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● 11.19.22

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● Links 18/11/2022: EasyOS 4.5.1 and FSF Giving Guide

Posted in News Roundup at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Framework Laptop 2 Review: An Upgradable Laptop | WIRED

• Once the laptop was assembled and configured to my liking, it was time to install an OS. Framework supports Windows 11 and a few different Linux distributions. (While I was testing, Framework released a Chromebook as well. ChromeOS can technically run on a regular Framework laptop, but this requires adding some different hardware.) Having used nothing but Linux for over 15 years now, I obviously installed Linux. I started with what I think is the best Linux option for newcomers, System76’s Pop_OS, which I covered in more detail in my review of the HP Dev One. I also tested Ubuntu, which Framework supports, and Arch Linux, which Framework does not officially support but worked just fine (Framework does support Manjaro, which is based on Arch).

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Install Arch Linux easy (Official Guided Installer) – Invidious

=> ↺ Telehealth Privacy Debacle

• This week in the WeeklyNewsRoundup, telehealth is being scrutinized over data collection, several scams seek to steal passwords, and Banking as a Service is getting started. We also look at Silly News.

=> ↺ Hidden NAS | Self-Hosted 84

• We’re chatting about workstation builds for a home NAS with Joe Ressington this week. Chris chews on the news of the Evernote buyout and his challenges with Zigbee.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ SCSI mpt3sas kernel module added

Applications

=> ↺ Top 3 Free MS Paint Alternative Programs in Ubuntu + Others

• Here we list the top 3 MS Paint alternative drawing programs for Ubuntu and other Linux distros.

• For quick drawing and editing images – MS Paint-type applications are essential. Here are three of them which are similar and can be used for quick drawing/editing in Linux and Ubuntu systems. These 3 MS Paint alternative drawing programs are best fit for general users and professionals who need a quick and fast edit on images or create drawings.

=> ↺ NeoChat, encryption, and thanks for all the olms – Adventures in Open Source

• Early in 2021, Carl and I were made aware of NlNet, a dutch foundation that sponsors many open source projects, and decided to apply for some funding there to expedite the development process. Fortunately, the application process at NlNet is very light-weight, so there isn’t a lot of risk involved in applying for funding. A while after sending our application, NlNet got back to us with the good news that they would indeed be funding E2EE work for NeoChat and libQuotient.

• The actual development work started with creating Qt-Style bindings for libOlm, the library that provides implementations of the cryptographic functions required for implementing end-to-end encryption in matrix. Most of this work was done by Carl and is now merged into libQuotient.

• Building on this foundation, we implemented support for reading and sending encrypted messages into libQuotient. This includes support for all of the different types like texts, images, files, audio and others. By integrating this into libQuotient, this is almost completely transparent to the actual application, meaning that for the most part, app developers building on top of libQuotient do not need to do extra work for supporting E2EE. There are some parts, like loading images and notifications, that will need slight adaptions from how they were implemented before supporting E2EE. If you, as an app developer, have questions about those, come talk to us in #quotient:matrix.org.

• The last part of end-to-end encryption that has been implemented so far is device verification. Device verification allows users to verify that their devices are actually who they claim they are and are not subject to, for example, a man-in-the-middle attack.

=> ↺ 15 Best Linux Screen Recorder Tools: Experts’ Recommendation

• Screencasting provides multiple benefits for many people, such as making video tutorials and presentation creation, compiling how-to guides, conducting software reviews, and even streaming while playing PC games. Many people are now earning money for themselves by posting how-to guide videos on sites like YouTube and Facebook. Although there are many Linux screen capture and video streaming software available, I will only share the best of the best that can be installed on Ubuntu and other Linux distros.

=> ↺ Kubernetes Removals, Deprecations, and Major Changes in 1.26 | Kubernetes

• Change is an integral part of the Kubernetes life-cycle: as Kubernetes grows and matures, features may be deprecated, removed, or replaced with improvements for the health of the project. For Kubernetes v1.26 there are several planned: this article identifies and describes some of them, based on the information available at this mid-cycle point in the v1.26 release process, which is still ongoing and can introduce additional changes.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How To Install PlayOnLinux on Fedora 37 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, PlayOnLinux is free software that enables one to easily install and use Windows applications and games. PlayOnLinux has a database of Windows applications from which the user can install the desired applications with a few clicks. Fedora is one distribution that makes it easy to install PlayOnLinux with the application being available in the default repositories.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of PlayOnLinux on a Fedora 37.

=> ↺ Understanding how fast Ethernet really is (and in what units)

• I’ve been around computer networking for a long time, but in all of that time I’ve never fully understood what the speed numbers of the various Ethernet standards actually meant. I knew what sort of bandwidth performance I could expect from ’1 Gigabit’ Ethernet as measured on TCP streams, but I didn’t know exactly what ’1G’ meant, beyond that it was measured in bits (for example, was it powers of ten G or powers of two G). My quiet confusion was likely increased by the numbers that the Prometheus host agent reports, where a Gigabit Ethernet interface is reported as ’125,000,000′.

=> ↺ How to use a Raspberry Pi in kiosk mode

• Kiosk mode on Raspberry Pi allows you to boot straight into a full-screen web page or an application without the need to use the desktop environment.

=> ↺ Show Clock in Top-bar for different Locations in Ubuntu 22.04 | 20.04

• This simple tutorial shows how to add world clock in top panel, so you can have a glance at what time is it now for different countries and locations.

• Say you have business world-wide or family members or good friends live in different countries, a world clock can be quite useful to know the time in their locations.

• If you’re working on Ubuntu, Fedora Workstation, or other Linux with GNOME desktop, then there’s an extension to display the time for your specified locations in top panel to make life easier.

=> ↺ How To Install qBittorrent on Fedora 37 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install qBittorrent on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. It is a native application written in C++ and uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and the libtorrent-rasterbar library. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to uTorrent.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the qBittorrent on a Fedora 37.

=> ↺ How to remove the Linux development environment on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to remove the Linux development environment on a Chromebook.

• We will start the tutorial by installing Linux Apps first. opening up the terminal, and then removing it. All your Linux files and Linux applications will be lost, when you remove the Linux container. If the futre you can always enable a new Linux container again.

