● 01.25.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/1/2022: No ARM for Nvidia, End of EasyArch, and WordPress 5.9 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 9:40 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

• Modern software development happens at a breakneck pace, and while staying on ancient versions (hello, Debian Stable / Ubuntu LTS / Android users) is not really a safe and realistic option anymore (try reporting bugs without getting laughed out of the room by upstream maintainers), it is becoming a challenge for users to keep up. When it works, it works… but when something breaks down in the upgrade threadmill, the chain of dependencies to get back on track can become absolutely ludicrous and throw your digital life in turmoil. Just like needing to replace that one light bulb…

• Case in point: I’m finally publishing this article in 2022, while I initially meant to blog about this way back in 2017… but more stuff kept breaking all the time, resetting my productivity and accidentally adding more potential content for this blog post. More value for you, dear reader!

• As someone who has been running Linux for 19 years (as of 2022), I think I know my way around most hurdles you can possibly encounter. Undoubtedly, running Linux-based operating systems on desktop/laptop computers has overall gotten incredibly easier compared to 2003, but also, as one gradually becomes highly dependent on specific tools and committed to well-oiled workflows, the upgrade threadmill can become a real high-stakes pursuit.

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.4 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Kernel Space

• NXP engineers continue persevering for bringing up a mainline-suitable, open-source kernel driver for their Amphion video encoder/decoder hardware. Out today is their 15th revision to the Amphion driver patches.

• The Amphion v15 driver patches were posted this morning for handling this video encoder and decoder found via the video (VPU) block with the NXP i.MX8Q platforms. Initially the IMX8QXP and IMX8QM SoCs are supported by this Amphion driver work.

Graphics Stack

• My work on Wayland and Weston color management and HDR support has been full of learning new concepts and terms. Many of them are crucial for understanding how color works. I started out so ignorant that I did not know how to blend two pixels together correctly. I did not even know that I did not know – I was just doing the obvious blend, and that was wrong. Now I think I know what I know and do not know, and I also feel that most developers around window systems and graphical applications are as uneducated as I was.

• Color knowledge is surprisingly scarce in my field it seems. It is not enough that I educate myself. I need other people to talk to, to review my work, and to write patches that I will be reviewing.

• In addition to Mesa 22.0 landing Vulkan 1.3 support today with the Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers, Mesa today also received initial support for next-gen Raptor Lake S processors.

• With the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel there is the initial i915 kernel driver support for Raptor Lake S so now that the DRM/KMS side has initial RPL-S support, Mesa has landed its dependent support.

Vulkan

• For the just-announced Vulkan 1.3, the open-source Intel “ANV” and Radeon “RADV” Vulkan drivers within Mesa are prepared to land support for this updated specification.

• On the same day as the graphics vendors shipping beta proprietary drivers with Vulkan 1.3 support, the open-source ANV/RADV drivers within Mesa are good to go too with their Vulkan 1.3 support.

• Granted, Vulkan 1.3 is about making official various extensions as part of the core specification that previously were optional. The Intel and Radeon Vulkan Mesa drivers have supported the 23 extensions already promoted to core, so the hurdle today isn’t too extremely challenging. In any case, this same-day support is a remarkable difference compared to the old days of Mesa where it was months/years behind the upstream OpenGL driver specification for its hardware drivers.

• With the release Tuesday of Vulkan 1.3, NVIDIA continues its unparalleled record of day one driver support for this cross-platform GPU application programming interface for 3D graphics and computing.

• Vulkan has been created by experts from across the industry working together at the Khronos Group, an open standards consortium. From the start, NVIDIA has worked to advance this effort. NVIDIA’s Neil Trevett has been Khronos president since its earliest days.

• “NVIDIA has consistently been at the forefront of computer graphics with new, enhanced tools, and technologies for developers to create rich game experiences,” said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

Applications

• One of the superpowers of computers is being able to find what you are looking for quickly and efficiently. Finding a needle in a haystack may have been an impossible challenge in the pre-computer days, but the advent of the computer has made finding things a lot easier, faster and more effective. For us Linux enthusiasts, there are plenty of alternatives available to make finding specific files, such as documents, photos, videos and applications, easier and faster. In this article, written by Paul Surman, one of the readers of this website, two powerful search applications for Linux are described based on his personal experiences. Paul shares his enthusiasm for Albert and Catfish and the way these tools makes his life in Linux easier, so enjoy and see if these powerful tools can be something for you as well.

