Docker packages and run the daemon.

• If you want to read some background information about Docker’s strength and what its use-cases are, I encourage you to start reading here: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/ . Essentially, Docker uses Linux kernel and filesystem capabilities to isolate an application and its dependencies from the host computer it is being executed on. Docker provides powerful means to connect multiple containers via internal (virtual) networking and can expose ports to the network outside of your container. It enables you to run applications reliably without having to worry about the underlying Operating system. You can even run Docker on a MS Windows computer but your containerized application running inside Docker will not be aware of that. This is sometimes called ‘light-weight virtualization’ because unlike real virtualization solutions like QEMU, Virtual Box or VMWare, the containerized application still runs on your host’s kernel. This is why you can run a 32-bit container image on a 64-bit (Linux 64-bit kernel has that capability to execute 32-bit binaries) host but you cannot run a 64-bit image on a 32-bit host kernel.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ IBM’s original ‘Linux man’ Irving Wladawsky-Berger: A New Measurement Framework for the Digital Economy

• Several weeks ago I heard a very interesting keynote presentation by Cambridge professor Diane Coyle at the annual workshop of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, – What Don’t We Know About Measuring the Digital Economy? Professor Coyle is also a research associate of the UK Economics Statistics Centre of Excellence. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Indigo Prize on how to measure economic activity in the digital economy for her essay Making the Future Count, co-authored with Benjamin Mitra-Kahn.

• “GDP captures only market transactions at the price of exchange, and not the welfare gains, externalities, environment, distribution of wealth or innovation which occurs in an economy,” wrote the authors. “Hence almost since its creation in the 1940s it has been criticised for its inability to capture economic welfare. Now changes in the economy, being restructured by digital technology and paying the price for unsustainable growth, make the case for a new measurement framework more pressing than ever. GDP was never an ideal measure of economic welfare and its suitability has been decreasing.”

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) became the accepted international measure of economies in the1940s. While being a good measure for the 20th century industrial economy, GDP is a flawed measure for the 21st century economy. It was suitable when the economy was dominated by the production of physical goods, but GDP doesn’t adequately capture the growing share of services and other intangible assets that now characterize advanced economies. Nor does it reflect important economic activity beyond production, such as income, consumption and living standards.

=> ↺ Remi Collet: PHP version 8.0.15RC1 and 8.1.2RC1

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

• RPM of PHP version 8.1.2RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-php81-test repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux.

• RPM of PHP version 8.0.15RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 35 or in the remi-php80-test repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux.

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-01

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

• I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” released [LWN.net]

• Linux Mint has announced its 20.3 (“Una”) release for three different desktop environments: the Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions. Mint 20.3 is a long-term support release, with support lasting until 2025. Each edition comes with a long list of new features (Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce) and detailed release notes (Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce).

=> ↺ Ubuntu-on-a-phone crowd fix Google account issues in new Touch update

• While some smartphone users are pondering when their next Android or iOS update will hit, the UBports foundation has released one for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system in the form of OTA-21.

• Still based on the Ubuntu 16.04 (although the team continues to work on 20.04) the update is due to hit supported devices (from the Google Pixel 3a to OnePlus hardware) during the coming week and has a number of useful tweaks.

• The most immediately visible is a change to what UBports call “the Greeter” (or the thing that appears when a user wants to unlock their device.) It’s all a bit slicker now, and has a different appearance depending on PIN or password selection. The storage statistics display has also received an overhaul and the Tamil language font added.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Horizon X3 AI development board is powered by Sunrise 3 AI Edge Arm processor – CNX Software

• After asking for some details, I was just told the SDK is based on Linux.

=> ↺ CEEFAX Lives! (Courtesy Of A Raspberry Pi) | Hackaday

• As analogue TV slides from memory, there’s a facet of it that’s fondly remembered by a band of enthusiasts. Teletext was an electronic viewdata information service digitally encoded in the frame blanking period, and a TV set with a decoder chip would provide access to many pages of news and other services all displayed in the characteristic brightly colored block graphics. It went the way of the dinosaur with the demise of analog TV, but for [Nathan Dane] the flame is kept alive with his own private version of the BBC’s CEEFAX service.

=> ↺ Fanless Alder Lake-S system supports extended temperatures

• Vecow’s rugged “ECX-3000” runs Linux on a 12th Gen Alder Lake processor. The fanless embedded system has up to 8x 2.5G LAN with 4 PoE+, optional 2x 10GigE LAN, 4x front-access M.2 SSD trays, DC 9-50V and 40 to 75°C extended temperature support.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Slither: A Visual Pedometer That Sheds Light | Hackaday

• Have you already broken that New Year’s resolution to get more exercise? Yeah, us too. Maybe the problem is simply that we didn’t gamify the goal. A simple visual aid that shows your progress can help make a goal more achievable and easier to stick to, day after January day. That’s the idea behind [skhackett]’s Slither, the visual pedometer.

