● 03.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/03/2023: Many HowTos, Several New Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 9:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• MNT Research has finally launched the Pocket Reform, roughly 9 months after it presented the mini laptop. As we discussed last June, the MNT Pocket Reform has a 7-inch LCD panel. It now outputs at 1,920 x 1,200 pixels rather than 1080p, though. Additionally, the MNT Pocket Reform has 8 GB of DDR4 RAM and 128 GB of eMMC flash storage, with a MicroSD card reader and an M.2 2280 slot in place for storage expansion.

• Moreover, the mini laptop has an ortho-linear matrix keyboard with 60 Kailh Choc White mechanical switches, N-key rollover and RGB backlighting. Also, the MNT Research has included four mouse buttons and a micro-optical trackball. Meanwhile, the MNT Pocket Reform has an 8,000 mAh combined battery capacity that should last up to 4 hours charges via a built-in USB port.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Here is a new Teaser Video Showing a little more of what’s behind the curtain with Makulu Max…

• OpenZFS auditing for storage Performance, Privilege drop; privilege separation; and restricted-service operating mode in OpenBSD, OPNsense 23.1.1 release, Cloning a System with Ansible, FOSDEM 2023, BSDCan 2023 Travel Grants

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about how much space do you need. Welcome to episode 54 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon.

Applications

• Transmission BitTorrent client got another bug-fix release for the new major 4.0.0 that was released a month ago.

• Ksnip, the popular free open-source screenshot and annotation tool, released 1.10.1 version yesterday. Ksnip is a Qt based screenshot tool with editing features, that works in Windows, macOS, and Linux on both Wayland and Xorg.

• Looking for a Linux emoji picker you can trigger with a custom keyboard shortcut and that works across all your favorite apps? If so, Smile might make you smile.

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 239. This version includes the following changes: [...]

Instructionals/Technical

• Someone recently asked me about locking down a bond to specific NIC devices within the machine. Specifically they were concerned with the sometimes unpredictable nature of NIC naming in Linux.

• Sed, short for “stream editor”, is a powerful text-processing tool that is commonly used in Linux and Unix systems. It can perform a wide range of operations on text files, including searching, replacing, inserting, and deleting lines. One common task that users often need to perform with Sed is uncommenting lines in a text file.

• Are you looking to install Java on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? Our step-by-step guide will walk you through the process with ease.

• libvirt’s default Linux bridge imposes limitations with some advanced network features. Try using OVS to implement libvirt networks instead.

• On Linux, you need to know when the root account is enabled or disabled. Well, today you will learn how to enable and disable it in Ubuntu 22.04 Although short, this post can help you on more than one occasion.

• Bash is a powerful shell that provides a wide range of special variables that can be used to manipulate and control the behavior of scripts.

• VidCutter is a free, open-source video editing software for Linux-based operating systems. It is a lightweight, easy-to-use video editing tool with basic and advanced editing features. VidCutter allows you to cut easily, split, and merge video files. Additionally, you can add text overlays, image overlays, and audio tracks to your videos.

• Managing user groups is a critical aspect of Linux system administration, as it is essential to ensure security and control access to resources. There are several ways to list user groups in Linux, and this article explores some of the most common and effective methods.

• Linux is a powerful and adaptable operating system that delivers many features for managing user accounts. In this article, we provide a detailed guide on how to delete a user in Linux using different command-line utilities.

• DNF Automatic is a CLI tool that is designed to upgrade packages on a Linux system.

• OpenJDK 11 is a free, open-source implementation of the Java SE 11 Platform, which includes the Java Development Kit (JDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

• Android Studio is a popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for developing Android applications. It was developed and released by Google in 2013 as a replacement for Eclipse, which was previously used as the primary IDE for Android app development.

• In this tutorial, we will use Arduino, an NPK soil sensor to get the soil fertility. The percentage of nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium is measured

• Some notes on using debvm, an amazing piece of software I’ve started using only recently.

• Create a new virtual machine:

• You now have a virtual machine with Debian Sid of your host native architecture (probably amd64). The image file is called rootfs.ext4. You’ve got 1G of disk space in the VM.

• You can now just run the VM! You will be automatically logged is as root.

• Experiment in the VM, run all the sort of tests you have in mind. For example, one thing I commonly do is verifying that things work in a clean environment, as opposed to “on my machine”.