• The question as to which is the best program for any specific purpose depends on the program, but also on the person who is going to use it. Exceptional programs tend to rise in popularity, like the ones that most often come with Linux distributions. But what works best for you is what really matters.

• This article is about Albert and Catfish, but I am not about to tell you they are the best, only that they have best suited me, and the reasons why. You may have different, perfectly valid reasons, for an entirely different choice. It’s a question of horses for courses. Linux offers diverse choices, and that is one of its many strengths.

• When building, self-building, renovating or extending a home, software and hardware products are almost indispensable.

• For floorplans and CAD drawings there is FreeCAD and LibreCAD. The former, FreeCAD, appears to offer more features for 3D and a BIM workbench for Building Information Modelling. Even if you use architects and engineers to do most of the drawing and design work, it can be really helpful being able to view their drawings at home using one of these tools.

• Once you have a plan for a building it is important to make calculations about energy requirements. One of the most well known tools for this is the Passive House Planning Package (PHPP). Some web sites refer to it as open source software but it is neither free nor open source. It is a spreadsheet and there is a charge for downloading it. There are discussions about an equivalent feature for FreeCAD and another discussion in OSArch.

• For the construction phase, some of the tools promoted by Open Source Ecology offer the possibility to help with everything from earthworks to decorating.

Instructionals/Technical

• We can use multiple tools to monitor system statistics, but if you are looking for virtual memory, use vmstat, which support numerous options and parameters.

• And you can set vmstat with screen or any other screen multiplexer for best usage.

• This is guide, howto install NVIDIA proprietary drivers (manually using .run files) on openSUSE Leap 15.4 Alpha/15.3/Tumbleweed and disable Nouveau driver. This guide works with GeForce 8/9/200/300/400/500/600/700/800/900/10/20/30 series cards.

• XBPS is the default command line package manager tool in Void Linux. Here’s how to use it to install, remove, update, and upgrade packages in Void Linux in a breeze.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Sublime Text on Zorin OS 16.

• Glance at Windows 11, macOS, or even customised KDE Plasma desktops, and you’ll quickly learn that blurred window effects are a real vibe.

• But did you know that you can get a similar look on your GNOME-based Ubuntu desktop? Oh yes, all thanks to the third-party, unofficial, no-warranties, use-at-your-own-risk mutter-rounded repository on Github.

• Translucent app windows on Linux is not a new idea. The road to a feted desktop is littered with code from projects that have, in one form or another, tried to bring this feature to the fore, for all, over the years.

• Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch has quickly become the most popular search engine and is commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.

• In this guide, we will learn how to install Elasticsearch using docker.

• Today we are looking at how to install Shotcut video editor on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• Over the last couple of years Zoom has become extremely popular, either as a tool to use whilst working from home, or to keep in touch with friends and family. It’s available on many platforms – typically I use it on a Mac but recently had a need to install Zoom on my Ubuntu 20.04 system.

• This article covers a couple of ways in which you can install Zoom on Ubuntu using the Linux terminal / bash.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Envoy Proxy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Envoy is an open-source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications. Built on the learnings of solutions such as Nginx, HAProxy, hardware load balancers, and cloud load balancers, Envoy runs alongside every application and abstracts the network by providing common features in a platform-agnostic manner.

• 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 through the step-by-step installation of the Envoy Proxy on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• Welcome Back! today we are going to discuss PetaSAN. A storage management solution for day to date backups and data protection. While looking for some good article material, I was able to find a decent and dedicated NAS OS that not only comes with Ubuntu OS as backed but is also easy to manage and install. A storage device that is based on modern storage technology. Highly scalable storage which provides agility and elasticity. Let’s discuss features and installation processes one by one.

