today's leftovers

• WordPress 5.4 Beta 2

  WordPress 5.4 Beta 2 is now available! This software is still in development, so we don’t recommend running it on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.

• Open Build Service: More Responsive Than Ever Before!

  We want to change this. And with the new UI technology we introduced last year, we have the chance to do so! :clap: So in the last couple of weeks, we have focused on improving the user experience following a mobile-first approach (start the design of the page on a small screen, which has more restrictions, then expand the page features to create a tablet or desktop version).

• Charity Navigator awards the FSF coveted four-star rating for the seventh time in a row

  Recently, we got some terrific news: Charity Navigator, an independent evaluator of US-based nonprofit charities, awarded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) a four-star rating, the highest available. According to the confirmation letter from Charity Navigator president Michael Thatcher, this rating demonstrates the FSF's "strong financial health and commitment to accountability and transparency." A four-star charity, according to their ratings, "exceeds industry standards and outperforms most charities in its cause." This is our seventh time in a row receiving the coveted four-star rating! Only 7% of the charities that Charity Navigator evaluates have gotten this many in a row, and they assess over 9,000 charities a year. As Thatcher's letter says, "This exceptional designation from Charity Navigator sets the Free Software Foundation apart from its peers and demonstrates to the public its trustworthiness." Even better: our overall score went from 96.66 out of 100% last year, up to 98.55 this cycle.

• Arm's ASTC Encoder Replaces Its Restrictive EULA With Apache 2.0 License

  Arm has been developing the ASTC encoder as the texture compressor for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) as open-source but until last week was carrying a restrictive license.  The Arm ASTC encoder had been carrying an end-user license agreement that is rather restrictive to not only the code but also the documentation and Mali ASTC specification. The EULA has been quite restrictive and far from conventional open-source licenses. 

• Anwesha Das: The scary digital world

  Some years ago, my husband and I were looking for houses to rent. We both were in different cities and were having a telephone conversation. We had three or four phone calls to discuss this. After that, I opened my laptop and turned on my then browser, Google. Advertisements started popping up. Showing the adds of houses for rent at the very same location, the same budget I was looking for. A chill went down my bone. How did this particular website knows that we are looking for a house? [...] Why would someone want to track me? I have nothing to hide. This is the general response we get when we initiate the discussion of and about privacy. To which Glen Greenworld has a great reply, ‘if you do not have to hide anything, please write down all your email ids, not just the work ones, the respectable ones but all, along with the passwords to me.’ Though people have nothing to hide no one has ever got back to him :) Everyone needs privacy. We flourish our being and can be true to ourselves when we do not have the fear and knowledge of being watched by someone. Everyone cares about privacy. If they did not have, there would be no password on their accounts, no locker, no keys.

• Stephen Michael Kellat: Trying A Minimum Working Example

  When you make assertions in a channel like the Ubuntu Podcast's Telegram chatter channel they sometimes have to be backed up. Recently I made reference to how you could utilize Markdown within a LaTeX document. I should take a moment to discuss a way to use LuaLaTeX to make your Markdown documents look nice. We're going to build a "Minimum Working Example" to illustrate things. First, I will refer to a package on the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network simply named markdown. That handles processing Markdown input. In its documentation you find that you can actually input a separate Markdown-formatted file into the macros provided which will convert them into appropriate LaTeX code and add that programmatically into your document. LaTeX is a Turing-complete programming language after all.

• Stuart Langridge: On the Birmingham tech scene

  You see, it doesn’t appear that the Tech Week team did much in the way of actually trying to find out whether there was a tech scene before declaring that there probably wasn’t one. If they had then they’d have probably discovered the Birmingham.io calendar which contains all the stuff that’s going on, and can be subscribed to via Google. They’d probably have spoken to the existing language-specific meetups in the city before possibly doing their own instead of rather than in conjunction with. They’d have probably discovered the Brum tech Slack which has 800-odd people in it, or2 CovHack or HackTheMidlands or FusionMeetup or devopsdays or CodeYourFuture_ or yougotthisconf or Tech Wednesday or Django Girls or OWASP or Open Code or any one of a ton of other things that are going on every week. Birmingham, as anyone who’s decided to be here knows, is a bit special. A person involved in tech in Birmingham is pretty likely to be able to get a similar job in London, and yet they haven’t done so. Why is that? Because Brum’s different. Things are less frantic, here, is why. We’re all in this together. London may have kings and queens: we’re the city of a thousand different trades, all on the same level, all working hand in hand. All collaborating. It’s a grass roots thing, you see. Nobody’s in charge. The calendar mentioned above is open source exactly so that there’s not one person in charge of it and anyone else can pick it up and run with it if we disappear, so the work that’s already gone into it isn’t wasted. [...] And so there’s a certain amount of resistance, on my side of the fence, to kingmakers. To people who look at the scene, all working together happily, and then say: you people need organising for your own good, because there needs to be someone in charge here. There needs to be hierarchy, otherwise how will journalists know who to ask for opinions? It’s difficult to understand an organisation which doesn’t have any organisation. W. L. Gore and Patagonia and Valve are companies that work a similar way, without direct hierarchy, in a way that the management theorist Frédéric Laloux calls a “teal organisation” and others call “open allocation”, and they baffle people the world over too; half the managers and consultants in the world look at them and say, but that can’t work, if you don’t have bosses, nobody will do anything. But it works for them. And it seems to me to be a peculiarly Brum approach to things. If we were in this for the fame and the glory we’d have gone down to London where everyone’s terribly serious and in a rush all the time. Everyone works with everyone else; BrumPHP talks about BrumJS, Fusion talks about School of Code; one meetup directs people to others that they’ll find interesting; if the devopsdays team want a speaker about JavaScript they’ll ping BrumJS to ask about who’d be good. That’s collaboration. Everyone does their bit, and tries to elevate everyone else at the same time.

