● 03.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/03/2023: GNU Octave 8.1.0 and Scrcpy 2.0

Posted in News Roundup at 8:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week wasn’t so bad but it could have been better. We got new releases of LibreELEC, Audacious, SparkyLinux, EndeavourOS, LibreOffice, siduction GNU/Linux, and KDE Frameworks with lots of interesting goodies for your to experience and enjoy on your personal computers.

• On top of that, the Flatpak vs Snap controversy continues with a new Ubuntu Flatpak Remix and Flathub announces their plans for 2023. Check out the hottest news of this week and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for March 12th, 2023, below.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Applications

• Scrcpy, a free and open-source tool that allows users to control their Android devices from their computer.

• It has released its latest version, Scrcpy 2.0. With this newest update, users can now mirror their Android screens on not only their computer but also forward audio from their device to their computer.

• Learn more on this release coverage.

• The free open-source Android screen mirroring and remote control application, Scrcpy, released version 2.0 today! The new release feature audio forwarding support! Meaning it’s not only mirroring your Android screen, but also sending the sound from Android to your PC speaker. The new feature supports Android 11 and higher.

Instructionals/Technical

• Maven profiles are a way to define a set of configuration options for a Maven build. Profiles are used to specify different build configurations for different environments or situations. For example, you may have a development profile that uses a local database for testing and a production profile that uses a remote database.

• Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes: The Czech team translated the LibreOffice Base Guide 7.3 – and it’s now available on the documentation page. Our team consists of three translators: Petr Kuběj, Radomír Strnad and Zdeněk Crhonek, along with localized screenshot maker Roman Toman, and Miloš Šrámek, who prepared machine translations.

• If you want to share multiple files, compressing them all into one is the best solution you can opt for.

• Developed by Puppet Lans, Puppet is an open-source configuration management tool used for automating and centralizing the configuration of infrastructure such as servers just like Ansible and Chef. It helps the simple execution of repetitive tasks which would otherwise be cumbersome and time-consuming.

• Puppet adopts a client-server architecture and comprises the following salient aspects.

• Based on a comment from Arnaud Gomes on yesterday’s entry, the answer to where you can observe the fsid of existing NFS exports turns out to be /proc/net/nfsd/exports. Filesystems only show up here once someone actually mounts them, but when they do you’ll get lines like this (on Ubuntu 22.04): [...]

• Kubernetes is a powerful platform for managing dynamic containerized applications in the cloud, but it may be difficult to understand where costs are incurred. Managing the cost efficiency of Kubernetes resources can be a challenge. That’s where OpenCost comes in. OpenCost is a cloud cost monitoring tool that integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes, allowing you to track your cloud spend in real-time so you can optimize your resources accordingly.

• OpenCost is an open source CNCF Sandbox project and specification for the real-time monitoring of cloud costs associated with Kubernetes deployments. The specification models current and historical Kubernetes cloud spend and resource allocation by service, deployment, namespace, labels, and much more. This data is essential for understanding and optimizing Kubernetes for both cost and performance from the applications down through the infrastructure.

• Installing Debian can be a difficult experience for beginner Debian users. The official download page contains several links, and it’s a little confusing as to which one to download.

• Keeping that in mind, I have prepared this guide to help you to pick up the right Debian ISO file directly from this page.

• Some months ago, I published an article on how to set up a Wireguard server with adblocking capabilities on GNU/Linux systems, focusing Debian and PiHole specifically. Recently I wanted to reproduce the same setup on an OpenBSD server(since the Wireguard protocol is available on *BSD systems as well) and, while PiHole is not currently available for *BSD systems, I managed to accomplish the same result using the DNS resolver unbound(8) and unbound-adblock to fetch updated blocklists every day. In this guide, I will show you how to achieve the same result.

WINE or Emulation

• Running applications on a different architecture than the one for which they were compiled is a common occurrence, not in the least with Apple’s architectural migration every decade or so. It’s also commonly used with for example ARM, OpenRISC, and RISC-V systems to run applications that are only available for x86 or x86_64. While QEMU and kin are often used here, they’re pretty resource heavy, which is where an option like Box86 and its 64-bit sibling Box64 are attractive options. Unlike QEMU, both offer dynamic recompilation and redirection of dynamic library calls to native libraries, including those for SDL and OpenGL.

• The first two installments of Syberia are now ready for testing in ScummVM!

• The acclaimed series from Benoît Sokal follows Kate Walker, a lawyer from New York as she initially tries to complete the sale of the Voralberg toy factory. But quickly Kate is drawn into a search for the owner which takes her on a journey of discovery. Join her as she uncovers the owner’s fascination with mammoths, the secrets of Syberia, and a love for adventure.

Games

• The Pimoroni DV Stick will plug into an HDMI port, sport dual RP2040 chips. It’s due in a few weeks.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode has served as many people’s first introduction to Linux. People are getting to encounter desktop Linux without needing to pick a distro, download an ISO, or wipe their hard drives.

• But is SteamOS a good introduction to Linux, or is it too different? Here are some of your experiences with SteamOS that can completely carry over to other Linux desktops.

• Coming more than three months after digiKam 7.9, the digiKam 7.10 release is here to add support for new cameras, including Canon EOS R3, Canon EOS R7, Canon EOS R10, Fujifilm X-H2S, Fujifilm X-T30 II, OM System OM-1, Leica M11, and Sony A7-IV.

• This release also adds support for new formats, including the Phase One/Leaf IIQ-S v2 format, Canon CR3 film rolls/raw burst format, as well as Canon CRM movie format. All of these are possible thanks to the update to the libraw 0.21.1 library.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 44 Release Candidate is here to reimplement elementary OS support and revert the “add preference to set new tab page” change in the Epiphany (GNOME Web) web browser, allow the creation of virtual machines without selecting an Osinfo operating system entry in GNOME Boxes, and improve the state of switchers throughout the GNOME Control Center app.

• It also improves Flatpak support for the GNOME Disks app, updates the About You page in the GNOME Initial Setup app to make it clear that you can choose a different avatar, add nightly builds for AArch64 (ARM64) for the GNOME Maps app, and cleans up the Shortcuts menu and decreases memory usage in Songs View in the GNOME Music app.

• So it’s that time that occurs twice a year when we’re approaching a new GNOME release, this time 44.

• [...]

• Unfortunately an issue has come to our attention with the way the „go to“ animations works, resulting some times when covering large distances (for example when selecting a search result far away) that results in throttling from the tile server (HTTP 429, „too many requests”). This results in empty tiles showing up at the destination (and one needs to sometimes wait a while before Maps gets the view refreshed with new tiles (after restarting to force re-trying).

• As this results in a really bad user experience as a work-around we have disabled the animations for now (the animations when zooming is still in place, and of course panning the map view still works as usual).

• I also cherry-picked this for the 43 branch, and will probably also cut a 43.4 with this change (versions prior to 43.0 is not affected, as the animations in libchamplain uses another algorithm, first zooming out „high“ (a low zoom level) before moving, resulting in less intermediate tiles compared to the “fly to“-like animations now used in libshumate.

• We will try to come up with a better solution in libshumate soon. Either reverting to an approach like that in libchamplain, or try to implement our own rate limiting of some sort during animations to avoid firing off too many requests.

• Meanwhile at the libshumate side James Westman has been busy working on the vector tile support implementing label support among other things.

