Your favorite device has just run out of juice, so you quickly take off the cover and reach into that old stash of alkaline batteries you have lying around. After trying countless combinations, you still cannot be sure they’re working properly, as each one has been slightly used. If only there were a way to know. In comes a maker named Moragor with his take on a battery analyzer. The one he built doesn’t just measure the voltage for a certain type of battery. Instead, users can select from three different types (alkaline, NiMh, or Li-on), along with the current from a sleek OLED display. Then, values get read, shown, and also logged to an SD card for more advanced analysis. The entire device is based on a custom PCB that acts as a shield for an Arduino Mega.

We are excited that the Librem 14 is shipping, and we are so pleased with the production model that we wanted to share some brand new pictures of it inside and out...

The ESP32 is a microcontroller that has very little RAM and isn't quite suited to deal with HTML and such. So I had to use a Raspberry Pi as a rendering proxy and transforms the RSS and the text on the page so that the ESP32 can digest. The idea is to transform XML RSS to JSON and transform any article URL to plaintext by a nodejs script via an HTTP API SaaS or whatever you call it. Even so, I think I'm stretching the ability of the little controller. Anyways, it works most of the time – or at least, I hope, not worse than the Kindle. At least now I can flip one page at a time.

There’s a brand new device-to-device communication feature available now in the Arduino IoT Cloud. It’s something we’ve been working on for a long time. So we’re excited to see how it’ll add a whole new connected dimension to your Arduino projects. [...] Combined with IoT Cloud’s dashboards this delivers a powerful new way to build incredible automations with minimal (if any) changes. Furthermore, it gives you smartphone control of your connected boards via the existing Arduino IoT Remote iOS and Android apps.

Have you ever been asked to troubleshoot a failing Kubernetes service and struggled to find basic information about the service such as the source repository and owner? One of the problems as Kubernetes applications grow is the proliferation of services. As the number of services grows, developers start to specialize working with specific services. When it comes to troubleshooting, however, developers need to be able to find the source, understand the service and dependencies, and chat with the owning team for any service.

Special thanks to Tim Hockin and Bowie Du (Google), Dan Winship and Antonio Ojea (Red Hat), Casey Davenport and Shaun Crampton (Tigera), and Abhishek Raut and Antonin Bas (VMware) for being supportive of this work, and working with us to resolve issues in different Container Network Interfaces (CNIs) over time. A brief conversation around "node local" Network Policies in April of 2020 inspired the creation of a NetworkPolicy subproject from SIG Network. It became clear that as a community, we need a rock-solid story around how to do pod network security on Kubernetes, and this story needed a community around it, so as to grow the cultural adoption of enterprise security patterns in K8s.

CKA certification is a problem-solving exam, meaning you don’t have any questions but instead have a number of scenarios to troubleshoot.

I’ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That’s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I’d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data. Yes, there are free services that are indirectly forced upon common users, and many of us get attracted to it. Many of us do not think that the information, which is shared for the free service in return, is of much importance. Which may be fair, depending on the individual, given that they get certain services without paying any direct dime. [...] So for my communication, I like to prefer emails over any other means. That doesn’t mean I don’t use the current trends. I do. But this blog is mostly about penning my desires. And desire be to have communication over email format. Such is the case that for information useful over the internet, I crave to have it formatted in email for archival. RSS feeds is my most common mode of keeping track of information I care about. Not all that I care for is available in RSS feeds but hey such is life. And adaptability is okay. But my preference is still RSS. So I use RSS feeds through a fine software called feed2imap. A software that fits my bill fairly well.

There is a new tool available for Sparkers: ProtonMail Bridge

Just a short post. There has been a bugfix release of SeaMonkey. EasyOS has SM 2.53.7. I have compiled SM 2.53.7.1 and it will be in the next release of Easy, expected to be version 2.7.1.   

OK, I got those two files 'rastertospl' and ' libscmssc.so' and created a PET, 'printer-driver-samsung-1.00.39-amd64.pet'. It is about 1Mb so will increase the size of 'easy.sfs' by that amount.  Have included it in the build, but there has to be a limit to this of course. There are so many other special files for various brands of printer and scanner.   

I have compiled 'setcolortemperature' package in OE. This has the 'sct' executable. Added this to the package-list for Easy, as well as the 'brightness-control' PET that provides the tray operation (and uses sct).   

Last year I worked on implementing in Turnip the support for a HW feature present in Qualcomm Adreno GPUs: the low-resolution Z buffer (aka LRZ). This is a HW feature already supported in Freedreno, which is the open-source OpenGL driver for these GPUs. What is low-resolution Z buffer Low-resolution Z buffer is very similar to a depth prepass that helps the HW avoid executing the fragment shader on those fragments that will be subsequently discarded by the depth test afterwards (Hidden surface removal). This feature comes with some limitations though, such as the fragment shader not being allowed to have side effects (writing to SSBOs, atomic operations, etc) among others. The interesting part of this feature is that it allows the applications to submit the vertices in any order (saving CPU time that was otherwise used on ordering them) and the HW will process them in the binning pass as explained below, detecting which ones are occluded and giving an increase in performance in some specific use cases due to this.

Google announced today that with Android 12.0 they will be deprecating their RenderScript APIs. Moving forward Android developers should primarily target the Vulkan API for high performance compute needs. RenderScript has been an API around since Android 3.0 for heterogeneous CPU/GPU programming and for some time even had a 3D rendering API. RenderScript though has been of less relevance with GPU compute being available for some time via Vulkan and even OpenGL. Some current Android devices only support RenderScript for CPU-only execution and with Android 12.0 the APIs will be deprecated.

It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.2.175 that introduced the Vulkan Video extensions while out this morning is now the Vulkan 1.2.176 revision.