● 09.10.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 10/09/2023: FreeBSD 14.0 Beta and Calamares Qt6

Posted in News Roundup at 12:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• As you can probably tell I’m not a professional artist, but you gotta start somewhere. The original idea was to have a capybara head which is wearing the PDF logo much like a bow tie around its ear. The gist of it should come across, though it did look much better inside my brain. The PDF squiggle logo is hard to mold to the desired shape.

• The font is Nimbus Sans, which is one of the original PostScript Core Fonts. More precisely it is a freely licensed metrically compatible version of Helvetica. This combines open source with the history of PDF quite nicely.

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model where an organization outsources the equipment used to support storage, hardware, servers and networking components.

Instructionals/Technical

• The step-by-step guide on this page will show you how to Install Proxmox VE on bare metal.

• In this blog post, we will show you how to use variables in Ansible playbook. If you have done programming or written code before, then the concept of variables should ring a bell.

• OOPS! When I play some videos on my Ubuntu computer, the video gets played, but I can’t hear anything from the speakers. If you’re facing this problem, then you’re probably missing some important codec, which is required for decoding the audio or video file.

• Sometimes you don’t get to use a debugger. When do bare metal development, often it is faster to get to the root of a problem by throwing in trace statements, and seeing what path is taken through the code.

• As a developer, you might have a need to work with GUI containers.

Games

• Karlis is using a Raspberry Pi Pico to power a custom flexible keyboard that’s small enough to fit inside of a Steam Deck case.

• [Video Game Esoterica] loves a 1990s video game called Operation Tiger. Apparently, there are only a few of these known to exist in 2023, and he managed to find one of them. Well, it is really just a module so he has to figure out how to give it enough input and output to be actually playable. You can see several videos of his work with the Taito game below.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Saturday, 9 September 2023

• KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.110.0.

• A week ago I wrote about Calamares 3.3.0 getting closer. One of the items on the TODO list for that release is Qt6 compatibility. That is a bit tricky because Calamares uses a bunch of KDE Frameworks and also KPMCore, all of which also need to be Qt6-compatible.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• If so, you’re in luck as there’s a plucky little GNOME extension that lets you do exactly that.

• The creator of the Nano Lights GNOME extension says their add-on “…controls Nanoleaf shapes and possibly others Nanoleaf devices on your local (wifi) network (sic)”. This includes turning devices on/off, adjusting the brightness, changing/setting the colour, and setting Scenes.

• Also remember you can use the 45beta branch of the flatpak runtime, which is now available on Flathub beta.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• In the early hours of this morning, everything seemed OK and uploaded version 5.5. My current host system is 5.4.9, so tested an update; clicked the “update” icon and that went OK, but after rebooting: [...]

• Building what is intended to be EasyOS 5.5 in woofQ, host OS is Easy 5.4.10. Building with packages compiled in OE with the “usrmerge” flag set in DISTRO_FEATURES, reported earlier: [...]

Debian Family

• DebConf23, the 24th annual Debian Developer Conference, is taking place in Kochi, India from September 10th to 17th, 2023.

• Debian contributors from all over the world have come together at Infopark, Kochi to participate and work in a conference exclusively run by volunteers.

• Today the main conference starts with over 373 expected attendants and 92 scheduled activities, including 45-minute and 20-minute talks, Bird of a Feather (“BoF”) team meetings, workshops, a job fair, as well as a variety of other events.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Andes Technology has recently announced the general availability of the AndesCore AX45MPV RISC-V CPU which builds upon the AX45MP multicore processor and adds RISC-V Vector Extension 1.0. Equipped with RISC-V vector processing and parallel execution capability, the new RISC-V CPU core targets SoCs processing large amounts of data for applications such as ADAS, AI inference and training, AR/VR, multimedia, robotics, and signal processing.

• Ever since the Raspberry Pi Pico was introduced in early 2021 we’ve seen the tiny Pi being used for an astonishing variety of applications. It has powered countless clocks, gadgets, games, and accessories for all kinds of computers old and new. [Michael Wessel] has recently added an interesting new application in the “old computer” category, by turning a Pico into a 2114 SRAM emulator for his Busch 2090, an educational computer system from 1981.

• The ESP8266 was one of the first chips that provided wireless functionality at a cost low enough to be widely popular for small microcontroller projects. This project uses one to provide rapid, small, and inexpensive network-attached storage (NAS) capabilities wherever you happen to go.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Hello Thunderbird community! We’re bringing back monthly Office Hours, now with a Saturday option to make attendance more convenient. Please read the details below to learn how and when you can meet with us to share your feedback and ask questions.