=> ↺ How to Install Chrome OS Flex on a Windows PC – Make Tech Easier

• Google is making Chrome OS available on PCs and Macs with the latest Chrome OS Flex version. This is a very lightweight OS that represents a great solution for anyone who wants to revive an older computer with low-end specs. Below we show you how you can get it running on your device.

=> ↺ Set Up Your Virtual Data Room in 3 Easy Steps

• How to set up your virtual dataroom software depends on how you intend to use it.

• Modern-day virtual data rooms serve different organizational purposes. For example, many businesses use them as their primary database to manage their routine document sharing or storage needs.

• At the same time, businesses opt for a virtual data room service for initial public offerings, mergers, acquisitions, fundraising, joint ventures, and similar business transactions.

=> ↺ Enable Automatic Firefox Translation to Translate Web Pages

• You can natively get the Firefox Translation feature – right at the browser window. You can easily translate it into English and other available languages. Here’s how.

• Firefox Translation is part of Project Bergamot, which was launched in 2019. It comes as a Firefox official extension. The entire translation happens locally in your system, unlike Google Chrome’s translation feature.

• For example, Google Chrome uses Google’s own Translate engine, and it happens on the cloud. Which obviously transmits your data to Google servers.

• In contrast, this native Firefox translation happens locally in your browser, keeping your data safe. And you can safely translate foreign languages into English or any other available language.

Desktop Environments/WMs

=> ↺ 7 Reasons Why Cinnamon is a Fantastic (Yet Underrated) Linux Desktop Environment – It’s FOSS

• Linux Mint is one of my favorite distributions. The flagship (or default) Cinnamon desktop is why I like it so much.

• The user experience offered by Cinnamon desktop may not be mind-blowing or fancy. But, the desktop environment provides enough reasons for users to like it and easily work with it to get things done.

• At the end of the day, that’s what we want. A user interface that works as expected and does not get in the way.

• I think Cinnamon desktop does a few things right to give you an exciting experience. Let me mention some of those here.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ This week in KDE: less-rage-inducing error messages in Discover – Adventures in Linux and KDE

• This week I’d like to highlight a particular 15-minute bug that got fixed: When Discover shows you significant error messages, they now take the form of normal dialogs rather than tiny little overlays at the bottom of the screen that disappear after a few seconds. And it should now show you fewer un-actionable error messages in general too! These major improvements were contributed by Jakub Narolewski and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and will show up in Plasma 5.27. Thanks guys!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ #70 Useful Progressbars – This Week in GNOME

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 11 to November 18.

=> ↺ Boatswain 0.2.2 is out! – Georges Stavracas

• Last week, I’ve rolled out the 0.2.1 release of Boatswain, the Elgato Stream Deck application for Linux.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ EasyOS Dunfell-series 64-bit version 4.5.1 released

• This is, mostly, a bug-fix release of version 4.5, that was released on November 12, 2022. If you are new to Easy, please read that announcement, as it has more introductory descriptions:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202211/easyos-dunfell-series-64-bit-version-45-released.html

• If you already have Easy 4.5, booting either from a USB-stick, other external drive such as SD-card, or from an internal drive, you will be able to click on the “update” icon on the desktop to download a small “difference file”, which, in the case of 4.5-to-4.5.1 is only 2.8MB.

• However, this difference-file mechanism (that we also call “delta files”), requires the full image file of the current release. If you haven’t updated before and this is the first time you will be doing an update, copy the ‘easy-4.5-amd64.img’ file to /mnt/wkg. That’s it, then you can update.

• After updating, /mnt/wkg/easy-4.5.1-amd64.img will exist and you can leave it there, ready for the next update.

=> ↺ EasyShare needed lots of TLC

• I think will leave the LAN setup. Not having it for the last couple of years resulted in a gradual degradation of EasyShare, because “out of sight, out of mind”.

• [...]

• Expect EasyOS version 4.5.1 very soon.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

=> ↺ Mageia 9 Alpha 1 Looks Solid, Out For Testing

• After almost two years of development since Mageia 8 release, the upcoming Mageia 9 – first release copy is now available for download and test.

• Mageia is one of the easy-to-use Mandriva-Linux fork and provides desktop and server images. It is a popular distro in its own segment and one of the most used non-Debian, non-Fedora distro. Feature-wise it brings all the modern tech assisted with the popular desktop environment offerings such as Xfce, KDE Plasma and GNOME. Also brings additional desktops and window managers.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2022/46

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• For Tumbleweed it has become the norm to deliver snapshots daily – and we are not making any exception to this in week 46. We have again published 7 snapshots (1111…1117), with the latest one just published moments ago. From a staging point of view, it seems like things are being tested much better lately before being submitted: almost everything passes through staging in a day or so (this is not an invitation to change this – more a Thank you to the respective maintainers making things the way they are)

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ FOSS Weekly #22.43: Fedora 37 Released, Firewalls and More Linux Stuff

• Fedora 37: From features to upgrade procedure, tip your Fedora

=> ↺ CPE Weekly Update – Week 46 2022 – Fedora Community Blog

• Purpose of this team is to take care of day to day business regarding CentOS and Fedora Infrastructure and Fedora release engineering work.

=> ↺ Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2022-46 – 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)!

• Fedora Linux 37 was released on Tuesday! Fedora Linux 35 will reach end of life on 2022-12-13.

=> ↺ Ben Williams: F37-20221118 updated Live isos released

• The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F37-20221118-Live ISOs, carrying the 6.0.8-300 kernel.

• This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 1GB of updates savings )).

• A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks: geraldosimiao, ledini, Southern_Gentlem for testing these iso.

=> ↺ Fedora 37, openQA news, Mastodon and more | AdamW on Linux and more

• Hey, time for my now-apparently-annual blog post, I guess? First, a quick note: I joined the herd showing up on Mastodon, on the Fosstodon server, as @adamw@fosstodon.org. So, you know, follow me or whatever. I posted to Twitter even less than I post here, but we’ll see what happens!

• The big news lately is of course that Fedora 37 is out. Pulling this release together was a bit more painful than has been the norm lately, and it does have at least one bug I’m sad we didn’t sort out, but unless you have one of a very few motherboards from six years ago and want to do a reinstall, everything should be great!

