today's leftovers

• Here's what's new and changed in Kodi 20 'Nexus' Alpha 1

  Yesterday, we revealed that the next big version of Kodi had hit an important milestone. Nightly builds of Kodi 20 'Nexus' have been available for months, but now there’s a much more stable release for users to download. Although it’s only a pre-release build, and therefore will likely have some bugs to watch out for, Kodi 20 'Nexus' Alpha 1's arrival will excite a lot of people. Team Kodi is very proud of this release, and highlights the following changes and new features.

• MiTubo 1.0: playlist support, new “website” | Mardy

  Expanding a bit on the points above, the first thing worth saying is that the choice of releasing this version as “1.0” does not mean that it's more stable than the previous ones; it just means that I'm rather satisfied with the feature set, and that I believe that the program is ready for more widespread use. This is also the reason why I decided to prepare a web page for it: mardy.it/mitubo. I didn't go for a completely separate website, unlike what I previously did for Mappero Geotagger, PhotoTeleport and Imaginario (which reminds me that I haven't been working on the latter for a long time! I should try to correct this soon!), both because this way it's simpler to publish news about it (I'll continue doing that here, instead of cross-posting in two sites), and because having it in the same domain might be mutually beneficial for the SEO ranking of the blog and of MiTubo.

• Adriaan de Groot: Blue Systems Farewell

  Calamares serves the needs of several dozen Linux distributions, large and small. I’ve been running the Calamares project for five years now, sponsored by Blue Systems who have supported the Calamares project since its beginning and through two maintainers now. After these five years, I have decided to hand in my badge and move on to different things. This means that I’m no longer paid to spend three days a week on Calamares and my involvement is going to be dialed back to incidental-volunteer-contributor. This means that maybe I’ll finally ignore Linux distro’s and sit down to make it work for FreeBSD.

• Elevate from a normie to an elite internet user - Invidious

• Strengthening digital infrastructure: A policy agenda for free and open source software

  While there is little debate that digital forces are playing an increasingly crucial role in the economy, there is limited understanding of the importance of the digital infrastructure that underlies this role. Much of the discussion around digital infrastructure has focused on broadband availability (which is certainly important), but the role of free and open source software (FOSS or OSS) has gone underappreciated. FOSS—software whose source code is public, is often created by decentralized volunteers, and can be freely used and modified by anyone—has come to play a vital role in the modern economy. It is baked into technology we use every day (cars, phones, websites, etc.), as well as into various aspects of critical infrastructure including our finance and energy systems.

• Improve legibility and reduce layout shifts with x-height adjustments

  There’s more to setting the text size on your webpages than just the CSS font-size property. It only controls the size of majuscule (“uppercase”, e.g. “A”) letters, numbers, and punctuation. The size of minuscule (“lowercase”, e.g. “a”) letters is left up to the font. [...] Unfortunately, font-size-adjust is only supported in Firefox. It has been supported by this browser for over a decade already. It was implemented in Chrome for almost half a decade, but it has been left to rot behind the Experimental Web Platform features flag. It’s not implemented in Safari.

Linux and "Open" Devices

• Intel promises ‘substantial contributions’ to RISC-V growth • The Register

  Here's something that would have seemed outlandish only a few years ago: to help fuel Intel's future growth, the x86 giant has vowed to do what it can to make the open-source RISC-V ISA worthy of widespread adoption. In a presentation, an Intel representative shared some details of how the chipmaker plans to contribute to RISC-V as part of its bet that the instruction set architecture will fuel growth for its revitalized contract chip manufacturing business.

• Project Cassini sees first hardware with congatec SMA... eeNews Europe

  ARM’s Project Cassini has released its first standard hardware. congatec in Germany has developed a SMARC Computer-on-Module based on NXP i.MX8 M Plus processor, achieved ARM’s SystemReady IR certification as part of the project. Cassini aims to overcome the barriers of ARM deployments by providing a comprehensive and secure ecosystem…

• Arm Project Cassini completed: congatec modules with NXP i.MX 8M Plus processor now Arm SystemReady IR certified

  Hardware with Cassini SystemReady IR certified bootloader is validated to run unmodified ISO images of Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and Debian operating systems, making native software installation an easily executable task.

• congatec simplifies Arm deployments with i.MX 8M Plus | RoboticsTomorrow

• Mixtile Blade 3 is a stackable single-board PC with RK3588 processor, support for cluster computing (crowdfunding)

  The boards ship with Android 12 software, with a custom version of the Debian 11 GNU/Linux distribution pre-loaded in a container, and source code and SDKs are available for Buildroot and Yocto.

• Marvell CXL roadmap goes all-in on composable infrastructure • The Register

  Introduced in early 2019, CXL is an open interface that piggybacks on PCIe to provide a common, cache-coherent means of connecting CPUs, memory, accelerators, and other peripherals. The technology is seen by many, including Marvell, as the holy grail of composable infrastructure, as it enables memory to be disaggregated from the processor.

"Open Source" as False Marketing

• Once frenemies, Elastic and AWS are now besties

  To cut a War and Peace-esque story short, Amazon had introduced its own managed Elasticsearch service called Amazon Elasticsearch Service way back in 2015, and in the intervening years the “confusion” this (among other shenanigans) caused in the cloud sphere ultimately led Elastic to transition Elasticsearch from open source to “free and open” (i.e., a less permissive license), exerting more control over how the cloud giants of the world could use the product and Elasticsearch name.

• What sort of open source licence is your database?

  If vendors are changing the licence to make them more restrictive, does that make them any different to proprietary software? Zaitsev says no. He sees such a move as meaning a company and its products are no longer open source.