• Another day I wrote about setting up ssh public key password-less authentication for FreeBSD server version 12/13 with an optional 2FA hardware USB key (FIDO 2) for additional protection. However, FIDO2 and key type ecdsa-sk and ed25519-sk are not supported by the OpenSSH client and server version shipped with FreeBSD 12 or 13. But, fear not, we can safely upgrade the OpenSSH version using ports collection. This page explains how to install and configure the latest portable version of the OpenSSH client and server on FreeBSD 13.

• Discover everything about your file system mount points with the Linux findmnt command. It’s an all-in-one tool with a very easy syntax. We show you how to use it.

• Sooner or later, almost everyone who looks at some software that they or their team have created imagines a user getting to grips with it, and a pang of empathy for that unknown person prompts them to think: what we need here is a tutorial.

• The Linux uptime command is often used when troubleshooting a Linux system. One of the first puzzles to solve when investigating an outage may be to check if a system has been rebooted, or how long it has been available for. Quite often its as simple as running the uptime command, but there are a few additional options that it is useful to be aware of.

• First of all – do you have the uptime command? The answer is most certainly yes! The uptime command is present on all Linux distributions (such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, Centos etc), and many other operating systems including Unix and VMware ESXi. It can generally be found at /usr/bin/uptime.

Games

• Ahead of the Linux-based Steam Deck hopefully shipping around the end of February, Valve announced a new Steamworks feature called Dynamic Cloud Sync.

• Steam’s Dynamic Cloud Sync can simply be summed up as, “This feature allows players to seamlessly move between Deck and PC instances of the game without needing to worry about exiting the game on the Steam Deck.”

• Paradox and Colossal Order have today release a number of DLC packs including Cities: Skylines – Airports.

• [...]

• “The teams at Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order are excited to give fans an all new transportation option to integrate into their designs” said Magnus Lysell, Cities: Skylines Product Manager at Paradox Interactive. “Fans have long been requesting the possibility to integrate airports into their cities, and we can’t wait to see the things our community delivers with these new tools.”

• Between 2022-01-18 and 2022-01-25 there were 34 new games released on Steam with native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 281 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 12.1 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones…

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Let’s welcome Latte Dock v0.10.8 the 8th Official Bug Fix Release of v0.10.x branch!

• Go get it from, download.kde.org

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Now that Linux 5.17 has prepared DRM privacy screen support, the GNOME 42 is ready with its user-space side support for making use of this new standardized interface.

• A growing number of newer laptops are having built-in electronic privacy screens for helping prevent others from viewing your screen contents. With Linux 5.17 the exposing of this support to user-space has been standardized for Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) drivers plus there is x86-specific initialization code and other related infrastructure work for privacy screens. For user-space is a new privacy screen property for capable GPU/connector combinations so it can be easily toggled.

Distributions

• Yes, have a working desktop, and even have the bin and lib folder symlinks just like it is in Arch. Actually, most of the issues are resolved I think, but it has been “dependency hell”. To build a distro with everything builtin, Scribus, OBS-Studio, Shotcut, LibreOffice, Inkscape etc., I ended up with a download file over 800MB — compared with about 580MB for the Dunfell img.gz file.

• Could create a smaller build with minimal apps, like peebee has done, but have decided cannot see the point of it.

• Yes, there is a big package repository, and I tested it by installing Shotcut video editor, and it works. But that is not giving me enough reason to keep working on it. Takes away too much time that could be spent working on improving EasyOS itself.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical is pushing the limits on its MLOps platform to automate the full lifecycle of feature engineering, training, and release workflows for machine learning (ML) models.

• The Canonical Data Platform team on Tuesday announced the release of its MLOps platform Charmed Kubeflow 1.4. The new free release enables data science teams to securely collaborate on AI/ML innovation on any cloud, from concept to production.

• Charmed Kubeflow is an open source MLOps platform released under the Apache License 2.0. The platform helps data scientists automate the workflow from ideation to production.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• Looking back on the road we have already traveled, Purism has pioneered many areas. These include securing boot firmware (PureBoot), manufacturing in the USA (Librem Key and Librem 5 USA), and creating the first truly convergent operating system (PureOS) by authoring the foundational pieces for mobile GNU/Linux (Phosh, Phoc, Squeekboard, Calls, Chats, etc). These innovations and growth have happened due to the unflinching support of our team, early backers, supporters and customers. As we look ahead to 2022, we wanted to share where we are going next.

