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● 01.11.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 11/01/2023: Discourse 3.0 Released and GnuCash 5.0 Coming Soon

Posted in News Roundup at 7:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Post Collapse Computing Part 4: The Road Ahead – Space and Meaning

• The goals of wanting software to be frugal with resources but also easy to repair are often hard to square. Efficiency is generally achieved by using lower-level technology and having developers do more work to optimize resource use. However, for repairability you want something high-level with short feedback loops and introspection, i.e. the opposite.

• An app written and distributed as a single Python file with no external dependencies is probably as good as it gets in terms of repairability, but there are serious limitations to what you can do with such an app and the stack is not known for being resource-efficient. The same applies to other types of accessible programming environments, such as scripts or spreadsheets. When it comes to data, plain text is very flexible and easy to work with (i.e. good for repairability), but it’s less efficient than binary data formats, can’t be queried as easily as a database, etc.

• My feeling is that in many cases it’s a matter of choosing the right tradeoffs for a given situation, and knowing which side of the spectrum is more important. However, there are definitely examples where this is not a tradeoff, e.g. Electron is both inefficient and not very repairable due to its complexity.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ OBS 28 – 29 Flatpak Are Unusable On AMD GPUs – Invidious

• I rely on OBS actually working so when it doesn’t it puts me in a very fun situation and it turns out that both OBS 28 and the new OBS 29 were broken but for completely different reasons.

=> ↺ FLOSS Weekly 714: Sugar Labs and Music Blocks – Music Composition in Open Source, Devin Ulibarri and Walter Bender

• Devin Ulibarri and Walter Bender of Sugar Labs join Doc Searls and Dan Lynch on FLOSS Weekly. Searls and Lynch learn how kids can compose music and produce code with open source Music Blocks. You can learn too, in just an hour of fun listening. Or, even better, by watching this week’s video.

=> ↺ How to install FreeOffice on KDE Neon – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install FreeOffice on KDE Neon.

=> ↺ Slowly Switching to Linux – Invidious

• When we talk about Switching to Linux, we are not usually talking about a 100% change right now. You should move slowly for the best transition.

=> ↺ Manjaro KDE – Still The King Of Arch Distros? – Invidious

• A quick video covering the newest release of Manjaro KDE. With a newer kernel and a fresher look will Manjaro retain the mantle of the Best Arch Distro?

=> ↺ BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium Quick Overview #shorts – Invidious

• A Quick Overview of BunsenLabs Linux Beryllium

=> ↺ How to install OpenMandriva ROME 23.01 – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install OpenMandriva ROME 23.01.

=> ↺ 46: Build Your Own – Linux Out Loud – TuxDigital

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about the age of building PCs coming to an end.

• Welcome to episode 46 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

Applications

=> ↺ Liferea Feed Reader finally Released 1.14.0 Stable [Ubuntu PPA] | UbuntuHandbook

• Liferea, Linux Feed Reader, finally announced the new stable 1.14 release series! Here’s how to install it via PPA in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Ubuntu 22.10.

• Liferea is a news aggregator that brings together all of the content from your favorite subscriptions into a simple interface for easy organizing and browsing. It features offline reading, HTML 5 support, sync with Google Reader API, Reedah, and TinyTinyRSS.

• The new 1.14.0 was released today as a new stable release, after more than 2 years of v1.13 series unstable development.

=> ↺ Discourse 3.0 is Here!

• Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Discourse 3.0! We are bringing our customers and users some major new capabilities to enable communities to have thoughtful, purposeful discussions online. This new release includes real-time chat and user status to enable more informal communication, a customizable sidebar for easier access to the things each user cares about most, and a new notifications interface that makes it easier to decide what is important to follow up on, along with many other improvements.

• With this release we are also celebrating 9 years since Discourse 1.0, when we set out to build a platform for civilized discourse to enable communities to raise the quality of conversations on the Internet. As we approach a decade in our journey, our desire to improve Discourse for diverse communities of all sizes is stronger than ever and we look forward to continuing to evolve with you for the next decade!

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Install Kodi 19.5 On Ubuntu 22.10/ 22.04 – Linux Mint – Tips On Unix

• This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Kodi 19.5 On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, and Linux Mint 21.

=> ↺ 8 Typos You Really Need to Avoid on Linux

• The Linux command line delivers great power. The problem is, the correct use of that power hinges on the accuracy of your typing. Here are eight typos you never want to make.

=> ↺ What Are utmp, wtmp, and btmp Files in Linux?

• If you are aware of the Linux file structure, then you might already be aware of the “/var/log” directory that is responsible for keeping the system related logs.

• You can easily list the content of this directory using the ls command.

=> ↺ Syslog-ng 101, part 4: Configuration and testing | Random thoughts of Peter Czanik

• This is the fourth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. I hope that since the previous part of my tutorial, you successfully installed syslog-ng. In this part we will finally work with syslog-ng, not just learn about the theoretical background. We will do basic configuration and testing.

=> ↺ Linux files: creating, listing, updating, and more | Network World

• Linux provides a number of handy commands for managing file permissions, understanding who has access to the files and checking on file content.

