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● 11.06.22

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● Links 06/11/2022: Mutt 2.2.8 and PGroonga 2.4.1

Posted in News Roundup at 1:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #23 – Godot foundation, Mozilla ventures, Rust 1.65, Linux Lite 6.2, – other releases | FOSS Weekly

• Here is everything that has happened in the open source world this week. Lots of big announcements and interesting releases.

=> ↺ Alibaba Cloud debuts cloud-powered laptop

• Users will also get to run multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux and Android, on the same device simultaneously.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Sourcehut Takes A Stand Against Cryptocurrency – Invidious

• Drew Devault is kind of a devisive figure in the FOSS world and to keep that trend going he’s decided to take a stand against cryptocurrency and blockchains by banning them from Sourcehut

=> ↺ Video: Intel CEO and Linus Torvalds Talk | www.montanalinux.org

• We don’t get to see Linus talking much these days but here’s a recent interview.

=> ↺ My laptop broke, Steam Deck was there for me! – Invidious

=> ↺ NCSC Is Scanning Every Machine in the UK’s Internet – Invidious

• In this video I discuss the National Cyber Security Centre Scanning Made Easy program where they are doing automatic scans of internet facing devices in the UK for software vulnerabilities and how you can do these same scans yourself using NMAP scripts.

=> ↺ Using Vim with Linux Commands – Invidious

• Vim has the ability to run system commands. In this video I’ll explain how you can use this feature to sort your text, apply filters. Compute lines and run Python expressions all in Vim.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Results of requested backlight testing for 6.1 – Hans’ hacking log — LiveJournal

• I have received quite a few test reports in response to my previous blog post. Many thanks to everyone who has run the tests and send me their results!

• These tests show that as a result of the current 6.1 changes quite a few laptop models will end up with an empty “/sys/class/backlight”, breaking users ability to control their laptop panel’s brightness.

=> ↺ Second request for Linux backlight testing for changes planned for 6.2 – Hans’ hacking log — LiveJournal

• As mentioned in my previous blog post, I have written a new patch series for 6.2 to try to avoid having multiple entries in /sys/class/backlight for a single panel again.

• This new series might cause regressions on a different set of even older laptop models then the one affected by the 6.1 backlight work. So I’m again looking for people willing to run a few quick tests.

=> ↺ Short Topix: Linux Kernel 5.19.12 Code Could Permanently Damage Some Laptop Screens

• Chaos, a new malware written in the Go language, is causing havoc. Chaos is a cryptocurrency miner and DDoS piece of malware with backdoor capabilities, according to an article at TechRepublic. It is written for both Windows and Linux. Malware authors are using Go to write the code for the malware, since it is more difficult for security researchers to analyze.

• Facebook is warning one million users that their account credentials may have been compromised by apps downloaded from the Apple and Alphabet software stores, according to an article from the Seattle Times. Meta (the parent company of Facebook) identified more than 400 malicious apps that target users to steal their login information. Apple has removed 45 of the problem apps, while Google removed all of the apps in question. The apps disguise themselves as photo editors, mobile games, or health trackers.

• [...]

• According to a recent article on Ars Technica, Linux kernel 5.19.12 has the potential to damage certain laptop screens. Users of laptops that used Intel GPUs started complaining that their laptop screens would rapidly flicker after updating to the 5.19.12 kernel.

• Intel engineers took a look at log files and discovered some bogus panel power sequencing delays, which were found to be responsible for the rapid flashing of the displays. They recommended immediately reverting the changes that caused the issue, and that people using laptops with Intel GPUs avoid using the 5.19.12 kernel, even if they didn’t experience the display flashing.

• One day later, kernel 5.19.13 was released without the screen flashing issue.

• Even though kernel 5.19.12 is behind most of us now (the most recent Linux kernel in the PCLinuxOS repository at the time of the writing of this article is 6.0.6), it’s reassuring that such issues as these get addressed so, so quickly, and in such a public manner. You would NEVER see this swift of a response from the “commercial” operating system vendors! And, because the “commercial” operating system vendors are close-sourced, much of the discussion and “fixes” would occur behind closed doors, away from the watchful eyes of the end users.

• It makes you proud to be a Linux user!

Applications

=> ↺ This tool adds current Weather in Top-Bar Clock in Ubuntu 22.04 | UbuntuHandbook

• There are quite a few weather applications for Linux desktop. GNOME, the default desktop environment for Ubuntu, Fedora, and some other Linux, also has a core weather application.

• With the core weather app, user can either open the app window to get current weather condition, hourly and daily forecast, or open the clock menu to see the weather forecast for next hours.

=> ↺ Mutt 2.2.8 was released on November 5, 2022

• Mutt 2.2.8 was released on November 5, 2022. This is a bug-fix release, fixing a possible crash when using GPGME to view an application/pgp key block. It also makes some changes to resizing and window size logic, and enables batch-mode IMAP Fcc’ing. See the UPDATING file for more details.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to Use diff to Compare Text Files in the Linux Terminal

• diff is a standard command-line Linux utility that lets you compare the differences between two files. Here’s how you can use it to your advantage.

• Have you ever had two similar files and wondered which parts are different? Are you writing code and trying to figure out how to blend in changes that you or some other programmer made? There’s a standard Linux utility called “diff” that will help.

=> ↺ How to Install FreeOffice on Debian 11/10/Sid

• FreeOffice is a free, open-source office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet application, and presentation program. The suite is compatible with Microsoft Office, making it an ideal choice for users who want an alternative to expensive proprietary software. FreeOffice offers all the features of a mainstream office suite, including support for complex documents, multimedia elements, and more. The following tutorial will teach you how to easily install the office suite using the command line terminal on Debian Bullseye, Buster, and Sid with the SoftMaker repository.

=> ↺ Workaround for creating bootable FAT partition for Beagle Bone / AM335x on recent distros

• On recent GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 22.04 and 22.10, you may hit an issue creating a bootable FAT partition for embedded boards, at least with the TI AM335x processor, such as the 32 bit Beagle Bone boards.

=> ↺ Docker interview questions for developers

=> ↺ PDF Part Two: Editing The Universal Document

• Before we get too into talking about how to edit PDF files, I need to talk about two more ways to create PDF files. A post by PCLinuxOS forum member dm+ showed me a “new” (to me, anyway) way to create a PDF file, which then reminded me of yet another way to create a PDF file that I had tried several years ago, but couldn’t satisfactorily nor reliably get it to create a PDF file.