• UUGear’s $201-and-up “PiGear Nano” carrier for the Raspberry Pi CM4 provides 8x USB 3.0, 4x COM, HDMI, MIPI-DSI/CSI, GbE, CAN, ADC, DIO, M.2 for NVMe, and mini-PCIe with SIM.

• UUGear has launched a full-featured, 120 x 120mm Nano-ITX carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. The PiGear Nano starts at $201 without the CM4 module or case. The board ships with UWI (UUGear Web Interface) software for mobile access.

• UUGear started in Prague, Czech, but last year moved to the Netherlands, incorporating the company as Dun Cat B.V, but continuing with the UUGear branding. The company has produced a bevy of Raspberry Pi add-ons, such as the Witty Pi RTC/PMIC board, the Mega4 4-ort USB 3./1 hub, and Zero2Go OMINI power supply.

• RAKwireless will add new modules to its WisBlock IoT modular system every quarter. Last July, WisBlock family welcomed 14 new modules, and in September 2021, RAK11310 Raspberry Pi RP2040 LoRaWAN core was introduced together with a new baseboard and various sensor modules.

• This time around, the company launched 16 new Wisblock modules with two wireless modules, one adding LoRaWAN to an ESP32 core module, the other acting as an RFID and NFC card reader, as well as six sensor modules, and eight “interface” modules ranging from barcode scanners to keypads.

• Getting that perfect up-close macro shot is touch, especially since even the smallest movement can throw off a focused image or make the subject leave the frame. This need for stability and precision is what drove Kike Glez (AKA ‘TelekikeG’ on Instructables) to build a motorized photography platform that would be able to gradually move closer/further away relative to the subject with extreme levels of granularity.

• The device utilizes an Arduino Uno as its primary microcontroller and its job is to generate pulses for the DRV8825 stepper driver, which turns the stepper motor as well as accepts user inputs from a series of five buttons — all mounted on a custom PCB shield. The board also features several TIL331 seven-segment modules for a more vintage appearance. Rather than constructing the entire platform from scratch, an old CD-ROM drive was repurposed in order to use the laser head gantry to move the subject instead. Lastly, a pair of bright lights were placed in front of the subject that provided plenty of illumination.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Several months in the works, Phosh 0.15.0 is massive update with hundreds of changes, starting with full support for VPN authentication. This means that there’s now a VPN indicator in the top-bar that displays the VPN state, as well as a VPN quick setting that will appear when there’s at least one VPN configured. In addition, the new VPN implementation supports the WireGuard VPN protocol.

• The Phosh 0.15.0 release also adds a swipe-to-remove gesture for notification frames, adds support for arbitrary passwords on the lockscreen through a new button on the keypad that unfolds the on-screen keyboard and shows a text entry to enter passwords, and brings back gamma control protocol support.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• There is a new application available for Sparkers: Mullvad VPN

Events

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced Marleen Stikker as its opening keynote speaker for LibrePlanet 2022. The annual technology and social justice conference will be held virtually on March 19 and 20, 2022, with the theme “Living Liberation.”

• Scale, otherwise known as the Southern California Linux Expo, announced in an email sent yesterday that due to Covid concerns this year’s conference has been pushed back to July 28-31. In addition, the event will be returning to its original home, Los Angeles, at a facility that’s yet to be named.

• The event, which is one of three major community-focused Linux and open source conferences held on the U.S. West Coast each year (along with LinuxFest Northwest and Seattle GNU/Linux Conference), was originally scheduled to take place March 3-6 at the Pasadena Convention Center, where it’s been held since Scale 14x in 2016. Before that it was held at various venues in Los Angeles, mostly at facilities located near the city’s international airport. Last year’s event was canceled entirely due to the pandemic.

• Yesterday’s announcement was brief and to the point, evidently primarily intended to make the organization’s email subscribers aware of the change before they made travel and hotel arrangements, which might be costly to cancel or reschedule.

Web Browsers

Chromium

• In recent weeks, Google Chrome users have been suffering from an annoying problem that directly affects the playback of videos through the popular browser.