• He is also working on a vector tile style using the GNOME color palette in light and dark variants.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Earlier today I tested EasyOS 5.0 with Ventoy:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202303/ventoy-does-not-work-with-easyos.html

• Forum member jaje mentioned “EasyOS 4″ working, and I do recall some other people reporting success awhile back. So I decided to test the last of the Dunfell-series, version 4.5.5. No, also fails:

• Forum member jaje reported unable to get EasyOS 5.0 to work with Ventoy USB-stick multiple-boot manager:

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=8131

• As jaje reported, Easy used to work.

• See my post in that thread; I did attempt it, and there were lots of errors. I took a snapshot but wasn’t able to capture the earlier error messages:

• As is the usual way of things, the monthly Activity Report is hereby combined with my Contract Report.

• This report covers hrev56748 through hrev56803.

Reviews

• AlmaLinux is a reliable and stable Linux distribution that is suitable for enterprise use. The distribution is built from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is known for its stability and reliability. AlmaLinux provides regular security updates and includes various security tools to ensure a secure operating system.

• While AlmaLinux is server-focused and does not come with a pre-installed desktop environment, users can easily install a desktop environment of their choice. The distribution also provides access to a vast repository of software packages through the yum package manager, which is widely used in enterprise Linux distributions.

• Overall, AlmaLinux is a viable option for enterprises looking for a reliable and stable Linux distribution. It is also a good option for users who are familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and want to switch to a community-driven project. The active community support, compatibility with RHEL, and focus on security make AlmaLinux a solid choice for enterprise use.

• When I’m reviewing a distribution there are two questions floating in the back of my mind. First, do I find this project useful or interesting? Second, does the project accomplish what it sets out to do, does it meet its own goals? I want to discuss these two queries and my responses to them after running blendOS.

• Is blendOS doing something interesting? It’s starting to. This is a young project and it seems to be trying to match features with Vanilla OS, which got a lot of hype in the second half of 2022. This project feels like an attempt to basically: “Be Vanilla OS, but with an Arch base.” And, if that is the case, it’s a worthwhile goal. The idea of being able to pull in software from multiple sources, multiple distributions, and run them all together on one, relatively minimal host operating system has a lot of merit.

BSD

• FreeBSD 12 is the “previous” series of releases. FreeBSD 13 is the “stable” series as of today (march 2023) and FreeBSD 14 is “current”, e.g. upcoming somewhen. The major versions of FreeBSD tend to bring larger changes – such as a newer base compiler, or a sudden improvement in system header-file compatibility. The previous series releases use clang 13, for instance, while stable uses clang 14. FreeBSD 12 is poorly supported by the KDE-FreeBSD team, and that’s on purpose.

• Chasing compiler versions, and more importantly, C++ standard library versions, is frustrating work. Maintaining backwards compatibility has real costs – especially when most of KDE development is done with some recent gcc on Linux.

• Crystal Kolipe has written up more of her work on the console. This time, it regards bugs in the handling of UTF-8: ExoticSilicon.com – fixing cringeworthy bugs in the OpenBSD console code.

• The problem is, Panasonic and Apple have spoiled me with their 2× HiDPI displays. I love how images look, the higher fidelity of fonts in documents, and the ability to crank text down to smaller sizes when tailing logs. People saying these are silly luxuries were writing into PC Magazine saying 8-bit colour was sufficient in the 1990s, and that you don’t need double-density floppy disks because in my day we used punch card libraries, dagnabit!

Fedora Family / IBM

• Sorry for the slight delay, we discovered a problem in the GNOME OS startup but that should be fixed now with the patch for mutter here: [1] (thanks Carlos for helping with the investigation and the fix). You can see all the tests passing now in our openQA instance at openQA: gnomeos-master-iso-x86_64-gnomeos@qemu_x86_64 test results 25

• We remind you we are string frozen, no string changes may be made without confirmation from the l10n team. Hard code freeze is also in place, no source code changes can be made without approval from the release-team. If you need to request any of the above, see ReleasePlanning/RequestingFreezeBreaks – GNOME Wiki! 17

• Also remember you can use the 44beta branch of the flatpak runtimes, which is now available on Flathub beta.

• A measure of growth is most apparent when scaled across a span of different times and situations. That applies to folks getting to see you after a long time, to vegetation left alone to spread and of course, to communities having their first meetup after a prolonged spell of online-bound interactions. FOSDEM 23 happened to be one of the first times after around three years that community members from across the world met in person with each other in Brussels, Belgium. With new and old faces alike, their time was well spent representing the community, exhibiting to the wider free and open-source communities the good stuff that they have been keeping themselves busy with and most importantly, bonding with their Fedora friends.

• This year FOSDEM took place on 4th February ’23 and 5th February ’23 at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Campus du Solbosch, Avenue F. D. Roosevelt 50, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium. This free event was participated by over 8000 software engineering enthusiasts from across the world, had around 36 lightning talks and around 771 talks spanning 55 designated devrooms. Contributors from our community did not restrict their participation in the event as just attendees but they also enthusiastically volunteered to be stand keepers in the Fedora Project booth, speakers for a variety of talks and lectures, organizers for a set of devrooms and even as ground staff for making FOSDEM 23 a grand success.

Open Hardware/Modding

• PALPi doesn’t have a built-in speaker to output audio, but Raspberry Pi Zero W’s Bluetooth capability means you can connect a Bluetooth speaker and blast all the retro games’ original audio while you’re playing.

• In my previous article, I talked about Stellarium in a web browser. This stellar software allows for a 3D view of your local sky, with amazing telescopic and scripting features. In this article, I’ll show you how to put those stars in your pocket using a Raspberry Pi 4, along with scripting some animations for fun. If you remember my Halloween-themed article, I covered using a Raspberry Pi to make a festive Halloween jack-o-lantern. I’ve repurposed this same Raspberry Pi to create a traveling galaxy box. That’s what I’ll be calling it today. So let’s get packed for a galactic trip.

• The Raspberry Pi is a staple in the toolbox of electronics tinkerers everywhere. But supply issues have meant that they’re in short supply, and you’re likely to pay a premium when you do find one. Raspberry Pi isn’t the only cheap single-board computer out there, however: if you open yourself to alternatives, you’ll find a cornucopia of fruit and veg themed hardware for under $50.

• Bear in mind that the issues affecting the Raspberry Pi supply chain also caused problems for other manufacturers and retailers. In some cases, these alternatives are being sold at above their original price point.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit organization that promotes open source that maintains and evaluates compliance with the Open Source Definition. Every year the OSI holds elections for its board of directors. It has become somewhat of a tradition for me to write questions for OSI board candidates.

• In past years, I’ve asked questions about the focus of the organization and how the board should work with staff. The board has since acted decisively by hiring its first executive director, Stefano Maffuli. It has also expanded staffing in other ways, like hiring a policy director. To me, this is a huge success, and so I didn’t pose those questions again this year.

• What is does is something pretty simple, but IMO pretty useful. It shows you what every closing delimiter is actually closing. When you have a large file and you are the end of a function, you might have a lot of closing brackets, one for the function, one for a loop, one for that conditional you started and one for that switch statement. Also, which function is this closing bracket for again? Answers for all of these question is provided by scopeline.el. It uses tree-sitter under the hood to parse the code and figure out what we are looking at and makes use of overlays to display it. It works with elisp-tree-sitter as well as builtin treesit package.

• Emacs 29 aims to change this with the introduction of a built-in support Tree-sitter. Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited. Sounds great, right?

• The time has come to make the first technical preview release of A4PDF, nicknamed embarrasment. The name stems from this statement.