• Granted, when I first tried the “second” way alluded to above (and couldn’t get it to work), I was a pretty green Linux noob. So, I abandoned it and pretty much forgot about it until I read dm+’s forum post. This time, with considerably more Linux “experience” under my belt, the “second” method worked, and works easily and reliably. So, it’s quite likely (as in, highly probable) that I didn’t have the command line parameters set appropriately when I made my first attempt.

• Both of these “new” methods of creating a PDF file are linked to using LibreOffice. If you have LibreOffice installed, then both of these methods are available for you to use.

• In the first method, dm+ points out that you can create a PDF file by running the following LibreOffice command at a command prompt to convert any file “understood” by LO to a PDF file.

• First, however, you will need to know which version of LO you have installed. To do that, open a terminal window, type “libre” (without the quotes) at a command line prompt, and hit the “Tab” key. Note the version of “libreoffice” that shows up. In his example, he uses “libreoffice7.3″ as his version of LO. On my home laptop, I’m still using LO 6.0, as indicated by the “libreoffice6.0″ that shows up on the command line. On my “travel” laptop, I have “libreoffice6.1″ installed. Don’t judge … I just don’t have a need to “update” LO very often. I feel safe (enough) in the “if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” approach. So, just replace “libreofficeX.X” in the command below with the version of LO that is installed on your computer. Also, keep in mind that whenever you DO update LO, you will have to slightly alter the command to reflect the newer version of LO that you have installed.

=> ↺ GIMP Tutorial: An Uncommon Fishbowl

• On the YouTube channel, Logos By Nick, he uses a light bulb image to make a fish bowl. It looked really fun, so let’s do something like it.

=> ↺ HTTP UEFI Boot with TianoCore libvirt – Lukáš Zapletal

• One of the new features in EFI 2.x is “HTTP Boot” also known as “UEFI HTTP Boot” or “UEFI Boot”. Let’s explore how you can use it in your environment, I will show everything on a Fedora server running KVM/QEMU with Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVFM) TianoCore implementation.

=> ↺ Convert File Names to Lowercase – Linux Nightly

• In Linux, file names are case-sensitive, so you might face situations where you want to change file names to lowercase. In general, it’s easier to work with files on the Linux command line that are entirely lowercase. In this tutorial, you will learn how to change file names to lowercase with Linux commands.

=> ↺ How to install Podman Desktop on Linux

• After a long time, Podman Desktop for Linux is now available. Now, yes, Podman continues to consolidate as the main alternative to Docker.

=> ↺ How to Record the Screen in Ubuntu

• If you recently moved to Ubuntu Linux and are looking for the easiest way to record the screen, well, this guide is for you. We have added detailed instructions on how to screen record in Ubuntu. You don’t even need to use any third-party apps anymore as the Gnome Desktop Shell comes with a native screen recorder. Along with that, we have included popular apps like SimpleScreenRecorder and OBS Studio in case you want more options to record the screen. So on that note, let’s go ahead and learn how to do screen recording in Ubuntu.

=> ↺ How to restore Trash can icon on Ubuntu 22.04 Desktop

• Restore the Trash can or Recycle bin icon if missing on your Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish Desktop using the command terminal.

• In Windows, the deleted files go in to Recycle bin in case later you want o restore them. Similarly, we have a bin in Ubuntu Linux known as a Trash can. The purpose of it is also the same, whenever we delete some files, it moved to this Trash can.

• Well, we are not comparing the Recycle bin and Trash can to each other instead we are here to know the command to restore the icon of it in Ubuntu 22.04.

• On this Linux instead of on the Desktop, you will have the Trash can icon again on the Dock only. However all users won’t like it, some of us might want it again on the right-side bottom.

• Well, there is an option in the Dock settings to show or hide the Trash can icon from the Dock but not for the Desktop.

• Hence, if you are not finding an option to show the Trash can icon on Ubuntu Desktop, then here is the tutorial for that.

=> ↺ Create a Local Git Repository on Linux with the Help of SSH – The New Stack

• Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you need to deploy a quick Git repository on a machine within your LAN? If you’re a developer, chances are pretty good this task has fallen into your lap on several occasions.

• Fortunately, you don’t really need to depend on a bunch of overly complicated software packages or third-party tools to make this happen. Sure, if you want a sweet GUI to make the lives of all those who will contribute to your development project considerably easier, you might turn to a platform like Gitea. But if you prefer the simplicity and ease of deployment that comes along with the command line, you’re going to want to give this method a go. It might not have all the bells and whistles of the web-based options but it does the job reliably and quickly.

• And so, how do you deploy this magical repository? With the help of git and SSH. Both of these tools are freely available to all Linux distributions, so you don’t have to worry about searching out or paying for the tools.

• Sound like a winner? I thought so. Let’s make it happen.

=> ↺ LibreOffice – how to edit – read-only content

=> ↺ 2 Ways to Install Google Chrome on Pop!_OS 22.04 | 20.04

• Google Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world, and for a good reason. It’s fast, feature-rich, and compatible with nearly every website and online service. And for Pop!_OS users, Chrome is an especially great choice. That’s because it’s faster than Firefox, the default browser installed on your desktop. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Google Chrome on your desktop using the command line terminal.

Games

=> ↺ 11 of the Best Game Boy Advance (GBA) Emulators for Android – Make Tech Easier

• The Game Boy Advance is one of the most popular portable game consoles of all time. Android smartphones take up such a large part of the market, that it’s almost inevitable that Android owners would take an interest in playing their old GBA favorites on their phones. The maturity of the Android platform means there are now a few good Android GBA emulators worth using. We’ve gathered the best of them for you here.

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ LXQt 1.2 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New

• LXQt 1.2.0 is still based on Qt 5.15, as this release includes many new features for the File Manager, Panel, QTerminal, and so on.

• LXQt is a free, open-source, lightweight, and user-friendly desktop environment built using Qt libraries. It consists of many small individual components like a panel, session manager, hotkey daemon, and more.

• It is an excellent choice if you require a low-resource, nearly fully-featured desktop environment. So, users looking for extreme performance in a desktop environment should consider LXQt.