• [...]

• Although Slither uses the Fit Bit app, no actual Fit Bit is required — great news for those of us who don’t like to wear accessories.

=> ↺ Tiny LED Matrix Panels Tile Together Perfectly | Hackaday

• There’s a lot to admire about LED matrix projects, which more often than not end up looking really cool. But most of them rely on RGB matrix panels sourced from the surplus market, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, building your own tiny, tileable LED matrix panels makes these builds just a little bit cooler.

• There’s a lot to admire about these matrix panels, not least of which is the seamless way they tile together. But to get to that point, [sjm4306] had a lot of prep work to do. He started with a much simpler 5×7 array, using the popular WS2812 RGB LEDs on a custom PCB. With a little practice under his belt, it was time to move to the much smaller SK6805 LEDs, which were laid out in an 8×8 matrix. The board layout is about as compact as it can be; [sjm4306] reports that it pushed the PCB fab to their limits, but he ended up with LEDs spaced perfectly on the board and just enough margin to keep consistent spacing in two dimensions when the boards are adjacent to each other.

=> ↺ Board with 25 RGB LEDs is offered with ESP32-C3 or ESP32-Pico-D4 – CNX Software

• In case you are in need of a tiny WiFI or Bluetooth-connected board with an RGB LED matrix, two have shown up on Banggood with basically the same 25 RGB LED design , except “C3FH4 RGB” board is based on ESP32-C3 RISC-V SoC, while the other, named “PICO D4 RGB“, features ESP32-Pico-D4 SiP (System-in-Package).

=> ↺ PsyLink An Open Source Neural Interface For Non-Invasive EMG | Hackaday

• We don’t see many EMG (electromyography) projects, despite how cool the applications can be. This may be because of technical difficulties with seeing the tiny muscular electrical signals amongst the noise, it could be the difficulty of interpreting any signal you do find. Regardless, [hut] has been striving forwards with a stream of prototypes, culminating in the aptly named ‘Prototype 8’

• The current prototype uses a main power board hosting an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, as well as a boost converter to pump up the AAA battery to provide 5 volts for the Arduino and a selection of connected EMG amplifier units. The EMG sensor is based around the INA128 instrumentation amplifier, in a pretty straightforward configuration. The EMG samples along with data from the IMU on the Nano 33 BLE Sense, are passed along to a connected PC via Bluetooth, running the PsyLink software stack. This is based on Python, using the BLE-GATT library for BT comms, PynPut handing the PC input devices (to emit keyboard and mouse events) and tensorflow for the machine learning side of things. The idea is to use machine learning from the EMG data to associate with a specific user interface event (such as a keypress) and with a little training, be able to play games on the PC with just hand/arm gestures. IMU data are used to augment this, but in this demo, that’s not totally clear.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ 30 startups that show how open source ate the world in 2021 | VentureBeat

• It has been a busy year in the open source software sphere, from high-profile license changes to critical zero-day vulnerabilities that sent businesses into meltdown. But in among all the usual excitement that permeates the open source world, countless open source startups launched new products, attracted venture capitalist’s (VC) money, and generally reminded us of the role that open source plays in today’s technological landscape — including the data sovereignty and digital autonomy it promises companies of all sizes.

• Here, we take a look at some of the fledgling commercial open source companies that gained traction in the past year, revealing where enterprises and investors are betting on the power of community-driven software.

=> ↺ Try FreeDOS in 2022 | Opensource.com

• Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, DOS was king of the desktop. Not satisfied with a proprietary version of DOS, programmers worldwide worked together to create an open source version of DOS called FreeDOS, which first became available in 1994. The FreeDOS Project continues to grow in 2021 and beyond.

• We’ve run several articles about FreeDOS on Opensource.com to help new users get started with FreeDOS and learn new programs.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ After heavy criticism: Mozilla Foundation no longer accepts donations in crypto money

• The Mozilla Foundation will no longer accept donations in cryptocurrency until further notice. Recently the foundation, which develops the free internet programs Firefox and Thunderbird, publicly reminded that donations are also accepted in crypto money. There was then strong criticism from many quarters that the generation of crypto currencies is climate-hostile and wastes energy.

• The Mozilla project explains on Twitter that the criticism has been received and the discussion about the impact of cryptocurrencies on the environment is being heard. Mozilla now wants to examine in detail whether crypto money is compatible with its own climate goals. This process is carried out transparently in the sense of open source.

=> ↺ Firefox skeleton will download latest Firefox

• As we have ongoing issues with SeaMonkey, not working properly on some sites, we need to be able to easily install Firefox, Chromium or Chrome browsers. I very much like the SM suite, so want to keep it builtin to EasyOS.