• Now that Thunderbird 115 Supernova has been released, we have a lot to discuss, plan, and do! And we’re rolling out monthly Office Hours sessions so that you can: [...]

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• The move will keep farmers and factory technicians from studying helpful manuals, some say.

Programming/Development

• A minor maintenance release of the RcppFarmHash package is now on CRAN as version 0.0.3.

• RcppFarmHash wraps the Google FarmHash family of hash functions (written by Geoff Pike and contributors) that are used for example by Google BigQuery for the FARM_FINGERPRINT digest.

Leftovers

• While we were working on the podcast this week, Al Williams and I got into a debate about the utility of logic analyzers. (It’s Hackaday, after all.) He said they’re almost useless these days, and I maintained that they’re more useful than ever. When we got down to it, however, we were actually completely in agreement – it turns out that when we said “logic analyzer” we each had different machines, and use cases, in mind.

• If someone stops by and asks you to help them make some noisy thing less noisy, you probably wouldn’t reach for a roll of tape. But [The Action Lab] shows some 3M tape made for exactly that purpose. For the right kind of noise, it can dampen noise caused by a surface vibrating. You can see how (and why) it works in the video below.

Hardware

• To study the history of the automobile is to also be a student of technological progress — as with each decade’s models come new innovations to make them better handling, more corrosion-resistant, faster, more efficient, or whatever the needs of the moment dictate. But sometimes that technological advancement goes awry and works against the motorist, making for a vehicle that’s substantially worse than what went before. [FordTechMakuloco] has a video with an example in a Ford pickup, which we believe deserves to be shared.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Mr Kishida addressed leaders of the G-20 on issues ranging from the global economy to food security and the water release.

• Approximately 150 Japanese fishermen, hailing from the Fukushima Prefecture filed a lawsuit on Friday in the district court of Japanese jurisdiction. The defendants in this case are the government and the TEPCO company. This legal action revolves around the discharge of radioactive treated water from the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant.

• S. Korean govt finds no scientific problem with the release of water from the nuclear power plant.

• We all know that a poor night’s sleep can leave us feeling groggy and irritable, but the effects of chronic sleep deprivation on our brains go much deeper, potentially increasing the risk of neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s. A recent study in the Journal of Proteome Research sheds light on how sleep deprivation can harm our brains and provides insights into the protective mechanisms we rely on when we rest.

• If you’re an outdoors person, one of the earliest things you learned was probably that in-field water sources can’t always be trusted as drinkable. A clear mountain stream could have a dead sheep in it just upstream, for example. Maybe you learned to boil it, or perhaps add chemical tablets. Up-to-date campers have a range of filters at their disposal thanks to nanotechnology, but such devices aren’t the only options to avoid sickness. [BeraAjan] has built one using plant xylem.

• A new study published in the open-access journal BMJ Oncology reveals a staggering 79 percent increase in the number of new cancer cases among individuals under the age of 50 worldwide over the past three decades (1990-2019).

• An exodus of health care workers is straining Sri Lanka’s stressed medical system. Doctors are weighing their professional responsibility against their own well-being.

• The ruling is a critical step according to activists on the road towards abortion access at public health institutions in Mexico.

Security

• This post covers my debugging of a self-signed certificate on one of my Bacula instances. The error message is: I’ve encountered that unsupported certificate purpose message before: OpenVPN: unsupported certificate purpose SSL client vs server certificates and bacula-fd I always thought it was a server versus client issue.

Defence/Aggression

• Palestinian health authorities say that Israeli security forces have killed a 16-year-old Palestinian in a confrontation in the southern occupied West Bank. Saturday’s shooting marked latest violence to roil the territory during one of the most violent stretches of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in nearly two decades. The death of Milad al-Rai brings to 185 the number of Palestinians killed in the West Bank so far this year by Israeli fire, including over 30 youths under the age of 18. This year’s death toll in the West Bank and east Jerusalem has already overtaken that of 2022, which had been considered the deadliest year since the United Nations began tracking in 2005.