• Today, nearly seven months after the previous release of LXQt 1.1, this lightweight desktop environment has surprised its users with the release of LXQt 1.2.0. So, let’s see what’s new.

=> ↺ Release LXQt 1.2.0 | LXQt

• The LXQt team announces the release of LXQt 1.2.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Dolphin Meeting at Barcelona – Felix Ernst

• Among my contributions towards KDE I am probably best known for becoming a dolphin maintainer recently. “Maintainers” are the people most responsible for something, and I share this responsibility with Méven Car these days.

• The plan was to have a dolphin meeting at Barcelona, so I set off.

=> ↺ Adriaan de Groot: I got some badges

• While reconstructing my blog archievs – something I do every now and then, dig up another month from the Internet Archive and add it to my modern site – I found that my Serendipity blog setup had nice category badges. So here are some blasts from the (2008) past.

=> ↺ KDE Gear 22.12 branches created

• Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 22.12 releases to them

• We’re already past the dependency freeze.

• The Feature Freeze and Beta is next week Thursday 10 of November.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

=> ↺ Easily Migrate from Linux to FreeBSD – Klara Inc.

• If you are already experienced with Linux, FreeBSD should feel very familiar. The operating systems have a lot in common, due both to their Unix heritage and many shared modern components. Much of what may be unfamiliar to a Linux user adopting FreeBSD is also inconsistent between Linux distributions themselves.

• In this article, we will cover some of the conceptual differences between Linux and FreeBSD, and go on to contrast some aspects of the basic system utilities and the differing views of hardware given by the two systems.

=> ↺ The FreeBSD Journal is still Free!

• In January 2019, the FreeBSD Journal moved away from a subscription model, and we’ve been proud to offer it as a free publication ever since. We’ve hoped to raise awareness of FreeBSD throughout the world by making the voice of the FreeBSD community as accessible as possible.

• Issues are published on a bi-monthly schedule and can be found on the Foundation’s website. You can also find past issues, details on becoming involved, and information about the editorial and advisory boards. Article ideas are always welcome and are a fantastic way to give back to the FreeBSD community.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ Repo Review: FeatherNotes

• FeatherNotes is a lightweight and powerful hierarchical note manager with plenty of features. It has support for many text formatting options, embedding images and tables into notes, printing notes, password protection, searching, and more. FeatherNotes uses a node system, where essentially all hierarchical items in a note document are called nodes. You can create an assortment of parent and child sub-nodes, allowing for a great degree of organizational flexibility within note documents.

• FeatherNotes is quite well laid out and easy to use. Most of the formatting options are easily available from the toolbar at the top. To the left of the text field is the node tree, where you can arrange and organize the nodes and sub-nodes that you create. A system tray icon can also be enabled from the preferences, allowing you to easily access the FeatherNotes window when you need it.

• Once you create a new note document, you can begin adding nodes to it. By default, there is always one node already present in the document. You can add more nodes by right clicking on an already existing node and then selecting to either create a sibling or a child node. You can rename, assign tags, and even add icons to nodes. These nodes can then easily be rearranged by dragging them around in the node tree.

• FeatherNotes gives you plenty of common text formatting options, such as bold, italic, underline, strike through, as well as text alignment, and text font and size. Images can easily be embedded by dragging and dropping them into the text field, and they can then be resized and placed to your liking. Tables can also be added and inserted into notes, as well as hyperlinks to internet addresses or local files. You can also change the text and background colors if you so wish. FeatherNotes has spell checking functionality, but one has to first configure the Hunspell dictionary path in the preferences.

=> ↺ PCLinuxOS Screenshot Showcase

=> ↺ From The Chief Editor’s Desk…

• In the U.S., for most people, the “earliest” you can retire is age 62. I turned 62 years old this past August. The only other people who can “retire” earlier are those who are very wealthy, or those who lived their lives in utter austerity (think eating a 50 cent box of macaroni and cheese every night for dinner and reusing tea bags four or five times), amassing their income into a sizable nestegg that most of us would be envious of.

• I am in neither of those groups. But, I am planning on retiring at the end of the year.

• [...]

• So many of my coworkers keep saying “you’re gonna get bored.” After 35 years, believe it or not, I don’t think I’ll be bored at all. I plan to refocus all my attention on raising my kids. I had my kids late. I was almost 53 when my son was born, and almost 56 when my daughter was born. Now, I just want to spend as much time as I can with them, and (hopefully) help set them down a good path in life.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ Dominique Leuenberger: openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/44

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• Despite the week being one hour shorter (as a reminder: Europe switched from summer time to winter time on Oct 30), the maintainers and contributors went beyond and still delivered 7 snapshots (1028…1103). The staging projects have been nicely balanced and performance seems good. Unless the requests cause breakages, they are still going through the process rather quickly.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-44

• 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.

Debian Family

=> ↺ My Debian Activities in October 2022 – blog.alteholz.eu

• This month I accepted 484 and rejected 55 packages. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 492.

=> ↺ Annual donations for our server 2022 – SparkyLinux

• The annual payment day for our server is coming.

• We got quite a large increase from our server provider.

• So, until 15.01.2023 we would collect for the server the amount of 510 Euros, plus min. 720 Euros for our monthly living and bills, such as: electricity, gas, water, internet, domains, expenses related to improving the functionality of the sites, constantly consuming small computer equipment (memory sticks, pendrives, mice, batteries, etc…), fuel, as well as rent, medicines and living, which become more and more expensive every month.

• We are starting the collection today to make sure we will pay for the server on time, so we could stay online for you another year.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 6.2 Set To Enable Easier 4K Connections for Raspberry Pi | Tom’s Hardware

• Presently, you can connect the Pi 4 to a pair of 4K monitors, thanks to its dual micro-HDMI ports, and it will happily display its Debian-based desktop across them, at a refresh rate of 30Hz. This isn’t enough for some people, and the option exists to raise the output of one of the ports – the one nearest the USB-C power input socket – to 60Hz. To do this, you need to edit the config.txt file from a Terminal window then select it in the screen configuration utility. It’s a fiddly job, but perfectly in line with the Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab) ethos.

• Version 6.2 of the Linux kernel seems about to change all that. For some time, you’ve been able to use an unofficial patch (opens in new tab) to drive both ports at 60Hz, but official support missed the merge window for kernel 5.15, then a regression occurred from 5.18 that made things worse.

