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● 12.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/12/2022: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 172 and OpenCV 4.7.0

Posted in News Roundup at 9:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ OpenIndiana 2022.10 Quick overview #shorts – Invidious

• A Quick Overview OpenIndiana 2022.10 #illumos #OpenIndiana #mate #opensource https://youtu.be/dHkRq9FpKyE OpenIndiana is a continuation of the OpenSolaris operating system. It was conceived during the period of uncertainty following the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems, after several months passed with no binary updates made available to the public.

Applications

=> ↺ OpenCV 4.7.0 Is Now Available! – OpenCV

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Understanding the “/etc/shadow” File in Linux – TecAdmin

• The /etc/shadow file in a Linux system stores password information for user accounts. It is a secure file that is readable only by the root user and is used to store the encrypted password for each user account, as well as other optional password-related information.

=> ↺ Top 10 tutorials for Linux administrators of 2022 | Enable Sysadmin

• Get some tips and tricks to help you become a better sysadmin from Enable Sysadmin’s community of writers.

=> ↺ Open file in Google Chrome / Chromium, Google Chrome

• Over the years one feature that has been removed from web browsers such as Google Chrome and Chromium is the file menu, which gave you the ability to open a file a directly in the browser.

• To open a file locally in your web browser you need to locate the file, then right click and open with Google Chrome or Chromium.

=> ↺ The Dig Command: An Introduction to Linux Digging | Unixmen

• The Domain Information Groper command, or “dig” for short, collects data about Domain Nameservers and enables troubleshooting DNS problems.

• It’s popular mainly because it is one of the simplest and most flexible networking commands and provides a clearer output than the host command.

• You can use the dig command on Linux and Unix machines to perform DNS lookups, verify ISP internet and DNS server connectivity, check spam and blacklisting records, find host addresses, mail exchanges, nameservers, CNAMEs, and more.

• In this guide, we’ll walk you through how the command works. Boot your machine, launch a terminal, and ensure you have sudo privileges, and we’re ready to go.

=> ↺ Fsck: How to Check and Repair a Filesystem | Unixmen

• Every operating system needs a mechanism to store and recover data. This mechanism is called the filesystem.

• But the odds of a filesystem failing increase over time for one reason or another. If your filesystem goes corrupt, you might not be able to access certain parts of your data.

• The good news is that inconsistencies can be checked for and repairs carried out accordingly. You can use the fsck system utility to verify your filesystem’s integrity.

• In this brief post, we’ll walk you through using the utility and repairing disk errors.

=> ↺ How to Install Audacious on Manjaro Linux

• Audacious is an lightweight open-source audio player that comes with different skins like Winamp Classic, amongst many other things. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install Audacious on Manjaro Linux using the command line terminal.

=> ↺ How to Install Stellarium on Manjaro Linux

• Stellarium is a free, open-source planetarium software package. The software renders the night sky in 3D, allowing users to see stars, constellations, planets, nebulae, and other astronomical objects in their correct positions relative to each other. Users can also set the time and date to see how the night sky changes. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Stellarium on Manjaro Linux. The tutorial will use the command line terminal with the Arch Linux user repository for the latest Stellarium version.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ blog.ipfire.org – IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 172 released

• Shortly after Christmas, we release IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 172. It comes with cryptography improvements for IPsec and OpenVPN, as well as security improvements under the hood, a plethora of package updates and various bugs fixed across the place.

• [...]

• OpenVPN is automatically reconfigured to use a secure Diffie-Hellman parameter, both of sufficient length of 4,096 bit and standardized (see RFC 7919, section A.3, bug #12632). All OpenVPN clients and peers will automatically benefit from this cryptography improvement; no manual action is required. This also obsoletes the necessity of generating or uploading Diffie-Hellman parameters while configuring OpenVPN, saving a lot of time, as the generation of such parameters could have taken hours on slower hardware.

• For early 2023, we anticipate post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to land in IPFire for IPsec, for which there is a strong (and growing) need, thanks to so-called “capture now, decrypt later” attacks endangering the confidentiality of information with long-term secrecy demand, such as biometric and health data.