=> ↺ How to install and run Linux apps on a Chromebook | Android Central

• Your Chromebook probably does everything you want it to do. You have the web and mankind’s lifetime of achievements, Chrome apps and extensions, and Android apps right out of the box. Click and use. But it can do even more.

• That’s where Linux programs and the command line come into play. Linux has been around forever and chances are that no matter what you want to do there is a Linux app that does it. Since your Chromebook is just another Linux laptop at its core and Google has finally made it easy to install third-party Linux apps you might want to give it a go.

=> ↺ Beginners Guide for Finger Command in Linux

• The finger is an external command-line tool that can be used to list all the logged-in users on a remote machine or server, like “w” or “who” commands.

• This tool is also referred to as a “user information lookup program”, as it provides you with user related information like their home directory, default shell, when they logged-in, etc.

• In this article, you will learn how to list all users and view their information using the finger command (with practical examples).

=> ↺ Beginners Guide for Uptime Command in Linux

• The uptime command is one of the many resourceful Linux utilities for sysadmins that is capable of telling the system boot related information like the current time, the uptime (in days and hours), the number of users currently logged on to the system, and the load average.

• The introduction went too far, but the utility is pretty simple for beginners to understand, so let’s start with practical examples.

=> ↺ Snapd unrecognized service: Solution

• You may receive the Snapd unrecognized service error when trying to start the Snap package manager service, or when trying to execute a snap command. In this tutorial, we will go through some troubleshooting steps to resolve the Snapd unrecognized service on a Linux system. Try out some of the methods below to get your Snap service up and running smoothly again.

=> ↺ A developer’s guide to using OpenShift with Kubernetes | Red Hat Developer

• This article is the second in a series that describes the relationship between Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift. The first article, An OpenShift Developers Guide to the Essentials of Kubernetes, described basic Kubernetes concepts, components, and resources. This installment describes what OpenShift is and what it does. I’ll also describe the relationship between Kubernetes and OpenShift, and briefly explain some of the basics for working with OpenShift and Kubernetes using both the web console and OpenShift’s oc command-line interface (CLI).

=> ↺ How to Add Markdown Preview to Gedit Text Editor – OMG! Ubuntu!

• Gedit text editor? Pretty popular. Markdown? Also pretty popular — and Gedit Markdown Preview is a plugin that brings the two together.

• It’s like the climax of a FOSS rom-com 😌.

• You might be thinking: “Gedit? Forgedit!” – Ubuntu 22.10 swapped Gedit for GNOME’s (very capable) Text Editor. However, Gedit is available in the Ubuntu repos, and continues to serve as the default text editor in long-term support releases of Ubuntu (which are what the vast majority of Ubuntu users are on).

• But while Gedit supports a lot of different programming, code, languages, and text markup formats, it doesn’t support Markdown natively.

=> ↺ How To Setup Qt SDK on Ubuntu Kubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

• Qt Software Development Kit is a free software licensed, world-class grade full-featured programming framework and tools to create cross-platform graphical user interface applications in C++ language. Examples of great software built using Qt include Kubuntu, KDE, and Telegram. This tutorial will help you install Qt SDK on Ubuntu and Kubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish. With this, you can start developing applications with a lot of code examples, drag and drop techniques, accompanied with complete the famous Qt’s documentation & tutorials. Now let’s setup!

=> ↺ How To Install Apache Subversion on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Subversion on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Subversion (SVN) is an open-source version control system that is used to manage and track changes to files, such as source code, documents, and images. It allows multiple users to work on the same files concurrently, and it provides a central repository where all changes are stored and tracked.

• 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 Apache Subversion on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

=> ↺ How to reset your root password on Linux Mint | FOSS Linux

• A password is used to authenticate any system, whether a desktop or mobile device. Setting a strong password that is difficult to guess is required when using the system. Changing your password periodically will help you protect your system from assaults. It occurs while you are working as a teammate in the workplace. In that case, some of your team members might be aware of your password. This might cause issues since anyone could hack into data or attack it.

• You can overcome these challenges by periodically changing your passwords. Even if someone finds your old password or credential, they won’t be able to access the system. Let’s assume that, for some reason, you forgot the Linux computer’s password. Whatever the reason, the result is that you forgot the most crucial component for using your computer. What’s next? You are prevented from accessing vital office documents, assignments, or anything important. You might think that you should modify your system’s password as well. It can sometimes be crucial if you believe someone tried to access your computer unlawfully. You should immediately change your password to something more difficult if it is a basic one.

=> ↺ How to configure Linux Mint for internet connection sharing | FOSS Linux

• Linux Mint is a free and open-source computer operating system. Based on Debian and Ubuntu, Mint offers a whole out-of-the-box experience by providing browser plugins, video codecs, DVD playback support, Java, and other components. Unfortunately, many of these parts are proprietary, so they are closed-source.

• We’ll show you how to activate internet connection sharing on Linux Mint so you may share your Mint’s internet connection with other connected devices on your network. We’ll also teach you how to set up a Wi-Fi hotspot to share an internet connection with other devices.