• The new code in kernel 6.2 does slightly more than simply unlock the higher refresh rate. To use it, you need a monitor and HDMI cable capable of carrying and displaying the signal, and HDMI detection code has been reworked to permit automatic configuration if the entire chain is compliant.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Protects Candy by Screaming at Trick or Treaters | Tom’s Hardware

• Halloween 2022 may have already been and gone but this project serves as inspiration for 2023! Haloween is an exciting holiday but what can you do to stop would-be candy thieves from running off with all of your sweet treats? Dr. David Pride has developed a Raspberry Pi-powered solution to this problem with his “Super Spooky Sweetie Stealer Stopper” project. When trick-or-treaters approach the candy bowl, this Pi-powered horror blasts them with air duster while emitting a horrifying scream.

• Dr. Pride joined our Raspberry Pi-themed podcast, The Pi Cast, and he showed us what the project looks like in action and provided a thorough breakdown of its design. According to Dr. Pride, he was inspired to create the project while cleaning an old PC with a can of compressed air. Spraying the can while upside down creates a visible smoky blast which it makes it the perfect tool for his screaming mask project.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi RP2040 PCB Streams and Records Game Boy Games | Tom’s Hardware

• The Raspberry Pi is no stranger to retro gaming but this is one of the first Pi projects we’ve seen that allows users to capture gameplay from original Game Boy hardware. Using a custom PCB created by maker Sebastian Staacks, users can record and stream original Game Boy games. In his demonstration, Staacks is using a Game Boy Color which is cross-compatible with original Game Boy games.

• The adapter was designed from scratch and features a Raspberry Pi RP2040 processor as its main controller. It plugs directly into the cartridge slot of a Game Boy DMG-01 or Game Boy Color and has a port on the top in which original Game Boy games can be connected. This adapter captures data in real time and transmits the visual feed to your PC so it can be recorded or streamed.

• With this setup, the game is not connected directly to the Game Boy but the adapter allows for seamless gameplay with no interference on the main screen. However, there is a slight delay in the capturing process that leads to an occasional skipped frame on the captured video. According to Staacks, it has an average refresh rate of 24 fps.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi Costume Automatically Dispenses Candy

• There are no tricks with this Raspberry Pi project—only treats available on demand thanks to this amazing, wearable project created by maker Yinglish119. Instead of just creating a simple candy dispenser, Yinglish119 has turned his idea into a totally portable and wearable Nerds costume that looks just like the candy it provides.

• Yinglish119 himself is dressed in suspenders and bowtie combo while sporting a huge Nerds candy box which contains all of the Pi-powered goodness we love. To get the candy to dispense, users wave their hands in front of an ultrasonic sensor which triggers the mechanisms inside to dispense a box of candy out of the bottom of the giant Nerds box.

• According to Yinglish119, the candy is magazine loaded and pushed through the bottom thanks to a continuously rotating servo motor. When the sensor detects a user, it initiates a wheel inside the suit which picks up a box of candy and moves it down the channel, guiding it out to the platform at the base of the costume.

=> ↺ Arduino Uno Calculator: How to Create your DIY Calculator

• One of the most basic but formative projects with Arduino Uno is performing algebraic calculus with a custom-designed calculator by using a 4×4 keypad, Arduino

=> ↺ Mole crab robot burrows into sand using flexible legs | Arduino Blog

• Revolutionary new technologies tend to require small, incremental developments. For example, physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a transistor way back in 1925. But it wasn’t possible to actually build transistors until semiconductor production caught up in 1947 — something that took decades of “boring” materials research. Such research may seem trivial, but often turns out to be important to the bigger picture. That is likely the case with this burrowing mole crab robot, called EMBUR, built by UC Berkeley engineers.

• This Arduino Due-controlled robot can burrow into loose substrates like a mole crab in sand. In the wild, mole crabs can bury their bodies in sand within a few seconds. That is surprisingly hard to replicate, as wriggling robots tend to just push themselves up on top of the sand. The key to this robot’s burrowing ability is a special set of flexible legs. The Arduino spins motors that rotate a reciprocating mechanism to actuate legs covered in fabric. When the legs push forward into the substrate, the fabric folds to decrease resistance. Then when the legs move back, the fabric unfurls and creates resistance for propulsion.

=> ↺ The Great Resistor lamp makes color codes readable | Arduino Blog

• Resistor color codes are great, because they make it easy to identify a resistor’s value by referencing a simple chart (or memorizing that chart). But resistors are also very small and their color bands are hard for many of us to see clearly. Instead of buying a magnifying glass, J built the Great Resistor lamp that reproduces a resistor’s color code at a much larger scale.

• To display a resistor’s value, one must first find that value. To measure the resistance of unknown resistors, J used an Arduino Nano and a 16-bit ADC (analog-to-digital converter) to measure the input and output voltages of a voltage divider circuit. One of the resistors in that circuit has a known value, while the second is the unknown resistor being tested. The three known values let the Arduino calculate the unknown value, which is the resistance of the tested resistor.

=> ↺ Keep your packages safe with Clem Mayer’s secure parcel pickup box | Arduino Blog

• As a part of his business, element14 Presents’ Clem Mayer sells physical goods online and has people retrieve them near his house. But for the times he is not able to be home, Mayer was inspired by his post office’s pickup lockboxes to create his own version that could be accessed with just a code at any time.

• Because this parcel container would be outside and exposed to the elements, Mayer went with a sturdy electronics cabinet that is IP66 rated and made entirely from metal. Initially, he was thinking of a system that would require users to scan a QR code on the box, go to a website, and then enter the code to gain access. However, the complex nature and network connectivity led him towards a much simpler solution instead- just enter the digits on a physical keypad. This way, a single code could be set in the Arduino Leonardo’s EEPROM and then compared each time a total of six digits are selected.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Mecool Now KA2 Android TV review: Could be smarter

=> ↺ 5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly

=> ↺ Unpaid Volunteers At CyanogenMod Successor LineageOS Maintain Builds For Old Android Devices – Slashdot

=> ↺ Nearly Half of Local Govt. Employees Use Old Android Devices | PCMag

=> ↺ How to Record Audio on an Android Phone

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Why Mastodon is Better – Quick Fixes

• It is no secret I am a great fan of the Fediverse. I am especially fond of its most successful incarnation, Mastodon. I wrote an intro to Mastodon for Linux Magazine back in 2019, then expanded it into a tutorial. Later, I went on to explain how to write a command line client for reading toots, and then expanded that into a full-fledged client that allowed you to post and schedule posts in the following issue.