• Apparently, Google Chrome 97 (the most recent stable update) is causing media playback pausing randomly on Windows and Linux for many users (1, 2, 3).

Mozilla

• One of the primary functions of computers is to parse data. Some data is easier to parse than other data, and voice input continues to be a work in progress. There have been many improvements in the area in recent years, though, and one of them is in the form of DeepSpeech, a project by Mozilla, the foundation that maintains the Firefox web browser. DeepSpeech is a voice-to-text command and library, making it useful for users who need to transform voice input into text and developers who want to provide voice input for their applications.

• In recent days Mozilla has begun activating Wayland support by default on Firefox Nightly for configurations capable of running Wayland.

• Mozilla tweeted a notice that “Wayland was activated by default on Firefox Nightly (only) for eligible configurations last week.”

• They encourage those Firefox Linux users on Wayland to check this bug ticket and connected dependent tickets regarding the Wayland port for known issues. There have been recent new bugs submitted around crashes, WM_CLASS handling changes, dragging tabs sometimes freezing Firefox, and menu alignment issues.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• MongoDB is one of the most extensively used databases on the market. There are three parts to it: Express, Angular, and Node. Developers choose NoSQL databases since data is stored in documents rather than relational tables; this has dramatically boosted its appeal. NoSQL databases include pure document databases, key-value stores, wide-column databases, and graph databases.

• Unlike SQL relational databases, MongoDB databases can be dispersed over multiple servers. The structure’s flexibility and efficiency make it useful in various situations. MongoDB cloud hosting is an excellent and cost-effective choice for your company. The database organizes all of the data so that the user can access it quickly when needed.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Ever wondered about using modern chat tools to discuss LibreOffice? Here we will discuss using a Matrix bridge to connect to the LibreOffice IRC rooms, to participate more efficiently in LibreOffice-related discussions.

• Traditionally, IRC has been the preferred way of communication for the FOSS communities including the LibreOffice community. There are multiple IRC rooms that you can join, and the one related to the LibreOffice development is #libreoffice-dev at Libera Chat network.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Introducing 5.9, Joséphine. Named in honor of acclaimed international jazz singer Joséphine Baker, this latest, most versatile WordPress release is here: download it or update it directly from your dashboard.

• As a lifelong civil rights campaigner, Joséphine Baker believed that all people could live in harmony together, just as different instruments in a jazz band blend together to make a whole piece. Turn on a playlist from your favorite music service and enjoy her famous renditions of “You are the greatest love”, “Sans Amour”, and “Love is a Dreamer” as you discover all the features of this brand-new WordPress release.

• Kiwi open-source cloud solutions provider Catalyst IT has completed the rollout of the Koha Library Management System for Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

• The Linux-based system is one of the most widely used open-source library management systems in the world, and it was first developed in NZ.

• “Koha is open source software which connects us to an international community of over 15,000 libraries working collaboratively to continually improve it,” AUT research and learning director Ben Conyers stated in August when the project began.

• “It’s great that the best system for AUT was first developed in New Zealand, and in Catalyst, we have a New Zealand-based company to implement and support it. Our collective team is keen to embrace the ways we can approach the project and ongoing system support in a te ao Māori way, which we have not had the opportunity to explore before now.”

• The project began with two in-person workshops between Catalyst and AUT. After an interruption due to lockdowns, the rest of the project was delivered remotely.

• It was delivered by Catalyst’s Koha team and included server setup and configuration, data migration, development, training, and consulting, a statement said.

Programming/Development

• Version 2.35.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. There are a lot of changes, as usual; see the announcement and this GitHub blog entry for details.

• QT recently announced the qt digital advertising platform to make it easier than ever for developers to embed ads into both their mobile and desktop qt apps but is this going to lead to a horrible result/.

• If you could create your app in 5 instead of 6 months, would it matter? If you could build the first prototype within 4 hours instead of one week, would it matter?