• Personally I’ve been running Fedora Silverblue this cycle, as an experiment to see how it fares as a daily driver and a dogfooding base. Overall it’s been working fine; there are still some awkward corners if you are strict about avoiding RPM overlays, though. I’m definitely interested in Colin’s big native container rework proposal, which would significantly change how the rpm-ostree-based systems work and make package layering a more ‘accepted’ thing to do. I also found that sourcing apps feels slightly odd – I’d kinda like to use Fedora Flatpaks for everything, from a dogfooding perspective, but not everything I use is available as one, so I wound up with kind of a mix of things sourced from Flathub and from Fedora Flatpaks. I was also surprised that Fedora Flatpaks aren’t generally updated terribly often, and don’t seem to have ‘development’ branches – while Fedora 37 was in development, I couldn’t get Flatpak builds of apps that matched the Fedora 37 RPM builds, I was stuck running Fedora 36-based Flatpaks. So it actually impeded my ability to test the latest versions of everything. It’d be nice to see some improvement here going forward.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ How to Check Your Ubuntu Version in 2022 (4 Methods) | Beebom

• In Ubuntu, if you are installing a new program from the Terminal, you sometimes need to check the Ubuntu version to choose the correct installation candidate. Apart from that, from adding repositories to applying security patches, finding your Ubuntu version beforehand is crucial. So in this article, we bring you four simple methods to check the Ubuntu version. Be it the command line or GUI, you can find the OS version of Ubuntu in quick and easy steps. On that note, let’s jump to the tutorial.

=> ↺ How to Take a Screenshot in Ubuntu (5 Easy Ways) | Beebom

• If you are new to Ubuntu and looking for a way to take screenshots, well, this tutorial will guide you through the steps and all the different ways to do that. Earlier, we compiled guides with the best screen recorder apps for Ubuntu and explained how you can record the screen in Ubuntu. Along the same lines, we have included 5 methods to take a screenshot in Ubuntu, including the native keyboard shortcuts as well as third-party apps like Flameshot and Shutter. On that note, let’s go ahead and check out the steps to grab a screenshot in Ubuntu.

=> ↺ Take Your Ubuntu Experience to the Next Level With Ubuntu Pro

• Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distros. It is widely used on both servers and workstations.

• Every two years, Canonical releases a Long-Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu. LTS releases of Ubuntu are more stable and normally get updates for up to five years. Ubuntu Pro takes your Ubuntu experience to a whole new level.

• Here’s how you can upgrade to Ubuntu Pro for free, with no hidden costs whatsoever.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ LinkStar H68K – A Rockchip RK3568 “multimedia” router with dual 2.5GbE, dual Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6 – CNX Software

• We’re told the “router” ships pre-installed with Android 11 OS and also supports Ubuntu, OpenWrt, and Debian (TBC). Seeed Studio says the current Android and Ubuntu images do not support the MT7921 wireless module, so if you want to use WiFi and/or Bluetooth the only option are to run OpenWrt or Debian operating system or to use a USB dongle.

=> ↺ Medical device development with Raspberry Pi

• At eg technology, we have over 20 years of experience in the design, development and regulatory approval of medical devices and in-vitro diagnostics. That means that every year we get to work with our clients to take their new medical devices through the regulatory approvals process within our ISO 13485 framework, and specifically help them to navigate testing their electronics and software to the IEC 60601 and IEC 62304 standards.

=> ↺ PicoStepSeq – RP2040 music maker

• Tod found easily available ‘step switches’ – lever switches with LEDs – as an inspiration. “I wanted to make a MIDI step sequencer, looking like the 1980s synths and drum machines that had these switches,” he says. “Their integral LED makes it really clear of the state of the parameter that the switch is controlling, and they take up only a bit more space than a regular tactile switch. And their clicky-clicky sound is ‘chef’s-kiss’.”

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ 2 Easy Methods to Install Go on Raspberry Pi

• Go is a fast, reliable, and efficient programming language developed by Google. The syntax of the Go language is like C but is more stable and memory efficient than C. You can use this language to build and develop concurrent and scalable software.

• This article will show different methods to install Go on your Raspberry Pi system.

=> ↺ 10 Best Features of Raspberry Pi

• Raspberry Pi is a small sized board that can be used as a personal computer, for gaming and designing multiple electronics projects. It has gained popularity among SBCs due to its wide range of applications such as home automation projects, crypto mining, running games, and more. It has also gained popularity among children and enthusiasts because of the larger online support which helps them learn programming with ease through Raspberry Pi board.

• The Raspberry Pi device has many features and here we will show you some of those that are crucial for a beginner who has recently purchased this device.

=> ↺ 20 Security Tips for Raspberry Pi

• Like other operating systems, Raspberry Pi OS can get exposed to viruses or get hacked by hackers especially when connected to the internet. So, you should need some tips to secure your system from any type of attack.

• In this article, we will discuss 20 Security Tips that help you secure your Raspberry Pi system.

=> ↺ Use light painting to visualize magnetic fields | Arduino Blog

• Light painting is a photography trick that exploits a camera’s shutter. To ensure proper exposure in different lighting conditions, cameras have variable shutter speeds. If the subject is well-lit, then the shutter may only remain open for ten or so milliseconds. But if the subject is very dark, then a photographer may choose to leave the shutter open for minutes. Anything bright that moves in the frame will leave “painted” streaks. This project takes advantage of light painting to visualize magnetic fields.

• Because exposure (both for film cameras and digital cameras) relies on brightness, anything dark that moves in a long exposure photo will be barely visible. But anything bright (LEDs, in this case) will be very visible. For this project, Chris Hill wears an LED array on their fingertip. When they capture a long exposure photo, their hand is dark and almost invisible. But the LEDs, which illuminate in response to the presence of magnetic fields, are bright and show up clearly in the picture. The result is a light painting of magnetic fields that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye.

=> ↺ Quick Guide to DIY Smart Homes With Arduino – Make Tech Easier

• Some of us have this innate desire to make things on our own and relish the challenge of learning something new. If that sounds like you, then you’ll probably enjoy leveling up your smart home DIY-style with an Arduino.