BSD

=> ↺ [DragonFly] New packages: 2022Q4 and upgrade notes

=> ↺ BSD Now 487: EuroBSDcon Interviews Pt. 2

• This year end episode of BSDNow features a trip report to EuroBSDcon by Mr. BSD.tv, as well as an interview with FreeBSD committer John Baldwin. Happy New Year, 2023!

=> ↺ Valuable News – 2022/12/27 | 𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚗

• The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX or BSD systems. Whenever I stumble upon something worth mentioning on the Internet I just put it here.

=> ↺ Lazy In Other BSDs Reading for end of 2022 – DragonFly BSD Digest

• Merry Christmas! Here is a present. I haven’t been posting while I fiddle with layouts, or just get too busy from holiday work, but here’s a pile of links, also known as “all my open tabs so that I can now close them”.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ 8 resources for navigating the cloud during digital transformation

• Hybrid cloud figures prominently as companies continue to accelerate their digital transformation plans. For CIOs, delivering strategic business value requires more agility and flexibility in your technology stack than ever. This year, we shared valuable insight from our community with advice for navigating the cloud during digital transformation.

=> ↺ Product leader: A day in the life | The Enterprisers Project

• Many people associate product leaders with owners of strategy, tools, and systems. But I think a product leader is someone who helps individuals and teams be their best selves.

• A product leader’s role is to listen, learn, and ask questions; define a positive, trusting culture; and hire and promote top talent to achieve the best results on behalf of customers, stakeholders, shareholders, and users.

• Each day, I set out to accomplish this while navigating the demands of family, business, and industry. I believe that everything and everyone has an opportunity to continuously improve. This foundational belief is powerful to me as a product leader because digital transformation requires enormous amounts of change, adaptation, and general evolution. It’s not only about changing technology but also processes and the skills people bring to the table, both for technology and those it reaches.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Zephix 6 Portable Linux OS Released Based on Debian 11.6

• Zephix is a USB-ready portable Linux OS based on Debian’s stable branch that can be easily installed and run from a USB drive. This allows you to take the operating system wherever you go and use it on any computer with a USB port.

• You’ll find Zephix very useful if you need to use multiple computers or want to have a portable and secure operating system for use on the go. Furthermore, when running from USB, you can make additional changes and then save them back to the USB device as a module. As a result, they will be available after a system reboot.

• Recently, a brand-new release of Zephix 6 has been announced, so let’s see what’s new.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi ‘Holographic’ Christmas Tree Spins Ridiculously Fast | Tom’s Hardware

• We’ve seen Raspberry Pi hologram projects before but this is the first one we’ve seen that functions as a Christmas tree. This project, created by Sean Hodgins, uses a Raspberry Pi 4 and relies on the principle of persistence of vision. This principle uses an LED strip to “paint” light at a specific speed. Using the tree’s rotation, it displays custom 3D effects in mid-air that in this case resemble a festive holiday evergreen.

• This tree is made from a metal, triangular frame. It’s mounted to a larger frame that has a motor capable of spinning the triangle into a cone at 10 Hz. The tree is capable of displaying both static and moving images. This makes it possible to display a simple tree or cartoon images and, in one demonstration, a flaming tree.

=> ↺ How To Monitor Temperature With a Raspberry Pi Pico | Tom’s Hardware

• The Raspberry Pi Pico is the ideal way to get into microcontrollers. Starting from $4, the board is cheap and easy to work with. The low cost and ease of use means we can easily drop them into a project without fearing the worst for our wallet.

• In this how-to, we will use a Raspberry Pi Pico to capture live temperature data using a DS18B20. This sensor comes in many forms, from a bare transistor chip, to a water resistant cable. We’ll be using the latter version, which can be partially submerged in a liquid to monitor the temperature. Our project will take a temperature reading and using a conditional test in MicroPython it will trigger an LED to flash if the temperature goes below 20 degrees Celsius.

=> ↺ Memfault Adds Embedded Linux to IoT Platform

• Memfault, which provides an Internet of Things (IoT)-based reliability platform, has announced that its solution now includes full support for embedded Linux. This expansion, according to the company, offers cross-platform support for developers building on microcontroller units (MCUs), Android-based devices or embedded Linux for any hardware, for an unlimited number of devices running any use case.

