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● 10.07.22

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● Links 07/10/2022: KaOS 2022.10 and EasyOS 4.4.1

Posted in News Roundup at 6:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ 10 best Linux laptops to look for in 2022

• Best Linux laptops to look for in 2022: Our list includes laptops that mostly come with 11th Gen Intel Core processors ranging from i3 to i5, which are best for work purposes, basic gaming, entertainment and online studies.

• [...]

• Ensure to check with the manufacturer or seller regarding the features provided by the Linux laptop.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ LHS Episode #483: LHS4EVA | Linux in the Ham Shack

• Hello and welcome to the 483rd episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts discuss the upcoming JOTA and JOTI event, an additional period of ARRL club grants, the Internet Archive creating a repository for amateur radio content, a kerfuffle at SQLite, making money with Open Source and much, much more. Thanks for listening and have a great week.

=> ↺ Google delays adblock’s death, New Nvidia driver, Debian goes non free – Linux and Open Source News – Invidious

=> ↺ The Badger Stack | Self-Hosted 81

• Chris Raspberry Pi server is dead, and Alex has a few ideas for his next build.

=> ↺ 70: Razer and Logitech Put Steam Deck On Notice? – Hardware Addicts – TuxDigital

• In this episode, we’re going to be talking about Intel Arc, new portable gaming devices, and Apple’s latest launch. Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss Camera Sensors.

• Hardware Addicts is a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ HEVC uAPI mainlined

• The release of Linux 6.0 earlier this week brought a significant milestone: the H.265/HEVC user-space API was mainlined. That is the result of more than two years of efforts by our engineering team.

• Collabora has actively contributed to the enablement of video codecs such as VP8, VP9, H264, and others, so the addition of HEVC marks another important contribution from our team to this space. These activities do involve not only kernel drivers but also GStreamer plugins for stateless decoders.

• The primary focus of the HEVC uAPI work was on VeriSilicon’s Hantro Codec component, present on a number of popular SoCs (Rockchip, NXP, Microchip, …). Marketed as a small and power efficient, it is especially attractive for open source developers as a stateless accelerator. The RKVDEC and the Cedrus codecs will also benefit from the stable HEVC uAPI, gaining the ability to decode HEVC in mainline too.

• Designing the HEVC uAPI has been challenging as we wanted to make it future proof. To get maximum confidence in the uAPI, we leveraged the Fluster testing framework and fixed the whole decoding stack from the driver to userland until all tests passed, up to the limit of the hardware capabilities of course. Along the way, we also added support for 10-bit bit-streams and the P010 pixel format.

=> ↺ Stable Kernel: Linux 5.4.217

=> ↺ Linux bug can tigger Chipzilla PC screens

• A bug in the Intel integrated graphics driver for Linux machines is triggering a power sequencing issue which, can damage the screen.

• Victims see very fast white flashes on the screen which can potentially send the panel to silicon heaven.

• Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman promptly released Linux 5.19.13 where the faulty patches for the Intel graphics driver have been reverted.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 6.0 Officially Released

• It’s been a long two month waiting period, but Linux Kernel 6.0 has finally arrived. While not a huge release in terms of features and bugfixes, the Linux Kernel 6.x is anticipated to bring many news features to the kernel and continue to modernize Linux as a platform. In his release announcement, Linus assured us that 6.0 was meant to establish a stable base before the “big changes” come.

=> ↺ How to Install Linux Kernel 6.0 on Ubuntu / Linux Mint – Tips On Unix

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Linux kernel 6.0 On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and LinuxMint 21.

Applications

=> ↺ Best email client for Linux | IT PRO

• While web-based email has become the norm and can be accessed from any web browser, many users prefer a native email client. On Windows, you have applications like Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird. On Android or iOS, there are clients like Nine and K-9 Mail. But what about Linux?

• Hundreds of native email clients for Linux have come and gone, and only a few offer comparable features to Windows native clients. But one of the great things about Linux is that most applications are available for free, forever, so you can try them all out to find the best email client for Linux for your needs.

• There is also a more diverse range of email clients for the Linux desktop than you’ll find on Windows. When developers don’t like something about a piece of software written on Linux, they often make their own version and release it free to the world. This has resulted in some unique email clients that you might find suit you better than the usual suspects, and which may yet rank among the best email providers.

=> ↺ Nala – A Neat Structured Frontend for APT Package Manager

• This article will walk us through the installation and usage of Nala as an alternate package manager to the commonly used APT package manager for Debian-based Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

• The primary aim of the Nala package manager is to help Debian-based Linux users understand what goes on in the background when installing, removing, and/or upgrading various system packages.

• The libapt-pkg frontend is interfaced by python-apt api hence the need to have Python 3 installed on a Debian-based system prior to the installation of Nala.

• The use of Nala as a package manager excludes redundant messages, provides better package formats, and uses color to highlight specific system events behind package installation, removal, and upgrade.

=> ↺ TIDAL Hi-Fi – Electron-based software for TIDAL

•  TIDAL Hi-Fi is a third-party music streaming program. It uses Castlabs’ version of Electron for widevine support. It’s free and open source software. You’ll need a subscription to TIDAL to use the software.

• It will no doubt cause confusion that the software is named TIDAL Hi-Fi given that the TIDAL service has a HiFi plan. Let’s be very clear, TIDAL Hi-Fi has no affiliation with TIDAL. The latest version appears to be renamed to Tidal-Hifi although it’s still showing as TIDAL Hi-Fi in the program. Even with this renaming, things really aren’t any clearer.

=> ↺ 10 Essential Privacy and Security Apps for Linux Desktops

• Linux Privacy and Security Apps Linux-based operating systems have a reputation for being very secure and private. Linux is free and open source, unlike Windows or macOS. This makes its source code more open to scrutiny—more difficult for developers to add any malicious software.

• Many Linux distributions also have built-in features and apps for improved desktop security. But installing a Linux OS isn’t the be-all and end-all solution for protecting your desktop.

• Fortunately, there are also many free and open-source software (FOSS) that can add more layers of protection to your desktop. Here are some of the best Linux apps for keeping your computer private and secure.