• If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• You’ll have noticed – as indicated earlier, the Chromium packages for Slackware 14.2 are no longer being updated. Today I made available the Slackware packages available for Chromium 111.0.5563.64, and they are accompanied by the un-googled version. This latest release squashes a massive 40 vulnerabilities, none labeled critical, but it’s wise to keep your systems […]

GNU Projects

• GNU Octave version 8.1.0 has been released and is now available for download. An official Windows binary installer is available. For macOS see the installation instructions in the wiki.

• This major release improves the graphics backend, compatibility with Matlab and contains many new and improved functions. A list of important user-visible changes is available by selecting the Release Notes item in the News menu of the GUI or by typing news at the Octave command prompt.

• Thanks to the many people who contributed to this release!

Programming/Development

• Researchers have developed a range of analog and other unconventional machine learning systems in the expectation that they will prove vastly more energy efficient than today’s computers. But training these AIs to do their tasks has been a big stumbling block. Researchers at NTT Device Technology Labs and the University of Tokyo now say they’ve come up with a training algorithm (announced by NTT last month) that goes a long way toward letting these systems meet their promise.

• Often economic and other Machine Learning data are of different units or sizes making either estimation, interpretation or visualization difficult. The solution to these issues can be handled if the data can be transformed to unitless or data of similar magnitude. When the need to transform thus arises, then one finds it difficult to get handy function to achieve that.

• About a year ago I hit 100% code coverage on an open source project known as Leaf. I blogged about this when I hit that coverage marker and after a year its worked out quite well. Adding new large features is a pain from all the requirements, but little changes here and there I’ve now got full confidence in whether they regress or break the site.

• AI is going to do a lot of interesting things in the coming months and years, thanks to the detonations following GPTs. But one of the most important changes will be the replacement of our existing software.

• In my opinion, one of the greatest tools to gain competitive advantage in a tech career is hidden in plain sight: it’s the wealth of information out there made for people in roles you work with.

• A major difference between software and book projects is that the latter have a point when they can be considered complete and finished. For my debut novel, that time has come.

• [...]

• The text block has been created with a “mini-LaTeX” DTP program that I wrote basically from scratch. This caused “fun” things to happen. For example I got an email from the printing house some four days before the unveiling event that the book contains words that were not hyphenated according to recommended style guides. I was aware of said style guides, had added handling for those and even had unit tests to ensure that they work. And yet in production they did not work. This lead to a very stressful debugging session where you know that the only person in the world that can fix it is you, and that there is a very strict and personal deadline.

• The actual PDF generation was done with Cairo and Pango. Surprisingly there were zero issues with them, the printer accepted them just fine and the printout looks great. The cover was made with Scribus and it did have several issues none of which had anything to do with Scribus itself, just that doing a full color managed print job is to this day a bit tricky. did have to postprocess Cairo’s output with Ghostscript because Cairo only produces PDFs in the RGB colorspace whereas printers require grayscale PDFs.

• As a candidate in my early career, I experienced all sorts of technical interviews, ranging from being asked to write an algorithm on a piece of paper with an ink pen (not kidding) to doing leet coding in an IDE. Looking back, the best experiences were when the interviewer wanted me to succeed, was empathetic, and presented me with a problem that reflected how I would solve problems in the real world without gotchas.

• Since then, I’ve been on both sides of the table hundreds of times and reflected a lot about the problem that plagues technical hiring: how to assess whether a candidate is both technically proficient and has the right mindsets and behaviors to succeed in your organization.

• Most organizations have a technical interview process that attempts to evaluate both qualities to varying degrees of success. They may also use platforms like HackerRank or Karat to assess technical strength. But all too often, these approaches can lead to suboptimal outcomes, filtering out great talent or, worse, providing a poor candidate experience that hurts the company’s reputation.

• For a device advertised as the “Multi-tool Device for Hackers”, the Flipper Zero already offers a considerable list of onboard capabilities. But some hard decisions had to be made to get the retail price down, so features like WiFi and Bluetooth had to be left off. Luckily, there’s an expansion interface along the top of the device which makes it possible to plug in additional hardware.

• To enable relative line number, add the following line to your init.lua. Save this file by doing a :w or Shift + z repeat z. The next time you open Neovim, you should see the relative line number enabled.

Python

• Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you need to create a new Python 2 virtual environment today; perhaps you need to install some package to see how its old Python 2 version behaves. With Python 3, creating a virtual environment is really easy; it’s just ‘python3 -m venv /tmp/pytest’. With Python 2 today, you have two complications. First, Python 2 doesn’t have a venv module (instead it uses a ‘virtualenv’ command), and second, your installed Python 2 environment may not have all of the necessary infrastructure already set up since people are deprecating Python 2 and cutting down any OS provided version of it to the bare minimum.

Java

• Java is a cross-platform language, which means that Java applications can run on a variety of operating systems, including Linux and Windows. The performance of Java applications can depend on a variety of factors, including the specific implementation, the hardware and software environment, and the workload of the application.

• The performance of PHP and Java can depend on a variety of factors, including the specific implementation, the hardware and software environment, and the workload of the application. In general, Java is considered to be a faster and more efficient language than PHP.

• There are several good security practices to follow when developing Java applications. Here are some of the most important ones: By following these best practices, you can help ensure the security of your Java applications and protect against common security threats.

• SP (JavaServer Pages) pages are essentially HTML files with embedded Java code. To rewrite JSP pages in Java, you will need to extract the Java code from the JSP pages and refactor it into Java code files that can be compiled and run independently.

• Orcacle releases new Java versions quite often and the current one is 19. However, plenty of production code is still running on older Java versions as even Java 8 is still supported.

• There are several quick wins that can be achieved through refactoring Java code: Overall, refactoring can help improve the quality of Java code, make it easier to maintain, and reduce the risk of introducing bugs.

• In one of our previous articles How to Mock Variables for Interfaces and Casts in Java we described how to use the method withSettings().extraInterfaces() in order to add more interfaces / implementations to mocked objects.

Rust

• Rust is designed around safety and soundness. Roughly speaking, safe code is code that doesn’t use the unsafe keyword,What we mean by “safe” depends on context, which is partly what this post is about.

Standards/Consortia

• The bi-annual changing of the clocks takes place this Sunday, but some federal lawmakers hope it’s the last time we “spring forward” as they push to make daylight saving time permanent.

• XMPP peeps: Email is a lost cause, a dead horse, it’s unpossible Also XMPP peeps: Everyone needs to get on OMEMO, all old jabber clients are obsolete and need to be thrown away

• Not sure why one of them can be improved and the other can’t…

Leftovers

• Since I joined RevenueCat a year and a half ago, I have without fail sent a weekly email summary to my manager and my team, and I am asking all product managers in my team to do the same. It’s not something I invented, and it’s deceptively simple. However, this weekly ritual has many benefits that I want to talk about in the following.

• At its core, the weekly email has two headings with 3–5 short bullet points each: achievements this week and priorities next week. Under the former, you list the 3–5 most important things you got done this week, under the latter, the 3–5 most important things you want to get done the following week.

• Ever so rarely, the human species can reach accord and agreement on some topic seemingly contentious and divergent. Such occasions tend to be rarer than hen’s teeth, but the UN High Seas Treaty was one of them.  It took over two decades of agonising, stuttering negotiations to draft an agreement and went someway to suggest that the “common heritage of mankind”, a concept pioneered in the 1960s, has retained some force.