• One of Windows’ finest features is the ability to share internet connections quickly. However, that is not the case for Linux operating systems, as you must configure the internet-sharing preferences to allow other PCs to connect to your network. In this tutorial, you will study how to share a Linux Mint internet connection via a wireless hotspot and how to share a wireless internet connection through a wired connection.

=> ↺ How to Install the latest OpenSSL version from Source on Linux

• OpenSSL is a widely used crypto library that implements SSL and TLS protocols to secure communications over computer networks.

Games

=> ↺ Happy Belated New Year 2023 with a Photoshoot Event! – DDraceNetwork News

• Thanks to louis we have a “DDNet New Year Photoshoot 2023” server again with a fresh map for 2023! Also thanks to TsFreddie for the server modification. Everyone can join the New Year Photshoot server running now to be part of the community photo! Check out last year’s result too.

=> ↺ Godot Engine – Godot 4.0 Documentation Sprint

• With the release candidate for Godot Engine 4.0 being just around the corner, we want to make sure that the community is fully prepared and can dive right into it as soon as the new version is available. To that end, this is a call to action — to help in completing the documentation for Godot 4.

• Everyone is welcome! New contributors, we’re happy to help you get started. Seasoned participants, please take this chance to document all the awesome work you and your teammates have been doing on Godot. Helping each other is highly encouraged, filling the gaps and reviewing contributions to make sure they are factual and well written.

• We have many new features, and documentation is going to be the first place people look at to figure them out. If you don’t have a lot of time or lack writing skills, don’t worry! The documentation team happy to help out, just give us something to work with be it a class reference addition or a new tutorial for the manual.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Nautilus File Manager Adds Expandable Tree View – OMG! Linux

• The latest alpha release of the Nautilus file manager is front-loaded with goodies.

• Issued as part of the GNOME 44 release cycle, the latest bleeding edge edition of Nautilus (or Files, as we’re supposed to call it) includes a few formative features that, over the coming months, will be finessed further ahead of (possible) inclusion in the stable release.

• Two additions stand out.

• Firstly, there’s a new option to enable ‘expanding folders’ in list view. This oft-requested feature (which so nearly arrived in GNOME 43) is akin to a tree view. Once enabled (it’s not by default) and in list view, you can expand a folder, subfolders, sub-sub folders, etc.

=> ↺ Wordbook: Offline English Dictionary App for GNOME

• We mostly search Google, DDG or any search engine online for word information such as meaning, synonyms, antonyms etc.

• Since almost everyone today has an internet-connected mobile phone, it’s probably easier to search on Google.

• But for offline usage, you may try Wordbook when no internet connection is available.

=> ↺ Outreachy Week 3: New Learnings

• I have learnt a lot since I applied to Outreachy and started working on my internship project. I think the most interesting thing I have learnt about so far is Valgrind. I had heard the tool’s name in passing in various online discussions but never fully understood how it is used and what it is used for.

• During the application period, I was researching various ways to reliably benchmark code in CI and came across cachegrind and valgrind again. This time I decided to finally understand more about it. To get a better understanding of the term, I looked up the definition on the valgrind website. According to the documentation, “Valgrind is an instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools. There are Valgrind tools that can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your programs in detail.” Cachegrind is a tool built using valgrind framework and will be instrumental in producing reliable and consistent results for my project.

=> ↺ Outreachy Week 5: My project and progress so far – Shinigami’s Blog

• In today’s blog post, I will explain what my internship is about and what progress I have made so far. I am an Outreachy intern with the GNOME Foundation working on the Create infrastructure for Performance tracking for librsvg project.

• librsvg is a library that is commonly used to convert SVG documents into raster images, and it is utilised by various projects such as the GNOME desktop to render their icons from SVG assets. There have been attempts to improve librsvg’s performance in terms of memory and CPU usage, but there is currently no system in place to monitor these efforts.

=> ↺ gedit on the Microsoft Store

Distributions and Operating Systems

=> ↺ Kali Linux (is) Everywhere! | Kali Linux Blog

• One of the primary goals of Kali Linux is to put the tools you need as close to you as possible. Over the years this has resulted in a number of different ways to get Kali, but not everyone knows about all the options! In this post we are going to do an overview of different options you have for running Kali, and where you can go for more information for each option.

• You should keep in mind as we review options what will be best for you, in your specific use case. What do you intend to use Kali for? Where will you be when you need access to Kali? One of the items that is unique to Kali is most instances are actually pretty short lived, and replaced often. For instance, in the penetration testing space it is considered best practice by many to wipe your install and start over with each new customer or assessment. On the other hand, there are instances of Kali that are around for a very long time; for instance, running scanning engines for enterprises.

Red Hat

=> ↺ Nobara Project is a Modified Version of Fedora With User-Friendly Fixes – Linux Magazine

• If you’re looking for a version of Fedora that includes third-party and proprietary packages, look no further than the Nobara Project.

• The Nobara Project’s aim is to bring users a better gaming, streaming, and content creation solution out of the box.