• We as Product Managers always have had three dimensions to play with when steering a software development project: Scope, Time, and Quality. The number of developers is most of the time fixed for multiple reasons. The amount of quality issues customers are willing to tolerate is limited. That leaves us typically with two dimensions to manage the expectations of management and customers: Scope and Time. But there is another way to increase R&D velocitywithout cutting down the Minimum Viable Product to a bare minimum.

• Qt Quick 3D has some new features in 6.2. One of them is that you can map interactive Qt Quick scenes onto 3D objects.

• During a hackathon last year, we developed the Kappa Tau Station demo: a model of a space station in which you can use the WASD keys to walk around (as in many games), but also containing some 2D UI elements on some surfaces.

Perl/Raku

• In my last post I used a one-shot-operator to improve neatness. Sadly, by defining custom operators we also improve Rakudo’s slowness. After staring at the code form quite some time, I realised that hyper- and meta-operators are code generators. They produce a new operator in-place, which is then used with two operands. In functional programming we do the same thing by returning a sub from a sub.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• My wife and I go for an early morning walk by a nearby river every day. I like to know in advance how cold it’s been overnight, so I can wear suitably warm clothing. There’s no local weather station recording the riverside temperature, but a fair approximation is the minimum overnight temperature at Devonport Airport here in northwest Tasmania. The airport reports its temperature data to the Bureau of Meterorology (BOM; Australia).

• Previously, to get the minimum and current temperature I would open a browser, go to the BOM website page with Tasmanian observations, then look for the Devonport Airport figures: see screenshot.

Java

• GraalVM 22.0 has been released for this Java VM/JDK that also supports other programming languages and run-times / execution modes. GraalVM continues to be performant and showing promising results not just for Java with JIT’ing but also ahead-of-time Java compilation to Native Image as well as for its Python implementation, WebAssembly run-time, and other targets.

• GraalVM 22.0 is the newest quarterly release from Oracle. The free, open-source community edition of GraalVM 22.0 is available alongside its GraalVM Enterprise variant.

• I like the Groovy programming language a lot. I like it because, in the end, I like Java, even though Java sometimes feels clumsy. And because I like Java so much, I don’t find many other JVM languages especially attractive. Kotlin, Scala, and Clojure, for example, don’t feel much like Java, pursuing their own perspectives on what makes a good programming language. Groovy is different; in my view, Groovy is the perfect antidote to those situations when a programmer who likes Java just needs something a bit more flexible, compact, and sometimes even straightforward.

• A good example is the List data structure, which is used to hold an ordered list of numbers, strings, or objects, and allows the programmer to iterate through those items in an efficient fashion. Especially for people writing and maintaining scripts, “efficiency” is mostly about clear and brief expressions that don’t require a bunch of ceremony that obscures the intent of the code.

Leftovers

• Every winter, millions of tons of rock salt is sprinkled across roads in the US, mostly in the Midwest and Northeast regions. It’s a cheap and effective way to prevent accidents. Rock salt is chemically the same as the stuff that sits next to the pepper, except it isn’t as finely ground, and it doesn’t have sodium or potassium iodine added to it to prevent goiters. Both table salt and rock salt melt ice by lowering the freezing point of water. So does sugar.

• Much of what we salt the Earth with every winter comes from underground networks of salt crystal that formed when various ancient seas dried up. As natural as it may be, rock salt is bad for the environment. For one thing, chloride is forever, and can’t easily be decoupled from the soil and water it taints when it washes away. Rock salt also corrodes concrete, makes its way into the groundwater, and is bad for pets. Worst of all, its efficacy drops along with the temperature. At 15° F (-9° C), rock salt loses more than 86% of its melting power.

• As we all know, the lightsaber is an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. [Alex Burkan] is doing what he can to bring that technology to fruition, and even secured a Guinness World Record in the process.

• With 3d printing continually gaining ground, some hackers might not see the need for traditional injection molding. After all, you can tweak the code or the model and print dozens of different iterations with fairly minimal lead time. Things get trickier when you need to print hundreds or thousands of the same thing and that ten-hour print time adds up quickly. [Actionbox] built a tiny injection molder they dubbed INJEKTO to speed up their manufacturing.