• By that time, the editors at Linux Magazine where advising me to please, please move onto another topic.

• Maybe now, with the Muskquake leading to a tsunami of users flooding Mastodon they will see the errors of their ways and regret not commissioning five more pieces on the matter. Even mainstream journalists from the The Guardian and CNN regarding the platform as “interesting”.

• What I am saying is that I am going to be biased in this piece. Big whoop. As if anybody wasn’t.

=> ↺ Why enterprises must do more to support open source software they use

• CNCF panellists discuss what if the maintainer of that vital component goes under a bus

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Mozilla Ventures: Investing in Responsible Tech – Mark Surman

• Many people complain about today’s tech industry. Some say the internet has lost its soul. And some even say it’s impossible to make it better.

• My response: we won’t know unless we try, together.

• Personally, I think it is possible to build successful companies — and great internet products — that put people before profits. Mozilla proves this. But so do WordPress, Hugging Face, ProtonMail, Kickstarter, and a good number of others. All are creating products and technology that respect users — and that are making the internet a healthier place.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: PGroonga 2.4.1 released!

• PGroonga 2.4.1 has been released!

• PGroonga is a PostgreSQL extension that makes PostgreSQL fast full text search platform for all languages! It’s released under PostgreSQL license.

• There are some PostgreSQL extensions that improves full text search feature of PostgreSQL such as pg_trgm ^1.

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL@SCaLE 20x Call for Presentations Now Open Until Dec 2, 2022!

• PostgreSQL@SCaLE is a PostgreSQL two day, two track event that takes place on Thursday-Friday March 9-10, 2023, in Pasadena, California, at the Pasadena Convention Center as part of SCaLE 20x. The CFP is currently open through December 2, 2022. We are looking for talks that showcase PostgreSQL stories, features and applications!

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Octopai is adding out-of-the-box support and analysis of PostgreSQL

• Octopai’s platform enables data teams by providing them with complete end-to-end lineage across multiple systems regardless of being on-prem or cloud-based. Octopai’s Data Intelligence Platform provides cost savings to enterprises using cloud-based systems, from the migration phase all the way to day-to-day use. By getting the full picture of what and how different tables, columns etc. are being used, Octopai decreases the number of exploration queries over various cloud-based systems, directly reducing expenses.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

=> ↺ 3 Best Free and Open Source Scheme Static Site Generators – LinuxLinks

• LinuxLinks, like most modern websites, is dynamic in that content is stored in a database and converted into presentation-ready HTML when readers access the site.

• While we employ built-in server caching which creates static versions of the site, we don’t generate a full, static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. However, sometimes a full, static HTML website is desirable. Because HTML pages are all prebuilt, they load extremely quickly in web browsers.

• There are lots of other advantages of running a full, static HTML website.

FSFE

=> ↺ The coding contest Youth Hacking 4 Freedom launches its second edition – FSFE

• The registration for the second edition of “Youth Hacking 4 Freedom “, the FSFE’s hacking competition for teenagers from all over Europe, has started. This contest offers young people aged between 14 and 18 the opportunity to challenge themselves, meet like-minded people and win cash prizes.

=> ↺ Let’s talk with young hackers Ekaterina, Miquel and Alexia about YH4F – FSFE

• The first edition of the Youth Hacking for Freedom contest has ended. After 5 months of coding, over 35 young people came up with outstanding projects. Three of them will be introduced to you in this interview. Ekaterina, the mind behind Music Companion, Miquel who developed Smart Table Assistant and Alexia, the creator of a basic password manager.

• The Youth Hacking 4 Freedom contest, is a competition organised by the FSFE that encourages young Europeans to start working on their personal technical project. As there are no limits to the possibilities of projects that could be submitted and every technical idea is welcome, the first edition ended up with a great number of diverse and inspiring projects, making it really hard for the jury members to choose the six winners.With all those well done projects we thought about a way how to best highlight the effort and work that was put into them. Hence, we are happy to present three of the contestants.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Introducing yahoofinancer – Rsquared Academy Blog – Explore Discover Learn

• We are excited to announce the yahoofinancer package. The yahoofinancer R package allows the retrieval of nearly all data visible via the Yahoo Finance front-end and aims to reduce the pre-processing steps needed in analyzing such data.

• yahoofinancer is inspired by and a port of the Python package yahooquery. yahoofinancer is not affiliated, endorsed, or vetted by Yahoo, Inc. It’s an open-source tool that uses Yahoo’s publicly available APIs, and is intended for research and educational purposes.

=> ↺ Software Accessibility: Back-End Developers Play a Major Role

• Front-end developers aren’t the only ones responsible for building accessible apps; back-end developers can also help improve software accessibility.

=> ↺ Early speed optimizations aren’t premature

• As you code, you might have a coworker, or friend, or a little voice in your head, reminding you of Knuth’s famous saying: “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” But what makes an optimization premature, anyway?

• The short answer is that this aphorism is a tautology. “Premature” means “too early,” so we can rephrase the point as “doing things at the wrong time isn’t ideal.” Can’t argue with that!

• The problem with this saying is that many people wrongly interpret it as “early optimization is the root of all evil.” In fact, writing fast software from the start can be hugely beneficial.

• In order to reduce the scope a bit, I’m going to focus on one particular problem domain: data processing pipelines or batch jobs. This is the kind of software you often write when doing data science, or scientific computing: you load in some data, process them, spit out a result.

=> ↺ How to communicate effectively as a developer

=> ↺ Good old-fashioned code optimization never goes out of style

• Sometimes, making your Python data processing software faster doesn’t require libraries like NumPy or Pandas, or specialized techniques like vectorization. In fact, if you’re doing string processing, libraries like Pandas won’t help.

• Pushing calculation down to a faster implementation is just one way to speed up software. Another way to get faster results is to remove code that is redundant, repetitive, superfluous, needless, or otherwise does unnecessary work. The fastest software, after all, is software that doesn’t run at all.