• Debates about the sea have rarely lost their sting.  The Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, in his 1609 work Mare Liberum (The Free Sea), laboured over such concepts as freedom of navigation and trade (commeandi commercandique libertas), terms that have come to mean as much assertions of power as affirmations of international legal relations.

• The best gadget I got in lockdown was a set of motion activated lights. They have no user interface. I walk by them in the dark and they turn on. Midnight piss? No fumbling for a light switch, no shouting to a digital assistant, no logging in to an app.

Education

• Nevertheless, I have spent a lot of time over the last few years debating my future in this profession. There are a lot of reasons for this but it probably started with my disdain for everything shifting to the cloud. This is more than just a trend, its a complete re-imagining of how tech works and operates. As a slight aside, its also an ice pick shoved squarely into the eye of the vision of decentralization and resiliency that inspired the creation of ARPANET (aka the Internet), but I digress.

• This has created a situation in which I’ve gone from being a well-rounded tech professional that could juggle coding and systems tasks to one that is deficient in what is now a very important area. Sure I’ve done some basic Azure integration using Azure AD authentication and posting messages to Teams and I host this website on a VM I have at Linode, but beyond that, my cloud experience is exceptionally lacking at the moment.

Hardware

• Game cartridges are generally seen as a read-only medium with the contents as immutable as text chiseled into a granite slab, and with accompanying save files on the cartridge surviving for generations. The unfortunate truth is that as with any media storage, cartridges can and do fail, and save files are often just ethereal bits in battery-backed SRAM. This makes being able to copy not only the game data but also the save files off these cartridges essential. Projects like the Open Source Cartridge Reader by [sanni] make this something that everyone can do.

• [Russ Maschmeyer] and Spatial Commerce Projects developed WonkaVision to demonstrate how 3D eye tracking from a single webcam can support rendering a graphical virtual reality (VR) display with realistic depth and space. Spatial Commerce Projects is a Shopify lab working to provide concepts, prototypes, and tools to explore the crossroads of spatial computing and commerce.

• Over the last couple of years we’ve seen several iterations of the “slow movie player” concept, where a film is broken up into individual frames which are displayed on an e-paper display for a few minutes at a time. This turns your favorite movie into a constantly changing piece of long-term art. Unfortunately, due to the relatively high cost of e-paper panels, most of the examples we’ve seen have only been a few inches across.

• In my previous post, I mentioned that I managed to get the SSD1351 working with a Raspberry Pi Pico. I figured I would write a few blog posts going into detail about how this is done.

• In this first post, I’ll talk about how to talk to the SSD1351 OLED display. You’ll find that many OLED and LCD displays are very similar in this regard so it can be an excellent introduction to talking about displays in general.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• While rates of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts are at all-time highs, more college students than ever report receiving therapy or counseling, according to a new report.

• Three women are facing a lawsuit for wrongful death after a man accused them of helping his ex-wife obtain medication for an abortion.

• People who write about health insurance in the United States frequently cite statistics about what percent of the population has insurance. These statistics typically use point-in-time (PIT) measurements that report what percent of the population is insured at any given moment. These PIT measures are useful but can also mislead people into thinking that health uninsurance is a much less common experience than it really is.

• European Commission Event Warsaw, 10 Mar 2023 Mr Janusz Wojciechowski in Warsaw, Poland; meets with representatives of the Polish pig farming and breeding sector (Polsus and Polpig).

• Gut-wrenching.

• This isn’t over yet.

• Relief for millions.

• A newly released study published in the science journal PLOS ONE reveals the average number of plastic particles in the world’s oceans may have reached over 170 trillion as of 2019.

Security

• Josh and Kurt talk about the number of dependencies that is now normal. Keeping track of thousands of dependencies used to be impressive, now it’s normal. In what instances should we know everything about our open source? The days of being able to ignore your software liability is looking like it’s coming to an end.

• Apple has removed an app from its App Store that appeared to be a restaurant guide but was actually an online banking app for customers of Russia’s majority state-owned VTB Bank, according to the Russian business magazine Inc.Russia.

• While there’s little in the way of hard rules dictating what constitutes a cyberdeck, one popular opinion is that it should be a piecemeal affair — a custom rig built up of whatever high-tech detritus the intrepid hacker can get their hands on, whether it be through trades or the time-honored tradition of dumpster diving. It should also be functional, and ideally, capable of some feats which would be difficult to accomplish with a garden variety laptop.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

Privacy/Surveillance

• Elon Musk’s Twitter could soon face new competition from Facebook-owned Meta.

• Meta Platforms Inc is considering launching a new Twitter-like social network. “We’re exploring a standalone, decentralized social network for sharing text updates,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to Variety.

• In this article, I’d like to share with you about the Linux specific feature ecryptfs, which allows users to have encrypted directories.

• While disk encryption done with cryptsetup/LUKS is very performant and secure, there are some edge cases in which you may want to use ecryptfs, whether the disk is LUKS encrypted or not.

Defence/Aggression

• The US Navy wants a full-service submarine hub in Australia that can oversee all underwater activity in the Asia Pacific, including production and repairs, Defense News reported Thursday. The report cited comments from Navy Secretary Carlos del Toro, whose vision will be possible under AUKUS, the military pact signed between the US, […]

• During her visit to Kyiv on March 10th, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin suggested that Finland could consider providing Ukraine with its ageing Hornet fighter jets. The statement has caused controversy in Finland, with some government officials denying any discussion of such an action.

• Speaking to reporters in Ukraine, Marin said, “there will certainly be a discussion about fighter jets.”

• PRESIDENT Sauli Niinistö and the Ministerial Committee on Foreign and Security Policy met yesterday to discuss the Finnish accession to Nato.

• Piritta Asunmaa, a director at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, told YLE that the meeting was held exceptionally on a Sunday because the calendars of ministers are packed with campaign-related events this week.

• Iranian state media reported on March 11 that Tehran has reached a deal to buy advanced SU-35 fighter planes from Russia, citing Iran’s UN mission in New York.

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• In her second visit to Kyiv, which her critics see as a photo opportunity before Finnish elections, prime minister Sanna Marin has raised some eyebrows and received criticism for offering Finnish fighter jets to Ukraine.

• Prime Minister Sanna Marin (SDP) said in Kyiv that Finland should discuss whether its old Hornet fighters could be sent to Ukraine.

• Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, reported that air defense systems shot down four missiles in the city of Belgorod and its outskirts on Monday morning.

• We have seen much recently about the Ukraine war anniversary. But March also marks the eighth anniversary of the war on Yemen and the 20th on Iraq. Members of Congress should introduce a Yemen War Powers Resolution before this war enters a ninth year.

• In the past few weeks, activists in 17 cities across the United States protested at congressional offices and beyond, calling on lawmakers to bring the harmful U.S. role in the Yemen war to an end.

• The U.S. must end its unfair trade practices and stop flooding Haiti’s markets with food that can be grown locally.

• Is it Russian imperialism or great-power politics that explains Putin’s invasion of Ukraine? And how likely is it that we could see regime change in Moscow? Moreover, do ideological labels matter in today’s political climate? C. J. Polychroniou tackles these questions in an interview with the French-Greek journalist Alexandra Boutri. He contends that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a major war crime but that the ongoing war is rooted in NATO’s eastward expansion and associated with the game of great-power politics. As for those who compare Putin to Hitler and call for regime change in Russia, Polychroniou argues that such claims and demands are both absurd and dangerous.