=> ↺ Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 RISC-V MCU supports WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and Zigbee – CNX Software

• Boufallo Lab BL616/BL618 is a 32-bit RISC-V wireless microcontroller with support for 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.2 dual-mode, and an 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee, Thread, and Matter designed for IoT applications.

• We first spotted the BL616 RISC-V IoT MCU during the BL602/BL606 announcement in November 2020, but we had virtually no additional information about it so far. It appears both BL616 and BL618 will be launched next month with the main difference between the two being that BL616 has 19 GPIOs and BL618 comes with 35 GPIOs.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Geo Bookmark: Mark And Export Your Geo Places in Android

• Geo Bookmark is an amazing lightweight Android app widget that allows you to bookmark your places and manage your Geo bookmarks collections.

• Geo Bookmark is a home screen widget and a dash clock extension that allows you to quickly record your current whereabouts for later review with a single button press.

• [...]

• The project is released under the Apache License Version 2.0

=> ↺ OnePlus Nord CE 2 Lite 5G gets Android 13 update – GSMArena.com news

=> ↺ Realme GT Neo 2 Android 13 x Realme UI 4.0 Open Beta Testing begins

=> ↺ OnePlus Nord CE 2 Lite gets the stable OxygenOS 13 update

=> ↺ The Sony WH-1000XM5 are Android Police’s 2022 headphones of the year

=> ↺ 9 Android Features We Want to Get in 2023

=> ↺ Why You Should Not Buy a Budget 5G Android Phone in 2023

=> ↺ Choose the best phone charger. Here’s how.

=> ↺ This creepy Android flaw can detect your identity and even gender | TechRadar

=> ↺ Lenovo Tab P11 Pro Gen 2 Review: Best mid-range Android tablet of 2022 | Technology News,The Indian Express

=> ↺ New Android application security trends bound to protect your data in 2023

=> ↺ Nokia T10 tries but fails to get budget Android tabs out of an unremarkable loop – Hindustan Times

=> ↺ The Best Upcoming Android Games Of 2023 – Droid Gamers

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ How open source provides accessibility for the neurodivergent community | Opensource.com

• Not everyone uses the internet or digital assets in the same way. When some people think about accessibility, they only think of people with physical disabilities, which accounts for a portion of disabilities worldwide. According to the National Cancer Institute, 15-20% of people live with neurodivergence.

• [...]

• Light sensitivity is common in people who are autistic, as well as folks who just had their eyes dilated or have a migraine. There are two articles from 2022 that support the configurability of light and dark modes.

• In Ayush Sharma’s A practical guide to light and dark mode in Jekyll, you walk through how to tighten up HTML and then utilize CSS and Sass to create classes. Once you consolidate your styles, you can reuse them, define the new styles, and apply them to the HTML elements. Lastly, you can add a toggle so folks can easily switch modes.

• A beginner’s guide to making a dark theme for a website by Sachin Samal introduces a beginner-friendly way of programming a dark theme. Samal gives you practical code examples of how icons can be inserted and how to toggle between themes. It reminds you that you can utilize your browser inspector to play around with styling.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Shortest Time-to-Launch

• There’s a class of software that solves the simplest case and optimizes for the shortest time-to-launch (a different sort of TTL). When code is a liability, sometimes these are the best options. Think of this post as a continuation or list of examples for Solving the Simple Case. While these products aren’t always the best for real stacks, they can be invaluable for a proof-of-concept or demo app. I imagine looking back at this list in a few years will be interesting.

=> ↺ MIDI madness with ChatGPT: the AI-powered tunes that will make you laugh, cry, and dance | R-bloggers

• ChatGPT seems to be taking the world by storm. This is version of the GPT3 language model which is somehow optimised for chat dominates my Mastodon feed and inspired countless articles and discussion. 1

• A decent chunk of the discourse has been about how the outputs of the models sound very plausible and even authoritative but lack any connection with reality because the model is train to mimic language, not to give truth. Another chunk of the discourse is dominated by funny responses and creations. Things like poems, stories, limericks.

=> ↺ A Personal File Share CLI — Andrew Healey

• There are a few ways around this problem without paying for a subscription. Like emailing the PDF as an attachment or uploading it to Google Drive with share permissions.