• There are Firefox and Chromium SFS files, that can be downloaded via the “sfsget” icon on the desktop; however, I want a mechanism that is a single-click to install one of these browsers, and also a single-click (or a couple of clicks) to update to the latest version.

• So, I have created a PET ‘firefox-skel-ask’, that is just a skeleton, with various configuration files for Firefox. Most importantly, it has an entry in the menu “Internet -> Download latest Firefox”.

• First time you run this, it will download the latest version of Firefox, which right now is 95.0.2, and will set it up to run as user “firefox”. That is, it will run non-root, for enhanced security, and it’s home will be /home/firefox

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ Snowflake named DBMS of the year by DB-Engines • The Register

• It is joined in the top three by three-times previous winner PostgreSQL, which came second, and third-placed MongoDB, which took the top prize in 2014 and 2015.

• Rather than measuring database popularity on revenue — which would skew against FOSS systems — or basing its findings on downloads — which would include software downloaded for hobbyists, pilots, and tinkerers — DB-Engines bases its popularity score by amalgamating metrics.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ LibreOffice: The Klingons and Interslavs are already here – The Document Foundation Blog

• We happily report that Klingons have – at this point – not taken over control of the LibreOffice bug-tracker.

• While Klingon language support still ranks somewhat low among issues thought not to be essential, the federation that is LibreOffice 7.3 will also bring Interslavic support to the mix when released come early February.

• Since you were wondering, Interslavic is an artificial language meant to operate in the cross-section of Slavic interlingualism.

• Targ-herders everywhere are reportedly mildly pleased. The synergy in KSL (Klingon as second language) regions is a potato harvest that we can all appreciate.

• Undeterred by the confines of a monogalactic community of translators, LibreOffice numbers are growing. Hundreds of millions or earthlings alone now have powerful tools honed in their native languages.

Programming/Development

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ Eertree: Palindromic Tree

• The Task 2 of the Weekly Challenge #145 asked us to build a Palindromic Tree. It also linked to a blog post explaining the “Eertree” data structure.

• Maybe it was just me, but I found the blog post confusing. Fortunately, it further linked to a scientific paper that introduced the structure around 2014.

• I spent several evenings of the Christmas holidays wrapping my head around the description of the algorithm to efficiently build the graph. Most of it is described in the proof of Proposition 2, but some parts are rather laconic. I wasn’t able to implement the creation of a suffix link from P where |P| > 1.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Publishers Clearing House Odds: Not Particularly Good

• America has quite a long history of lotteries and sweepstakes. Even George Washington participated as an investor in a lottery that included land, livestock and people (i.e. slaves) as prizes. The primary modern distinction between a lottery and a sweepstakes is that the latter cannot require purchase for entry. Otherwise, they effectively operate the same. States have a monopoly on lotteries. But sweepstakes can be very lucrative for private enterprise.

• Industry experts told the New York Times that the industry hit a stride in the 1960s as consumer products struggled to gain attention in an increasingly crowded space. One company, D.L. Blair, estimated it controlled some 80 percent of the corporate sweepstakes market (like the ones in children’s breakfast cereal) in 1979. However, it was the publishing industry that realized the full power of sweepstakes in driving sales, especially for magazine subscription. Reader’s Digest was one of the first to the party in 1962 having awarded nearly a million dollars a year until the end of the 1970s.

• The sweepstakes explosion in the 1960s and 70s led to a unique situation where magazine publishers were often paying out more to non-subscribers or the “no purchase necessary to enter” crowd than to those who subscribed. By 1979, Publishers Clearing House (PCH) had distributed over $7 million to some 2.3 million winners, most of whom weren’t driving revenue to the company.

Science

=> ↺ How Do Capacitors Work? | Hackaday

• If you are like [The Science Asylum], you might wonder how a capacitor can work since, at their core, they are nothing more than a gap filled with air or another insulator. He explains how in a recent video you can see below.

• Of course, at DC, a capacitor doesn’t conduct any better than the insulator used as its dielectric. However, a DC voltage has to start sometime and when it does, it briefly looks like AC. The video explains it all in simple terms. Of course, if you are math savvy, you can probably get as much out of the normal C=dQ/dV equation.

• If that doesn’t speak to you, the explanation in the video about charges will shed some light. He even shows an animation of the classic “hydraulic model”, which is helpful to develop intuition about the process.

Hardware

=> ↺ How Many Wires Do You Need To Measure A Resistor? | Hackaday

• Measuring resistance doesn’t seem to be a big deal. Put your meter leads across two wires or terminals and read the value, right? Most of the time that is good enough, but sometimes you need better methods and for those, you need more wires, as [FesZ] explains in his recent video that you can see below.