• In short, sometimes all you need is some good old-fashioned speed optimization.

=> ↺ The type system is a programmer’s best friend

• I am tired of primitive obsession and the excessive use of primitive types to model a domain.

• A string value is not a great type to convey a user’s email address or their country of origin. These values deserve much richer and dedicated types. I want a data type called EmailAddress which cannot be null. I want a single point of entry to create a new object of that type. It should get validated and normalised before returning a new value. I want that data type to have helpful methods such as .Domain() or .NonAliasValue() which would return gmail.com and foo@gmail.com respectively for an input of foo+bar@gmail.com. Such useful functionality should be embedded into those types. It provides safety, helps to prevent bugs and it immensely increases maintainability.

=> ↺ Performance Musings – Kai Uwe’s Blog

• Sometimes while using my computer I notice random slowness when launching a certain application or some feature that just doesn’t run very well. That’s always reason enough for me to take a deeper look.

• My tool of choice for analyzing performance issue is Hotspot, KDAB’s excellent perf visualizer. It comes with an easy to use GUI for browsing the results collected by it. Particularly its flame graph view lets you detect, well, hotspots during execution quickly. Just launch an application through Hotspot or attach it to an existing instance, and look at the graphs. Depending on your system configuration you might need to adjust the perf_event_paranoid kernel setting in order for it to inspect other processes.

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppEigen 0.3.3.9.3 on CRAN: Maintenance

• A new release 0.3.3.9.3 of RcppEigen arrived on CRAN moments ago (and just went to Debian). Eigen is a C++ template library for linear algebra: matrices, vectors, numerical solvers, and related algorithms.

• This update is again mostly maintenance. To accomodate one small aspect of the Fortran interface, we now require R 3.6.0 or later. Jonah Gabry spotted a really old typo and fixed it. The fastLm support code now uses the unabbreviated df.residual. We accomodated clang-15 in one signature as is common with many recent uploads, and also updated one aspect of GitHub Actions.

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds, Read-only FS and How a Persistent QML Cache then Can Ruin Your Day – cordlandwehr

• Long title, but the combination is important. Recently, I had an embedded device on my desk, which drove me to claiming quite strongly that “this is not possible what is happening in front of me!!!” If you are familiar with setups of all the points above, this article might be interesting to you.

• Starting from the very strange effects I had. The device itself in question has a read-only root file system, as it is common for embedded devices. On this device a QtQuick application is running and, because I have not the most efficient processor, QML cache is enabled. Instead of going the build-time cache generation route, I have a persistent writable partition on the device, on which the QML cache is generated and stored at first start of the QtQuick application after first boot. Note that the cache needs to be persistently stored since otherwise the whole performance improvement on startup is moot.

• So far so good, everything works well… until we are starting to update the software or more precisely the root file system. For this example, and this will be important later, the update of the root file system just updates my QtQuick application and its QML file but not the Qt version. What I then see after the update and the following boot is a system where the QML application still looks like before the update. Looking deeper at the file system, everything seems fine, files are updated, even QML files are updated, but the application just ignores them. But even worse, the application now randomly crashes because the executable and the shared libraries apparently do not match to the QML code being executed. — I will shorten this up, because with the intro the problem is quite obvious: the QML cache is not being invalidated even if it should and old versions of the QML files are used to run the applications. But how can this be?!

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Not Quite Emoji Domain Names

• That’s “Unicode Power Symbol Dot Gabon”. Because why not.

• Regular readers will know that I helped get ⏻ and several power symbols into Unicode. When I do talks about this, I usually refer to them as Emoji because, to most people, Emoji are simply little pictures in text. But that is a gross oversimplification. You know the meme that real Champagne must be from the Champagne region of France – otherwise it is merely sparkling wine? Well, Emoji must come from the Supplementary Multilingual Plane of Unicode otherwise they’re just ✨sparkling✨ characters.

• Except… That’s not quite true. There are a bunch of symbols stuffed in the Miscellaneous block of the Basic Multilingual Plane which are also Emoji.

• The Power Symbol appears in the block Miscellaneous Technical. The symbol itself is not an Emoji, but it is in a block which has 18 Emoji. Confused? Good1!

Leftovers

Security

=> ↺ OpenSSL vulnerabilities get high-priority patches

=> ↺ Project Zero: A Very Powerful Clipboard: Analysis of a Samsung in-the-wild exploit chain

• As defenders, in-the-wild exploit samples give us important insight into what attackers are really doing. We get the “ground truth” data about the vulnerabilities and exploit techniques they’re using, which then informs our further research and guidance to security teams on what could have the biggest impact or return on investment. To do this, we need to know that the vulnerabilities and exploit samples were found in-the-wild. Over the past few years there’s been tremendous progress in vendor’s transparently disclosing when a vulnerability is known to be exploited in-the-wild: Adobe, Android, Apple, ARM, Chrome, Microsoft, Mozilla, and others are sharing this information via their security release notes.

• While we understand that Samsung has yet to annotate any vulnerabilities as in-the-wild, going forward, Samsung has committed to publicly sharing when vulnerabilities may be under limited, targeted exploitation, as part of their release notes.

• We hope that, like Samsung, others will join their industry peers in disclosing when there is evidence to suggest that a vulnerability is being exploited in-the-wild in one of their products.

=> ↺ Microsoft Warns of Uptick in Hackers Leveraging Publicly-Disclosed 0-Day Vulnerabilities

=> ↺ Researchers Uncover 29 Malicious PyPI Packages Targeted Developers with W4SP Stealer

• Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered 29 packages in Python Package Index (PyPI), the official third-party software repository for the Python programming language, that aim to infect developers’ machines with a malware called W4SP Stealer.

• “The main attack seems to have started around October 12, 2022, slowly picking up steam to a concentrated effort around October 22,” software supply chain security company Phylum said in a report published this week.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The bird, the billionaire and the precipice. – affordance.info

• Is Twitter really worth 44 billion dollars ? Nobody knows. But for some background and history, Google acquired Youtube for 1.65 billion dollars in 2005. In 2021 and for 20 billion Microsoft bought the company “Nuance”, specialized in conversational artificial intelligence. In 2016, Microsoft again spent 26 billion dollars to buy LinkedIn. In 2014 Facebook bought WhatsApp for 22 billion dollars, half the amount that Musk is investing today to acquire Twitter. And in 2012 the same Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. The company is now worth 100 times more. All of the companies targeted by these acquisitions have a history. And the biggest offers don’t always make the best stories.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Free Speech Is Too Important To Be Entrusted to Elon Musk

• Liberals who minimize the importance of free speech on Twitter are dead wrong. But we shouldn’t have to hope that a billionaire with a track record of suppressing his critics will live up to his free speech rhetoric.