=> ↺ QOwnNotes

• QOwnNotes is a open source (GPL) plain-text file notepad with markdown support and todo list manager for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, that (optionally) works together with the notes application of ownCloud (or Nextcloud). So you are able to write down your thoughts with QOwnNotes and edit or search for them later from your mobile device (like with CloudNotes) or the ownCloud web-service. The notes are stored as plain text files and you can sync them with your ownCloud sync client. Of course other software, like Dropbox, Syncthing, Seafile or BitTorrent Sync can be used too.

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #22.37: Free Ubuntu Pro, Kernel 6.0, TUXEDO OS, Crossword, Btrfs and More

• After several weeks, I published a new video on YouTube. Videos take quite some effort and I am not a fan of videos.

• However, I know many people prefer videos to text articles. What do you prefer?

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ “apt-add-repository” Command Not Found on Debian 11

• “In Linux, the “apt-add-repository” command is used to add a new repository to a system for installing any or all the packages belonging to that repository. This command adds the repository into the /etc/apt/sources.list file or in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory. However, after running the “apt-add-repository” command for the first time in your Debian 11 system, you may receive the “apt-add-repository command not found” error. Let’s see why your system returns this error and how to fix it in Debian 11.”

=> ↺ Tar Command in Linux with Practical Examples

• Tar command is used for creating archive of multiple files and directories into single archive file, extension of archive file will always be ‘.tar’. Tar can further compress the archived file using gzip and bzip2 techniques. Tar stands for ‘Tape archive’ and used to create and extract archive files from the command line. Tar can also be treated as command line backup and restore utility.

=> ↺ How to install Tabby Terminal on Ubuntu 22.04 Linux

• Download and install Tabby Terminal on your Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Linux Jammy JellyFish to have a feature-rich app to run commands.

• Tabby is another user-friendly open-source terminal app for local shells, serial, SSH, and Telnet connections. It is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. Comes with an integrated SSh client, serial terminal, SFTP, and Zmodem.

• This open-source Terminal app for Ubuntu offers fully configurable shortcuts and split panes that can remember your tabs. Tabby uses integrated encrypted containers for SSH secrets and configuration. Hence, it is full of features that further support PowerShell, PS Core, WSL, Git-Bash, Cygwin, Cmder, and CMD as well on Windows.

=> ↺ How to install Parrot 5.1 Security Edition – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Parrot 5.1 Security Edition.

=> ↺ How to Install and Configure Squid Proxy Server on Rocky Linux/Alma Linux 9

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Squid Proxy on a Rocky / Alma Linux 9 server.

=> ↺ How to Enable Audio Casting in Linux – Make Tech Easier

• This universal guide is everything you need to know about Audio Casting on Linux. Find out how to enable Audio Casting and more, right here!

=> ↺ How to Setup OpenVPN Server in Ubuntu 22.04 [The Easy Way] | UbuntuHandbook

• This simple tutorial shows how to easily setup OpenVPN in your Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 server and connect remotely in Windows or Linux with GNOME.

• My PPTP and IKEv2 VPN server refused to work recently due to the Great Firewall (maybe). So I decided to setup OpenVPN in my Ubuntu VPS as a workaround.

• DigitalOcean has a step by step setup guide, but it’s really long and complicated for beginners. Thankfully, there’s a free open-source script make things as easy as few commands.

=> ↺ How to Start X11 on Linux Without a Display Manager

• It is completely possible to start your Linux desktop without a display manager, or even a GUI for that matter.

• While most modern Linux systems use a display manager to log in users and start a desktop environment, it’s possible to start X11 and your favorite window manager/desktop environment without one. You can start X from a virtual console and even set it up to launch automatically on login. Here’s how.

=> ↺ How to Use DreamBooth to Fine-Tune Stable Diffusion (Colab)

• With Stable Diffusion DreamBooth, you can now create art generation images using your own trained images.

• For example you can generate images with yourself or a loved one as a popular video game character, as a fantastical creature, or just about anything you can think of – you can generate a sketch or a painting of your pet as a dragon, or as the Emperor of Mankind.

• You can also train your own styles and aesthetics like aetherpunk/magicpunk, or maybe people’s facial expressions like Zoolander’s Magnum (I haven’t tried this yet).

• In this tutorial we’ll cover the basics of fine-tuning Stable Diffusion with DreamBooth to generate your own customized images using Google Colab, for free. After we’ve fined tuned Stable Diffusion we’ll also test it out using Stable Diffusion WebUI built into the same Google Colab notebook.

• In machine learning, fine-tuning means adjusting a model that was trained on one dataset to work with a new, related dataset. This can make your model work better on the new dataset, or help it work better in a new situation. A dataset, in our case, is a bunch of pictures and some words that tell a machine what they should be looking for in order to generate new images.

=> ↺ Linux Cloud Servers | Create and Install SSH Key Pairs – Invidious

• What’s up, Linux Community!!! In this video, we’ll focus on setting up SSH keys for Ubuntu 22.04 installation. SSH keys provide an easy, secure way of logging into your server and are recommended for all users.

=> ↺ Meet the latest SUSE documentation “accrual” | SUSE Communities

• Under the two currently available categories Kubernetes and Linux, we have already published 50+ documents—expect more to be posted during the next few weeks.

Games

=> ↺ Top 14 New Games You Can Play on Linux with Proton – October 2022 Edition – Boiling Steam

• We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Overhaul Enncryption Support in Kontact — Decrypted mind

• For a long time I have been fixing issues behind the scenes to support Autocrypt and fixing bugs around encryption.

• But the best crypto support does not help if it is too complicated for users to use the system. PGP is complex and a lot of things can go wrong, so the UI should support the user to find solutions, if things are going the wrong way. For me it was obvious that I cannot do this on my own and found Eileen Wagner a UX designer who is experienced in crypto UX. It was a lot fun to work together with Eileen to improve the UX in Kontact

• It soon became obvious that the part that needs an overhaul is mostly sending. There is a lot that happens AFTER you press send. You may be faced with information that the keys are not good enough, or that a used key is near expiry. So we tried to improve the UX so that these issues will bubble up earlier so you can fix the issues before pressing send.

• At least for me, it is often that I concentrate in order to finish a message before I need to go, and then press send in a hurry. So all dialogs and warnings are facing me while I’m in a hurry and I just want them to disappear. If instead, I know of those things in advance, I will have time to ask for a new key or search for the correct key for a particular recipient.

