today's leftovers

• Arm Server CPUs: You Can Now Buy Ampere's eMAG in a Workstation

  Avantek offers the system with three optional graphics cards: AMD FirePro W2100, a Radeon Pro WX 5100, and the NVIDIA Quadro GV100. OS options are variants of Linux: Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE SLES, and openSUSE.

• A General Notification Queue Was Pushed Back From Linux 5.5 Introduction

  Red Hat has been working on a "general notification queue" that is built off the Linux kernel's pipe code and will notify the user-space of events like key/keyring changes, block layer events like disk errors, USB attach/remove events, and other notifications without user-space having to continually poll kernel interfaces. This general notification queue was proposed for Linux 5.5 but has been pushed back to at least 5.6. This Linux kernel general notification queue builds off a standard pipe and allows user-space applications to efficiently become aware of changes to block devices (disks), keys, USB subsystem happenings, and other possible events. The proposed documentation spells out more of the planned functionality and behavior.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the weeks 2019/48 & 49

  Once again I’m spanning two weeks; besides the normal work on getting you openSUSE Tumbleweed updated and timely delivered, the release team has been working together with the build service team to implement/stabilize the OBS-internal staging workflow. There is (should) not be any real noticeable difference for the contributors – except the new used URLs. The Factory Staging dashboard can now be found at https://build.opensuse.org/staging_workflows/1 During the last two weeks, we have pushed out 10 Tumbleweed Snapshots (1121, 1122, 1123, 1124, 1126, 1127, 1128, 1202, 1203 and 1204) containing those changes...

• Rugged Coffee Lake PCs offer up to two PCIe slots and two HDD bays

  Nexcom’s fanless, Linux-ready “NISE 3900 Series” features an 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPU with triple display support plus M.2, mini-PCIe, 3x GbE, 10x USB, and 2x serial ports. Six different models have various combinations of PCIe, PCI, and SATA. Nexcom announced a new series in its NISE family of industrial computers that follows recent models such as the Apollo Lake based NISE 51. The rugged NISE-3900 Series systems run Linux Kernel 4.9 or Windows 10 on Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs, including the quad-core Core i3-8100T and the hexa-core, 2.1GHz i5-8500T and 2.4GHz i7-8700T.

• More new books from The MagPi and HackSpace magazines

  If our recent release of Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi, Getting Started with Arduino, and Coding the Classics isn’t enough for you, today sees the release of TWO MORE publications from Raspberry Pi Press!

OSS Leftovers

• Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Finally Adds Native MP3 Importing Support

  While lossy compression audio formats like MP3 are not recommended for use within professional audio tasks, for those using the open-source Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software as of today there is finally native MP3 import support. Obviously it's better working with lossless audio formats as source material for Ardour and other digital audio workstation software suites, but given how common MP3 content is, there certainly is relevance to being able to import MP3s into DAWs. But historically due to licensing/patent issues, MP3 support within Ardour hasn't been possible -- thus leading to common complaints/questions by users over the years.

• Certbot Leaves Beta with the Release of 1.0

  Earlier this week EFF released Certbot 1.0, the latest version of our free, open source tool that helps websites encrypt their traffic. The release of 1.0 is a significant milestone for the project and is the culmination of the work done over the past few years by EFF and hundreds of open source contributors from around the world.

  Certbot was first released in 2015 to automate the process of configuring and maintaining HTTPS encryption for site administrators by obtaining and deploying certificates from Let's Encrypt. Since its initial launch, many features have been added, including beta support for Windows, automatic nginx configuration, and support for over a dozen DNS providers for domain validation.

• Open Repos provides code metrics on open source projects

  GitClear is offering Open Repos as a free product, though it is not open source. GitClear’s paid product offers many of the same insights and more. Long-term plans include allowing projects to embed an Open Repos view of a project in their site, and “improving data quality before adding features.”

• Improvements in LibreOffice’s PowerPoint presentation support

  LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements… A few months ago, we announced an initiative to improve the support of PPT and PPTX files in LibreOffice. Lots of great work happened since then and the results are collected below!

• People of WordPress: Jill Binder

  Jill Binder never meant to become an activist. She insists it was an accident. Despite that, Jill has led the Diversity Outreach Speaker Training working group in the WordPress Community team since 2017. This group is dedicated to increasing the number of women and other underrepresented groups who are stepping up to become speakers at WordPress Meetups, WordCamps, and events. [...] The following year her internship advisor, who had become a client, was creating the first ever BuddyCamp for BuddyPress. He asked Jill to be on his organizing team. At that event she also moderated a panel with Matt Mullenweg. Then, Jill was invited to be on the core organizing team for WordCamp Vancouver. Part of this role meant reviewing and selecting speakers. From 40 speaker applications the team had to pick only 14 to speak.

• Mint: Late-Stage Adversarial Interoperability Demonstrates What We Had (And What We Lost)

  In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as "small, without much economic opportunity"—but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he'd spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken.

  Patzer was frustrated with the amount of manual work it took to track his finances with these tools, which at the time weren't smart enough to automatically categorize "Chevron" under fuel or "Safeway" under groceries. So he conceived on an ingenious hack: he wrote a program that would automatically look up every business name he entered into the online version of the Yellow Pages—constraining the search using the area code in the business's phone number so it would only consider local merchants—and use the Yellow Pages' own categories to populate the "category" field in his financial tracking tools.

today's howtos

• Copying files into a container at run time

• How to Automatically Disconnect Idle or Inactive SSH Sessions After Five Minutes of Inactivity

• Potential pitfalls with multi-NIC and cloud-netconfig

• PenTesting: Gaining Root Privileges on Kioptrix

• Read only rootfs