• This new Linux distribution (which is not a Fedora Spin) is a completely independent project. This Linux operating system includes NVIDIA drivers, WINE dependencies, OBS Studio, third-party codecs, and a collection of package fixes that are geared toward making it easy for users to immediately be productive, without having to tweak, install, or patch anything.

• Pre-installed packages include Blender, Davinci Resolve, OBS Studio, WINE, Proton, Discord, Flatpak, Steam, Lutris, OnlyOfice, Vapoursynth, and much more. You’ll also find the RPMFusion repository that includes both free and non-free software.

• Unlike Fedora, Nobara uses AppArmor because they claim it is more user-friendly, less intrusive, and easier to manage. Nobara ships with the same kernel used in Fedora with a few added patches.

=> ↺ Fedora 38 is finally taking shape • The Register

• A Fedora Project meeting this week is starting to set the shape of the next release, Fedora 38, due in April.

• Two very visible changes were decided earlier this month. Two additional desktop environments (we are using the word “desktop” somewhat loosely here) will get their own new spins with this version. One of these is the new Fedora Budgie, which will have the Budgie desktop environment first seen in the Solus distro.

• There is an interesting little bit of history here. Solus first registered on our radar back in about 2015, with a different new desktop environment which was called Consort.

• Consort was a fork of the existing Fallback desktop mode in GNOME 3.4, which is still around but was later renamed Flashback. Flashback is an alternative shell for GNOME 3 which gives it a look and feel very much like GNOME 2, with two panels at the top and bottom of the screen.

• Oddly, this is separate from GNOME Classic, implemented as a GNOME extension, which does… well, pretty much the same. Solus abandoned Consort, developed its own new desktop Budgie instead, and now that’s making its way into Fedora. As we’re trying to avoid making any reference to anyone smuggling budgies anywhere, let’s just say it’s the circle of life or something.

=> ↺ Sylabs Announces the Availability of SingularityCE in the EPEL Repository

• loads, today announced that SingularityCE is now available in the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository, a repository of additional packages for Enterprise Linux distribution (such as Alma Linux, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Scientific Linux and Rocky Linux).

=> ↺ SingularityCE Container Technology is Now Available in the EPEL Repository

• Top performance-based container runtime technology now available for Enterprise Linux users

=> ↺ IT talent: Top 6 books for job hunters in 2023

=> ↺ 8 TED Talks to sharpen your communication skills

• Effective communication is a key characteristic of great leaders – it’s instrumental in gaining trust, inspiring change, building connections, and influencing others. In today’s era of hybrid and remote work, communicating effectively is more important than ever.

=> ↺ Fine-grained authorization for Quarkus microservices | Red Hat Developer

• Microservices require a robust authorization system that works consistently for all services. This article describes a solution we call fine-grained authorization and uses Quarkus, a modern Java framework, to implement Relationship-Based Access Control (ReBAC) in the manner of Google Zanzibar.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Xubuntu 23.04 Will Offer Official ’Minimal’ Image – OMG! Ubuntu!

• As the Ubuntu 23.04 development cycle gets underway we’re learning more about what’s in store for Ubuntu and its growing family of flavours.

• Xubuntu, one of the more minimally-minded spins, has revealed its planning to release a new ‘Xubuntu Minimal’ image starting with Ubuntu 23.04. It’s an expansion of the Xubuntu Core effort started back in 2015 but with a big ol’ rubber-stamp of officialdom on it.

• In a post to the Ubuntu developer mailing list, Steve Langasek says Xubuntu Minimal “…parallels existing minimal install targets from the Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server images to provide a smaller install footprint without applications that the developers want installed as part of the default experience, but which are not essential.”

=> ↺ ASRock Industrial Partners with Canonical for Ubuntu-Certified Industrial Platforms

• ASRock Industrial, the leading manufacturer of Edge AIoT solutions, announces a partnership with Canonical to certify Ubuntu on its industrial systems and motherboards.

=> ↺ ASRock Partners Canonical for Ubuntu-Certified Platforms

• ASRock Industrial has announced a partnership with Canonical to Ubuntu-Certified platforms including its industrial systems and motherboards. The collaboration allows for providing Ubuntu-certified devices with all Ubuntu functionality and long-term support with security updates from Canonical. Through extensive testing and validation, the new iEP-5000G Industrial IoT Controller is now an Ubuntu-certified platform. Customers can gain confidence in products’ seamless integration with Ubuntu while accelerating the time-to-market of application development.

• Ubuntu operating system (OS) is now one of the most popular OSs worldwide. It is extensively used in applications dedicated to developing and verifying AIoT solutions.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Introducing Coolita 2.0: Veira Group’s Linux-based Smart TV Solutions for the Indian Market

• Veira Group, one of India’s largest ODM for Smart TVs introduces Linux-based Coolita 2.0 solutions for the country’s growing smart TV market. With this development, Veira Group enters a new tech territory in partnership with the proprietary Coolita OS, highlighting its commitment to building a new smart TV ecosystem. Coolita OS is Skyworth first self-developed smart TV operating system, delivering a lighter, smoother, more convenient user experience.