• Here you see a sample of creating a message to several recipients after our improvements.

=> ↺ KaOS 2022.10

• It is with great pleasure to present to you the October release of a new stable ISO.

• Many changes have been implemented to the installer Calamares in the last few months, so it is fitting to start with listing all that is new or has changed. It is now possible to do a typical install entirely from a touchpad or mouse, a keyboard is no longer needed. A virtual keyboard has been implemented for those modules that need text input.

• For those who prefer PulseAudio over Pipewire, a module has been added (KaOS only), that gives users the option to select which sound server they prefer (with Pipewire set as default).

• Dracut is the new default for the initramfs image creation (mkinitcpio is no longer in use for new installs). To accommodate that change, the Dracut module in Calamares had to be adjusted, so it now supports version-less kernels.

=> ↺ Akademy Awards 2022

• As one of the three winners of the KDE Akademy Awards in 2021 (Alexander Semke for Best Application; Paul Brown for Best Non-Application; me for Jury Award), it fell to me and the other winners to decide upon winners for this year’s Akademy. Alexander couldn’t make it to the event, so Paul and I got up on stage. Congratulations Jasem, Harald and Aniqa!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ #64 Everything Green Again! – This Week in GNOME

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 30 to October 07.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ EasyOS 4.4.1 released

• Version 4.4.1 has put in place improvements for running apps in containers, plus various small fixes and enhancements.

=> ↺ EasyOS Dunfell-series 4.4.1

• EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure.

• Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs.

• EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64.

• The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021.

• The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021.

• Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent.

• The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications.

• The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.

=> ↺ Considering future directions for EasyOS

• I have decided to release EasyOS 4.4.1 in a day or two, as contemplating major changes that may break things. One major change is a move away from running as the root user. Remember “fido”?

• [...]

• User ‘fido’ never got any traction, and has just about been forgotten. I am considering bringing back user fido, but doing it differently. This proposed fido will (maybe) have root privileges — if go for giving fido full root access, it will be just like before, except apps that object to running as root will no longer complain.

• And, fido may have some restrictions, that you can decide on in a menu in the initrd at bootup. In other words, may back off from full root privileges.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ Lubuntu 22.10 Beta

• Today we are looking at Lubuntu 22.10 Beta. It comes with LXQt 1.1.0, Linux kernel 5.19, and uses about 400-500MB of ram when idling.

=> ↺ Lubuntu 22.10 Beta Run Through – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at Lubuntu 22.10 Beta.

BSD

=> ↺ BSD Now: 475 Prompt Injection Attacks

• The first link and the title for this week’s BSD Now doesn’t have anything to do with BSD as far as I know, but I think it’s funny.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

=> ↺ Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-40 – Fedora Community Blog

• 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.

=> ↺ CPE Weekly Update – Week 40 2022 – Fedora Community Blog

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

• We provide you both infographics and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

=> ↺ Telecompaper: NEC selects Red Hat OpenShift as preferred container platform for mission-critical applications

=> ↺ Red Hat CEO on OpenShift roadmap, competitive play

• Red Hat’s newly minted CEO Matt Hicks talks up OpenShift’s roadmap, the competition with VMware and opportunities in the Asia-Pacific region.

=> ↺ 3 ways CIOs can empower their teams during uncertainty

• The role of the CIO has evolved from technology decision-maker and IT gatekeeper to change agent and strategic business partner, influencing decisions that impact client and customer-facing business initiatives. In addition to serving as technology experts who lead the traditional enterprise IT organization, CIOs now lead collaborative, cross-functional initiatives that drive business impact.

• Additionally, CIOs must be change leaders, driving innovation and business agility at scale. In times of economic volatility, CIOs, more than ever, are tasked with helping organizations ride out the storm.

=> ↺ Moving from apt to dnf package management

• A package manager makes it simple to install GNU/Linux applications on a local computer. Before package management became commonplace, installing applications was a tedious, error-prone undertaking. The ease a package manager brings to installing an application on a Linux computer has been a major factor contributing to the widespread adoption of Linux as a mainstream operating system for both business and home users.

=> ↺ What’s inside an RPM .repo file?

• The previous article in this series, How does RPM package discovery work?, described how the RPM package management technology discovers and installs an .rpm package on a local computer running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or CentOS Stream operating system. In that article, you learned that the .repo files stored in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory of the local machine play a critical role in discovering, installing, and managing RPM packages.

• This article goes to the next level of detail to describe the format specified for a .repo file.

• This article describes not only the format specification for a .repo file but also describes the logic that’s applied to a .repo file when managing RPM packages on a given machine. But, before delving in, let’s review how RPM discovers a package on the internet and then installs it.

=> ↺ IBM integrates Red Hat storage for hybrid cloud

• IBM storage has integrated Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and Ceph into its new hybrid cloud data storage offering. Analysts said the move is good for both vendors.

=> ↺ IBM merges its data storage offerings with Red Hat’s OpenShift and Ceph

• IBM Corp. is making some big changes to its data storage services, announcing today that it will bring Red Hat Inc.’s storage products and associates under the “IBM Storage” umbrella. The aim, IBM said, is to deliver a more consistent application and data storage experience across on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

=> ↺ AnsibleFest 2022: Know before you go

• AnsibleFest 2022 is right around the corner, so it’s time to start preparing for your automation experience. Here you can find some ways to map out your time spent with us in Chicago on Oct. 18 – 19.

=> ↺ What is the Confidential Containers project?

• Confidential Containers (CoCo) is a new sandbox project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that enables cloud-native confidential computing by taking advantage of a variety of hardware platforms and technologies.

=> ↺ Pipelines for cloud-native network functions (CNFs) Part 3: Pipelines for multi-tenant end-to-end integrations

• In this article, I discuss how to use the outputs from the previous pipelines and combine them to achieve automation, consistency and reliability of Day 2 operations at scale.

• [...]

• When a new version of OpenShift has been accepted by the service provider’s lifecycle management pipelines, the end-to-end combination of applications and CNFs that have been accepted by the service provider’s onboarding pipelines need to be tested and validated. This is achieved using multi-tenant end-to-end integration pipelines, as depicted below. This pipeline illustrates the concept and is not intended to represent any final configuration or definition of this type of pipeline.