• In the usual case, the meter applies a known voltage and measures the current which, by Ohm’s law, gives you the resistance. It is also possible to control the current and measure the voltage — doesn’t matter. [FesZ] shows how many meters measure voltage across a known resistor and the unknown so that a precision voltage or current source isn’t necessary.

=> ↺ Tiger Boy Advance Is A 90s Kid Dream Come True | Hackaday

• From the release of the DMG-01 in 1989 until the final Micro variant hit store shelves in 2005, the Nintendo Game Boy line represented the epitome of handheld gaming for hundreds of millions of players. But that’s not to say there weren’t a wide array of other handheld systems that aimed to chip away at the Japanese gaming giant’s monopoly. SEGA and Sony released high-tech systems that brought impressive technical innovations, while Tiger Electronics famously took the opposite approach with ultra-cheap handhelds that leveraged simplistic games based on popular children’s franchises.

• [Chris Downing] had to make do with these budget Tiger games as a child, and now as an adult, he’s determined to made things right with the Tiger Boy Advance. As the name implies, this retro hybrid combines the look and feel of a branded Tiger game with the power and software compatibility of a legitimate Nintendo Game Boy Advance (GBA) circa 2001. It even sprinkles in some modern niceties, like USB-C charging and a backlit display. While most of its charm is probably lost on anyone who didn’t grow up within a fairly narrow range of years, the video below seems to prove that even modern kids can appreciate this one-of-a-kind creation.

=> ↺ A Savage Discussion Of Measurement And Accuracy | Hackaday

• Then, out come the Big Guns. The ceramic blocks so flat that… well you’ll just have to watch it. But the discussion goes deep into nanometers, microns, and jeweled movements.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

=> ↺ Today in America: Moderna CEO tells investment bank that COVID won’t end and vaccines will be an annual product. Bonus: Food prices off the charts. Don’t turn the heater on. – BaronHK’s Rants

• Moderna’s CEO tells Goldman Sachs (mega investment bank) that COVID will never end, and vaccines will be an annual product now. “[Stephane] Bancel, while speaking at a health care event organized by Goldman Sachs, said that the booster efficacy will wane over time, similar to the first two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine.” Bancel added that COVID is “not going away.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 199 released

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 199. This version includes the following changes:

• [ Chris Lamb ]

• • Support both variants of “odt2txt”, including the one provided by unoconv.

• (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#298)

• [ Jelle van der Waa ]

• • Add external tool reference on Arch Linux for xb-tool.

=> ↺ WordPress Releases Security Update

• WordPress versions between 3.7 and 5.8 are affected by multiple vulnerabilities. Exploitation of some of these vulnerabilities could cause a denial of service condition.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Windows 10 is a data privacy nightmare

• all those surveillance and “in app trying to sell something” make it way slower than Win 7… which is not good for a company that want’s to be productive (security, reliability, speed, speed, speed)

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ FOSS Patents: Texas-based Estech Systems targets car makers Toyota and BMW in rapidly expanding VoIP patent assertion campaign

• There’s a gut instinct when a patent holder based in the Lone Star State files patent infringement lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas against famous companies: “Oh, another non-practicing entity.” (or “troll” as some would call it)

• While Cisco dislikes certain patent enforcement tactics employed by Estech Systems (“ESI”), Estech is not a “patent troll.” According to its website, the company was founded in 1987 and “has sold over 400,000 phone systems and deployed more than three million phones nationwide.” ESI claims to have been “the first company to build a truly combined telephone and voice mail system, as well as the first to build a purely IP-based business communications system, and has numerous patents granted or pending on its products’ unique designs and capabilities.”

Copyrights

=> ↺ It’s about time to give the music producer her/his copyright due – The IPKat

• Every songwriting process is a different story. You can get a closer look at it by watching ‘Diary of a song’ by The New York Times on YouTube, and documentaries such as Ed Sheeran’s ‘Songwriter’, or Shawn Mendes ‘In Wonder’. But all these stories have something in common. Nowadays, the song is usually composed using samples and artificial instruments.

• [...]

• Currently, a case may reach the Polish Supreme Court (a cassation appeal has been filed, but the Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to accept the case), in which the author of the entire arrangement of the song was not recognized as the co-author by the Court of Appeal. The judge ruled that the music producer created only a derivative work because lyrics and vocal melody could constitute a separate work.

• In this author’s view, if the music producer participates in the composing process, even if the work has several versions in the meantime, he should be considered as a co-author. However, if a music producer engages in a separate, independent process of creation, he/she should be recognized as an author of the derivative work. The clearest manifestation of the unity of the creative process is the cooperation in creating the final version of the work, based on mutual exchange of comments, guidelines, acceptance of stages of the creative process and versions of the work.

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