● 12.30.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 30/12/2022: Vanilla OS 22.10 and Calculate Linux 23

Posted in News Roundup at 7:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• In general, Linux distributions that use lightweight desktop environments and window managers, such as LXDE, Xfce, and Openbox, tend to be lighter and more resource-efficient than those that use more heavyweight desktop environments such as Gnome and KDE.

Server

• Docker is a popular tool for packaging and deploying applications, and a key part of the Docker workflow is running Docker containers. In this beginner’s guide, we will explain what Docker containers are and how to run them.

• Linux DevOps is the practice of using Linux-based systems and tools to build, deploy, and manage applications in a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) environment.

Applications

• Home Assistant is an open-source smart home platform that focuses on providing local control and privacy to its users. It can run off a Raspberry Pi or even a local server.

• They also have a subscription service for access to additional features such as support for Alexa and Google Assistant, which is managed by a company called ‘Nabu Casa’.

• Math calculators are handy tools not just for students, but for everyone. Even we have access to calculators as built-in apps for mobiles and our operating systems, there is still need to have open-source advanced calculators on our systems.

• Here in this article, we offer you a list of open source calculator apps, as some come with advanced and unique features.

• Modern GUI Linux distributions bundle with essential applications to help users get started without much of a hassle. This means that you don’t need to install them in the first place.

• Despite that, developers are constantly coming up with newer and more innovative applications which streamline workflows and make the life of the ordinary desktop user much easier.

• In this guide, we look at some of the most essential applications for desktop Linux users.

• Limine Installer is a project for a GUI to install the Limine bootloader.

Instructionals/Technical

• The Linux Command Line by William Shotts – Fifth Internet Edition Available Now!

• Telegram is a free, cross-platform messaging app with end-to-end encryption. It’s famous for providing video calling and other missing features from Facebook or Twitter – one of its main attractions! In the following tutorial, you will learn to install Telegram on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 release series using the apt package manager and flatpak package manager, with some tips for maintaining or removing popular messenger software in the future.

• This beginner tutorial will show you how to download and install Kdenlive 22.12 on Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and Linux Mint 21.

• This is a continuation of my previous post about upgrading the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel that came with my Chumby 8. In that post, I got a modern U-Boot working with SD card support, which is what I needed in order to boot Linux.

• Tor browser provides a secure, anonymous way to explore the Internet. With its open-source code and mission of protecting personal identity, Tor helps you stay safe while browsing online. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Tor Browser on Linux Mint 21 or Linux Mint 20 release series using various methods using the command line terminal with some information on basic setup.

• QMPlay2 is a free, open-source multimedia player that offers enhanced audio and visual experience. It’s equipped with the latest technology to deliver excellent playback of all formats supported by FFmpeg, libmodplug (including J2B and SFX), Audio CDs, raw files, Rayman 2 music, and chiptunes. The following tutorial will demonstrate how to install QMPlay2 on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish or Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa using a LaunchPAD PPA dedicated to QMPlay2 or using Flatpak with Flathub repository.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• It is with great pleasure that we announce that Vanilla OS 22.10 Kinetic, the first stable release of the project, is available for download!

• We have been working on the project for many months, there were many changes along the way and also many complications, but we managed to get through them.

• Introducing such a large project is not easy, there are many ways, many means and so many things to say. To make it easier for you to understand this project, we created a commercial like the big guys do (or at least we tried). Here it is below, enjoy it but then come back here, we have a lot to talk about!

• We are pleased to announce the release of Calculate Linux 23.

• This new (year) version includes a server Calculate Container Manager for working with LXC, a new cl-lxc tool, and features mirror selection for updates.

• Calculate Linux Desktop featuring the KDE (CLD), Cinnamon (CLDC), LXQt (CLDL), Mate (CLDM) or Xfce (CLDX and CLDXS) desktop, Calculate Container Manager (CCM), Calculate Directory Server (CDS), Calculate Linux Scratch (CLS) and Calculate Scratch Server (CSS) are now available for download.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

• This was an amazing year for the Enable Sysadmin community. We saw an average of more than 825,000 page views per month in 2022, which is over 200,000 per month more than in 2021. Overall, we generated more than 9.5 million page views and 5.4 million unique visitors in 2022, far surpassing 2021′s traffic.