=> ↺ Open source incident response solutions

• Red Hat leads the tech industry’s cutting edge practices for the resolution of cybersecurity issues. Red Hat does this by providing relevant and accessible information and enabling the larger community to make well-informed decisions about security issues.

• As part of our continuing reviews, Red Hat saw the need to make public a formal incident response plan (IRP) to lead our incident response and vulnerability management. FedRAMP and other regulatory frameworks also require a formal, published IRP. It made sense that Red Hat should put forth the effort to make sure we thoroughly documented our incident response processes to cover our needs and to deliver a more systematic way to analyze and improve our vulnerability reports.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Free Ubuntu Subscriptions, Some Pause Open Source, New ’Undistro’

• Ubuntu Pro, the expanded security maintenance and compliance subscription, is now in public beta for data centers and workstations. Canonical will provide a free tier for personal and small-scale commercial use for up to five machines.

• Canonical on Wednesday announced the new program as part of the company’s community commitment and mission to make open source more easily consumable by everyone. Ubuntu Pro is available for every Ubuntu LTS from 16.04 LTS, and it is already in production for large-scale customers offering global services. Users can obtain a free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription.

• “Since we first launched Ubuntu LTS, with five years of free security coverage for the main OS, our enterprise customers have asked us to cover more and more of the wider open-source landscape under private commercial agreements,” according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Linux tries for the office desktop | ZDNET

• Linux runs the world, but it doesn’t run the traditional PC desktop — nor does it seem likely it ever will.

• But, that doesn’t mean the Linux desktop can’t play a major role on the office desktop. Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, is trying a new take on its popular Ubuntu desktop.

• One of these moves is the introduction of Ubuntu Pro beta. This is an expanded security take on the Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases.

=> ↺ What’s New in Ubuntu 22.10 ‘Kinetic Kudu’

• Canonical has released the beta build of Ubuntu 22.10, the next release of their Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ahead of its October 20, 2022 release, we check out the Kinetic Kudu to see what’s new.

• The Kinetic Kudu is an interim release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution produced by Canonical and the Ubuntu community. Interim releases are the builds—usually three of them—that come out at six-month intervals between the Long Term Support versions. LTS versions are released in April every two years. The last LTS build was 22.04, the Jammy Jellyfish. 22.10 is the first interim build since then.

• Commercial or mission-critical installations tend to move from LTS build to LTS build, because they prioritize stability and long-term support over the newest visual tweaks and the latest round of upgraded applications. For the more casual user in a domestic setting, each build is a chance to move to a new kernel, new applications, and new eye candy. The new kernel and applications will always have security fixes, so that’s worth the price of admission in itself.

=> ↺ The State of IoT – September 2022 | Ubuntu

• Smart homes, automotive and RISC-V took the headlines, with several announcements and press releases in each industry. Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the most prominent news across the IoT landscape from the last month.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Librem 5- Device Overview – Purism

• Librem 5 phones are for those who care about their digital security and the use of free and open source software. Our team has designed the phone so that the parts are easily repairable and you can keep using the same phone for a longer time. Let’s go through the hardware of the phone.

=> ↺ This gorgeous headboard simulates sunrises | Arduino Blog

• The world would be a much better place if everyone could wake according to their own natural circadian rhythm and natural sunlight peeking through their window. But the world doesn’t work like that and many people have to force themselves awake. That’s especially true for people who don’t have conventional work schedules and this gorgeous Artificial Sunrise Headboard gives them a pleasant wakeup call.

• Consider how our ancestors woke up before artificial lighting came along and humanity was still nomadic, because we haven’t evolved much since then. As the sun started to rise, the sky would transition from black to dark blue and then continue to lighten over the course of an hour or two. That provided people with gradual stimulation to ease them from sleep into wakefulness, which stands in stark contrast to the sudden, blaring alarms that are common today. This headboard simulates the gradual sunrise and an integrated personal assistant brews coffee to give sleepers a little extra incentive to get out of bed.

=> ↺ James Burton is giving legs their snakes back | Arduino Blog

• James Bruton gave that title to his most recent video as a good-natured jab at Allen Pan’s project about “giving snakes there legs back.” In Pan’s video, he built a robotic exoskeleton to let snakes walk around on motorized legs. But as Bruton noted in his video intro, those legs didn’t look very snakelike. So Bruton created his own robot that walks around on more serpentine limbs.

• This robot’s six limbs each have three degrees of freedom (DoF), all of which are motor-driven. But unlike most robotic limb designs, these use “oblique swivel joint mechanisms.” That mouthful of a term means that each joint rotates on a plane offset at an angle relative to the preceding joint. While that arrangement isn’t suitable for many applications, the kinematics are interesting and the resulting movement does resemble the wriggling of a snake’s body as it slithers along.

=> ↺ Olimex ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo is a tiny RISC-V board with WiFi 4, Bluetooth 5.0, and a LiPo battery charger – CNX Software

• Olimex has just launched the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo board based on ESP32-C3 RISC-V wireless microcontroller offering WiFI 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, some I/Os, as well as USB and JTAG.

• As its name implies, the board can be powered by a LiPo battery and charged through a USB Type-C port. It offers up to 15 GPIO for expansion and comes with an ICSP connector in case you need to reflash or debug the bootloader through a JTAG interface.

=> ↺ Can you become the next Trombone Champ? | Arduino Blog

• The first Guitar Hero game hit shelves in 2005 and kickstarted the rhythm game revolution. While it wasn’t the first rhythm game, its inclusion of “realistic” guitar controllers changed the industry. It wasn’t long before competitor Rocksmith took things a step further and let players use real electric guitars. But guitars are so common; if you want to stand out, you go for the brass. That’s why Greig Stewart (AKA Theremin Hero) built this custom controller for the Trombone Champ game.