• Need to get up to speed on what an Arduino is? Check out our beginner’s guide to Arduino and everything you need to get started with Arduino projects.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Samsung thinks it can get Android 14 to phones even faster than it did Android 13

=> ↺ Official Galaxy Z Flip 3 Android 13 One UI 5 update is now available – SamMobile

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi can now run Android TV 13

=> ↺ Android fans left baffled after I revealed huge mistake millions are making | The US Sun

=> ↺ OPPO Reno9 series teased as the first mid-range Android smartphones with 16GB RAM options – NotebookCheck.net News

=> ↺ Beginner’s guide to Android updates and why they’re crucial | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ Samsung to beat Google at Android updates? One UI 6 could release faster | Mobile News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Free and Open Source TeleConsultation Software for Healthcare

• If you are looking for a free embeddable telehealth app that provides secure and reliable communication functionality try Q-Consultation Lite powered by QuickBox. Q-Consultation Lite provides a virtual room experience, enabling providers to conduct private video consultations with patients, together with a virtual patient queue.

• As a leading CPaaS provider, QuickBlox has a track record of providing high quality communication solutions for a variety of industries. Q-Consultation was originally built to meet the extraordinary demand for remote communication by QuickBlox’s customers during COVID-19.

• Having seen firsthand the benefits in healthcare delivery using this app, the QuickBlox team have expanded the availability of the app, and just launched a free version with open source code downloadable from GitHub. Developers are able to try the software at no cost.

=> ↺ Home invasion

• Well, it looks like it’s finally happened. As news sites began reporting that Elon Musk had finalised his purchase of Twitter, the fediverse’s Eternal September — hoped for and feared in equal numbers amongst its existing user base — began.

• We’ve had waves of new people before — most recently earlier this year when Musk first announced his purchase offer — but what’s been happening for the last week is different in both scale and nature. It’s clear that a sizeable portion of Twitter’s users are choosing to deplatform themselves en masse, and many have been directed to Mastodon, the most famous and populated software on the fediverse.

=> ↺ Fediverse

• I joined Mastodon in 2018. It was one of many days on Twitter that felt like it’s finally enough. I don’t exactly remember why. Twitter has been my social home on the internet since 2008 and it boosted my career in many ways. I made a lot of friends there. Some online friends turned into offline friends, into friends for life. But Twitter changed over the years.

• I started to feel anxious whenever I scrolled my timeline. The lovely conversations with friendly human beings vanished. They where replaced by retweets and breaking news and the ever growing search for attention. The world through the lense of Twitter started to look darker and darker every day.

• The promise of a new social home with the old friendly vibes seemed exciting. But my friends from Twitter only stayed around for a bit and then returned to Twitter – and so did I. We repeated this process a couple times. Whenever something went terribly wrong on Twitter, a group of refugees gave Mastodon another try, but it didn’t work out.

=> ↺ Don’t store TOTP in Bitwarden for your online accounts! – Patryk’s blog

• Since I’ve started working in Information Security space, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the topics related to protecting ones identity online. Basically, trying to answer the question: What does it take to sufficiently secure my online accounts? Of course the meaning of sufficiently is very subjective here, but I’ve always kept it vague to gauge what it means to them specifically.

• I did make sure to talk people of various backgrounds – from deeply technical all the way to not technical at all. Surprisingly many of them, even among the quite technical crowd, turned out to be lacking the understanding of some important fundamentals. In particular, it’s not always clear to them, what problems Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is targeting and solving. What threats do Password Managers are targeting and solving.

=> ↺ VirtualClinic: An Open-Source Clinical Practice Management System

• Virtual Clinic is a free open-source EMR and clinical practice management system for small and medium size clinics.

• The project is written on top of the Django Web Framework, and can work with MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Oracle.

=> ↺ Joe Brockmeier: Vivaldi jumps into social while Twitter burns: Dissociated Press

• Looks like Vivaldi is the first to jump on Mastodon/the Twitter exodus as an opportunity to boost their other offerings. The company launched “Vivaldi Social” on November 15th, which is a Vivaldi-run instance of Mastodon tied in with their other offerings.

• From their post, “Vivaldi Social is a natural progression for us, given our existing reliable alternatives to Big Tech — a feature-rich and flexible browser with a built-in mail client, calendar, and feed reader. We also give you the ability to express yourselves through a free and ad-free blogging platform, a thriving forum, and a webmail service.”

=> ↺ How To Contribute To Open Source Privacy Projects | Bogomil Shopov

• Contributing to open source project is something you should care about in any stage of your career. Here is a guide on how to contribute to privacy related projects.

Events

=> ↺ LibreOffice Conference 2022 videos: Events, GSoC, CJK issues, graphics subsystems…

• Here’s a new batch of talks from the recent LibreOffice Conference 2022! Watch the individual videos below, or click here to view the playlist.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox Regional feedback: Let’s start with Europe

• We work hard as an organization to ship the best browser possible every 4 weeks with about 1000 new patches per release.

• We ship new features to make our browser useful and easy to use. We also do platform work to be able to render new sites and web applications while remaining compatible with millions of websites created a decade (or more) ago.

• This ongoing work also includes updating our translations in more than 100 languages thanks to our impressive community of localizers.

• Yes, we want to make sure that Firefox can be used everywhere by everybody.

FSF

=> ↺ FSF Giving Guide: Put freedom first in your giving this year | Defective by Design

• It’s that time again. All the holiday decorations are out on full display. Ads are thrown across every screen, each one trying to convince you how much you need that new device. They’re ready to give it to you at a cut rate, too, since they want to let you know how much your friends and loved ones need the same tech gadget in their pocket, lap, or monitoring their living room. But is the gift that you’re about to give (or splurge on for yourself) respectful of a person’s right to freedom? For the last thirteen years, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published our Ethical Tech Giving Guide as a way to guide concerned individuals towards gifts that do not deprive them of their freedom. The right to determine what a device you’ve purchased does or doesn’t do is something too valuable to lose. It’s the difference between having control over your digital life or having someone else control you.