• The trilateral meeting between Finland, Sweden and Turkey about the NATO membership of the former two countries was covered in an article by Politico on March 10. The article provides details of the meeting – first time since November 2022, emphasising on Turkey’s continued blockade of Helsinki and Stockholm for NATO.

• Pope Francis says he is willing to travel to Ukraine, which is under attack from Russia, but only on the condition that he can also travel to Moscow

• Britain has called on Olympic sponsors, including Coca-Cola and Samsung, to support a ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes competing at next year’s summer games in Paris.

• Ukraine insisted that it was holding on in Bakhmut and was giving a “decent rebuff” to Russian forces.

• The goal was for the defendants, including alleged ringleader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to plead guilty and spend up to life in prison. They would avoid a death penalty trial, but the problem-plagued case would finally end. The 9/11 judge backed the effort, canceling all public hearings for the past 12 months so lawyers could focus on negotiating.

• Yet the talks are in limbo. And that has family members of 9/11 victims — who have been waiting more than two decades for the case to go to trial — in a familiar state of frustration.

• [...] The blast at a cultural center during an event for journalists in northern Afghanistan killed at least one person and wounded eight, according to authorities and journalists. [...]

• The head of Moldova’s police, Viorel Cernauteanu, said in a news conference that an undercover agent had infiltrated groups of “diversionists,” some Russian citizens, who allegedly were promised $10,000 to organize “mass disorder” during the protest in the capital, Chisinau. Seven people were detained, he said.

• An American B-52 Stratofortress strategic bomber with the call sign NOBLE61 conducted a maneuver over the Baltic Sea, 200 kilometers (around 125 miles) from St. Petersburg, reports Russian state broadcaster RBC, citing data from FlightRadar24.

• Relatives of men mobilized from outside of Moscow sent a video appeal to President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, asking that their sons and husbands be returned from assault units.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• It’s clear from court filings in the Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox news that the network cares only about making money, and knows its money comes from telling viewers exactly what they want to hear. Supporting former President Donald Trump and parroting his lies about the 2020 election being rigged was good for the bottom line, so the network and hosts like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson responded in kind.

• What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads?

• Science and secrecy are two words that rarely go well together. Yet remarkably, our peak scientific institution, the Australian Academy of Science is deliberately engaging in secrecy, aided and abetted by the Australian National University. Transparency Warrior Rex Patrick tells the story.

• Back in January, knowing the Safeguard Mechanism legislation that underpins Labor’s key climate change policy (which we now know, flawed) would be debated in the upcoming parliamentary sitting, I FOI’ed a paper written by Australian National University Associate Professor, Cris Brack, on ‘the “science” of measuring carbon credits for human-induced regeneration’.

• It seems like these days, everyone is finding classified documents in places they shouldn’t be: their homes, their offices, their storage lockers, their garages, their guitar cases, between the cracks of their couches, under some withered celery in the vegetable drawer … OK, we’re exaggerating—but it is getting ridiculous.

• While the pundits continue to speculate whether President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and President Joe Biden put national security at risk by hoarding these secrets, that ultimately might not be the biggest problem.

• What we know for sure is that these episodes illustrate overlapping problems for government transparency. It reveals an epidemic of over-aggressive classification of documents that could easily be made public. It means that an untold number of documents that belong to the public went missing—even though we may not get to see them for at least 25 years, when the law requires a mandatory declassification review. And then there’s the big, troubling transparency question: If these officials pocketed national secrets, what other troves of non-secret but nonetheless important documents did they hold on to, potentially frustrating the public’s ability to ever see them?

• Ukraine is a pawn for militarists intent on degrading Russia and ultimately China in a self-defeating quest to ensure U.S. global hegemony. The end of this war, like most proxy wars, will be ugly.

• The three bronze statues that have been touring the world have arrived in Assange’s home country, where John Shipton, John Pilger, David McBride and other speakers demanded the prime minister tell Joe Biden to release the WikiLeaks publisher.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• The Mackinac Island Ferry Co., formerly known as Star Line, will replace two 1988 diesel engines on its Chippewa ferry vessel with electric propulsion motors. Ferry Company owns the former Arnold Line Ferry fleet and Mackinac Marine Services shipyard.

• The company plans to upgrade all of its seven steel vessels with electricity after the Chippewa is converted. EGLE plans to electrify all 28 Mackinac Island ferries and help develop a full-time, year-round shipbuilding industry in the straits region.

• Fundamentally, Bhatraju said he believes that distribution utilities should focus on distributing power, not generating it, and take on a “coordinator” role to manage DERs. That transition won’t take place now, or ever, without incentives for distribution utilities.

• The economics support that business model, too. Transmission and distribution costs are going up, while generation costs continue to dive thanks to new technology. Plus, the monopolistic piece of the business involves poles and wires, not power plants.

• Saudi Aramco, an oil giant almost entirely owned by the government of Saudi Arabia, announced Sunday that it brought in a staggering $161.1 billion in profits last year as it joined other fossil fuel companies in capitalizing on energy market turmoil sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Wildlife/Nature

• Tamil documentary “The Elephant Whisperers” emerged as the winner at the 95th Academy Awards making it a maiden victory for India in the Documentary Short Subject category.

• These are the facts. Almost half of the Ashland Ranger District of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest in southeastern Montana has burned in recent wildfires. This has severely impacted mule deer habitat, resulting in a declining mule deer population which will continue to fall if the Forest Service goes forward with its proposed South Otter logging and burning project on 292,000 acres (456 sq. miles) of public lands.

• The 1990 Ashland Deer Guidelines were developed jointly between the Forest Service and the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks to limit logging impacts on what they note is “the most stable and important population of mule deer in southeastern Montana.” Yet, by ignoring its own scientists and arbitrarily changing existing standards, the South Otter project will destroy even more of what’s left of this vitally important mule deer habitat.

Finance

• Local food pantries may soon see a surge in demand for their services after pandemic-era SNAP benefits come to an end. A temporary boost to SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps, was put in place to help low-income individuals and families during the COVID-19 pandemic.

• The Biden administration is getting a lot of grief over its proposal to tax share buybacks at a 4.0 percent rate. They are being denounced as economic illiterates, and worse. I’m going to side with the economic illiterates, and say Biden is very much on the mark with this proposal.

• To be clear, I have written before that I don’t agree with most of the complaints directed against buybacks. It makes little difference as a practical matter whether companies pay out money to shareholders as buybacks or dividends.

• Protests against pension reforms in France have flared up again, with large rallies being held in major cities such as Paris, Nice and Toulouse. The authorities reportedly expected up to one million protesters across the country.

• Among the current governing parties, the views of the supporters of the Centre and Swedish People’s Party were often closer to those of the NCP than of their cabinet partners.

• Behind the gleaming skyscrapers and multimillion-dollar homes that have made this city the world’s most expensive property market lies a far less attractive parallel reality: one of the world’s seemingly most intractable housing crises.

• Given how deeply and widely its roots run across the industry, Silicon Valley Bank — dramatically seized on Friday by the federal government amid a crippling bank run and a swooning stock — couldn’t have a more apt name.

• The U.S. government on Friday assumed control of Silicon Valley Bank and its billions of dollars in customer deposits, temporarily shutting all branches and freezing withdrawals.

• U.S. banking regulators on Friday assumed control of Silicon Valley Bank, the country’s 16th largest bank and a top financial institution for technology and life sciences companies.

• Silicon Valley Bank on Friday paid out annual bonuses to eligible U.S. employees, just hours before the bank was seized by the U.S. government, Axios has learned from multiple sources.