• I’ve been using rsync for years and still did not know its full powers. I just wanted a quick and

• dirty simple backup but realised that rsnapshot is not in Debian anymore.

• However you can do much of rsnapshot with rsync alone nowadays.

Games

• The Steam Deck is getting its first sale, with 10% off as part of the Steam Spring Sale.

• For anyone that has known anything about “CubicleNate” for any period of time will know that I am a huge fan of all things Commodore 64. Maybe not everything but most things, I absolutely am. I am also a fan of open source and the communities that have developed around it.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Today SUSE open-sources its implementation of a Secure Virtual Machine Service Module (SVSM), which will enhance the security of confidential virtual machines (CVMs).

Fedora Family / IBM

• Silverblue is an operating system for your desktop built on Fedora Linux. It’s excellent for daily use, development, and container-based workflows. It offers numerous advantages such as being able to roll back in case of any problems. Let’s see the steps to upgrade to the newly released Fedora 38 Beta, and how to revert if anything unforeseen happens.

• The So Cal Linux Expo again returned to Pasadena, CA and Fedora came back as an exhibitor!  I have now attended SCaLE every year since 2010, shortly after I moved to Calfornia.  Since the last SCaLE was in late July, there was less time between them.  As a result, I noticed a few things that contributed to this year’s SCaLE being an especially special year: Many larger corporate vendors who were at SCaLE last year didn’t come back this year, so it felt like there were more hobbyist and community groups to fill in the space.  At the same time, many who had not been travelling due to COVID returned for the first time in years.  It resulted in SCaLE feeling a bit more geniune this year with a crowd of people who largely knew what Linux and open source are about and were excited to be there.

• Podman supports two ways for storing sensitive data: using raw Podman secrets or creating Kubernetes secrets using Podman.

• RPMs of PHP version 8.2.4 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php82 repository for EL 7.

• RPMs of PHP version 8.1.17 are available in remi-modular repository for Fedora ≥ 36 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 8 (RHEL, Alma, CentOS, Rocky…) and in remi-php81 repository for EL 7.

• The modules for EL-9 are available for x86_64 and aarch64.

• Systemd-boot, previously called “gummiboot” is Grub’s newer competitor. On compatible EFI systems, you can use systemd-boot in place of Grub to boot the system’s operating system. From a high-level perspective, systemd-boot links to the bootloader already in UEFI, offering the most basic feature set for selecting an operating system.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• The French speaking PG Day France 2023 will be held in Strasbourg (France), on June 19 and 20.

• The Call for Speakers is open until April 16 2023, 23h59 CEST ! More details at https://www.pgday.fr/appel

• For any question related to this Call for Speakers or about the PG Day France event, please reach out to us at contact@pgday.fr

• We look forward to seeing you in Strasbourg!

• LAS 2023 is happening next month and registrations are open!

• Our project lead, Marek Marczykowski-Górecki will be interviewed tomorrow during the Dasharo Developers vPub. This is a virtual event hosted by the Dasharo team, who just introduced the first Qubes-certified desktop computer.

• OSI is pleased to announce our 2023 Open Source Initiative License Clinic, an in-person event…

Programming/Development

• We have released Qt 6.4.3 today. As a patch release, Qt 6.4.3 does not introduce any new features but contains more than 300 bug fixes, security updates, and other improvements to the top of the Qt 6.4.2 release. See more information about the most important changes and bug fixes fromQt 6.4.3 release note.

• We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 10 RC!

• By the way, if you’ve never used Python’s debugger, it really is as simple as adding a call to the built-in function breakpoint() at the point you want it to stop.

• Build your React-based CRUD applications, without constraints.

• Tremor is a free, open-source library that aids developers in building data-rich dashboards. With Tremor, you can create simple and modular components to build insightful dashboards with ease. The library is fully open-source and was made by data scientists and software engineers with a sweet spot for design.

• Cloudflare is a web performance and security company that provides a wide range of services, including content delivery network (CDN), DDoS mitigation, and DNS management. It has a global network of servers that help improve website performance by caching content closer to users and reducing latency.

• Secure Backend Server for Web, Mobile & Flutter Developers…

Python

• In Python, Yield is a keyword that allows you to pause and resume a function’s execution, effectively turning it into a generator. The Yield keyword is used to produce a value from a generator function in Python and then pause the function’s execution.