=> ↺ Rock 5 Model B, A Powerful New SBC From Radxa – The DIY Life

• Today we’re going to be taking a look at the Rock 5 Model B, a new SBC or single-board computer from Radxa which is based on the powerful Rockchip RK3588 SOC.

• The Rock 5B is available in three RAM configurations, 4GB, 8GB and 16GB. I’ve ordered the 8GB to try out and I’ve also got their passive heat sink to cool it with.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Spreading Awareness about Purism in 2022 – Purism

• Is it enough to produce “goods”? What about “being good” especially when we promote ourselves to others? President of Purism, Kyle Rankin shared the internal discussions we were having as we looked to expand our marketing efforts beyond what we’d done in the past, in the blog post, “Is Ethical Advertising Possible?”. We received wonderful response from our audiences, and crystallized all the thoughts through our Ethical Marketing Principles. To us, this means staying true to our Digital Bill of Rights, and our social purpose to respect our users.

=> ↺ Joe Grand Creates the World’s Thinnest Boombox

• Joe used a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to drive it, a DAC, NeoPixel LEDs (from Adafruit) for a VU meter, capacitive touch sensing buttons for the controls, and flat PiezoListen speakers from TDK.

=> ↺ Introducing the new MKR IoT Carrier Rev2: Time to start your next IoT project | Arduino Blog

• If you’re looking for an ever faster, smoother, and more rewarding way to build your own IoT projects at home, the new MKR IoT Carrier Rev2 could be perfect for you.

• The new carrier can work with any board from the MKR family, giving you a wide choice of connectivity options to match the needs of your next IoT project. With the MKR IoT Carrier Rev2 you don’t need any additional components to get started, and you can build impressive and complete hassle free projects this way.

=> ↺ A chip design that changes everything: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023 | MIT Technology Review

• About 3,100 members worldwide, including companies and academic institutions, are now collaborating via the nonprofit RISC-V International to establish and develop these norms. In February 2022, Intel announced a $1 billion fund that will, in part, support companies building RISC-V chips.

• RISC-V chips have already begun to pop up in earbuds, hard drives, and AI processors, with 10 billion cores already shipped. Companies are also working on RISC-V designs for data centers and spacecraft. In a few years, RISC-V proponents predict, the chips will be everywhere.

=> ↺ Key Technologies for 2023: RISC-V on the Rise

• “Aside from cost and customizability, RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) benefits from being a modern, elegantly designed architecture without the baggage of legacy code,” says Eric Brown. “Along with the open development environment, the modern design appeals to developers, who are increasingly crucial to success.”

=> ↺ Sensor glove for sign language translation – Hackster.io

• As the title suggests, this device is a sensor-based wearable that converts simple hand gestures to text and speech. I decided to make this a project in university.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ We asked, you told us: You’re intrigued by a RISC-V Android phone

=> ↺ How to print text messages from your Android phone – Android Authority

=> ↺ How to like a text message on Android – Android Authority

=> ↺ How to get to the downloads folder on an Android phone

=> ↺ Sony’s new Android-powered NW-A306 Walkman features lightweight design, Hi-Res wireless audio and long battery life

=> ↺ Android 14: Everything you need to know

=> ↺ The Android 13 Update Is Coming to Your PC – Review Geek

=> ↺ The Best Android Endless Runners – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy A42 5G starts receiving Android 13 update in the US, but there’s a catch – PhoneArena

=> ↺ Android 13 is rolling out to all Windows Insiders

=> ↺ Check your Android phone now – millions have missed mind-blowing app hack | The Sun

=> ↺ Android spyware strikes again targeting financial institutions and your money | Fox News

=> ↺ Urgent alert issued to millions of Android users – act now or it could cost you | The Sun

=> ↺ Nothing Phone 1 vs. Samsung Galaxy A53 5G: Pure value for the money

=> ↺ How to find a lost Android | Fox News

=> ↺ Android phones are about to get a whole lot more personal | T3

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ New software sells new hardware – but not forever • The Register

• A few months back, I wrote that buying software is a big lie. All lies have consequences, of course. The worst kind of consequences are the ones you didn’t see coming. So let’s look at some of those, and some other lies they conceal.

• As we said last time, you can’t really buy software. Commercial software is mostly – but as some readers pointed out, not always – proprietary. Proprietary software has both pros and cons, but so does FOSS. It’s not always all about money. Last time, we argued that convenience – minimizing expenditure of work, time, and effort – can be even more important than simple financial cost.

• The differences between commercial software and FOSS also have lots of important consequences when it comes to hardware, too, though. With commercial software, the relationships are generally easy to follow. With FOSS, it’s more complicated, with contradictory and conflicting effects. That’s what I want to look at this time.

Events

=> ↺ Automotive trends at CES Las Vegas

• CES is a once a year opportunity for all industry professionals to showcase their innovations and meet with their peers and customers. This year is special for Canonical because although we attended as visitors in the past, it was the first time we had a booth dedicated to Automotive and Smart Home IoT at CES!