• Here’s one takeaway: The bank’s extremely online clientele may have contributed to its downfall.

• Young companies raced to get their money out of the bank, which was central to the start-up industry. Some said they could not make payroll.

• The implosion of the Silicon Valley bank led to finger-pointing, as executives and investors jumped on the crisis for their own messaging.

• On Friday, March 10, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by federal regulators. SVB was the 16th largest bank in the country and its bankruptcy was the second largest in U.S. history, following Washington Mutual in 2008. Despite its size, SVB was not a “systemically […]

• With a resoluteness befitting a response to the threat of an all-out banking crisis, US banking regulators issued a joint statement on the evening of March 12, declaring that all depositors in the failed Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) will have full access to their funds starting March 13.

• Employees of Silicon Valley Bank have been offered 45 days of employment at 1.5 times their salary by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, the regulator that has taken control of the collapsed lender, according to an email sent to staff.

• A recent survey conducted by Kantar Public Oy on behalf of Suomen Yrittäjät (Finnish Entrepreneurs) has found strong support for universal income security and social security reform in the Finnish workforce. The survey, called the Työelämägallup, was conducted among 1,511 respondents, including employees, entrepreneurs, furloughed workers, and the unemployed.

• The results of the survey indicate that 42% of those surveyed view a universal income security model favorably.

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• An Australian MP accused the church’s founder Brian Houston of spending lavishly using church funds.

• The Bersatu leadership has rallied around Muhyiddin, urging him to remain in command of the party.

• In a joint statement released by Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome H Powell, and FDIC Chairman Martin J Gruenberg announced they would “fully protect” all depositors who had funds in Silicon Valley Bank, just days after regulators took control of the institution.

• Cryptocurrency firm Circle said all its depositors with the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank will be made whole and the $3.3-billion USDC reserve deposit held at Silicon Valley Bank will be fully available when banks open on Monday.

• Circle’s announcement comes after the US administration on Sunday stepped in with a series of emergency measures to shore up confidence after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and New York-based Signature Bank threatened to trigger a systemic crisis.

• Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) made and lost chancy bets on long-term bonds. This concerned depositors who in turn worried other depositors, starting a chain reaction, a massive exit of funds. SVB didn’t have enough liquidities, became insolvent and is now in the hands of the FDIC (Federal Deposits Insurance Corporation).

• To start with, Useful is not at risk of shutting down. The worst case scenario, as far as I can tell, is that we only have access to the insured amount of $250k in our SVB account on Monday. This will be plenty for payroll on Wednesday, and from what I’ve seen there are enough liquid assets that sales of the government bonds that triggered the whole process should be enough to return a good portion of the remaining balance within a week or so. If I need to, I’ll dip into my personal savings to keep the lights on. I know this isn’t true for many other startups though, so if they don’t get full access to their funds there will be job losses and closures.

• The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the largest vendor in the startup ecosystem, is likely to adversely impact the Indian startup scenario as well as it has injected a lot of uncertainty in the sector overnight, industry experts say. “Hopefully the matter will get resolved, but I think it is a big hit for Indian startups,” Ashu Garg, a prominent Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist and early-stage investor for over two decades, said in an interview. California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th largest bank in the United States, was closed on Friday by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation which later appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as its receiver. [...]

• How it works: Banks don’t keep deposits in a vault — they lend them out to businesses and individuals. So if depositors ask for all their money back at once, as they did at SVB, the bank is likely to fail.

• Corporate America just got a stark reminder that none of their deposits are insured above $250,000 by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

• The collapses of Silvergate and Silicon Valley Bank are like icebergs calving off from the Antarctic glacier. The financial analogy to the global warming causing this collapse is the rising temperature of interest rates, which spiked last Thursday and Friday to close at 4.60 percent for the U.S. Treasury’s two-year bonds. Bank depositors meanwhile were still being paid only 0.2 percent on their deposits. That has led to a steady withdrawal of funds from banks – and a corresponding decline in commercial bank balances with the Federal Reserve.

• Most media reports reflect a prayer that the bank runs will be localized, as if there is no context or environmental cause. There is general embarrassment to explain how the breakup of banks that is now gaining momentum is the result of the way that the Obama Administration bailed out the banks in 2008. Fifteen years of Quantitative Easing has re-inflated prices for packaged bank mortgages – and with them, housing prices, stock and bond prices.

• The failure of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday overtook the really big event of the day, the February jobs report. The 311,000 jobs were far more than I had expected. I thought the huge January number was a fluke of seasonal adjustments and unusually good winter weather. For that reason, I expected the February number to be very weak, not because I thought the labor market had crashed, but just as a correction to the high number in January.

• The New York Department of Financial Services took control of Signature Bank pursuant to Section 606 of New York Banking Law in order to protect depositors. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed as the receiver of the bank.

• Signature Bank had total assets of $110.36 billion and total deposits of $88.59 billion as of Dec. 31. It’s unclear what the figure is today.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Matt Taibbi does not know the difference between “true” and “authentic,” and it shows in his propaganda.

• Details on how sending the defense attorneys the wrong “Jencks” file has roiled the Proud Boys trial.

• Homelessness is emerging as a potent political issue in local elections this year, particularly when coupled with related concerns about crime.

• A few thoughts from a fascinating book.

• Lobbying at the International Labor Organization dovetailed with an influence campaign that set off a corruption scandal at the European Parliament.

• There will be no better opportunity than now for Anthony Albanese to ask US President Joe Biden for the release of Julian Assange. Michael West reports on the Belmarsh Tribunal and calls for the release of Australia’s number one political prisoner.

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meets with US President Joe Biden today, US time. He is in San Diego with AUKUS partners Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to strike a deal to spend billions of dollars of Australia’s public money with the US and UK on nuclear submarines.

• The 21 st C. New Normal – Psycho Political Dimensions of Being a Stranger in a Strange Land

• Measuring a Weaponized Infrastructure (Telecommunications)

• In 2018, ignoring the vocal warnings of experts and advocacy groups, the then-Republican-controlled Congress passed legislation that weakened post-financial crisis regulations for banks with between $50 billion and $250 billion in assets, sparking fears of systemically risky failures and more taxpayer bailouts.

• Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson tells USA Today that former president Donald Trump should abandon his 2024 campaign to re-take the White House if he’s indicted: “It doesn’t mean that he’s guilty of it or he should be charged, but it’s just such a distraction that would be unnecessary for somebody who’s seeking the highest office in the land.”

• Is Hutchinson right? Maybe. Does Hutchinson — who’s been talked up for years as a possible presidential candidate — have ambitions that Trump’s departure from the field would serve, or is he just doing the “elder statesman” thing out of concern for his party’s prospects? Either could be true.

• In July 2015, when two Black Lives Matter activists challenged liberal candidates running for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, the late Kevin Alexander Gray told me in an interview, “all candidates ought to have an agenda that deals with the issues that the Black community are grappling with right now, to include police violence, to include economics, to include all the issues that the Black Lives Matter activists raised.”

• Gray didn’t let anyone off the hook, including Vermont’s independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who had launched his first presidential campaign, and was considered the most left-leaning candidate. “They ought to hire Black people to advise them in their campaigns,” he said, “instead of just organizing a group of white men, which Bernie Sanders is guilty of doing too, and letting those people try to filter what it is that the candidates get.”

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• Americans increasingly lack the information they need to participate in the political process.