• The design was optimized to be accessible as it is held together with brackets and cheap aluminum flat stock. The hardest part to source is the heating chamber, as it is a piece of turned aluminum. A PID controller keeps the temperature relatively stable and heats the plastic pellets you can dump in the top. Next, you’ll need an external air compressor to power the dual 2″ pneumatic pistons. The pistons push the plastic out of the spring-loaded extruder nozzle. [Actionbox] is already planning on a version 2 with 4″ pistons that provide significantly more force to extrude larger amounts of plastic as the current version tops out at about 27 grams.

Science

• Imagine for a moment that you are a member of an early Mars colony. You’re stranded, and the only way to get a message home is to launch a radio well above the surface. To make matters worse, you’ve got no rockets! It was this thought experiment that has motivated [Thoisoi2] to experiment with making a rocket motor using only ingredients and methods available to your average Martian colonist. The methods he has chosen can be seen in the video below the break.

• If you skipped Rocketry 101, a quick refresher might help: Rockets work by burning a fuel in an enclosed chamber and then expelling it at high speed in one direction. To get the fuel to burn more quickly (and therefore adding more oomph to the angry end) a compliment to the fuel called an Oxidizer is added. It serves to create an oxygen rich environment for the fuel to burn in. It’s the same reason a oxy-propane torch burns hotter than propane by itself.

Hardware

• According to a report this morning from Bloomberg, NVIDIA is communicating to their partners that they face the real possibility their deal to acquire Arm will not come to pass.

• Nvidia Corp. is quietly preparing to abandon its purchase of Arm Ltd. from SoftBank Group Corp. after making little to no progress in winning approval for the $40 billion chip deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

• Nvidia has told partners that it doesn’t expect the transaction to close, according to one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. SoftBank, meanwhile, is stepping up preparations for an Arm initial public offering as an alternative to the Nvidia takeover, another person said.

• The purchase — poised to become the biggest semiconductor deal in history when it was announced in September 2020 — has drawn a fierce backlash from regulators and the chip industry, including Arm’s own customers. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to stop the transaction in December, arguing that Nvidia would become too powerful if it gained control over Arm’s chip designs.

• The acquisition also faces resistance in China, where authorities are inclined to block the takeover if it wins approvals elsewhere, according to one person. But they don’t expect it to get that far.

• We’re Makers. By definition, we make things. Some of us prefer to build from scraps, while others like to make their own IC’s in their garage. [Make With Miles] on the other hand prefers one of the oldest types of making around: woodworking. And in this build, he goes a step further by using a very old Japanese method of woodworking called Kumiko to build a Stratocaster style electric guitar. The results are absolutely stunning as you can see in the video below.

• Inspired by a challenge put forth by [The Modern Maker Podcast] to build a woodworking project that ties into another hobby that isn’t related to woodworking, [Miles] knocked it out of the park by including several art forms in this one-off Strat.

• It seems only appropriate that hot on the heels of the conclusion of Hackaday’s 555 Timer Contest that [Ken Shirriff] posts a silicon die teardown of an early version of a hacker’s favorite chip, the 555.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• There is a lot that happens in life that puzzles me. For example, the Australian authorities do not recognize “natural immunity” of someone who has already caught Covid-19. Instead, they are insisting everyone has to be vaccinated.

• There was recently a very high-profile case, a tennis star was issued with a visa to enter Australia, but it was revoked when he arrived at an Australian airport, and he was deported. He had, apparently, cought Covid-19 twice before, but they did not recognise that and made a big fuss about him being unvaccinated.

• There is a lot that happens, that the authorities are insisting on, that I don’t think is justified, or is not entirely rational. Our State Government for example, insisting that everyone has to have the new SecureWA app on their phone.

• Ha ha, better stop now.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

• Security updates have been issued by CentOS (java-11-openjdk), Debian (aide, apr, ipython, openjdk-11, qt4-x11, and strongswan), Fedora (binaryen and rust), Mageia (expat, htmldoc, libreswan, mysql-connector-c++, phpmyadmin, python-celery, python-numpy, and webkit2), openSUSE (kernel and virtualbox), Red Hat (etcd, libreswan, nodejs:14, OpenJDK 11.0.14, OpenJDK 17.0.2, and rpm), Slackware (expat), SUSE (java-1_7_1-ibm, kernel, and zxing-cpp), and Ubuntu (strongswan).