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Chrome Dev for Android Update

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Dev 110 (110.0.5481.29) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

• You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Extended Stable Channel Update for Desktop

• The Extended Stable channel has been updated to 108.0.5359.179 for Windows and Mac which will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 109 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

=> ↺ Chrome Releases: Dev Channel Update for Desktop

• The dev channel has been updated to 110.0.5481.30 for Windows, Linux and Mac.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ SQL Server to PostgreSQL Code Converter v1.3.3 has been released

=> ↺ PostgreSQL: Softbuilder Announces Launch of SB Data Generator 2.2

• Softbuilder, a leading French software development company, is pleased to announce the availability of SB Data Generator 2.2, the latest version of its powerful test data generation tool.

• SB Data Generator is a tool that helps users generate and populate databases with realistic test data. This can be useful for testing and debugging software, as well as for simulating real-world scenarios for training or demonstration purposes. By using SB Data Generator, users can quickly and easily create large volumes of data that can be used to test their software and ensure that it is working correctly.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ How to Import LibreOffice Calc Spreadsheet to Base Database Table

• While creating a database or tables, it isn’t easy to enter data manually. The most frequent use case is your data resides inside a spreadsheet, and you want to import them to a table for further storage and processing.

• Here’s a tutorial demonstrating how to import LibreOffice Calc data to a Base database table directly and verify the data.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GnuCash 5.0 Accounting Software Promises New Stock Transaction Assistant, More

• GnuCash 5.0 free, open-source, and cross-platform accounting software is in the works and promises some interesting new features for those of you who like to manage your finances on your GNU/Linux distributions.

• The upcoming major release comes with a new Stock Transaction Assistant that can be accessed from the Actions menu. This feature will guide you through entering most investment transactions for bonds, mutual funds, and stocks.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Kicking off 2023 with the MIT Reality Hack!

• It’s with excitement and nervousness that I’m writing this post, sitting on a plane heading to Boston where I will attend the MIT Reality Hack as a mentor. This is the first time I take part in this “AR/VR Metaverse Hackathon” so I’m not fully sure what to expect, but I’m certain that I will get to meet many excited hackers and mentors looking to explore the future of XR!

• The hack spans 5 days where teams of hackers are formed on the first day when we all are there. The hacking continues until Sunday and ends on Monday with a closing ceremony followed by a public exhibition in the afternoon, see the full schedule here. While registration is now closed, it was open to anyone, and it looks like there will be a diverse crowd of people attending, young and old, both as hackers and mentors.

=> ↺ Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.4 on CRAN: Extended and Updated

• The fourth release of the still new-ish qlcal package arrivied at CRAN just now.

• qlcal is based on the calendaring subset of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more.

• This release generalizes the advanceDate() function (similar to what advanceUnits() already had), and updates several calendars along with the upcoming QuantLib 1.29 release. This includes updates for the UK and Australia related to changes in the monarchy, an update for South Africa and the additional of 2023 holidays for China.

=> ↺ 5 Programming Languages to Build Your Career in Tech

=> ↺ Congratulations to our 2022 Qt Champions!

• It’s time to acknowledge and celebrate the Qt Contributions made by our Community Members.

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ Fosdem mini grants for 2023 | tprfmarketing [blogs.perl.org]

• One of the goals TPRF would like to achieve, now that conferences are becoming increasingly available in person, is to spread awareness of current Perl and Raku projects.

• In support of this goal, TPRF will be issuing a limited number of mini grants of up to $300 to participants interested in holding Perl/Raku based talks in FOSDEM 2023 dev rooms. TPRF has made an intentional decision to not apply for a dev room, but to encourage talks to be given in other, non-language specific dev rooms instead. This will allow Perl and Raku to be shared with new audiences.

=> ↺ Benchmarking Rakudo releases. Is Raku Still slow?

• Around the first ‘public’ release of Perl 6 (The x-mas release) I wrote a module that uses the libgumbo from google to parse html5 webpages.

• It was faster and more robust than the existing HTML::Parser module written in pure Perl 6. To be fair to the module, the full html5 norm is rather lenghtly to implement.

• I was using this to parse my list of favorite fan fiction on fimfiction.net and try to make some stats around them. It was still not super fast, like 0.5+ sec to parse one page (I have like 20+ pages of favorites). So each run of the script was rather slow.

• At the time Perl 6 was still in stabilization phase and performance improvements were not really important. But after a while, it started to creep its ways out into Moar and Rakudo. So I wanted to see the improvement over the Rakudo release for my Gumbo module.

Python

=> ↺ Overview | 16-Step Drum Sequencer | Adafruit Learning System

• Build a Roland 808-style step sequencer to trigger multiple drum tracks in your digital audio workstation (DAW), such as GarageBand or Ableton, over USB MIDI. All built in CircuitPython, and easy to customize.

=> ↺ ICYMI Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: New Products, Learning Resources and much more

• Welcome to the latest Python on Microcontrollers newsletter! The New Year brings new product announcements from Espressif and Raspberry Pi. And promised Raspberry Pi Pico W Bluetooth support. If you have a resolution to learn Python (or learn more Python), there are lots of free resources and classes available. And if you want to write Python on Linux, snag a free virtual machine from IBM. Now is the best time to get involved, with so many resources available.