• The open-source PyTorch project is widely used for machine learning (ML) training. Its anticipated 2.0 version is now generally available.

Java

• In Java, when you pass a parameter to a method, a copy of the value of that parameter is passed to the method, rather than the original object itself.

• In Java, varargs (variable-length arguments) are a feature that allows a method to accept an arbitrary number of arguments of the same type. The varargs feature was introduced in Java 5 and is denoted by an ellipsis … after the parameter type in the method signature.

• In Java, access modifiers are keywords that determine the accessibility of classes, methods, and variables in an object-oriented program. There are four access modifiers in Java: Access modifiers are used to control the level of encapsulation of an object-oriented program and to restrict access to sensitive or implementation-specific details of the program.

Rust

• Rust has lots of mechanisms that prevent you from doing something bad. But, right now, it has NO mechanisms that force you to do something good1. I’ve been thinking lately about what it would mean to add “must move” types to the language. This is an idea that I’ve long resisted, because it represents a fundamental increase to complexity. But lately I’m seeing more and more problems that it would help to address, so I wanted to try and think what it might look like, so we can better decide if it’s a good idea.

• In today’s lang team design meeting, we reviewed a doc I wrote about temporary lifetimes in Rust. The current rules were established in a blog post I wrote in 2014. Almost a decade later, we’ve seen that they have some rough edges, and in particular can be a common source of bugs for people. The Rust 2024 Edition gives us a chance to address some of those rough edges. This blog post is a copy of the document that the lang team reviewed. It’s not a proposal, but it covers some of what works well and what doesn’t, and includes a few sketchy ideas towards what we could do better.

Leftovers

Hardware

• TSMC founder Morris Chang took part in a public discussion today, commenting for the first time that he supported the US Chips Act and efforts to slow Chinese semiconductor developments.

• When it comes to chips, there is a big difference between a kicker and a fork.

• Netgear “Nighthawk” RS700 is the first WiFi 7 (802.11be) router from the company, with the tri-band router being rated “BE19000” meaning it can deliver a combined ~19Gbps link rate using all three bands. The router is based on the Broadcom BCM67263 Arm processor and with that kind of wireless bandwidth it comes with two 10GbE ports one WAN port to connect to the internet, and one LAN port to connect to the local networks plus four extra Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a USB 3.0 port for network storage.

• Texas Instruments has just introduced its low-cost MSPM0 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller portfolio comprised of the MSPM0L series with a 32 MHz CPU, up to 64 kB of flash, and 4 kB SRAM, and the MSPM0G series with an 80 MHz CPU, up to 128 kB of flash and 32 kB SRAM.

Security

• North Korean hackers alone used the tool to launder bitcoin worth more than $700 million.

• The warning comes as part of an overview of cyberattacks carried out by Russian-linked actors over the past year.

• The vulnerability used in the attack against the federal agency is well-known and among the top exploits in 2021.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A guide for ORG supporters and activists who want to take action to protect their digital rights from the Online Safety Bill Campaign Pack on the Online Safety Bill for ORG campaigners…

• Advocacy groups and human rights organisations have written to the Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, and the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, Stephen Watson, to ask them to investigate discriminatory police practices in the wake of the conviction of ten young Black men, known as the Manchester 10.

Defence/Aggression

• Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has thanked the Danish government and people for all their help

• The visit follows an invitation made during a conference call between the pair in December, with Xi’s visit an apparent show of support for the Russian leader.

Environment

Overpopulation

• The increased reluctance among Koreans to marry is a sign that the country’s fertility rate may fall even further.

Finance

• The OECD has released a report heavily criticising Denmark’s approach to fighting bribery involving foreign companies or individuals, along with several recommendations (see factbox) to improve the situation.   The report, published by the OECD Working Group on Bribery, said

• Swedish inflation defied the central bank’s mitigating rate hikes, unexpectedly spiking to 12 percent in February, according to official statistics, fuelling expectations of a contracting economy.

• THE RISE in food prices has picked up pace after letting up slightly for a couple of months, reports YLE.

• Finnish food prices surged by 16.3 per cent year-on-year in February, according to data published by Statistics Finland. The rise in food prices had let up slightly in the two previous months, but it re-accelerated last month to a level not seen last year.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Press Gazette’s monthly analysis of ABC national newspaper circulation figures.