• None of the alternatives are perfect. When I need to quickly share a file during an online conversation (on a platform without unrestrictive, native file upload) I waste time.

• I estimated that by building a custom solution within a time budget of two hours, I would start saving time within one year.

• This is where I lose time when I have to share a file.

=> ↺ Announcing GoReleaser v1.14 — the Christmas release

• Another month, another release! In fact, the last release of the year.

• This one in particular marks the 6 years anniversary of GoReleaser, and is packed with new features and improvements.

Python

=> ↺ Python readlines() Method – TecAdmin

• Have you ever wanted to read a file line by line in Python? Then you should be familiar with the Python readlines() Method! This powerful Python Method is used to read a file line by line and store each line in a list. This means you can access each line of the file using a simple list index, and you can easily manipulate the contents of the file.

• The readlines() Method is very useful for reading files that contain lots of information or have many lines of text. You can also use the readlines() Method to read a file one line at a time, which is great for file-processing tasks. What’s even better is that the readlines() Method is easy to use and can be implemented in just a few lines of code. So if you’re looking for a reliable way to read files in Python, look no further than the readlines() Method!

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ A Complete Guide to Check If File Exists in Bash | Unixmen

• A Shell script might demand that you check whether a file exists before doing a task.

• You could always assume that the programmer or user that will run the script will do their due diligence and ensure the file is present. But bash offers the ability to check that a file exists, and leaving it to chance will be the clumsy thing to do.

• Also, assuming a file is present isn’t the right way to go if the script is distributed on various operating systems.

Leftovers

Science

=> ↺ “The most intrusive animation is a train that twice interrupts the mathematician Moon Duchin, who is reflecting on what it would mean for a mathematical object like infinity to ‘exist.’”

• “The second appearance of the train blocks her entirely from view and rumbles over her thoughts, as though the underlying ideas aren’t interesting enough on their own. As a mathematician, I may be biased, but I think that they are. Is the universe as infinite as we might imagine it to be?”

=> ↺ Donald Knuth’s 2022 ‘Christmas Tree’ Lecture Is about Trees – The New Stack

• This year, 2022 marks the 60th anniversary of that fateful day in 1962 when a 24-year-old Donald Knuth started writing “The Art of Computer Programming.” Now approaching his 85th birthday, Knuth has become almost a legend in the world of computer programming — and he’s still writing additional volumes for his massive analysis of algorithms.

• But every year, right around Christmas time, there’s another tradition. Knuth gives a special lecture “pitched at non-specialists” for a small audience at Stanford University (where Knuth is a professor emeritus) and a larger audience online. Because of the pandemic, it’s been three years since Knuth has been able to honor this tradition.

• [...]

• So this year’s triumphant “homecoming” lecture would indeed include trees — specifically a phenomenon Knuth describes as “twintrees,” along with Baxter permutations, and Floorplans. Knuth noted they’re all topics touched on in the latest volume of The Art of Computer Programming, before jokingly reminding the audience that his book makes an excellent Christmas present.

• He added with a laugh that “From a lecturer’s point of view, it’s always best when you have something that you love to talk about.”

• Knuth began by introducing the audience to binary trees — a familiar branching data structure where, as you work your way down, each node can have up to two lower nodes (a left and a right “child” node). But then he showed the audience “one of my favorite algorithms of all time, for more than 50 years… binary tree insertion.” This is where data is inserted in the left fork if it’s lower than the key value, and in the right fork if it’s higher.

=> ↺ Stanford Lecture: Don Knuth – Twintrees, Baxter Permutations, and Floorplans (2022) – Invidious

Hardware

=> ↺ Rubenerd: Cleaning and retr0brighting a Commodore 64C

• A fortnight ago I bought a Commodore 64C because I’d always wanted one, though I rationalised it by saying it was so I could try out carts that aren’t compatible with my 128. It was in excellent working order, but the keyboard was a bit gross, and the case had an ugly, blotchy band of yellow along the front and edges of the case.

• Last weekend I popped the keys off, removed the springs, washed the individually in warm water mixed with dishwashing detergent, then gave them a scrub with 303 cleaner as Adrian’s Digital Basement recommended in a throwaway line on a video. They look practically brand new; I couldn’t be happier with the results.