=> ↺ Python Insider: Python 3.12.0 alpha 4 released

• Python 3.12 is still in development. This release, 3.12.0a4 is the fourth of seven planned alpha releases.

Leftovers

=> ↺ Ted Turner Made an MTV Competitor That Died After Only a Month

• I have said many times that I think Ted Turner was perhaps the most innovative man in the history of television—who, during his history as a cable television mogul, had developed a reputation of building genuinely interesting ideas for broadcast programming. But as anyone who lived to experience AOL Time Warner can tell you, there were a couple of mistakes on his watch, but one of the ones that doesn’t get discussed very much involves his attempt to compete with MTV. After winning over cable television the world over with WTBS and CNN, Turner tried something nearly as risky as launching a 24-hour all-news network: A network that competed with another cable network. Wondering which one? I’ll give you a hint—it played music, and it didn’t really work. Today’s Tedium talks about the Cable Music Channel, a network that lasted five whole days longer than CNN+ did. Yes, that’s how bad of a flop it was.

=> ↺ R-D – Optimizing 3D glTF Assets for Interactive Journalism

• High-quality 3D journalism should be accessible across platforms and devices. For browser-based 3D content to reach the widest possible audience, assets created by photogrammetry and modeling software must be heavily optimized — cleaned, simplified and compressed — for last-mile delivery to readers. Popular web build tools like Vite and Webpack offer excellent optimization pipelines for traditional web assets like JavaScript, HTML and CSS. But unfortunately, they lack support for the key formats needed for 3D experiences on the web.

Hardware

=> ↺ Chip Inventories Swell as Consumers Buy Fewer Gadgets

• The oversupply marks a sharp turnaround from a global shortage during two years of supercharged demand. Consumer appetite for electronics has weakened against a backdrop of rising interest rates, a falling stock market and recession fears. Chip inventories are swelling, mirroring what is happening in the wider economy where retailers are stuck with goods on their shelves and producers of a range of products in high demand early in the pandemic now face a glut.

=> ↺ Review of Creality Ender-3 S1 Pro 2-in-1 3D printer & laser engraver – Part 1: Unboxing and assembly

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Please Participate in the State of Green Software Survey 2022

=> ↺ Greenwashing by Microsoft boosters

Security

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

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (exiv2, hsqldb, libjettison-java, ruby-sinatra, and viewvc), Fedora (golang-github-docker, mbedtls, and vim), Gentoo (alpine, commons-text, jupyter_core, liblouis, mbedtls, ntfs3g, protobuf-java, scikit-learn, and twisted), Red Hat (kernel and kpatch-patch), SUSE (rubygem-activerecord-5.2, tiff, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp, linux-oracle, linux-ibm, and linux-oem-5.17, linux-oem-6.0).

=> ↺ Google Kickstarts 2023 With 17 Chrome Security Vulnerability Updates For Windows, Mac & Linux

=> ↺ Everything to Know About Passkeys for a Password-Free Future | Wirecutter

• Usernames and passwords may soon be going away. Passkeys will replace them.

=> ↺ PyTorch Poisoned in Software Supply Chain Attack – The New Stack

• If you downloaded PyTorch-nightly on Linux via pip between Dec. 25, 2022, and Dec. 30, 2022, you’ve got trouble.

=> ↺ NCSC-UK Releases Guidance on Using MSP for Administering Cloud Services

• The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK) has released a blog post, Using MSPs to administer your cloud services, that provides organizations security considerations for using a third party, such as a managed service provider (MSP), to administer cloud services. Contracting with an MSP for cloud service management has become an increasingly appealing option for organizations.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ We wrote to the Tamil Nadu government on mandatory submission of Aadhaar: Voicing our fears of exclusion and privacy violation

• We have written to the Finance Secretary of the Tamil Nadu Government highlighting our concerns of exclusion and privacy around the notification mandating linkage of Aadhaar to avail benefits under all State government schemes. We have requested the Tamil Nadu government to cease the mandatory requirement for Aadhaar and consider accepting alternate and viable means of identification such as driving licence, passport, etc. to avail benefits under the government scheme, as it will not only prevent exclusion of beneficiaries who are otherwise rightfully entitled to these benefits but will also address the legitimate privacy concerns.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Fourth covid winter

• started on GPD Win 1 via PuTTY in living room

• Evy works, daughter plays with scrabble tiles

• under record playing southern US traditional songs

• finished in bed feeling sick before work

• —

• At playground while first daughter climbed, slid,

• Evy said “I can’t stop thinking about one woman I

• bodybagged last winter. I think about her at least

• once every week. I guess her mouth had been full

• of secretions. When I turned her….”