• Freedom is the best gift you can give, and the one that keeps on giving. Taking your first steps to freedom often doesn’t just help you win back your digital autonomy: it provides an opportunity for you to deepen your relationship with the ones you care about through a shared experience, and inaugurates you into a worldwide community of users. If you’re already technical and committed to furthering free software, we’ve also included a short list of devices that need developer attention to clear the last hurdles to freedom that stand between the chips they employ and full acceptability.

• This year’s Guide is replete with recommendations on DRM-free media for you and your loved ones to enjoy. In the time you have to yourself this holiday season, or your beach vacation to recover from it, consider going through a small (if invisible) stack of DRM-free ebooks. If you’re the type to read with a soundtrack — or who needs one to get through the season — our DRM-free music recommendations are there for you as well. As publishers and storefronts putting out these works are increasingly fewer and further between, we encourage you to support them.

FSFE

=> ↺ YH4F winners awarded in ceremony in Brussels

• The awards for the winners from the first edition of the Youth Hacking 4 Freedom competition, Stavros, Miquel, Artur, Ekaterina, Hector, and Mark were handed over in a ceremony in Brussels. We wish them a bright future, with many contributions to software freedom.

• Four of the six winners of the first Youth Hacking 4 Freedom competition. From left to right: Ekaterina, Miquel, Hector, Stavros. After five months of coding and the subsequent evaluation,the last and super exciting part of the competition finally took place at the beginning of October with a two-day trip to Brussels where the winners received the awards!

GNU Projects

=> ↺ Open source community split over offer of ‘corporate’ welfare for critical dev tools (Register) [LWN.net]

• The Register looks at the discussion around the GNU Tools Infrastructure proposal.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Automotive Grade Linux Releases UCB 14 Platform with Additional Support for App Development with Flutter

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for all connected car technologies, has announced the latest code release of the AGL platform, UCB 14, also known under the codename “Nifty Needlefish.”

=> ↺ .tar sorting vs .xz compression ratio – Michał Górny

• It is a pretty common knowledge that ordering of members within archive can affect the compression ratio. I’ve done some quick testing and the results somewhat surprised me. Firstly, it turned out that the simplest lexical sorting by name (path) gave the best result. Secondly, because it turned out that the difference between that and sorting by size was as large as 8%.

• Note that this is a pretty specific source archive, so results may vary. Test details and commands in the remainder of the post.

=> ↺ Refactoring with =delete – Arthur O’Dwyer – Stuff mostly about C++

=> ↺ Performance Optimizations Can Have Unexpectedly Large Effects When Combined With Caches

• In 2017, I was working a major performance issue. We were onboarding a large customer, and a batch process was taking 3 hours1, long enough to mean that trucks would be waiting at the dock, shipments would be fulfilled a day late, etc.

• We were able to run the whole process under a sampling profiler, and found that the foo method was taking roughly 50% of the time. Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to see room for improvement. The details were tricky, but after some work, I thought I had a solid improvement. I could avoid at least half of the work in the foo method, so perhaps I could shave 45 minutes off the whole process.

• We uploaded code to the test environment, expecting to wait a few hours, but the entire process finished in 45 minutes. Instead of a 45 minute savings, we’d shaved off 2 hours and 15 minutes. My first instinct was that we had a bug–nothing is faster than throwing an exception, or skipping all the real work.

• In fact, the code was fine. What I didn’t realize is that the code pulled data from caches that expired as time went on, and a significant portion of the original 3 hours was spent fetching data that had expired from the cache. After optimizing one slow portion of the code, other portions were reaching from the cache and the overall speedup was larger than seemed possible.

• It’s common wisdom that systems with caches can fail badly when the caches are cold. When every request misses the cache, the system is overloaded, and never recovers. What I observed was the mirror image.

=> ↺ The hidden cost of complexity. Complexity is an abstract and elusive… | by Dolev Pomeranz | Oct, 2022 | Medium

• To better understand the real and deadly cost of complexity. By noticing our biased perception of both simplicity and complexity. And also by modeling complexity to uncover some of its characteristics. Mainly it’s exponential nature.

=> ↺ Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” • Buttondown

• Now that Twitter is on a downward spiral I’m rewriting my favorite tweetstorms in a more permanent medium, so here’s the first: why do we have the term “boilerplate code”? It comes from the peculiar interplay of two industrial revolution technologies: steam engines and hot metal typesetting.

• So let’s start with the steam engine. Steam engines run on steam, produced by a water boiler. The hotter you can get the steam, the more efficiently you can extract energy from it. Now according to the ideal gas law, if you increase the temperature of a gas while holding the volume constant, you’ll also increase the pressure. If the boiler can’t handle the pressure, it explodes. This is a bad thing.

=> ↺ Is Everything Is A File?

• Strictly speaking, Unix itself doesn’t perfectly conform to any of these, but it does follow them enough in enough places that they’re recognizable and influential. And then there’s Plan 9 which took some of these ideas further.

• So there’s a lot to explore here. This is the first of a series of blog posts exploring different aspects of Everything Is A File, with an overall focus on system interface design.

• To get things started, here’s a quick exploration of one small but illustrative quirk of Unix.

=> ↺ Data Types in R

• There are five basic data types in R: [...]

=> ↺ A fast function to check your floating-point rounding mode

• In my tests, on both an Apple ARM platform and on a recent Intel processor with GCC, this fast function is several times faster than a call to fegetround(). It is cheap enough that you can probably call it repeatedly without much care.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ 10 Cool and Awesome Bash Loop Examples

• In the programming language, there are mainly three types of loops (for, while, and until). All three types of loops are important in different ways. There is not much difference between the while and until loops, but for loop works quite differently from these two. That’s why you can use these loops to create interactive scripts as a bash user.

• So learning bash examples can help you improve your skills in creating scripts. So in this tutorial, we will include 10 cool and awesome bash loop examples you can try to enhance your scripting skills.

=> ↺ Display the most active ethernet interface

Leftovers

=> ↺ Forensic genealogy leads to arrest in 1987 sex assault case

• Investigators then teamed up with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and found that one of the brothers had visited the Naval Justice School in Newport the day before the assault. Authorities in Indiana obtained a discarded sample of the suspect’s DNA, which police say matched the evidence recovered 35 years ago.