• [...]

• As a democratic socialist, I reject that view root and branch. Empowering ordinary people to run society in their own interests is the whole point of the socialist project — and that’s flatly incompatible with the technocratic liberal view that ordinary people can’t be trusted to decide for themselves what to believe.

• And socialists obviously reject the view that free speech only applies to governments and that private companies should be able to do whatever they want. If I didn’t think private regimes of power could be dangerous, I wouldn’t be a socialist in the first place.

• A better concern about Twitter becoming the personal property of Musk is that he can’t be trusted to practice what he preaches. Musk has a sketchy history of trying to shut down his own critics. He’s also deeply connected to the national security state, giving him a vested interest in enabling the United States’s giant surveillance regime — historically one of the biggest threats to free expression here and abroad.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ winds blowing

• Bartender, I know it’s kind of early, but I’m in the mood for a shot of Grey Goose and a pint of whatever ale you have on tap, as long as it is not of the India variety. Sure is windy outside today.

=> ↺ i’m in a resort 7 hours ago, pretty good.

• i’m in a resort 7 hours ago, pretty good.

=> ↺ A quick vacation

• I got back from a small vacation yesterday. I took the train up to Chicago on Tuesday, puttered around the city for a couple of days, rode the L, zoomed around on a Divvy bike, skulked around the enemy’s baseball stadium (it’s neat! I would have done a tour if they were having them), and generally was on no one’s schedule but my own for a few days.

• I ended up in Wicker Park, to see Myopic Books, of course, but also Quimby’s. Quimby’s is a bookstore full of independent publications, and more importantly, zines. I’ve been going through my backlog, and picked up a few there. It’s a great store, and if I make it back to Chicago, I plan on going again. That it’s right on a subway line is just an added bonus.

=> ↺ Sports Fans Flying Flags on Their Cars

• With the Football World Cup starting soon in Qatar, lots of fans will be dusting off their little plastic national flags to clip to the doors of their cars to show support for their teams. You must have seen them around, little flags with the cross of St George fluttering above the side windows.

• OK, so I object to anyone flying our national flag who feels the need for the word England to be printed across the middle. It smacks of the far-right Little-Englanders protesting the arrival of refugees from war zones on the basis that they want to take jobs that should by all rights be left vacant by born-and-bread Englishmen. But is there a better reason for banning the flags flown from car doors?

=> ↺ Biking and Idling

• Today B was sick and stayed home from school. Meg had some calls, so I worked from home. It was a fun morning- I printed out fantasy RPG map tiles and taped them to the table so he could color in a world- but it’s difficult to actually focus working with a small child. Meg came home around 1, and I biked to a coffee shop to work for the back half of the day.

• The coffee shop is only 1km away, but on the other side of a divided highway. I rolled up to the light, hit the button, after a few minutes the lights changed. I got the walk sign, and the highway paused in both directions… for 35 seconds. During this time, at least 40 cars piled up at the stoplight while I crossed, each idling for half a minute. 40 cars stopping, idling, and accelerating back to 60mph.

=> ↺ Love a good letter

• When I gave up my social media, I fell back on email and texting as a way to stay in touch with people. But now, ten months on, I’m finding that texting and email are just so troublesome.

• There’s been no drama (quite the opposite, it’s been lovely) but the physical act of hunching over my phone or sitting at my computer has started to feel like work.

• This is a good thing, I think. I want to believe it means my brain is learning to see technology as tool rather than as interface for living. It feels like the right direction for me. That said, I now feel bad that I told my social media friends to text and email me instead, only to now have their emails put me in such an ambivalent mood.

=> ↺ Agile: Or how to show how bad you are at your job

• Just completed another sprint. Doing our retro we didn’t have too many issues. It was an odd two weeks, a few days where all developers worked on “fun” projects unrelated to normal day to day so our velocity was going to be messed up. On the bright side, we are deep in the middle of a green service so there is all new APIs and UX work to be done that we couldn’t help but be super productive.

=> ↺ the dog lead and the backpack

• i bought a new backpack with a internal laptop pocket and suitable for cabin hand luggage: decathlon of course:-)

• the backpack looks smart but lacks high visibility features.

• i failed to find some reflective tape that i could tie on to the backpack but i did find a high visibility dog lead and had an idea. the lead had high visibility tape platted around it.

=> ↺ Extreme disappointment, Brevard NC editon

• Bunny and I choose The Bromfield Inn [1] because The Red House Inn [2] was no longer, having been sold last year [3]. The Bromfield Inn is beautiful, but it turns out it’s not suitable for us.

• The owners are new to the bed-and-breakfast business, having bought The Bromfield Inn just a few months ago (and after we had made reservations with the previous owners). The owners are a mother and daughter team, and thus, I will refer to them as Mother and Daughter. Mother lives on site and currently manages the inn, while Daughter is still in Florida closing up her real estate business there.

Politics

=> ↺ Food should not be bought and sold

• [ The following is satire. Originally posted in a different space, 2012-11-29. ]

• i’d like to discuss an issue pervading Western society which doesn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserves. That issue is the commodification of food, and the scourge that is the food industry.

• Food shouldn’t be commoditised. It is an essential human need. When people buy and sell food, the act of preparing and eating food becomes mere support for, and reinforcement of, the notion that it’s acceptable to transform relations between humans into relations between a human and an unimportant unfeeling object. We must reject all buying and selling of food.

=> ↺ Obsolescence Culture

• Capitalism requires consumption. That is not a value judgment, but an observation. Unfortunately, the pace of consumption leads to waste – and this is made worse when vendors deliberately cultivate a culture of obsolescence and constant upgrades.

Technical

=> ↺ Pop Ups are Terrible UI

• So what’s so terrible about pop-ups?