• Legal scholars and advocates say New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public in and around Albuquerque will spur a legal fight but might also move the debate about gun violence. Lujan Grisham on Friday announced at least a 30-day suspension of the right to carry firearms in her state’s largest city and surrounding Bernalillo County. Police and licensed security guards are exempt. Law professors at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles and Pepperdine in California say the Democratic governor’s order is certain to raise Second Amendment questions. They also note the U.S. Supreme Court last year expanded the right of law-abiding Americans to carry guns in public for self-defense.

• New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has issued an emergency public health order that temporarily suspends the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and surrounding Bernalillo County. The order issued Friday amid a spate of gun violence is in effect for 30 days. The Democratic governor says she’s expecting legal challenges but felt compelled to act. She references several recent deaths, including a suspected road rage shooting this week outside a minor league baseball stadium that killed an 11-year-old boy. The firearms suspension is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates that only the Albuquerque area currently meets. Police are exempt from the temporary ban.

• A group of about a dozen people were brawling on the pavement when at least two shots rang out, video of the incident shows.

• Samira Gozaine, the director of Panama’s National Migration Institute, held a press conference with Security Minister Juan Manuel Pino on Friday, explaining plans to increase border control and surveillance on land and in the air.

Environment

• The quake about 50 miles from Marrakesh turned residences into rubble and left the survivors terrified.

• An earthquake struck Morocco late Friday and killed more than 1,300 people. The death toll is expected to increase as rescuers struggle to reach some areas. Some of the deadliest earthquakes over the past 25 years have resulted in tens of thousands of deaths in countries such as Haiti, China and Pakistan.

• The only road into and out of two Hong Kong villages would partially reopen on Saturday evening, Chief Executive John Lee has said, after two landslides caused by record rain cut access to the coastal communities.

Finance

• There is a need to expand the mandate of multilateral development banks and develop global standards to regulate cryptocurrencies, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told G20 leaders during a summit of the bloc on Sunday.

• To make matters worse, income growth has not kept pace with inflation.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Leaked information suggests that security concerns may force officials to build a new house to replace 24 Sussex Drive, the derelict and abandoned official residence of Canada’s prime ministers.

• By Alice Philipson US President Joe Biden arrives in Vietnam on Sunday to deepen cooperation between the two nations, in the face of China’s growing ambitions in the region.

• UK police said Saturday they had arrested a man in his twenties for spying, with the Sunday Times reporting he was a researcher in Britain’s parliament suspected of working for China.

• Hanoi has worked to keep Beijing on side as Biden visit elevates U.S.-Vietnam relations.

• The two sides are expected to declare themselves strategic partners.

• By Andrew Beatty and Bhuvan Bagga US President Joe Biden and other G20 leaders gathered in New Delhi on Friday for their annual summit, as deep divisions between heavyweight members and a no-show by China’s Xi Jinping called the bloc’s relevance into question.

• Summit achieves unexpected breakthrough agreement in New Delhi.

• Mr Li’s call came as the European bloc grows warier of the risks of engaging China.

• On August 31, IPSI nonresident senior fellow Thomas Cynkin spoke with VOA Korea about the PRC’s reaction to the recent Trilateral Leaders’ Summit at Camp David. He explained, “I cannot rule out more aggressive action, but I think the Chinese are [currently] very cautious” in their response toward South Korea.

• Named individuals and company involved in illicit financing for weapons of mass destruction programs, said Seoul.

Civil Rights/Policing

• St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker has thus far managed to get immunity for upending Hamdi Mohamud’s life.

• Time to brush off your federal courts outlines.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technology and Free Software

• In theory a searchlight is grounded, but in Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead with suitable resources one can move a searchlight into a vehicle and drive off with it. Granted, the searchlight remains hostile, so friendly NPCs and other random monsters could attack it. Or you could mindlessly hit tab while next to it.

• Benefits of this, are, uh, maybe you can use it to provide free lighting at your base if you haven’t found an atomic lamp yet? Or maybe you like being lit up whilst driving through hostile realms by night? Or you’ve looted so much that a broken or inactive searchlight does not fit in your vehicle, but it does when intact? Game physics…

Internet/Gemini

• Life has been busy recently, as you may have noticed from my lack of posts in the past month or so. I’ve been following BBS daily, of course, chiming in when I get a chance. However, when it comes to programming projects, it has been challenging to find time for any substantial progress.

• [...]

• Lagrange v1.17 is shaping up nicely. However, there are a few features I’ve been wanting to implement for a long time, and I’d like to add them before making a release. There is no guarantee I’ll have much time later for the planned v1.18, so postponing features could mean several months of additional delay.

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