• Ever wonder what it’s like to be a CISO, product leader, or software developer? Are you looking to pivot careers from being a data scientist to a cognitive scientist? This year, The Enterprisers Project published a special series entitled “A day in the life”. Contributing authors shared their career stories to highlight what they love about their job, and the challenges they are facing. Through this series, readers get right in the shoes of their colleagues.

• Open source drives businesses and organizations around the world. This year, Opensource.com authors published several outstanding articles about open source at work. Topics ranged from contributing to open source, to mentoring, and productivity. Here are five of my favorite articles about how open source can help your career and organization.

• This article will explore what Btrfs snapshots are, how they work, and how you can benefit from taking snapshots in every-day situations. This is part of a series that takes a closer look at Btrfs, the default filesystem for Fedora Workstation and Fedora Silverblue since Fedora Linux 33.

Devices/Embedded

• SunFounder Pironman is a Raspberry Pi 4 enclosure inspired by Michael Klement’s DIY Raspberry Pi 4 mini server with an OLED display and ICE Tower cooling solution, as well as some improvements such as an aluminum alloy and acrylic enclosure, support for an M.2 SATA SSD, a power button for safe shutdown, an IR receiver, and an RGB LED strip.

• The company sent me a Pironman kit without Raspberry Pi 4 for review. I’ll check the package content, go through the assembly, software installation, and testing of the unique features listed above.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

• Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

• Gingerbread is a set of Python utilities used by Winterbloom to create decorative printed circuit boards (PCBs), such as the ones used for front panels. It initially started with a command-line driven, Python implementation but eventually involved into a fully browser-based application utilizing a native library written in Zig & C and compiled to WASM.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Occasionally I browse the Newest ‘jq’ questions on Stack Overflow and try to gently expand my jq knowledge, or at least exercise my young jq muscles. This morning I came across this one: Jq extracting the name and the value of objects as an array. Sometimes the questions are hard, sometimes less so. This one didn’t seem too difficult, so I thought I’d take a quick coffee break to see what I could come up with (the question had already been answered but I didn’t look until later).

• Load Multiple Packages in R, The following example demonstrates how to apply this syntax in practice.

• Whereas the direction of main effects can be interpreted from the sign of the estimate, the interpretation of interaction effects often requires plots. This task is facilitated by the R package sjPlot (Lüdecke, 2022). In Bernabeu (2022), the sjPlot function called plot_model served as the basis for the creation of some custom functions. One of these functions is alias_interaction_plot, which allows the plotting of interactions between a continuous variable and a categorical variable. Importantly, the categorical variable is replaced with an alias variable. This feature allows the back-transformation of the categorical variable to facilitate the communication of the results, for instance, when the categorical variable was sum-coded, which has been recommended for mixed-effects models (Brauer & Curtin, 2018).

• Frequentist and Bayesian statistics are sometimes regarded as fundamentally different philosophies. Indeed, can both methods qualify as philosophies, or is one of them just a pointless ritual? Is frequentist statistics about \(p\) values only? Are frequentist estimates diametrically opposed to Bayesian posterior distributions? Are confidence intervals and credible intervals irreconcilable? Will R crash if lmerTest and brms are simultaneously loaded? If only we could fit frequentist and Bayesian models to the same data and plot the results together, we might get a glimpse into these puzzles.

• This post presents a code-through of a Bayesian workflow in R, which can be reproduced using the materials at https://osf.io/gt5uf. The content is closely based on Bernabeu (2022), which was in turn based on lots of other references. In addition to those, you may wish to consider Nicenboim et al. (2023), a book in preparation that is already available online (https://vasishth.github.io/bayescogsci/book).

Python

• If you’re a Python programmer, you may have heard of the `writelines()` Method. But what exactly is it? The `writelines()` Method is a powerful tool that makes it easy to write a list of strings to a file. You can think of it as a shortcut for writing multiple lines to a file. It’s a great way to save time and effort when writing files.

• The `writelines()` method in Python is a method that is used to write a list of strings to a file. It is a method of the File object in Python, which represents an open file. With `writelines()`, you don’t have to worry about formatting the lines correctly – it does it for you. All you have to do is provide a list of strings and the `writelines()` Method will handle the rest. Another great benefit of `writelines()` is that you can use it with any type of file – from plain text to audio and video files. So if you need a quick and easy way to write to a file, the `writelines()` Method is the perfect solution.

