today's leftovers

• Sysadmins: How many spare cords do you have sitting around?

  I was recently reading a thread over on r/sysadmin on Reddit called "Every single one of you has a big box of cords" and it got me thinking: is that true? Are we all cord hoarders? Or do some of us manage to keep our unused computer accessories in check? So I thought I'd ask our own readers: How many extra cords do you have sitting around? I went through a few iterations of how to phrase the responses: How many kilograms? How many meters? What's the exact count? How many kinds? But if you're anything like me, giving an answer that's anything more than a ballpark is undoable. The Raleigh, NC-based Enable Sysadmin staff recently shifted workspaces, and aside from lots of other interesting finds from the years of collected detritus at our desks were an awful lot of cords. Fortunately, it was a good opportunity to clear some of these out. Sadly, though, my personal collection far exceeds those that I rehomed in my move here at work. And that's after I made significant inroads in clearing out my cable clutter in the past year. It's just a never-ending battle.

• AMD Pushes Updated AMDVLK Vulkan Code Following Adrenalin 2020 Unveil

  Earlier this week AMD unveiled the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver and we await a Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO driver update for Linux users on supported distributions. But AMD has begun pushing some updated AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code ahead of a possible tagged release in the next few days.

• Really, really awesome Raspberry Pi NeoPixel LED mirror

  Check out Super Make Something’s awesome NeoPixel LED mirror: a 576 RGB LED display that converts images via the Raspberry Pi Camera Module and Raspberry Pi 3B+ into a pixelated light show.

• HackEEG Arduino Shield Reads Signals from Your Brain (EEG), Muscles (EMG), and Heart (EKG)

• Golly – exploring cellular automata like the Game of Life

  Golly is a free and open source cross-platform application for exploring Conway’s Game of Life and many other types of cellular automata. A cellular automaton is a model studied in computer science, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology, and microstructure modeling. The Game of Life is an example of a set of rules often known as a “cellular automation”. Life takes place on an arbitrary-sized grid of square cells. Each cell has two states “dead” or “alive”. The state of each cells changes from one “generation” to the next only on the state of its eight immediate neighbors. The British mathematician John Conway invented the Game of Life in the late 1960s. He chose rules that produced the most unpredictable behaviour.

• Top tech conferences to attend in 2020

  Understanding the expanding technology universe takes diligence and patience, as chief information officers and other IT decision makers are tasked with setting technology priorities to serve the long-term needs of a business. It's easier said than done. To help navigate the changing world, research firms, vendors, collectives and communities put on conferences dedicated to enterprise technology covering the breadth of top concerns including data management, cloud strategy and security concerns.

• Twitter wants to fund an open source social media standard

  Centralised solutions, he says, can't meet the challenges ahead. "For instance, centralised enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people," he tweeted.

  There's also the fact that social media is moving from content hosting and removal to algorithms directing people towards content. "Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can't choose or build alternatives. Yet."

• End of term report for healthcare IT

  The research at Imperial that was widely reported in the past week was pointing at the fact that a high proportion of patients are seen without a full record available to the treating clinician. This is highlighted where care takes place in more than one organisation and information is not shared. The press articles written about this, that I have seen, were woefully wide of the mark, talking about the fact that as many as 21 different systems are used in a health provider (it can be many more), but that the answer was once again to move to one system.

  Ironically, large monoliths might not be as good at interoperability at those that need to do it for a living. This may be changing, but systems that are built to do everything typically find it easier to just build more functionality than to message or share platforms. The real problem forms at the edge though, and in a world where patients move around between organisations we need systems where their information flows with them.

• Report: Over half of people working with APIs are not developers

  API development firm Postman has released some interesting findings about the various types of people who are engaging with APIs.

  Most people would probably assume developers are the core group of people who are using APIs. However, 53 percent of the 10,000 respondents do not have the title of "developer".

  That's a significant increase over last year when 59 percent of respondents said they were either front-end or back-end developers.

• SAP users in the UK struggling to meet 2025 ECC6 maintenance deadline

  The UK&I SAP User Group's chairman said the complexity of the migration means customers are struggling to make the business case within their organisation

• The New bluesabre.org

  It's faster. Ghost is fast without any help, providing all the publishing tools I need and (from what I can tell) none that I don't. To further speed things up, I've optimized all of the images on my site for small download sizes and super-fast loading.

Screencasts and Shows: ArcoLinux 19.12 Run Through, TechSNAP and Python Bytes

• ArcoLinux 19.12 Run Through

  In this video, we are looking at ArcoLinux 19.12. Enjoy!

• 5G Fundamentals | TechSNAP 418

  As the rollout of 5G finally arrives, we take some time to explain the fundamentals of the next generation of wireless technology. Plus the surprising performance of eero's mesh Wi-Fi, some great news for WireGuard, and an update on the Librem 5.

• Python Bytes: #160 Your JSON shall be streamed

today's howtos

• How to Install PuTTY on Linux

• Install Nginx PHP 7.4 (LEMP stack) on Ubuntu 18.04 – Google Cloud

• How to generate code with Apache Velocity

• Make VLC More Awesome With These Simple Tips

• How to Remove All Unused Objects in Docker

• Six Hot Linux Certifications for 2020