• One year into Russia’s war against Ukraine, Katie Stallard speaks to Jade McGlynn, an expert on Russian propaganda and memory politics, about how the Kremlin has framed the conflict at home. McGlynn is an academic researcher at King’s College London and the author of two forthcoming books, Russia’s War and Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia.

Censorship/Free Speech

• One of England’s best-known sports personalities, he was taken off the air after criticizing a British government immigration proposal on social media. His ouster set off a staff boycott.

• Iran’s hard-line judiciary says its Supreme Court has upheld a death sentence against a Swedish-Iranian dissident who went missing from a Turkish airport two years ago before turning up in Iranian custody accused of terrorism.

• The defendant, Habib Chaab, a founder and former leader of a separatist group called the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), lived in Sweden for 14 years until he was apparently lured to Turkey by Iranian intelligence agents.

• But the moralists never left, and English authorities have stumbled when trying to figure out how to mediate between them and those they accuse. Last month, in the West Yorkshire town of Wakefield, a 14-year-old bought a bargain-basement English translation of the Quran on Amazon. (Known as the “Pink Qur’an,” it costs about $13.) He gave it to his buddies at school, and by the end of the day it was smudged and slightly torn. The school suspended the kids, and police investigated the incident as a possible hate crime—which, given that it was his own book, and that police don’t generally conduct investigations of creased covers and smudged pages, would be hard to distinguish from a charge of blasphemy.

• They did not, in the end, prosecute. And when the owner was threatened with death, police took the menacing seriously. But the incident illustrates how society’s defenses, like a watchman dozing off on a late shift, tend to slip. (Last year’s attempted murder of Salman Rushdie roused many advocates of free speech from a similar slumber.) Only one good thing has come from this incident: It has forced authorities, and civil society, to wipe the crust from their eyes and recall how best to respond to incidents, or non-incidents, like this one.

• After a highly acclaimed run in North America, Roger Waters will take his “This Is Not a Drill” tour across Europe. The long journey includes shows in Germany, with the final concert in the country originally planned to take place in Frankfurt on May 28. On February 24, however, Frankfurt’s city council and the Hessian state government announced the cancellation of the Frankfurt concert, for “persistent anti-Israel behavior,” and called Waters an antisemite.

• [...]

• The conflation of criticism of Israel and antisemitism is dangerous and perpetuates the common antisemitic perspective that all Jews monolithically support Israel. Because antisemitism is a real issue, its weaponization and distortion to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel is reckless, and undermines the fight against antisemitism.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• The journalist said he had been reporting from the quake-hit regions for a month. Spending the night in custody, Bulut was later released.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “This video fails completely” if China really wants to integrate Uyghurs into society, researcher says

• Berlin’s authorities took action after a female swimmer said she was prevented from attending one of the city’s pools without covering her chest in December 2022. The woman lodged a complaint with the city’s ombudsman’s office at the Senate Department for Justice, Diversity and Anti-Discrimination.

• Authorities agreed that the woman had been a victim of discrimination and this week said that all visitors to Berlin’s pools, including women and those who identify as non-binary, are permitted to go topless.

• At long last, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is being held to account for his company’s union-busting tactics.

• Don’t let cruelty win. Rush support to protect migrant rights.

• Campaigners at the global vigils for the closure of Guantánamo on March 8, 2023. Clockwise from top left: London, Washington, D.C., New York and Mexico City.

• A regional court in the Tula region is seeking to restrict the parental rights of Alexey Moskalev, whose daughter, Masha, drew an anti-war picture during school art class. Telegram channels supporting the Moskalevs report that a hearing related to the case has been scheduled for March 15.

• A friend just gave me a book by Richard N. Haass with the intriguing title, The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens. Mr. Haass is a self-described member of the establishment – in his words “people and institutions that have often been vilified and blamed for the failures of democracy.” Having worked in the Pentagon, State Department and White House under four presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, followed by his present leadership of the Council on Foreign Relations, may explain why there is nothing in the index of his book under “law” or “corporation” or “unions” or “consumer cooperatives.”

• Credit him, however, with the recognition of “the mounting evidence that this rights-based democracy is failing.” He discusses “ten obligations, that if adopted by a preponderance of citizens, would go a long way toward fixing American democracy.” He calls these “habits of citizenship” (Danielle Allen’s phrase) that “should happen but that the law cannot require.” … “Putting these obligations into practice is up to us.”

• Republican state attorneys general are threatening action against pharmacies that dispense it, as a federal lawsuit challenges the F.D.A.’s authority to approve it.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Monopolies

• That’s great news if you’re an airline shareholder. It’s terrible news if you’re hunting for your lost bags, or if you’re a flight attendant or pilot being squeezed, or if you’re being hit for billions in covid bailouts – or if you’re one of one million Americans who were stranded during Christmas week by the failure of Southwest Airlines’ IT systems, which use duct-tape and wishful thinking to hold together the IT systems of all the airlines SWA bought: [...]

• The lead actors in today’s blockbuster films are celebrities, not movie stars. That’s not their fault: the industry has reduced actors to stewards of profitable intellectual property, robbing them of the opportunity to connect with audiences and shine.

• Commissioner Christine Wilson’s “noisy exit” from the Federal Trade Commission officially has an end date. On March 2, she submitted her official resignation to President Biden announcing she will step down on the last day of the month, and she couldn’t help but take some final shots at her apparent nemesis, Chair Lina Khan. Evidently, Wilson still has a bad case of “Lina Khan Derangement Syndrome.”

Patents

• In a new study published in the BMJ, Dr. Hussain Lalani and a team of six other medical researchers document the massive extent to which the US public (through the federal government) financed the development, production, and purchase of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Through March 2022, the US government spent at least $2.7 billion to develop and produce these vaccines. As the researchers note this is a conservative estimate.

• In addition to these investments in research and development, the US government spent $29.2 billion through March 2022 to purchase the COVID-19 vaccines—at about $20.69 per dose on average, far in excess of estimated manufacturing costs of $1 to $3 per dose—bringing total public investment to $31.9 billion.

• It is now almost a year since the new confidentiality regime for patent disputes in Germany entered into force. Since then, confidentiality requests have become a standard procedure in German patent litigation. Courts and counsel have translated the legal requirements into manageable routines.

Copyrights

• The crowdfunding campaign is making big ask of $115,000, though in the final stretch, they’re already close to $100,000. Why so much money? “Al doesn’t own the rights to a lot of his early parodies so it really complicates the matter,” Kintaro explains.

• “The story can’t be told without the music of ‘Weird Al’ and music rights are expensive. He doesn’t own the rights to his early songs,” according to Odessa Lil. “The Kickstarter is to help fund that process and finish off the movie so it can be considered for distribution or streaming.”

• Google’s transparency report shows that ‘OpenAI’ has asked the search engine to remove several ChatGPT-related search results. These include links to apps and articles that allegedly infringe on OpenAI’s rights. While we can’t confirm the legitimacy of these requests, ChatGPT informs us that they could be legitimate.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• So, don’t optimize on your success but on your personal well-being.

• Last Friday I received a phone call from a fellow Scout leader which has spent my head spinning between disgust and disappointment. Turns out that a Scout leader in the local area had appeared on a paedophile hunter Facebook page. It appears he had been sending messages to a 15 year old boy about meeting up. This particular person was someone who I have worked with professionaly and as a volunteer with. I looked up to him and thought he was a sensible voice to get advice from. This news has shocked me. I am surprised he could do or contemplate something so disgusting and debased. My mind has been spinning ever since. This has filled my mind and destroyed any spare thoughts. The video from the paedophile hunters is a hard watch. It shows a group confronting him on his doorstep. His wife comes out eventually and doesn’t appear shocked. She is also heavily involved in local Scouting and another reason for the mind spinning. What if she knew and wasn’t reporting? How could someone do that? I occasionally hope it is some sort of mix up. It probably isn’t. The good news is that the police have been presented with evidence and are investigating. I have no idea if he has been arrested.