• [...]

• I put on gloves and smoothed the cream across the worst parts of the case, then wrapped it in plastic cling wrap and set it on our balcony for some Australian sun. Every half an hour I went back out and smoothed the cream around to reduce the chance of streaks where it was thicker than in other places.

• We’ve been having an uncharacteristically brisk summer in Sydney again, so it ended up staying outside for much of the day. But by the evening I unwrapped the shell, gave it a solid soak in the shower, and was shocked at how well it worked. The blotchy texture was completely gone, and what was an ugly yellow streak is now an almost unnoticeable line. Paired with the freshly washed and buffed keys, and it almost looks new.

Security

=> ↺ How to prevent and mitigate process injection | TechTarget

• Process injection affects every OS, including Linux, Windows and macOS.

Finance

=> ↺ China the Change Agent – Patreon Q-A #3 | Michael Hudson

• Karl Fitzgerald: Yes. You touched on the UK there and the resignation of Truss, Britain’s current economic woes. Where do they stem from? Is it monetary mismanagement or due to self-imposed economic sanctions? How much are due to structural problems and debt overhang?

=> ↺ A Tale of Two Cities – Jakarta is sinking, but funding for Indonesia’s new capital has yet to surface

• Indonesia’s capital Jakarta is sinking but financing for Indonesia’s new $33bn capital city on Borneo remains uncertain

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ A cry from the regions: media dominated by billionaires and corporations is not journalism – Michael West

• This submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry into Regional Newspapers by Broome journalist Andrew Chambers was rejected by the Committee for containing content “adverse” to another party so we published it here. I live in Broome, Western Australia, in the fiefdom of Kerry Stokes, owner of the Seven West network. Our regional weekly is The Broome Advertiser which offers little in the way of news in a traditional sense. It fills the columns between advertisements with a variety of re-written press releases, opinion pieces and the very occasional facsimile of news when it suits the editorial diktat. My understanding of what news should be is probably one based on a romantic notion, that it should attempt to retain some balance in reporting on an issue, to inform the public debate on issues that are of importance to the readership of the community. That, I had hoped, would include some attempt at fact-checking or seeking the response of named parties in any piece being published. This is almost explicitly not the case when it comes to publication of items under the banner of “news” in the Advertiser. It is invariably a trenchant supporter of big business and a slavish correspondent on behalf of those who take out advertising space, evidently the larger the advertisement, the more lavish and purple the prose.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

=> ↺ Limited TikTok ban could augur sweeping changes — Radio Free Asia

• A new ban on TikTok’s use on U.S. government devices may only be the start of congressional prohibitions against the Chinese social media app, with lawmakers from both parties angling for more decisive action against what they say represents a national security threat.

• The $1.7 trillion spending bill, which funds the federal government through to September 2023 and was passed by the Senate on Thursday morning, now heads to the House. Included in the package is a law that prohibits the installation of TikTok on federal government devices.

• But revelations this week that employees at TikTok’s Chinese parent, ByteDance, used the app to track the physical movements of some of its users, including two journalists, may add momentum to efforts in Congress to pass even more restrictions on the app’s use.

• When he introduced a bill to ban TikTok entirely in the United States earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) accused TikTok and its parent company ByteDance of “collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults” in order “to spy” on them on Beijing’s behalf.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Xmas Road Trip Report

• My wife and I just got back from

• Northern Alberta. It was a nice — but

• eventful — trip. The trip up to the

• Peace River area took three days

• because of a bad accident south of

• Grande Prairie. Traffic was stopped

• for almost 12 hours. It was -40C

• (which is pretty much -40F) and we

• waited for a bit, but neither of us

• felt like doing the “how much gas do

• we have left” math while trying to

• keep warm. So we went back to Grande

• Cache (an old coal mining town) and

• spent a lovely evening there.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: BEHNXPO Wordo: FREON

=> ↺ META: content in atom feed

• So I recently went back to using feed readers and it has made my life much much easier, only problem is – the feed does not have a tag. So I have to open any posts in their own links. Could we add a tag to midnight pub if possible?

• 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

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