• A vulnerability affecting Linux kernel and tracked as CVE-2022-0185 can be used to escape containers in Kubernetes, giving access to resources on the host system.

• If it’s not one thing, it’s another. After one real Linux problem — the heap overflow bug in the Linux kernel’s fs/fs_context.c program — is found and fixed, then a new security problem is discovered. This time security company Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit’s pkexec, CVE-2021-4034.

• Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program. It’s installed by default in every major Linux distribution.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Our brief history begins at the end of the ’90s when the EU and the US agreed on the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. On the 26th July 2000, the European Commission (EC) formalized it with the Commission Decision 2000/520/EC, where it was defined that data could be freely moved from the EU to the US. The assumption was that the data on US soil would have comparable (or better) protection than the same data on EU soil, and therefore the privacy of European citizens was not at risk. On 6th October 2015, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) invalidated this decision on the basis that in the US laws were authorizing public authorities to have access on a generalized basis to the content of electronic communications, and this was deemed to be “compromising the essence of the fundamental right to respect for private life” (the quote is from the ECJ decision).

Environment

Energy

• Nuclear war was very much a front-of-mind issue during the fraught political climate of the Cold War era. Since then, atomic sabre rattling has been less frequent, though has never quite disappeared entirely.

• Outside of the direct annihilation caused by nuclear war, however, is the threat of nuclear winter. The basic concept is simple: in the aftermath of a major nuclear war, the resulting atmospheric effects could lead to a rapid cooling in global temperatures.

• Some say it couldn’t ever happen, while others – including Futurama – suggest with varying degrees of humor that it could help cancel out the effects of global warming. But what is the truth?

• [...]

• The effect would not last forever, either. Following the models, within a decade or two, any cooling effect from lofted soot would likely have passed, while humanity would be left with huge swathes of burned-out areas for its trouble and likely a not-negligible contribution to CO2 levels from the multiple firestorms. Along the way, if the effect was overdone, excess cooling would still cause trouble for agriculture which could lead to widespread starvation. The answer to the question of which catastrophe would win out is: short term, nuclear winter; long term, global warming.

• Other methods of generating high-altitude aerosols are being explored to these ends, all of which would prove far less destructive and more maintainable than the idea of a nuclear winter.

• Humanity’s current problems need more complex solutions than simply blowing everything up. It was ever thus! Regardless, it is important to understand the science, in order to know how we may best preserve our lifestyles today, and into the future beyond.

Finance

• The average salary for a tech worker reached US$104,566 in 2021, yet nearly half still feel they’re underpaid.

• Forced to digitize operations and move to virtual work because of a worldwide pandemic, as well as address increased security concerns raised by those developments, organizations were hungry for tech talent in 2021 and willing to pay for it, Dice, a technology-focused employment website, noted in its annual tech salary report released last week.

• According to the survey, technologists in IT management — CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and such — made the highest average salary ($151,983) in 2021, followed by systems architect ($147,901) and cloud architects and engineers ($140, 571).

Civil Rights/Policing

• Abuses of technology happen in the dark. We’re turning on the light. Welcome to Authoritarian Tech, Coda Story’s newest newsletter. Each week, we’ll bring you stories from around the world on how people in power are abusing technology — and what it means for all of us. I’m Caitlin Thompson, a reporter at Coda and self-proclaimed surveillance nerd, and I’ll be on this journey with you as the curator/author of this newsletter. Sign up to make sure you get the newsletter each week.

• It’s only a matter of time before authoritarian governments start using predictive AI to crush protests before they even begin. Bahrain might be ahead of the curve.

• Data provided to Coda Story by The Markup showed Geolitica, the American predictive policing company formerly called PredPol, used their predictive analytics to show where past protests in Bahrain took place as a proof of concept. It seems to have just been a demo, and it’s not clear who the potential clients were or whether a deal progressed. But it marks a potential pivot to preemptive surveillance of protests.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• An oracular hoax by William Henry Ireland, aka Herman Kirchenhoffer, that profited from the 19th-century mania for Egyptology and Napoleonic relics.

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