Proprietary Software and Games for GNU/Linux

• ScreenRec – The Fastest Growing Free Screen Recorder For Business Announces New Version For Linux

  ScreenRec has been widely recognized as one of the best free screen recording software available. Previously, only Windows users could benefit from its cloud storage, private link sharing, and upscale security features. Now, however, ScreenRec has joined the ranks of free Linux screen recorders. When the team over at StreamingVideoProvider first released ScreenRec in 2018, there was stiff competition in the face of giants like Windows Game Recorder, OBS, and even Camtasia. Yet, its creator, the CEO of StreamingVideoProvider Deyan Shkodrov, knew he had something worthwhile because ScreenRec had drastically improved the efficiency of collaboration between him and his team.

• ScreenRec - The Fastest Growing Free Screen Recorder For Business Announces New Version For Linux

• Veeam Availability Suite v10 Enhances NAS Backup, DR and Security

• The Humble Digital Tabletop Bundle 2 is out with Slay the Spire, Armello and more

  In need of a few new games? The Humble Digital Tabletop Bundle 2 just launched today with a pretty damn good selection of Linux games on offer.

• With deck-building and real-time action 'One Step From Eden' launches on March 26

  Announced today, One Step From Eden from developer Thomas Moon Kang is going to be releasing on March 26 and they've managed to pull in Humble Bundle as their publisher. It's going to join a long list of crowdfunded games available on Linux and I'm personally excited about this. Blending multiple genres together with inspiration coming from Mega Man Battle Network, One Step from Eden is a roguelike deck-builder fused with a super-fast action game as you and enemies throw abilities across the screen. Check out their brand new trailer:

Kernel: Linux 5.7, D-Bus, Optane DC Persistent Memory and Calxeda ARM Servers

• Linux 5.7 Picking Up Support For A High-End USB-C Audio Interface

  More high-end audio gear is finally transitioning from Firewire to USB-C and one of these new high-end audio interfaces will be supported by the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring. The PreSonus Studio 1810c a ~$400 USD USB-C audio interface for connecting professional audio gear should be working with Linux 5.7.

• D-Bus Broker 22 Released With Option To Use Newer Kernel Features

  With BUS1 not looking like it will come to fruition anytime soon as an in-kernel IPC mechanism and the kernel module for it not being touched since last March, the same developers continue pushing ahead with Dbus-Broker as the user-space implementation focused on D-Bus compatibility while being higher performing and more reliable than D-Bus itself. Out today is Dbus-Broker 22 and in fact their first release since last May. David Rheinsberg of Red Hat released this new version of the Linux D-Bus Message Broker with several prominent changes.

• Intel Continues Optimizing Linux Memory Placement For Optane DC Persistent Memory

  With a new patch series for the Linux kernel, memory access performance by one measurement can improve by 116% on a dual socket Intel server with Optane DC Persistent Memory. Intel open-source developer Huang Ying is seeking feedback on a patch series that allows optimized memory placement in memory-tiered systems, principally those with Optane DC Persistent Memory. Due to persistent memory characteristics being different from conventional DRAM, the patch series works to ensure that hot pages are placed on a DRAM node and migrating hot pages that may get placed in a persistent memory node over to DRAM via NUMA migration. Similarly, cold pages can be migrated to the persistent memory and off the DRAM with related patches published by Intel. The patches do automatically determine the threshold for hot pages.

• Linux Looking To Sunset The Calxeda ARM Server Support

  It's already been six years since the collapse of Calxeda as the first promising ARM server company. With that, the Linux kernel upstream developers are looking at dropping the Calxeda platform support. Calxeda ARM servers never reached widespread deployment for these 32-bit ARM servers but mostly were used by various Linux distributions for building ARMv7 packages at the time and other software companies. Seeing any Calxeda server still in production in 2020 is quite rare and if so is probably running an older software stack, so kernel developers are looking at dropping this support to avoid the maintenance burden moving forward.