=> ↺ Podcast: Bluetooth bets on 6 GHz and TP-Link hops on Wi-Fi 7

• [...] We move from bad news to innovation with the news that the Bluetooth Special Interest Group is investing in new Bluetooth capabilities using the recently available 6 GHz spectrum. We also discuss the latest in Wi-Fi and TP-Link getting the jump on the next generation of Wi-Fi with its new Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers. [...]

=> ↺ Decision Fatigue

• The big buried lede of the past decade is that authoritarian conservatives network internationally as pervasively as the soi-disant “international communism” they railed against from the 1920s through the 1960s. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine it’s become glaringly clear that authoritarianism is the preferred governmental mode of petrochemical resource extraction economies (money attracts sociopaths, sociopaths like authoritarian leaders because they are convenient single points of failure for corruption-prevention systems, authoritarian leaders appeal to authoritarian followers).

=> ↺ Foot found in Yellowstone hot pool ID’d as that of LA man

• Investigators concluded that whatever happened to Ro occurred on the morning of July 31, but that nobody saw it. They identified Ro through a DNA analysis and notified his family, officials said.

=> ↺ “When We All Have Pocket Telephones”: A 1920s Comic Accurately Predicts Our Cellphone-Dominated Lives

Science

=> ↺ How Squid and Octopus Get Their Big Brains

• Cephalopods — which include octopus, squid, and their cuttlefish cousins — are capable of some truly charismatic behaviors. They can quickly process information to transform shape, color, and even texture, blending in with their surroundings. They can also communicate, show signs of spatial learning, and use tools to solve problems. They’re so smart, they can even get bored.

Education

=> ↺ Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation

• In this video, we argue that the nation’s politicians, who’ve neglected and underfunded education for years, and scored cheap political points vilifying teachers, have condemned a generation of young Americans to disrupted learning and empty classrooms, and left them with the feeling that nobody really cares.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Hive Ransomware Gang Hits 1,300 Businesses, Makes $100 Million

• Active since June 2021 and offered as ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), Hive has been used in attacks against businesses and critical infrastructure entities, including communications, government, healthcare, IT, and critical manufacturing organizations.

• In an effort to increase awareness of Hive ransomware, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have released a joint alert detailing observed indicators of compromise (IoCs) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs).

=> ↺ Amazon’s Distributed Computing Manifesto (1998)

• You can read the full post on Werner Vogels’ (CTO of Amazon) blog, All Things Distributed. The note is short and readable, but here are a few of my own reactions.

• The paper begins with a problem that Amazon is facing with its current client-server architecture: applications access the database directly and are tightly coupled with the data model. This makes the application sensitive to changes in the underlying data layer – where and how data is stored.

• It proposes two solutions: one, a move towards a service-oriented architecture, and two, to model processes as a workflow.

=> ↺ How to Download Your Twitter Archive

• Twitter provides a method to download your data that is, in theory, not difficult. It depends on the service functioning, and as of Friday, there were already visible cracks in the infrastructure.

• But if all goes well, here’s how you can download your data from Twitter, including your tweets, attached photos and videos, direct messages, likes, lists and Moments.

=> ↺ Write Windows 11 ISO to USB In Linux with Woe USB-ng – Invidious

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ AWS Thinkbox open sources Krakatoa MY and XMesh MY

Security

=> ↺ Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 227 released

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 227. This version includes the following changes:

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk, firefox-esr, php-phpseclib, phpseclib, python-django, and thunderbird), Fedora (grub2, samba, and thunderbird), Mageia (firefox, sudo, systemd, and thunderbird), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (firefox, go1.18, go1.19, kernel, openvswitch, python-Twisted, systemd, and xen), and Ubuntu (expat, git, multipath-tools, unbound, and webkit2gtk).

=> ↺ Successful Hack of Time-Triggered Ethernet

• Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is used in spacecraft, basically to use the same hardware to process traffic with different timing and criticality.

=> ↺ First Review of A Hacker’s Mind

• I got a starred review. Libraries make decisions on what to buy based on starred reviews. Publications make decisions about what to review based on starred reviews. This is a big deal.

=> ↺ Samba Patches Vulnerability That Can Lead to DoS, Remote Code Execution | SecurityWeek.Com

• Samba this week released patches for an integer overflow vulnerability that could potentially lead to arbitrary code execution.

• An open source Server Message Block (SMB) implementation for Linux and Unix systems, Samba can be used as an Active Directory Domain Controller (AD DC).

• Tracked as CVE-2022-42898 and impacting multiple Samba releases, the newly addressed security defect exists in the Service for User to Proxy (S4U2proxy) handler, which provides “a service that obtains a service ticket to another service on behalf of a user.”

• Also referred to as ‘constrained delegation’, the feature relies on request and response messages from the Kerberos ticket-granting service (TGS) exchange. Heimdal and MIT Kerberos libraries in Samba ensure Kerberos support and implement the Key Distribution Center (KDC).

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

=> ↺ DNSSEC “key tag” or “key ID”?

• RFC 4034 defines key tag as an identifier with which a DNSKEY RR containing the public key that a validator can use to verify the signature, but over time I have used the terms key tag and key ID interchangeably, without really knowing where they came from.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Protect children from exploitation and mass surveillance online!

• Instead of ineffective technical attempts to contain the spread of exploitation material that has been released, all efforts must focus on preventing such recordings in the first place. Prevention concepts and training play a key role because the vast majority of abuse cases never even become known. Victim protection organisations often suffer from unstable funding.

Confidentiality

=> ↺ Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPi for over a year | Tom Forbes

• You can check out their website for a lot of buzwords , but it’s clear from all the stock photos that they take security Very Seriously Indeed ™️.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ GOP operative found guilty of funneling Russian money to Donald Trump

• Jesse Benton, 44, was pardoned by Trump in 2020 for a different campaign finance crime, months before he was indicted again on six counts related to facilitating an illegal foreign campaign donation. He was found guilty Thursday on all six counts.

=> ↺ Attorneys give closing arguments in the Oath Keepers Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy case

• Prosecutors delivered their closing argument Friday in the Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy trial against Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes and four others, telling jurors that a “mountain of evidence” shows the defendants plotted to use force to stop the transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden.

• Over roughly two hours, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy walked the jury through some of the evidence — text messages, videos and witness testimony — presented over the past seven weeks and said it demonstrates a conspiracy to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history.