• Trombone Champ is currently enjoying viral attention thanks to its quirkiness. To play the game, the user drags their mouse cursor up and down to mimic moving a trombone’s slide and clicks their mouse to blow air. Like Guitar Hero and most other rhythm games, the goal is to hit the notes with the most accuracy possible. But Theremin Hero correctly surmised that moving a mouse is nothing like playing a real trombone, so he converted a cheap trombone kazoo toy into a controller for Trombone Champ.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Android 13′s themed icons don’t make sense

=> ↺ Samsung’s fourth Android 13 beta for Galaxy S22 now rolling out

=> ↺ Motorola Android 12 update and bugs tracker (cont.updated)

=> ↺ Stable OxygenOS 12 update goes live for the OnePlus 7 and 7T series

=> ↺ How To Get New Pixel Ringtones On Your Android Phone?

=> ↺ How to record your screen on Android for free | TechRadar

=> ↺ How to control your Android phone from Galaxy Watch 4

=> ↺ Google Pixel Watch Hands-On: Fitbit Makes Its Android Watch Debut – CNET

=> ↺ India among countries with most Android malware, ‘GB WhatsApp’ among responsible apps: ESET report | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ Android Auto weather icon disappears for some, again

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Plop Boot Manager boots PCs off media they can’t start from • The Register

• Elmar Hanlhofer’s Plop Boot Managers are a small family of tiny tools to enable booting from media that a computer can’t usually boot from.

• Before you point out that all modern computers can boot from USB – the boot managers also work well in virtual machines, where USB boot support is still a lot rarer. Yes, of course, you can virtually “insert” an ISO file into your VM’s virtual CD-ROM, but if you want to boot a VM from a real physical USB key, it’s not so easy.

• The programs are tiny: they fit onto a single floppy disk (even a 720kB one), and the ISO image is about half a megabyte.

• [...]

• The original Plop Boot Manager, currently on version 5.15, and the new, still in development, PBM6 are freeware, but they’re not open source. Saying that, though, both are free to use for both personal and commercial purposes. They also have a Linux-only relative, PlopKexec, which is fully open source.

=> ↺ Compare container orchestrators Apache Mesos vs. Kubernetes

• Exploring options for container orchestration? Kubernetes’ popularity doesn’t mean it’s always the best choice. Discover the tradeoffs and use cases of Mesos vs. Kubernetes.

=> ↺ OpenStack ‘SLURP’ ends requirement for six-monthly upgrades • The Register

• OpenStack has completed an alphabet’s worthy of releases, with the project on Wednesday issuing “Zed” – the 26th version of the open-source cloud stack and also adding an optional slower upgrade cadence.

• The stack’s 41 sub-projects – from adjutant to zun – each publish release notes and there are too many changes to mention or summarise.

• The OpenStack project has chosen to highlight the addition of OAuth 2.0 to the Keystone authentication service, Cinder now allowing users to transfer encrypted volumes across projects, and support for Xilinx FPGAs in the Cyborg accelerator support framework. The Nova VM-wrangler can now support IOMMU, which means VMs get direct access to memory if needed.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Fish shell now has underscore as a number separator (my feature request)

• In November 2021 I filed a feature request for the fish shell to add underscore as a thousand separator in numbers. My feature request has been implemented and is available in fish 3.5.0, released 16 June 2022.

=> ↺ The deep, the shallow and the ugly (classes) | lichtkind [blogs.perl.org]

• Previously I showed a bit of the API of my new module Graphics::Toolkit::Color. This time I want to mention some bits about the code base, which it to what i tried to say before (sorry for the long delay i hope I can complete the series).

• From technical point I was willingly cutting some corners – but what I want to talk about is the software engineering angle of good code.

• [...]

• Graphics::Toolkit::Color are in reality 3 modules. One is handling the low level operations, value like range checking, value conversion, averaging and so on. This is about single or few numbers and it does not have to be object oriented. Another module is handling the color names. I mean even the list of constants is so long it should not be intermingled with too much other code of the file gets hard to navigate. That is why the class sitting on top both packages can be rather concise and yet is handling a lot of complexity.

• I know to some of you this all is like explaining how to use the bathroom. But i think its worth to explicitly thinking about to write code we enjoy to work with even next year. And it’s also about to get the theory straight behind what we are doing and not get fooled by by buzz words.

=> ↺ OpenGL fixed in containers

• I figured out how to get openGL working in containers; achieved by mount-binding /dev/dri on /dev/dri inside the container. This is now a checkbox “3D graphics”…

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rblpapi 0.3.14: Updates and Extensions

• Version 0.3.14 of the Rblpapi package arrived on CRAN earlier today. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is required).

• This is the fourteenth release since the package first appeared on CRAN in 2016. It comprises a nice PR from Robert Harlow extending support to B-PIPE authentication (for those who have it) along with a few fixes made since the last release in January. The last one provided from a kind assist by Tomas Kalibera who pointed out how to overcome an absolute ‘rpath’ dynamic linker instruction (and as I noticed noticed something I already did in another package – ah well) so that we no longer require StagedInstall: yes.

=> ↺ Learn programming at Open Jam 2022 | Opensource.com

• Open Jam game jam is happening from October 28 to November 9 this year. Every year for the past several years, programmers from around the globe build open source video games, and then play and rate one another’s games. Just for fun.

• Open Jam is a “game jam,” which is a casual way to inspire programmers of all skill levels to focus on a just-for-fun project for a concentrated period of time. It promotes open source games as well as open source game creation tools. While participants aren’t required to use open source tools to create their game, the games themselves must bear an open license, and you literally get extra points during the scoring round for using open source tools.

• Another important aspect of the jam, for me, is that it promotes alternate win conditions, but not in the way you might think.

=> ↺ Atom vs Sublime: Most Significant Differences You Should Know

• Source code editors are crucial when it comes to real-time programming jobs. They allow users to code with their desired features and build the editor as they go on working. Atom and Sublime Text are two such editors we know of, so if you are looking to compare Atom vs Sublime Text, you’re in just the right place.

=> ↺ Qt for Android Automotive 6.2.6

• We are happy to announce that the latest patch release on Qt for Android Automotive is available for commercial Qt users, based on the latest LTS Qt 6.2.6.

=> ↺ 8 Tips for Improving UX with Qt’s Digital Advertising Platform

• Doesn’t everyone just hate ads? You know the feeling when you’re watching a video or using an application and the irritating advert interrupts you? It’s also completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with your interests!