• This new tool, teeplus.py, is an extension of the tee command.

• The tools takes (binary) data from stdin, and sends it to stdout, while also writing the data to a file on disk.

• While the tee command requires a filename as argument, teeplus.py takes no arguments (only options).

• By default, teeplus.py will write the data to a file on disk, with filename equal to the sha256 of the data and extension .vir.

• And it will also log this activity in a log file (teeplus.log by default).

Leftovers

• Which is pretty doggone funny. I’d like to imagine that Plan 9 is part of some complex spy program. Possibly involving Nazi’s. And space lasers.

• But this got me thinking… What other Operating Systems can the CIA “neither confirm nor deny” knowing about?

• Let’s find out!

• The sad reality is that every major Tech Publication is directly funded by the very same companies that they cover.

• Publications writing about Microsoft are funded by ad dollars from Microsoft.

• Publications writing about Enterprise Linux companies are funded by ad dollars from Enterprise Linux Companies.

• Another year, another slate of books to reflect back over! I read about as many books this year as I usually do (perhaps slightly fewer), but many more of them were read as audiobooks than I usually do.

• [...]

• TPM is a philosophy textbook about phenomenology, but it’s written in a pretty accessible style if you’re modestly familiar with philosophy. It was likely the most illuminating books I read this year, as it gave me a much more complete set of words/concepts to talk about consciousness. If you talk to people about philosophy enough, or are in circles that discuss AI, you often get to this frustrating breaking point in conversations around debates about what consciousness is. Phenomenology, in a sense, is a study of that debate.

• I haven’t had time to digest the concepts in this book enough to give a full treatment to them, but a couple key items I enjoyed reading in this book were: (1) the idea of reflective and pre-reflective consciousness, (2) the idea that consciousness and embodiment are intertwined at a deep level, (3) a description of how conscious thought interacts with the passage of time, (4) the integration of perception and intentionality into consciousness, and (5) the idea that there is valuable scientific information to be discovered from using an “inside-out” view of consciousness as the object of study.

• Pele, the Brazilian king of football who won a record three World Cups and became one of the most commanding sports figures of the past century, died Thursday. He was 82.

• The standard-bearer of “the beautiful game” had undergone treatment for colon cancer since 2021. He had been hospitalised for the past month with multiple ailments. Sao Paulo’s Albert Einstein hospital, where Pele was undergoing treatment, said he died at 3:27 p.m. “due to multiple organ failures resulting from the progression of colon cancer associated with his previous medical condition.”

• As I write this blogpost, 2022 will meet its demise in the span of just three days. So I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on what a year it’s been.

• Way back in the mists of time, I did my secondary-school work experience at the BBC. Specifically, Children’s BBC. Every day for a couple of weeks, I’d commute into White City, wander those hallowed halls, sit at a desk, and…

• You know… I can’t remember! I know I got to visit the “Broom Cupboard”, and I’m pretty sure I did a lot of data entry, oh – and I sat in a meeting for “Two-Way TV”.

• These were the early days of the consumer Internet. The WWW was still brand new and it wasn’t certain that it would be the dominant communications medium of the future. Digital TV had just launched in the UK and users were regularly exhorted to “press the red button now!” Doing so would bring up an MHEG page which acted as a sort of fancy teletext.

• [...]

• In the year 1999, Children’s BBC launched a TV show called “Sub-Zero”. Hardly anyone remembers it – indeed there’s barely a paragraph on Wikipedia. It doesn’t exist on YouTube. Essentially, it was kids’ version of The Crystal Maze. With some kids taking part via webcams!

• Another short story. This time in the form of a screenplay – formatted with screenplay.css.

• In my two most recent posts, I listed the fiction and classic fiction I enjoyed the most in 2022.

Science

• A new type of active pixel sensor that uses a novel two-dimensional material may both enable ultra-sharp cellphone photos and create a new class of extremely energy-efficient Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, according to a team of Penn State researchers.