• After months of intensifying scrutiny over TikTok’s user-data policies and national-security implications, the White House is reportedly “demanding” that Beijing-headquartered ByteDance sell its stake in the short-form app or grapple with a possible stateside ban.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Through an open letter, civil society calls on the Communications and Media Commission in Iraq to drop the draft regulation of digital content.

• Access Now and partners call for Iraqi authorities to immediately withdraw the draconian draft regulation for digital content.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• We join rights groups in condemning the decision to refer three female journalists from Mada Masr on charges of insulting MPs and misusing social media.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Dozens of people have been jailed for speaking out against authorities.

• You hear a knock on your door. Expecting a neighbor or perhaps a delivery, you open it, only to find a child welfare worker demanding entry. It doesn’t seem like you can refuse so you let them in and watch as they search every room, rummaging through closets, drawers, cabinets, the fridge — all without a warrant. They ask questions making it sound like you’re a bad parent and, finally, say they need to do a visual inspection of your kids, undressed, without you in the room, and take pictures.

• Legal intervention as an avenue for social change has been central to social, economic, and political progress for women, but is difficult to access for the people who most need it. Until recently, the mainstream women’s rights movement in the United States was dominated by white and wealthy women — such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Betty Friedan — fighting for the rights of others who look like them. As a result, the movement has too often excluded and erased the experiences of non-white and working-class women, limiting the movement’s progress in advancing equality for Black women, Indigenous women, and other women of color in this country.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• The FCC moves to enhance consumer protections against spam messages.

• The FCC moves to begin implementing the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act to end predatory pricing for calling incarcerated people.

Monopolies

Patents

• On March 14, 2023, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 6,839,417, owned and asserted by Buffalo Patents, LLC.

• The Perryman Group, in a recent economic study commissioned by Unified Edge, has found that over the next 10 years, the total economic benefit of reducing discretionary denials of inter partes review proceedings under criteria such as the NHK-Fintiv rules will lead to an increase in US business activity of $482.1 million, $230.4 million in personal income, and approximately 2,000 job-years of employment.

Trademarks

• In a nonprecedential opinion, the CAFC affirmed the Board’s decision upholding a Section 2(d) refusal to register the mark OXIPURITY for various chemical products, finding confusion likely with the registered mark OXYPURE for “hydrogen peroxide intended for use in the treatment of public and private potable water systems and supplies.” The applicant argued, without success, that the scientists, chemists, and manufacturers purchasing its products in the pharmaceutical, veterinary, flavor and fragrance, or cosmetic fields are not the same scientists, chemists, and manufacturers purchasing [Registrant] FMC’s hydrogen peroxide for potable water systems.”

Copyrights

• Rising to prominence in the seventeenth century, the Basohli School of painting is particularly known for its vibrant use of color and inventive textural elements — including iridescent beetle carapaces.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Well, tonight I went to a Levellers gig in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and I have to say, it was pretty fucking awesome.

• Though not related directly to this quote, what comes to mind is tangential. Tangential ideas toot my muffin. They enhance the darkness that extends from the membrane surrounding this house into the vast cosmos, stopping just short of the infinity peering back and sizing up said membrane, pining for its dissolution.

• I get intermittent lectures from my mother about *tipping*. I’m not against tipping itself. I’ve been known to throw money around practically at random at times. However, I certainly have problems with *tipping culture* in the good ol’ USA. And how does *tipping culture* in the good ol’ USA relate to Woodbury’s Soap?

• So in gemini there is a 1024 byte limitation on the URL; this is by design. Softwares can have a fixed buffer, and you’ll know whether some micro device (presumably with hairball SSL handled, elsewhere) will be able to deal with the protocol, or not. If there were no limitation (there still is one) that would rule out many smaller devices that either cannot allocate sufficient memory, or where the processing would become too slow. Some will argue that the modern web had already become too slow.

• today at a café i saw a grinder of “Pink Himalayan Salt” (it’s that sort of café). on the front of the label was the brand name “LITALY” with an italian slogan beneath.

Technical

• Twenty years ago, the United States government still reeling from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, began scaling up its surveillance capacity. There was “Total Information Awareness.” There was even a controversial plan to enlist letter carriers and even librarians to keep an eye on the populace.