Technical

=> ↺ Orphans of Netscape

• Mid last year, Sandra at idiomdrottning.org wrote a fantastic post, entitled “Talking about my generation”. I only read it much more recently. It resonated with me, I mulled it over a while, connected some ideas in it with what had previously been totally unrelated stuff in my mind, and it ended up doing a surprising amount of work in shifting my perspective on the modern internet and helping to lift me out of an aversive headspace, a bad tech funk, which I was deeply stuck in for most of 2022. This post is an attempt to share some of the thinking behind that experience, which might well be totally idiosyncratic and non-repeatable for people who aren’t me, but oh well. If you think this post is mostly nonsense and you hate it, that’s fine, but please do blame me and not Sandra because I am going waaaay beyond her starting point.

• [...]

• In passing, I should clarify that I’ve long been wary, even dismissive, of the notion of “generations”, all this “baby boomers”, “gen x/y/z”, “millennial” stuff. Obviously it’s not completely devoid of value, but I’ve always felt like a lot of it was cheap stereotyping, painting with extremely broad strokes, ignoring fuzzy boundaries and ignoring that some societal changes happen at different times in different parts of the world. Often it just seems to be deployed as an easy way to dismiss and “other” certain people based on their age when it’s convenient to do so. There used to be a fantastic post somewhere in Gopherspace (I have it in my head that it’s no longer up, but possibly that’s wrong, and I’ve forgotten where on Earth it is/was – please email me if you know what I’m talking about!) which espoused the idea that generations were mostly nonsense but occasionally there really were genuine nodal points in history (I’m borrowing that term from Gibson’s Bridge triology, it’s not the term the forgotten Gopher author used), like WWII, which separated people born on either side of them, and if I remember rightly this post proposed that the creation of the internet was one of those points. I like Sandra’s generational analysis despite my usual misgivings because (i) it explicitly acknowledges “exceptions in all directions”, and (ii) it fits neatly into the nodal point model, rather than the usual weird clockwork cycle of “lol, kids these days”. Maybe I also like it because I feel like it actually describes me accurately, whereas in standard generational discourse I’m supposedly a millennial, which is not a label I self-identify as at all, which carries a load of stereotypes that I don’t believe describe me accurately, and which seems like a hopelessly ill-formed category precisely because it uses round numbers on an arbitrary calendar to lump together folks who grew up on either side of exactly the nodal point that Sandra identifies.

=> ↺ Framework Laptop, 1st Impressions

• I’ve been on the fence about buying a Framework laptop for the last few months. Technically I don’t need to upgrade; I have a very serviceable XPS15, but it runs hot, the fans are super noisy, and it’s a bit too heavy when I’m single-bagging a trip abroad. Ideally, I want something like my old X1 Carbon: light, with good battery life and an excellent keyboard.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ It’s apparently a valid URL, despite it being malformed in my opinion

• I’ve had a few [1] posts [2] make it to the front page of Lobsters [3]. Lobsters supports webmention [4], yet I never received a webmention for those two posts. I checked the logs and yes, they were received but I rejected them with a “bad request.” It took a bit of sleuthing, but I found the root cause—the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of my post was, accoring to my code, invalid. Lobsters was sending in a URL of the form https://boston.conman.org//2023/01/02.1—notice the two slashes in front of the path. My code was having none of that.

=> ↺ State of the ‘Net entering 2023: indienet, smolweb, gemini

• This is just a quick post partly indended to jump-start my capsule after some healthy downtime last year. And that downtime isn’t so much time away from the indienet in favour of other digital spaces – in fact over the past couple of months, very much fuelled by the whole #muskrat saga on the birdsite, I’ve been shutting down my digital presence that still lingered[1] on across some commercial social networks; liberating the last traces of my data and fully closing my accounts. As well as stepping away from the commercial Web, I’ve also been slowly shifting away my media consumption habits towards something that I hope is the start of something a bit more radical going forwards. By this I don’t just mean consuming more content in spaces such as the Fediverse or Gemini, but taking a more critical approach to the sources of news and information media that I let myself engage with, and also taking a more considered approach to the articles and items I choose to engage with and pay attention to, learn from, etc. Unsurprisingly, this has largely meant a return to more useful educational book reading, essays, some other long-form (and mini-form!) items online, as well as swapping what used to be time used for doomscrolling/procrastinating on the commercial Web, instead paying more gentle attention to some of what’s coming out of the smolweb, the indienet, the fediverse, etc.

Programming

=> ↺ Cross Compilers: Part 1

• One of my recent projects has had me exploring the feasability of cross compiling Rust code for several achitectures on Linux. It turns out that it is not difficult to do once you have a suitable cross toolchain for C, but getting to that point is often a challenge as what documentation is available is often severely out of date. Worse, pretty much all of the documentation has a caveat saying that you should just use crosstool-ng, and my experience with that tool has been less than great. I’m writing this series both as a way to help others who may wish to take a diy approach to cross compilation, and as documentation for myself for future reference.

• [...]

• A functional cross compiler includes more than a compiler and is probably better referred to as a cross-toolchain. Included in the toolchain are a cross-linker, cross-compiler, and a sysroot containing kernel headers and C library compiled for the target arch. In order to get to a working cross-toolchain we are going to follow these steps in order.

• 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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