• Sumo is back for another tournament. We are back in Osaka for this one. I must admit, this one creeped up on me and I was not feeling the excitement in the build up. However, there is much to be excited about.

• Terunofuji remains kyujo and so is not fighting. This is expected although he has been training again. There has been lots of noise around him taking part in the Jungyo (travelling show case) after the basho. Sounds promising and hopefully he is not suffering too much.

• The disgraced former Ozeki, Asanoyama is back fighting in Makuuchi after dropping down a fair few divisions. Oh wait, he is just visiting. Yes, his previous efforts to get out of Juryo last basho had failed. However, he did get a win today so hopefully he will be back into the top division.

• The dreams that I can remember the next day are rarely concrete enough to describe in words, but last night I had an odd one. It’s amusing how, as far as I can recall, the dreams just, like, seamlessly place you into a certain context that makes sense in the dream.

• I am thinking about the limitations my aphantasia imposes on me at times. The topic has been getting more attention the past few years, but honestly, I do not keep up with any of it, so I don’t know if they made any progress in what causes it, if it’s even “real”, how to treat it, and so on.

• I just know that most of the time, I do not have a mental image. At all. Just knowledge. Internally visualizing stuff largely does not work for me. I never got the joke about “not thinking about the pink elephant” because of it. I read books and I don’t see anything. I play pen and paper roleplay and I don’t see anything. Not being able to see anything in front of my mental eye has shaped the way I understand 3D space, math, and art. When I do art, I work on it until it looks right for me. I sadly cannot imagine something and then bring it to the medium like it is in my head. I would love to have a finished product in my head and then following along my mental image until it looks like it does in my head.

• Some notes on new bands I’ve been getting into, plus some comments on music discovery.

• Polyseme: Spelled the same, pronounced the same, same etymology Homonym: Spelled the same, pronounced the same, different etymology Homograph: Spelled the same, pronounced differently, regardless of etymology Homophone: Spelled differently, pronounced the same, regardless of etymology

• [...]

• Polysemes are not homonyms, nor vice versa. Polyseme means “many meanings”, homonym means “same name”, homograph means “same writing”, homophone means “same sound”.

• I feel that the left’s reaction against cultural appropriation is good but some are missing that the flipside is cultural imperialism and we might need to walk the tightrope between the two of them (sometimes erring on one side, sometimes the other) instead of diving headfirst into compulsive white normativity.

• Clarification needed before I mention the word “radfem” just to make it explicit that it’s inherently queer inclusive, and you’ll see why as I get into the essay proper. The deluded TERF cult is a snake’s nest of inconsistencies, illogic, propaganda and alliances with the far right.

• They prop up what they claim to fight: oppressive, suffocating gender normative limitations. They claim to be “gender critical” while being 24/7 complicit in the performance of gender. They deny the existence of wall while being the wall. They have forgotten the fight for pants.

Technical

• I’ve been using Obsdian as a means for visualizing my notes as well as a way to package up some of my notes for sharing and collaborating with others. It makes for a really nice way for mortals to view my markdown content. I’ve already added support for most of the same features Obsidian has in my own process, well before discovering Obsidian, but the thing that has me going back to Obsidian is that oh-so-nice ~murder wall~ *Infinite Canvas*.

• I like dropping original source materials into a canvas and then starting to write markdown notes off to the sides where I’m contextualizing the new information. I’ve also used it to map out my capsule hierarchy from the perspective of user workflow. And I’ve made use of the excellent Excalidraw plugin to convert some hand drawn diagrams into SVGs. It’s **really** nice.

• In this article, I’d like to share with you about the Linux specific feature ecryptfs, which allows users to have encrypted directories.

• While disk encryption done with cryptsetup/LUKS is very performant and secure, there are some edge cases in which you may want to use ecryptfs, whether the disk is LUKS encrypted or not.

• So as a US American most* of us transitioned into Daylight Savings time last night (well “this morning”)… overnight… We jumped forward and hour cutting into our precious sleep time.

• This is always controversial because, it sucks. It throws off sleep schedules, messes up your internal clock, etc. But it’s great because as the days lengthen it shifts the social clock to be inline with solar time over the spring and summer months, allotting more “daylight hours” to social time.

• Ordinarily I’d say Unix, not Linux. This time I said Linux intentionally, because if you’re using another form of Unix then you are already not the average user.

• When I first started using Linux very few distributions shipped with sudo. If you needed to do sysadmin type things then you used su in a terminal and became root until you were done. The thing is, people are lazy, and a lot of people would just leave that root terminal running because typing a password is so much work.

• The first distro I personally saw that provided sudo by default was Ubuntu. They also discouraged the use of su to have a long running terminal by providing a default configuration that did not add your own personal user to the `wheel` group and disallowed logging in as root graphically. Now, they may very well not have been the first to go down this route. They were the first that I personally noticed. Over time, most Linux distros have followed a similar path.

• As a moderately new ham, got my ticket back in 2011, I have had the same thoughts wholesomedonut has. Such a wonderful hobby that is filled with aging hobbyists and dying knowledge. Discussions online from younger generations tend to drift off into annoyance with topics being had on the radio and older operators getting annoyed that computers are getting in the way with the bands being filled with the sound of modems rather than voice and Morse Code (CW). There is a good YouTube community of operators trying to revive the hobby, though revive may be the wrong word as numbers of new licensees has increased over the past few decades. While they all have been talking about why they get annoyed with others in the hobby, I have been thinking for quite some time why the hobby itself may not last.

• A short summary of the above is to “reduce ambiguity over time and create a healthy ecosystem”. Nuance has been gained; various downsides of “being liberal in what you accept” have been noted. Old implementations were expected to be conservative in what they sent, and to silently discard unexpected inputs unless the specification required an error message. The draft instead recommends “active maintenance” instead of an accumulation of tolerances for whatever wacky things the other end might do.

• A quick note before we start, this is an experimental first post and does not represent what this gemlog may look like in the future. I hope to do more in depth analysis of more interesting shows, or at least something better than this. So consider sticking around for that. anyway, on with the show.

Internet/Gemini

• To continue my progress of replacing my simple web pages with Gemini proxied capsules I needed to get Kineto[1] to run multiple instances pointing to different pages and served on different ports. Only problem, kineto doesn’t support config files and systemd unit files kind of suck with a dynamic layout.

• I’ve never been a big fan of systemd. When possible I’ve actively worked at not running it. Making a monolith isn’t great but that it the design that shows unseasoned developers. A purely configuration based init system is create when you have nothing special going on but that is rarely the case.

Programming

• An interesting set of essays about one of my favorite collaborative fiction projects from its earliest conceptions as a loose set of 4chan threads to a proper wiki akin to what it is today. Also some juicy drama in there if you have a taste for the flavor of petty human interactions.

• Oh and also noticed skylar’s capsule was down, she has an excellent scp article – to – gemtext converter service hosted on her capsule which I like using every now and then. Gemtext in Lagrange remains my favorite way to read. Sent her a message, hopefully it will be back up shortly.

• 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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