• Back then, I found this to be somewhat laughable. Even if the U.S. government was able to scoop up all sorts of information off the Internet and telephones, it will represent a massive trove of data that no humans could go through and analyze. Even if the Intelligence Community enlisted the entire population of the United States that would be humanly impossible. So my reaction to this was, what could they do?

• I got my hands on LLaMA and I’m trying to build an automatic translation bot and throw it into VRChat for assist in language exchange (credit to my friend Pichu for the idea). Thinking about it. Why not make the voice as quite as possible? It fits the weeb colture there. The standard TTS tools, even Festival can only do standard, boring speech. After a few seconds googling, I found a plethora of deep learning based voice synthesis models on HuggingFace. vits-models have a huge collection of voices.

• I’ve spent the last couple of months familiarizing myself more with Gopher and exploring gopherspace. This is in addition to Geminispace. I have such a calming sense of peace when I’m exploring gopherspace without the inundation with ads or video or photos that so prevalent on the modern web. I haven’t had the luxury of exploring as much as I want do since my computer is no longer my own un-shared private system any longer after a series of hardware failures and accidents with other household devices, so for the moment I am forced to share my computer and I loathe it. Work continues on my tutorials but due to the shared computer in addition to other factors it is taking much longer that anticipated. I remain hopeful that I will have my computer back to only my individual use again within the next two months.

• I don’t think I’ve explored enough to do a apples to oranges comparison of gopher vs gemini but I have been reading up on many others’ thoughts on the subject. I do know for sure however that I prefer Gemini’s requirement for SSL encrypted connections. I understand that the way that Gemini gemtext is written, the display of the content is solely determined by the client, but I do know that I really prefer the old “look and feel” of the gopher way of doing things with text being plain text only file, hard wrapped to 72 characters and left justified. It reminds me of a RFC text file and I love that format and look much more than the HTML versions.

Internet/Gemini

• So I’ve left smol.pub, ditched my old pseudonym, Sud0nim, and adopted a new one, Lesogorov.

• [...]

• Sud0nim, wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I came up with it in 2020 and had been using it since then, but I didn’t feel ever truly tied to it. I thought it was a fun play on the word “pseudonym”, while incorporating my interest in Linux with the “sudo” command. It also didn’t have any ties to any identifying information to make it fairly anonymous. Pretty quickly I realized I was far from the first person to select that as my online handle, which resulted in me needing to make it “Sud0nim” or “Sudon1m” or “Sud0n1m”, which just pushed me further away from the name. Plus when I wrote my piece on the struggles of being anonymous online, I got a very reassuring email from Ploum that reassured me not to worry so much about being tied to my online identity. This diminished my liking of the whole pseudo-anonymous aspect to the name. So when I decided to spin up my own Gemini server, I got the domain sud0nim.online and got it all ready for publishing, but stopped and started from scratch. If I wanted to put work into this it ought to be a name I feel tied to. I chose “Lesogorov” a Russian patronymic for “Son of the forested mountains”, it’s not a very common last name in Russia so it’s unique enough for me, and it represents my interest and connection to nature, especially mountains and thick forest. Plus it reflects my interest in Russian culture and the language, and in Russian cursive it is easy to distinguish each letter, which can’t be said of all names/words.

Programming

• I have developed some R code to use with data from the SEOSAW[1] database to calculate woody productivity and vital rates according to Talbot et al. (2014), Kohyama et al. (2018) and Kohyama et al. (2019). I’ve archived the code as a Github repository[2] in case anybody wants to use it.

• Over the past week I’ve been experimenting with using Nix to configure NeoVim, and its been going really well. I’ve been playing with using Nix as a package manager since the beginning of the new year when I bought a new machine, and its been an absolute breeze with installing new command line tools. However, by installing NeoVim via Nix, it wasn’t then picking up my rc files. Couple that with the fact that I’ve been putting off migrating to NeoVim’s built-in package manager to manage all my packages because it would drastically increase the number of steps required to set up a new machine, and I thought it would be worth investigating whether I could using Nix to configure NeoVim entirely. I use quite a few different tools and so this became quite a complex process, but I’ve got something I’m pretty happy with and picking it all up on my work machine was a simple case of pulling my dotfiles repo[1] and running `nix-shell` — simply brilliant.

• 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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