Chafa 1.6.0: Wider

Here’s another one from the terminal graphics extravaganza dept: Chafa 1.6.0 brings fullwidth character support, so in addition to the usual block elements and ASCII art, you now get some mean CJK art too. Or grab as many fonts as you can and combine all of the Unicode into one big glorious mess. Chafa can efficiently distinguish between thousands of symbols, so it also runs fast enough for animations — up to a point. Since some users want this in environments where it’s not practical to build from source or even to have nice things like GLib, I’ve started adding statically linked builds. These are pretty bare-bones (fewer image loaders, no man page), so look to your steadfast distribution first. Speaking of distributions, a big thank you to the packagers. Special thanks go to Florian Viehweger for getting in touch re. adding it to OpenBSD ports, and Mo Zhou (Debian), Michael Vetter (openSUSE), Herby Gillot (MacPorts), @chenrui and Carlo Cabrera (Homebrew) for getting 1.6 out there before I could even finish this post.

ClusBerry 9500-CM4 – A Raspberry Pi CM4 cluster, industrial style

Raspberry Pi cluster boards / solutions pop-up from time to time. But so far, I think we’ve seen only one based on Raspberry Pi CM4 modules with the upcoming Turing Pi 2 mini-ITX cluster board supporting four of those. TECHBASE has now unveiled a different kind of Raspberry Pi CM4 cluster with ClusBerry 9500-CM4 integrating up to eight Raspberry Pi Computer Module 4 in a DIN-Rail housing for industrial applications.

Rotary Un-Smartphone is a rotary dial phone based on Arduino, 4G LTE module

If you feel nostalgic and misses the days of the rotary dial phone, Sky’s Edge “Rotary Un-Smartphone” is an open-source hardware rotary dial phone controlled by an Arduino board and equipped with a multi-mode 4G/3G/2G module. It’s a bit more advanced that you old rotary phone with recent cellular technology, ePaper & OLED displays, quick dialing buttons, and the rotary dial can both be used to dial full phone number or quickly access your contact list. Also: 42Gears SureMDM Simplifies Setting up Kiosk Mode on Linux Devices