Environment

Energy

=> ↺ A timeline of cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s historic collapse

• Concerns of financial instability at FTX — a top platform where users buy and sell [cryptocurrency] — triggered a wave of customer withdrawals totaling billions of dollars. But FTX lacked sufficient funds to pay sellers, instead imposing a halt on withdrawals altogether.

• Some [cryptocurrency] traders, who deposited their savings on the platform, may never get their money back.

=> ↺ “Possible to lose everything”: Experts say dramatic FTX collapse should be a warning to [cryptocurrency] bros

• Within the traditional financial sector, these two companies would be separate firms entirely or at least have divisions and firewalls in place between them. But in early November 2022, news outlets reported that a significant proportion of Alameda’s assets were a type of cryptocurrency released by FTX itself.

• A few days later, news broke that FTX had allegedly been loaning customer assets to Alameda for risky trades without the consent of the customers and also issuing its own FTX cryptocurrency for Alameda to use as collateral. As a result, criminal and regulatory investigators began scrutinizing FTX for potentially violating securities law.

• These two pieces of news basically led to a bank run on FTX.

=> ↺ The Stablecoin Saga

• Starting in August, Datafinnovation has posted two series of posts about (meta)stablecoins, the first about Tether’s reserves and the second about tracing flows of stablecoins. Below the fold, primarily for my own understanding, I try to summarize the first. I plan to return to the second in a subsequent post.

• The TL;DR of the series is that, assuming Tether has turned over a new leaf and is being honest about USDT being backed by USD: [...]

=> ↺ FTX investors fear they lost everything, and wonder if there’s anything they can do

• The bankruptcy filings state FTX could owe money to upwards of 1 million people. And the basic facts are pretty grim. Gerstein says FTX told investors it would keep their assets safe. So if it can’t give people their money back, he says it probably broke the law by doing something else with it.

• “The company is short $8 billion dollars,” Gerstein says. “And there’s only two conceivable categories of explanation for what happened to that $8 billion. The first is they traded it in speculative investments and lost it.”

• In other words he says, the money’s gone. “Or they stole it.”

=> ↺ Is This the End Game for [Cryptocurrency]?

• The story so far: [Cryptocurrency] reached its peak of public prominence last year, when Matt Damon’s “Fortune favors the brave” commercial — sponsored by the Singapore-based exchange Crypto.com — first aired. At the time Bitcoin, the most famous cryptocurrency, was selling for more than $60,000.

Finance

=> ↺ Elon Musk, the un-CEO – Protocol

=> ↺ Amazon’s CEO says more layoffs will happen in 2023

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ Elon Musk Fires Twitter Employees Who Criticized Him

• Early on Tuesday, Mr. Musk’s team ordered nearly two dozen Twitter employees who had pushed back publicly and privately against him to be fired, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The billionaire, who completed a $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last month, later confirmed the exits on the platform and mocked the former employees.

=> ↺ After Elon Musk’s ultimatum, Twitter employees start exiting

• The company also notified employees that it will close its offices and cut badge access until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers began kicking some employees out of one office on Thursday evening, one source said.

=> ↺ About Twitter and Mastodon

• When I saw a lot of people are moving to Mastodon, and that network became overloaded, it was clear we needed an instance for the Java community. I’m very thankful that Foojay provided that possibility. This happened in three steps: [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ With a nod to ’1984,’ a federal judge blocks Florida’s anti-’woke’ law in colleges

• A federal judge in Florida partially blocked a law championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis designed to limit the discussion of racism and privilege in schools and workplace training.

• In a 139-page order issued Thursday, Tallahassee U.S. District Judge Mark Walker excoriated the Republican-led bill and blocked it from taking effect in the state’s public universities.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ The U.S. moves to shield Saudi crown prince in journalist killing

• The Biden administration declared Thursday that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince should be considered immune from a lawsuit over his role in the killing of a U.S.-based journalist, a turnaround from Joe Biden’s passionate campaign trail denunciations of Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the brutal slaying.

• The administration said the senior position of the crown prince, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and recently named prime minister as well, should shield him against a suit brought by the fiancée of slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and by the rights group Khashoggi founded, Democracy for the Arab World Now.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ Congress holds first ever hearing on a congressional seat for the Cherokee Nation

• Congress held its first hearing about establishing a non-voting delegate seat for the Cherokee Nation on Wednesday. The historic move is the closest the federal government has gotten toward satisfying a promise it made to the Cherokee Nation nearly 200 years ago.

• The federal government never fulfilled a provision made in the Treaty of New Echota in 1835, signed by then-president Andrew Jackson, promising the Cherokee Nation a seat in Congress after forcibly moving them off their ancestral land, an exodus known as the Trail of Tears.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia’s executions in 2022 now double last year: Report

• Amnesty International has condemned the resumption of executions for drug crimes, which flies in the face of a Saudi moratorium on executions for such cases announced in January 2021.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia: Execution of two Pakistani nationals is callous attack on right to life

• Since the beginning of 2022, the Saudi authorities have carried out 128 executions.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia: Rights group warns kingdom still issuing death sentences for children

• Saudi Arabia is continuing to issue and ratify the death penalty for detainees who were arrested and charged as children, despite repeated assurances from the kingdom that it had halted the practice, a rights group has warned.

• The European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESHOR) named several child offenders who were facing the death penalty following recent rulings in the Saudi courts.

• Citing the intimidation of, and oppression against, civil society groups and families in the kingdom, the group said it feared the actual number of cases was far higher.

=> ↺ Saudi Arabia beheads Nepali national

• In Saudi Arabia, execution is brutal—the person is decapitated with a sword. Sometimes, the body is crucified after the beheading, but in Dahal’s case, the Saudi authorities buried his body, according to multiple sources.

=> ↺ Why Qatar is a controversial host for the World Cup

• Working and living conditions for those migrant workers were frequently exploitative and dangerous. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian found that more than 6,500 migrant workers from five south Asian countries had died in Qatar since 2010 from all causes – workplace accidents, car crashes, suicides and deaths from other causes, including the heat.