• The gist is contained in the code comment above: surprise! there’s a continuation key (argh) or something about some new feature (don’t care) or would you like to know that the wifi went away? (not really) or how about you subscribe to our newsletter (die, modern web, die) and what you wanted to do is no longer possible, or at the very least you risk distraction, like being bothered by an annoying fly whilst trying to craft a fine hammer.

• It’s like some mischievous prankster god will–randomly!–move things around on you. And people–often deliberately–put this crap into their user interfaces.

=> ↺ The Analog Guideline

• Often when I think of a philosophical or moral or behavioral issue related to online, a guideline I use is “how would we have done this before the internet?” In the sixties, seventies, early eighties when even long-distance phonecalls were expensive and noisy.

• Conversations would’ve happened around the kitchen table or at parties between people who knew each other, and exchange of ideas would be at clubs or in the library or in the letter’s pages of magazines, like cooking magazines for example.

• That’s why I’m a huge fan of encrypted email but a lot more indifferent on or even reluctuant towards encrypted anonymous publishing. People were able to speak freely and try out ideas fearlessly when talking to their own friends, but you didn’t have to fear a dog-pile of two hundred anonymous sealions everytime you left your house.

=> ↺ Matrix To MMS-Over-Email Bridge: Step 1 — MMS Over Email

• Getting MMS working over email was exceedingly easy because all of the work was already done for me; I just used my phone provider’s email gateway.

=> ↺ replacing google websearch

• Every now and then I get to install or re-install a computer with a brand new libre operating system, allowing for a few days of futzing around and trying new things.

• If it’s a general purpose machine, I also need to install a big web browser. Whenever I install a a big-web browser I change the default search engine, and then, after a few days, reluctantly revert it back to google.

• For all its ills Google did create a good search engine, even if its results have become worse over the last decade for people like me–likely because me and those like me are not economically important enough, but it’s still the only option for many queries I need to make.

=> ↺ The Outernet

• NB: Andrew Roach’s “small things Manifesto” says much of what I’m saying here, better. I flirted with not posting this as a result, but it was mostly complete before the stM dropped, so here it is.

• When I first got into Gopher, around 2013, I saw it as little more than a toy. I liked the underground nature of it, and I enjoyed how straightforward it was to use, but it had no particular ideological context to me. It was just cool.

=> ↺ Contemplating My Perfect Gemini Client

• Okay now that I’ve finished the bulk of Lasso, I’m currently pondering what features I absolutely want in a smallnet client I’d like to write. I’ve assembled an incomplete list, more for my reference than for anybody else. (although I’d love somebody backing me up that they want features like these as well!)

• [...]

• Right now I’m debating writing it in Ada or Common Lisp. It’s 1000% narrowed down to those two programming languages because they’re the only programming languages I ​really enjoy writing; and the ones I’d want to choose for a semi-large-ish project. Up until now I’d planned to use Ada and I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing various support libraries for a Gemini client in Ada. However, after writing Lasso in Common Lisp and having it be so quick, easy, and legitimately fun to write, it’s really made me reconsider. I still feel like Ada will result in a better and more maintainable final product, just because it’s explicitly designed to basically force writing well-organized and understandable code, with an emphasis on large codebases; while in CL even something as small-scale as Lasso requires a lot of genuine effort to keep the code organized and clean. But it’s so hard to ignore the literal breeze that ​initially developing anything in Lisp is…

=> ↺ How to Install Linux

• Change your software to Linux software before you switch operating systems.

Science

=> ↺ Notes from Pantheist (Secular) Astronomy (November 5 2022)

• Newfound planet b Centauri b is a problem for the standard model of planet evolution, because it orbits “a pair of stars so massive that they challenge [their] ideas of how planets and stars form”. In the conventional model, “dust grains surrounding the fledgling star” supposedly “begin glomming on to each other” and “this process of accumulation eventually snowballs”. But the problem is that “stars that hot emit powerful ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, which should disrupt the planet-forming process”.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Leaving Twitter

• If you’re leaving Twitter because Elon Musk is a terrible boss, or because he fired half the team, either moderators or accessibility engineers, I don’t really know the details, then my recommendation is to join the fediverse. Personally, I have three accounts on three instances, and they don’t all use the same software but they all interoperate.

=> ↺ smolZINE – Issue 35

=> ↺ ANSI movie stills.

• Busy busy busy – done lots of work on the 3d engine. I wrote documentation,

• examples, tutorials, and all that(1). Initially encouraged to do so because

• screwtape needed some material for a class, and was looking to use Eternal.

• Did work on the physics in the engine (fixing the timestep was harder than

• I thought it would be) and now working on a post-processing pipeline and

• ultimately some anti-aliasing stuff.

=> ↺ How GNUnet File Share stores it’s data securely, on other people’s computers

• Took me a while to understand how GNUnet File Share is able to encrypt and store data on the decentralized network. While making nodes unable to decrypt it. The answer is in the GNUnet whitepaper published in 2002. Like any technical documentation, you need some background knowledge to understand it. I will try to explain it in a simple way.

Programming

=> ↺ Expressing operations and psychology

• I complained about stack manipulation in Whitespace and Forth, but maybe that’s only because I’m so used to infix operators. Postfix means you’re using a stack of values. Perhaps prefix would seem easier. The only language I know of that’s like that is Lisp, but I did once implement it as a formula “language” in a (very simple) spreadheet app. There’s still a stack, but it’s the other way around. Instead of values stacked up waiting for operations, there are operations and values waiting until the top-most operation has enough params. For some reason this isn’t making my head hurt so much. Maybe my problem is that the postfix stack is just a bunch of values waiting for… what? You can’t look at the stack and see anything meaningful. Two values waiting for addition look just like two values waiting for subtraction. And umpteen values looks like a mess. The right number of operations might well be applied to use up all those values, but there’s no way of knowing that by looking at the stack. In the prefix case, a stack of operations has a bunch of meaning in it, and I can see how many values it’s waiting for so it can do its thing.

=> ↺ Adventure Game

• I agree but I’d wanna add… an adventure game is a game that’s about you experiencing the game world, doing things in the game world, pawn stance or actor stance or adventurer stance, as opposed to how some other games (including some really really good games) lean more into the experience of being a story-creator, being in the writer’s room, being in the “wouldn’t it be cool if such-and-such” happened.

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