today's howtos

• Easy Setup Email Encryption with Evolution Mail Client

• LibreOffice Getting Started Guide

• How to Set Up SSH Keys on Ubuntu 18.04

• Handling an old Digital Photo Frame (AX203) with Debian (and gphoto2)

• WAI-ARIA menus, and why you should generally avoid using them

• Fuzzy matching in practice

Games: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, Humble Monthly and DXVK Updates

• An update on the status of porting Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for Linux

  Writing an update on what's happening with Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation [Steam], the Stardock CEO mentioned Linux support again in a recent post on Steam.

• Humble Monthly adds in Dungeons 3 and Hidden Folks, pretty good deal now

  The current Humble Monthly just became a much better deal for Linux gamers with two brand new early unlock titles. Previously, it only had Overwatch (which is playable with Wine + DXVK) although there were some issues recently with Linux gamers being banned and then unbanned. Nice to know Blizzard was good enough to overturn the bans, but still a little risky.

• DXVK Picking Up A Shader Cache To Help Reduce Stuttering, Boost Performance

  A shader cache is in development for the DXVK Direct3D-to-Vulkan API translation layer used by Steam Play / Proton and optionally by Wine. This shader cache holds a lot of potential for reducing in-game stuttering and helping boost the overall performance.

FOSS, standard essential patents and FRAND in the European Union

As part of the research project on “The Interaction between Open Source Software and FRAND licensing in Standardisation”, a workshop was organised by the European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC) in collaboration with Directorate General Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CONNECT) to present and discuss the intermediate results to date. The workshop took place in Brussels on September 18, 2018. I presented a set of observations from the research on the case studies performed as part of the project that are outlined below. Other speakers where Catharina Maracke on the issue of legal compliance between Open Source and FRAND licenses, Bruce Perens on “Community Dynamics in Open Source”, and Andy Updegrove on “Dynamics in Standardisation”. You may ask what the relevance of this debate is for the wider Free and Open Source Software community. The obvious answer is that to distribute software “without restriction”, the user needs all the usage rights associated with the program. While most FOSS contributors assume that this is naturally the central motivation for anybody to contribute in the first place, there is a long history of attempts to maintain some sort of exclusive control over a piece of FOSS code, possibly using other rights than copyright.

Today in Techrights

• Bogus Patents Which Oughtn’t Have Been Granted Make Products Deliberately Worse, Reducing Innovation and Worsening Customers’ Experience
• EPO is Like a Patent Litigation (Without Actual Trial) Office, Not a Patent Examination Office
• Philippe Cadre From the French National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) Wants to Join António Campinos
• Links 22/9/2018: Mesa 18.2.1, CLIP OS, GPL Settlement in Artifex/First National Title Insurance Company
• Links 21/9/2018: Cockpit 178, Purism ‘Dongle’