today's leftovers

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/09

  This week has proven to be challenging for Tumbleweed. We have built and tested 6 snapshots, and only 2 of them were of sufficient quality to send out to the users. Of course, that means our QA infrastructure is well suited in protecting you, the users, from running into trouble – and that is the best thing we can show with this.

• Yet Another Me - A debuginfod service for Debian

  This last Tuesday, February 23, 2021, I made an announcement at debian-devel-announce about a new service that I configured for Debian: a debuginfod server. This post serves two purposed: pay the promise I made to Jonathan Carter that I would write a blog post about the service, and go into a bit more detail about it. [...] You can find more information about our debuginfod service here. Try to keep an eye on the page as it's being constantly updated. If you'd like to get in touch with me, my email is my domain at debian dot org. I sincerely believe that this service is a step in the right direction, and hope that it can be useful to you :-).

• Raspberry Pi thermal camera

• Librem 5 News Summary: February 2021

  February was a month of strong and steady progress behind the scenes from operational improvements to a lot more code written and released. Each week we ship an increasing number of Librem 5s out to backers. We also continue to work to locate and expedite more i.MX 8M CPU supply for future Librem 5s—the industry has an overall shortage of components—and as we get firm dates for those secured CPU supplies we intend on sending out shipping estimates to Librem 5 backers. We have also made progress on the Librem 5 hardware support side. Last month we announced we had finished support for the OpenPGP smart card reader and this month we released a blog post and video that describes how to enable it on existing Librem 5s. We have also made a lot of advancements on camera support and have successfully taken some initial pictures. There is still more work to do to complete the camera driver and get the most out of the camera hardware and we hope to have more announcements on that front soon. Speaking of the kernel we also published a post that describes in detail the work we have done in the 5.11 kernel including progress on mainline support for the Librem 5 as well as improvements in power management and overall support for the Librem 5 hardware. On the Librem 5 USA front, it has taken much longer than we have expected to locate and secure new supply chains for all of the components we will need to start production of the PCBA due to some of the unprecedented issues in the electronics supply chain over the last year. We are happy to announce that we have tracked down almost every component now and are optimistic we can track down the one or two remaining components soon so that we can start production on the PCBA in the coming month. The Librem 5 USA will be manufactured at our facility in the US with our secure supply chain and Made in USA Electronics.

• Tantek Çelik: One Year Since The #IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Met In Person And Other Last Times

  March 2021 is the second March in a row where so many of us are still in countries & cities doing our best to avoid getting sick (or worse), slow the spread, and otherwise living very different lives than we did in the before times. Every day here forward will be an anniversary of sorts for an unprecedented event, experience, change, or loss. Or the last time we did something. Rather than ignore them, it’s worth remembering what we had, what we used to do, both appreciating what we have lost (allowing ourselves to mourn), and considering potential upsides of adaptations we have made. A year ago yesterday (2020-03-04) we hosted the last in-person Homebrew Website Club meetups in Nottingham (by Jamie Tanna in a café) and San Francisco (by me at Mozilla). Normally I go into the office on Wednesdays but I had worked from home that morning. I took the bus (#5736) inbound to work in the afternoon, the last time I rode a bus. I setup a laptop on the podium in the main community room to show demos on the displays as usual.

• Firefox B!tch to Boss extension takes the sting out of hostile comments directed at women online

  A great swathe of the internet is positive, a place where people come together to collaborate on ideas, discuss news and share moments of levity and sorrow, too. But there’s also a dark side, where comments, threads and DMs are peppered with ugly, hostile language designed to intimidate and harass. Women online, especially women who are outspoken in any field — journalism, tech, government, science, and so on — know this all too well. What’s the solution? People being less terrible, obviously. Until we reach that stage of human maturity, the B!tch to Boss extension for Firefox can help by replacing words like “bitch”, often used in derogatory comments and messages directed at women, with the word “boss”.

• EU Open Data Days

  Participate in the first edition of the EU Open Data Days 2021 from 23-25 November 2021.

today's howtos

• How to Install CHEF Workstation in RHEL and CentOS 8/7

  Chef is one of the popular configuration management tools, which is used to rapidly automate deployment, configurations, and management of the entire IT infrastructure environment. In the first part of this Chef series, we’ve explained Chef concepts, which consists of three important components: Chef Workstation, Chef Server & Chef Client/Node. In this article, you will learn how to install and test Chef Workstation in RHEL/CentOS 8/7 Linux distributions.

 

• Install Libreoffice 7.1.1 on Ubuntu / LinuxMint / CentOS & Fedora

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install LibreOffice 7.1.1 on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Centos 8, Fedora 33, and LinuxMint 20.1. LibreOffice released the newer version in the 7 series as 7.1.1  and it comes with new features and bug fixes and program enhancements. All users are requested to update to this version as soon as possible.

  

• How to live stream from your Linux desktop | TechRadar

  Live streaming is an increasingly popular medium, enabling you to produce content that’s shared in real time and – if your online provider supports it – available afterwards for those who missed the live show.  If you’re looking to make your next online live stream something special, then take a look at OBS Studio.  Not only can you easily combine multiple video and audio sources into a single stream, OBS Studio provides you with a means of breaking down your stream into specific sections, making it easy to seamlessly switch between different sources and screen setups. Crucially, it works with all the major online streaming providers.

• Create a Cross-Platform Twitter Clone with Vue.js

  A fun way to learn new programming skills is to create a clone of a popular app. We've released a course that will teach you how to create a Twitter clone using Vue.js, the Quasar framework, and Firebase. Danny Connell, from the Make Apps With Danny channel, created this course. You will learn how to create a beautiful, responsive, cross-platform Twitter app from scratch and get it running and working on 5 different platforms: iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Web Browser.

Security Incidents and Microsoft/Proprietary Role

• Dutch research funder operations frozen for a month after [attack] [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), which cannot pay a ransom to the attackers because it is a public body, was scrambling to restore its systems but said its activities would be on ice until at least 15 March.

• More than 20,000 U.S. organizations compromised through Microsoft flaw: source [iophk: Windows TCO]

  More than 20,000 U.S. organizations have been compromised through a back door installed via recently patched flaws in Microsoft Corp’s email software, a person familiar with the U.S. government’s response said on Friday.

• White House calls Microsoft email breach an 'active threat'

  Cybersecurity group FireEye said in blog post late Thursday night that [attackers] had been in at least one client’s system since January, and that they had gone after “US-based retailers, local governments, a university, and an engineering firm,” along with a Southeast Asian government and a Central Asian telecom group.

• We can’t teach in a technological dystopia

  I want to argue here that universities are fostering abusive technologies that replace empowerment with enforcement. There are worries, and much evidence, that we are already giving away too much control to Big Tech companies, which not only have vast appetites for our data, but also harbour ambitions to usurp the role of universities. Google offers courses with certificates it considers equivalent to three-year bachelor’s degrees to people it is hiring, for instance. And US universities such as Duke partner with Google Cloud to deliver large parts of their curriculum as outsourced digital education.

  The problem is not that these services are poor substitutes for in-person education. On the contrary, they are very good at providing a narrow range of outcomes: namely, consistent, efficient training and testing. But that is not the same thing as education.

• Coursera files for US IPO as edtech booms amid the pandemic

  Revenue rose 59% to $293.5 million for the year ended Dec. 31, 2020, the company said in a filing. Net loss widened to $66.8 million for the year ended Dec. 31, from a $46.7 million loss a year earlier.