=> ↺ Qt Safe Renderer Monitor: Debugging the Safety Application

• The Qt Safe Renderer (QSR) is our solution for creating user interfaces (UI) for safety-critical systems. Since 2017 the Qt Safe Renderer has been used by multiple customers and certified for different functional safety standards. With the upcoming version 2.0, we are introducing a new approach for validating the correct rendering of safety-critical information – the Monitor.

=> ↺ GrapesJS is A Developer-friendly Open Source Rrich Web Page Builder

• GrapesJS is an open-source, multipurpose, Web Builder Framework which combines different tools and features with the goal to help you (or users of your application) to build HTML templates without any knowledge of coding.

• It comes with dozens of handy feature that can be used to build a rich web pages, newsletter, landing pages, marketing and informative reports.

• It supports page layouts, blocks, and offers developers with a rich API set to add their own component.

=> ↺ [Old] First make the change easy, then make the easy change

• This quote is from Kent Beck, a software developer and the creator of the extreme programming methodology.

• Refactoring code can be a challenge. Software projects tend to grow with time. If left unchecked they can become unruly and hard to reason about. Spaghetti code is a term that’s never too far from such a mess.

• In a way, this quote is saying “first do what you should have always been doing; being organized” and “then do what you came here to do in the first place (add a feature, fix a bug).”

C/C++

=> ↺ Stupid RCU Tricks: CPP Summit Presentation: paulmck — LiveJournal

• I had the privilege of presenting Unraveling Fence & RCU Mysteries (C++ Concurrency Fundamentals) to the CPP Summit. As the title suggests, this covered RCU from a C++ viewpoint.

=> ↺ Posix Mutex in C

• “The usage of Mutex is the method for preventing race situations that is most frequently used. Mutex, which refers to mutual exclusion, essentially gives us a deadbolt lock that stops several users from simultaneously accessing and modifying the crucial data. Whenever multiple or more processes employ the same process as their medium for finishing their processing, deadlock must be avoided. The main subject of today’s discussion will be using the Posix Mutex function to avoid deadlock with different methods with C language in Ubuntu 20.04 system. Before doing anything with your code snippets, we should install the “gcc” compiler.”

=> ↺ Fsync System Call in C

• “You may have heard a lot about the C language’s basic structure and its simplicity because most developers tend to learn it first before learning any other language. It has a Fsync() system call or function that flushes (passes) all the updates to the disk to reflect the changes made to a file. Also, the fsync function stops the process of flush until all the updates taking place by several processes on a single file got done, and then the flush would happen using the fsync() function call. This article will demonstrate the working of the fsync() function in the C language.

• Any system in which you have been working or installed your coding environment must be upgraded and updated so that the new errors can be encountered well, and we can avoid any inconvenience. Therefore, it’s recommended to update your system, especially the Linux system, before and after any installations and configurations. Thus, the “apt” utility is the best to use for updating with “sudo” rights on the console. If it asks for your permission by requesting a password, you have to provide it. In a moment of seconds, your system will be updated.”

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ Using bash options to change the behavior of scripts | Network World

• Bash provides a large number of options that can be used to control the behavior of bash scripts. This post examines some of the more useful ones and explains how to display which options are in use and which are not.

=> ↺ Bash 09 – Conclusion | Linux.org

• Over the last eight articles, we have covered all the information for making Bash scripts. The rest is up to you.

• In this article, I hope to go over some concepts again and help you set up a helpful script.

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ NFS vs SMB vs CIFS: File storage protocols defined

• We take a close look at NFS and SMB – the key file storage access protocols – and weigh up their pros, cons and suitability to differing datacentre environments

Leftovers

=> ↺ An end to doomerism – Big Think

Hardware

=> ↺ UP Element i12 Edge embedded computer is equipped with Intel’s NUC 12 Compute Element – CNX Software

• AAEON’s UP Bridge the Gap has announced the UP Element i12 Edge fanless embedded computer based on the Intel NUC 12 Compute Element and designed for the autonomous mobile robot (AMR) and industrial automation markets.

• The computer is fitted with NUC 12 Compute Element equipped with 12th generation Alder Lake hybrid processor from Celeron 7350 to Intel Core i7-1255U hybrid processor, supports up to 32GB LPDDR5 memory, NVMe support, offers three Ethernet ports including one 2.5GbE, several USB ports, two RS232/422/485 interfaces, a DIO header, and more.

=> ↺ Datacenter Will Be AMD’s Largest – And Most Profitable – Business

• Two and a half years into the global coronavirus pandemic we all have upgraded our home IT infrastructure. And after several fibrillatory interest rate shocks by the major governments to try to curb inflation in the world economy, spending on PCs has consequently taken a nose dive. And a glut of back-generation GPUs on the market as cryptocurrency mining changes algorithms is going to also hurt those who make datacenter CPUs and GPUs.

• Nvidia took its financial hits back in August, with gaming GPU sales falling $1.58 billion sequentially to just over $2 billion in its second quarter of fiscal 2023 ended in early May, and luckily Nvidia does not have a CPU business aimed at PCs or else it would have taken a double whammy back them and probably for a few more quarters as inventories burn down. AMD is not so fortunate, in that it sells both CPUs and GPUs for client devices, but like Nvidia, it is fortunate in that it has a growing and vibrant datacenter business that counterbalances the PC crash to a certain extent.

=> ↺ The ‘Great Decline’ of High Capacity Disk Drive Sales – Random [Tech] Stuff

• Blocks & Files just published an interesting piece showcasing how fewer large capacity Hard Disk Drives (HDD) are being shipped than last year (let alone, last quarter) and by a significant amount. About 1/5 less HDDs are being shipped today, than they were last year around the same time. This is significant. Additional data from the top HDD manufacturers also show that the larger the capacity, the fewer the sales. I guess that would make total sense if your digital footprint hasn’t grown or needed to scale with hard drive replacements. What adds to this is the fact that prices are going down with the larger capacity NVMe drives. This gives HDD technologies a bit of competition. Why settle for just capacity when you can also get the performance with it?

• Although, this has and continues to raise the same key concern that I have always had: fault tolerance. I shared some of those concerns back in May when writing about the Nimbus Forever Lasting SSD. The larger the drive, the more risk of failure and without the proper measures in place to tolerate any and all sorts of failures, you run the risk of losing all of your data. That risk is even higher with rotational HDD media (more movable components).