• “Some of them include workers who collapsed on the stadium construction site and died after they were taken off it. Others died in road traffic accidents on their way to work in a company bus. And many others died suddenly in an unexplained way in their labor camps,” said Pete Pattison, one of the reporters on the investigation, in an interview last year with NPR.

=> ↺ Qatar’s Human Rights Record In The Spotlight Ahead Of 2022 World Cup

• MINKY WORDEN: In a word, the human rights situation in Qatar is bad.

=> ↺ Analysts: Iran’s ‘Civil War’ Warning May Presage Bloodier Crackdown

• Analysts say however that, regardless of who carried out the latest attacks, they could result in an even bloodier response to the protests that erupted after Amini’s death on September 16, following her arrest for an alleged breach of Iran’s dress code for women.

• “We don’t have a good sense of what happened in Izeh and Isfahan — was it a terrorist group, or potentially the regime itself?” said Henry Rome, an Iran expert at the Washington Institute.

• “Either way, the government will probably use the attacks to send the message that the protests are undermining national security and opening the door for Western-backed terrorism,” he told AFP.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books – Internet Archive Blogs

• Ever try to read a physical book passed down in your family from 100 years ago? Probably worked well. Ever try reading an ebook you paid for 10 years ago? Probably a different experience. From the leasing business model of mega publishers to physical device evolution to format obsolescence, digital books are fragile and threatened.

• For those of us tending libraries of digitized and born-digital books, we know that they need constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read. Fortunately this is what libraries do (if they are not sued to stop it). Publishers try to introduce new ideas into the public sphere. Libraries acquire these and keep them alive for generations to come.

• And, to serve users with print disabilities, we have to keep up with the ever-improving tools they use.

• Mega-publishers are saying electronic books do not wear out, but this is not true at all. The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies come around, as new text understanding technologies open new analysis, as formats change from djvu to daisy to epub1 to epub2 to epub3 to pdf-a and on and on. This takes thousands of computer-months and programmer-years to do this work. This is what libraries have signed up for—our long-term custodial roles.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Taylor Swift Calls Ticketmaster Woes ‘Excruciating’ in Statement to Fans

• Earlier, Ticketmaster had said it sold two million tickets for the tour on Tuesday alone. In a since-deleted blog post, the company said that 3.5 million people had registered for the Verified Fan program — designed to weed out bots and scalpers — and that about 1.5 million of them were given a special code to gain access to the early sale, with the remaining two million put on a waiting list.

• Ticketmaster said it received 3.5 billion system requests that day, four times its previous peak.

Patents

=> ↺ Federal Circuit Temporarily Pauses Judge Connolly’s Disclosure Orders In Delaware – Patent Progress

• In its order on a mandamus request filed by MAVEXAR-linked entity Nimitz Technologies LLC, the Federal Circuit has temporarily paused Judge Connolly’s order that entities in his court disclose details of any third-party litigation funding arrangements.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Z-Library Has Been Shut Down (but still lives on Tor) – Invidious

• In this video I discuss the ebook service Z-Library that has recently been shut down, and its operators arrested by the DOJ (site seems to still be up on Tor)

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ I like my boring fantasy setting

• Geographically, I fall back to something that is geographically close to where I live. There’s always mountains nearby. Like the maps my Alpine generator produces: woods, mountains, the valleys often filled with swamps, the highest peaks covered in ice. The mountains are hostile, the swamps are hostile, rivers are important. It’s what I know. No matter where we are on the map, I can produce scenes, castles, rock formations, caves, fields, villages.

=> ↺ Notes from Pantheist (Secular) Astronomy (November 18 2022)

• Biblical Creationists, naturally, were very quick to pick up on the obvious difference between what the Webb telescope is showing us and what we should expect to see based on the cosmic evolution myth. Pantheist (secular) astronomers are being forced to grapple with it as well, as the above article indicates.

Technical

=> ↺ Friday link roundup: November 18, 2022

• Fewer links this week since I’ve been busy working the rideshare grind. It’s a bullshit job, by the way. Wouldn’t be so bad if the Uber and Lyft apps were run by real people and not algorithms, but hey, I need money to exist in this garbage-ass society.

=> ↺ A new phone

• Finally I have a new smartphone. 3G is being phased out around here

• (and apparently around the world, too), 4G is used, and phones with 5G

• are finally available, so I was able to get one that may serve for a

• while, as my old phone did. Better yet, since official export into

• Russia is limited, there is the “parallel import” (contraband), so the

• previously unavailable smartphones are available now, including Google

• ones (those with plain Android, timely updates, easily supported by

• alternative Android distributions); and my new phone is Google Pixel

• 6a. It’s not locally certified, which means that there’s no

• “fatherland software” junk/malware on it. On top of that, I

• accidentally brought the price 10% down, to the lowest I saw online

• before going to a store. The only downside is that it has no warranty,

• and apparently no spare parts around.

=> ↺ print-circle

Science

=> ↺ Split Your Overwhelmed Teams

• Queue welcomes the return of columnist Thomas Limoncelli! You may remember Tom from his column, “Everything Sysadmin” which ran from 2015 to 2020. His new column, “Operations and Life” begins with this issue and will focus on DevOps and IT operations from a uniquely personal perspective.

• A friend came to me asking for advice. His SRE team was suffering from low morale. People were burning out. Attrition was high. People leaving often cited high stress levels as the reason. There was concern that their backfill replacements wouldn’t last.

• Then Todd (not his real name) told me the biggest shocker: The team is overworked, yet his boss won’t let him hire more people.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Joined Mastodon

• I’ve been thinking about joining Mastodon for a while. A geeky FLOSS media platform that is run by community rather than a company – obviously my kind of thing! So today I created an account on tilde.zone.

=> ↺ Pinafore: a light Mastodon web client

• This blog post is for Mastodon users who may not like the official Mastodon web interface. It has a lot of features, but it’s using a lot of CPU and requires a large screen.

• Fortunately, there are alternatives front-ends to Mastodon, this is possible through calls between the front-end to then instance API. I would like to introduce you Pinafore.

Programming

=> ↺ Useless code, part 2: the bit rot

• Almost 4 years ago I wrote here about some mostly useless and annoying

• code. It wasn’t developed actively during that time, but now it’s

• back, together with bit rot!

• 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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