• “When people are looking for a new phone, what are the specs that they are looking for?” said Saptarshi Das, associate professor of engineering science and mechanics and lead author of the study published Nov. 17 in Nature Materials. “Quite often, they are looking for a good camera, and what does a good camera mean to most people? Sharp photos with high resolution.”

• Victor Venema PhD was born in Groningen in the Netherlands. He attended Groningen University, where he was awarded his PhD in Physics for research on the measurement of cloud structure.

Security

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 230. This version includes the following changes:

Privacy/Surveillance

• I hate to write a piece just saying Someone Is Wrong On The Internet. But Reid Blackman’s The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs (in the NYTimes, forsooth) is not just wrong but dangerously misleading. I haven’t seen a compact explainer on why, so here goes.

• Blackman’s description of what Signal does is accurate: Provides an extremely private communication path among individuals and groups; private to the extent that Signal.org (a nonprofit) doesn’t even know who’s talking to whom, let alone what they’re saying.

• Blackman argues that this is dangerous because bad people could use it to plan nefarious activities and the legal authorities wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop on them and stop them. Indeed, bad people can and (I’m sure) do use cryptography to evade surveillance.

• [...]

• Don’t worry, be happy · While I acknowledge that in an ideal world we’d be able to eavesdrop on bad people without shattering privacy for good ones, that’s not the world we live in. And I actually don’t think it’s that big a problem. For example, Blackman notes that in the course of the law-enforcement investigation of the January 6th insurrection, police got access to the traitors’ Signal conversations. How? Obviously, by getting into their computers or phones, where those conversations are stored.

• Serious security professionals would rather hide a camera on your office wall or a keylogger in your PC than try to break the code.

Environment

Energy

• Kevin Gallagher is crying poor whilst raking in cash. Using his media allies to push a false narrative around the minor gas price caps.

• When important parts of the cryptosphere collapse, such as Terra/Luna or FTX/Alameda, people often ask “is this the end of crypto?”. The answer so far is no. But as the “crypto winter” continues, and contagion spreads from exchanges to miners and their financiers, the number of important parts still standing is decreasing.

• [...]

• If you look at the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a black box, nothing inside the box can create fiat currency. Some of the fiat currency flowing in from the buyers ends up with the miners, the remainder ends up with the sellers. The professionals are not in the business of losing money, so they expect to take out more than they put in. This would represent not paying the miners, and a disproportionate share of what is left after that. So everyone else has to both pay the miners and take out less than their share of what is left. The criminals using cryptocurrencies for money laundering are doing so because it is cheaper than other laundries; they expect to lose some on the deal. The retail traders have to lose the rest.

• A rough estimate of the total amount of fiat currency that could be extracted from the black box can be made by taking the “attestations” of the major stablecoins at face value and summing them; there are unlikely to be large stores of fiat in the box that haven’t been converted to stablecoins. This gets us $66.2B (USDT) + $44.2B (USDC) + $17.4B (BUSD) + $0.7B (USDD) = $128.5B, against a current total “market cap” of cryptocurrencies at around $800B. If there was a “bank run” in the cryptosphere, it is likely that the total recovery would be around the $128.5B or 16%. The costs involved in selling the non-cash securities forming part of the stablecoins’ backing might be roughly matched by the fiat the estimate missed.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Qantas is pulling back capacity to keep its airfare prices high as cagey chief Alan Joyce profiteers from the airline’s dominant market position and political clout.

• Deaf to the Murdoch and Nine Entertainment descants of the fossil fuel choir soaring high above the harmonies of Woodside, Shell and Santos, the Australian stock market sent Santos and Woodside share prices up, not down, in the wake of the Albanese government’s gas market intervention. Daniel Bleakley exposes the bull.

• Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly banned the use of TikTok on the state-issued devices of government workers under her control on Wednesday, becoming one of the first Democratic governors to restrict the popular social media app.

• The fact that TikTok is phenomenally popular is not a reason to let it slide — it’s exactly the reason it is urgent to ban it. The CCP is using TikTok to spy on people worldwide, and promote CCP-friendly propaganda.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

Technical

Programming

• Playing around with it, I wanted to generate some text and started porting some code I wrote in Clojure to Guile Scheme. It’s a basic implementation of Markov Chains; analyze input to record the likelihood some term(s) are followed by other terms and use those statistics to generate data at random.

• 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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