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ Oil giant Shell lends support to LF Energy in its open source power networks push

• Open source community LF Energy is continuing to go from strength-to-strength as its push to transform the way power networks operate gathers pace

Security

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 224 released

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 224. This version includes the following changes:

=> ↺ iTWire – New firm aims to help Huawei avoid US sanctions: claim

• A chip start-up known as Pengxinwei IC Manufacturing based in Shenzhen is allegedly aiming to help Huawei Technologies get around American sanctions that have crippled its smartphone business, the Bloomberg news agency claims.

• The start-up is run by a former Huawei employee, Bloomberg said on Thursday, adding that the firm was receiving support from Huawei to order chipmaking gear which it hopes to obtain by the first half of 2023.

• However, as Bloomberg admitted, Pengxinwei had not yet got off the ground, making a great deal of its extremely lengthy report speculative.

=> ↺ Hackers exploiting unpatched RCE bug in Zimbra Collaboration Suite

• Hackers are actively exploiting an unpatched remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS), a widely deployed web client and email server.

=> ↺ Researchers Warn of Unpatched, Actively Exploited Zimbra Flaw | Decipher

• A critical-severity, remote code execution vulnerability in Zimbra’s enterprise collaboration software and email platform is being actively exploited, with no patch currently available for the issue, warn researchers.

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (dbus, isc-dhcp, and strongswan), Fedora (booth, php, php-twig, php-twig2, and php-twig3), Oracle (expat, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and squid), Red Hat (expat, openvswitch2.11, and squid), Scientific Linux (expat and squid), SUSE (exiv2, LibVNCServer, postgresql-jdbc, protobuf, python-PyJWT, python3, slurm, squid, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (libreoffice).

=> ↺ FBI and CISA Publish a PSA on Information Manipulation Tactics for 2022 Midterm Elections

• The PSA also describes the extensive safeguards in place to protect election infrastructure and includes recommendations to assist the public in understanding how to find trustworthy sources of election-related information.

=> ↺ Spectro Cloud Strengthens Kubernetes Security at the Network Edge

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Spyware Maker Intellexa Sued by Journalist – Schneier on Security

• The Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis was spied on by his own government, with a commercial spyware product called “Predator.” That product is sold by a company in North Macedonia called Cytrox, which is in turn owned by an Israeli company called Intellexa.

=> ↺ Thanasis Koukakis Sues Intellexa Over Predator Spyware

• A Greek financial journalist is one of several who believe they have been targeted for surveillance by the nation’s government with the help of Intellexa.

=> ↺ Criminal Allegations Against Israeli-linked Spyware, Ex-intel Commander in Greek Hacking Scandal – Security, Cyber – Aviation – Haaretz.com

• Investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis was under surveillance by Greece. Now he’s decided to take Intellexa, the firm behind the Predator spyware allegedly used against him, and its owners to court

=> ↺ TikTok Tracks You Across the Web, Even If You Don’t Use App – Consumer Reports

=> ↺ Biden signs Executive Order for EU-US data transfer deal: privacy and surveillance reforms missing – Access Now

• Today, US President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order on Enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities, which paves way for a new EU-US data transfer deal. But this document alone is not sufficient to protect privacy and reform disproportionate US surveillance programmes, leaving the future of the deal in limbo.

• “This Executive Order is a positive yet insufficient step to ensure that any future EU-US data transfer deal effectively protects people’s rights, and doesn’t end up invalidated by the EU’s highest court,” said Estelle Masse, Global Data Protection Lead at Access Now. “Access Now appreciates the work done to bring more clarity on US safeguards, but the measures signed today are not sufficient to guarantee an effective right to remedy and to put limitations to the far-reaching scope of US surveillance.”

• Officials in the EU have been expecting this Executive Order to finalise the drafting and ratification process for the future data deal sometime early next year.

• The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down the previous data deals — the Privacy Shield in 2020 and the EU-US Safe Harbour in 2015 — because US authorities’ disproportionate data access and surveillance practices violate EU rights to data protection and privacy. The CJEU also found that the US failed to provide people in the EU with an effective remedy.

Finance

=> ↺ Since When Does the IMF Care About Inequality? – The Atlantic

• Last Thursday, the International Monetary Fund spooked the markets and surprised the commentariat by chiding the U.K. Conservative government for fiscal irresponsibility. The shock was palpable. For the IMF to criticize the government of a major Western economy was a little like the janitor scolding the landlord for putting the building’s assessed value at risk. That sense of a reversal of the usual order of things was all the sharper because, lest we forget, it was Britain’s Tories, under Margaret Thatcher’s steely leadership, who wrote the book on fiscal probity as the bedrock of neoliberalism. The IMF spent more than four decades inflicting that orthodoxy upon hapless governments the world over.

• As if in a bid to amplify the stir it knew it would make, the IMF’s communiqué went so far as to censure the British government for introducing large tax cuts (now partially canceled after the IMF intervention), because they would mainly “benefit high-income earners” and “likely increase inequality.” Tories loyal to Britain’s beleaguered new prime minister, Liz Truss; America’s feistier Republicans; international economic pundits; and even some of my comrades on the left were briefly united by a common puzzlement: Since when did the IMF oppose greater inequality? One would be hard-pressed to identify a single IMF “structural adjustment program”—ask Argentina, South Korea, Ireland, or Greece (where I was once a finance minister who had to negotiate with the IMF) about the strings attached to its loans—that had not increased inequality. Had the fund’s hard-nosed bureaucrats enjoyed a road-to-Damascus moment?

• [...]

• A year later, in a telephone conversation among senior IMF staff published by WikiLeaks, its European chief told a colleague that the IMF should confront the German chancellor…

=> ↺ “FIRE Statement on Free Speech and Online Payment Processors”

• In 2010, WikiLeaks began disclosing the contents of diplomatic cables, leading government officials to criticize credit card companies for allowing people to donate to the organization. Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal soon suspended WikiLeaks’ accounts.

=> ↺ See how much Oracle’s top executives made in 2022

• Larry Ellison’s total compensation grew by about 12 times the amount seen the year prior.

=> ↺ Fake meat stocks in the toilet and layoffs at Impossible and Beyond. | BaronHK’s Rants

• “Creepy Uncle Bill” Gates is heavily invested in both companies and was perplexed at the market rejection of both products. He took to his bribed/friendly media a while back to say that states were passing laws that prevented them from calling these products “beef” (because they’re not beef, and calling it beef is a form of fraud). So now, they have to call it “Plant Based Ground” on the package.

• He said that they sort of want to “force us to call it lab garbage”, which is basically what the stuff is.

• Plants are healthy. Beyond and Impossible are not.

• To make it taste better, they salt the crap out of it and do things to give it an unhealthy lipid profile, to the point where, from a health standpoint, you’re better off eating beef. Which obviously tastes like beef. Even if they made the fake stuff taste like beef, it would still be an unnatural highly processed junk food.

• The companies generally tend to charge about $9 per pound for “Plant Based Ground” lab garbage, whereas beef costs half that, for the decent stuff.

• Bill has some big problems.

• He invested heavily in these things, even though he admits that he doesn’t eat them himself. Of course not. Why would he? He’s so concerned about climate change that he has 9 private jets and it’s usually just him flying on them, and his house is 50 times bigger than the space he needs, especially now that his wife Melinda divorced him due to being embarrassed by his association with Jeffery Epstein.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ We the People Are All in This Together – YES! Magazine

• The purpose of human institutions is to secure the well-being of people and Earth. Despite our differences, all of Earth’s people share a common destiny that depends on our learning to live together with mutual commitment to a foundational truth recognized by our early ancestors: “I am because you are.” South Africans call it ubuntu.

• Now, however, we get near-daily reminders of the failure of our institutions to uphold that truth. Ignoring ubuntu, they pit us against each other in a deadly competition to dominate and exploit both the planet and our neighbors.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Quitting tactics

• It is easy to get addicted to things; quitting is a bitch. And it feels awful to do something you know you shouldn’t, be it using some substance, social media, eating meat, destructive behavior, or whatever.

• The human brain is designed to optimize risk/reward behaviors, but it has bugs. The same circuitry that helps you learn, gets you hooked on stupid things, like checking how many ‘likes’ your post got or whipping out your phone every 30 seconds. When substances are involved, the results may devastating. But there may be ways to gamify quitting, by metaprogramming the addiction bug into a tool.

=> ↺ SpellBinding: AEMNRVU Wordo: GOEST

=> ↺ Style

• Consider some of this next time you are operating machinery like a computer. Consider how computers discipline their operators and what that entails for the world at large.

=> ↺ Sometimes I just feel like such a loser

• I quit my job and after one year I’m unhappy, poorer and undisciplined

=> ↺ Personal Training

• I had my first workout with my new personal trainer yesterday. It went really well. Our session began with a bit of an assessment to record my baselines and to help her get an idea of how my body moves and behaves. She helped identify some of my areas of weakness and we’re going to work on improving them together, which I am pretty stoked about, honestly. We used the rest of our time to get a sweaty full body workout in. I am aching in its aftermath today.

Politics

=> ↺ If only teaching paid more than it does …

• I was in a nearly three hour meeting today (second of three), doing what is called a “transfer of knowledge.” I’m the only developer left on my team who actually knows how “Project: Wolowizard [1],” “Project: Sippy-Cup [2],” “Project: Lumbergh [3],” “Project: Cleese [4]” and “Project: Seymore [5]” all fit together in production (even if I don’t fully understand all the business logic implemented by “Project: Lumbergh”). So I spent my time mostly talking and answering questions from the other developers, including the team leader. Bunny was concerned that it might lead to me being let go, but just for my own sanity (and because plenty of other people at The Corporation have told our Corporate Overlords that under no condition should I be let go) I decided not to sink into cynical dispair and treat it for what it is—getting some other developers up to speed on the various components.

Technical

Science

=> ↺ Pocket calculator

• I’ve bought a pocket calculator / scientific calculator to use instead of relying on a computer or smartphone, it’s a refreshing experience.

• Being solar-powered helps as I can use it in extreme situations in which you’d need a calculator.. which are not that many, but who knows. The battery alone resists three years if you’d use it one hour per day which is quite something, this is if you’d have no light which is not the case unless we go into the next ice age in the upcoming months. Has a few modes which I still have to figure out.

=> ↺ Binocular observation of Jupiter and the moon

• When I was young, I used to be quite into astronomy (I was into a lot of things before computing came along and hypnotised me to the exclusion of much else for a big chunk of my life which I’ll never get back). I never owned a telescope or even, as far as I recall, binoculars, and to be honest I’m not sure I even felt the need. I grew up somewhere moderately remote, where light pollution wasn’t really an issue, so you could just go outside and look up on a clear night and behold the Milky Way whenever you felt like it. Shooting stars and satellites were things you could easily spot multiple times on any given night. I had one of those little rotating cardboard wheel star chart things, and I learned my way around the sky pretty well and spotted plenty of planets. I guess maybe all of this is more what you would call “stargazing” rather than amateur astronomy per se, although maybe that’s a bogus and snobbish distinction to draw. I guess it took a while even after the internet and computing appeared in my life for this interest to completely wane, I remember taking a degree of geeky pride in making the objectively unwise decision to interrupt my sleep at some ungodly hour the night before my final high school physics exam in order to watch a meteor shower (I still did fine). And I was even in my university’s astronomy club, although to be honest that was mostly just a social club for hypernerds and any kind of genuine astronomy-based event was outnumbered more than ten to one by quiz nights, video nights, fundraising BBQs, etc. Good times, to be sure, but I spent more time staring at the skies by myself as a kid. Until very recently, it had been definitely over a decade since I’d done anything like any of the above.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Re: Gemini is not decentralized

=> ↺ Making my Blog Mobile-Friendly

• In 2015 I remade my blog to consist of static HTML and CSS files. I made the body of the page a single column of fixed width. (I chose the width to get the same line lengths as books and articles.) The margins to the left and right were set to fill out all the extra space, resuling in a centered column. My hope was that this would automatically make my blog look good in mobile browsers. Instead I found that the page seemed to be rendered with very wide margins, and that the page was then zoomed-out so that the whole width was visible, which in turn resulted in the text being too small to read.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

=> Techrights

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