today's leftovers

• How to manage a 24×7 private cloud with one engineer

  In the last several years, we have witnessed the creation of many technologies, starting with the cloud and going further to machine learning, artificial intelligence, IoT, big data, robotics, automation and much more. The more the tech evolves, the more organizations thrive to adopt these technologies seeking digital transformation and disrupting industries along their journey, all for the benefit of better serving their consumers. With every technology having its own requirements, costs and benefits, the only common aspect between any technology you decide to invest in is one thing: it is all based on achieving a business goal that will help your organization better position itself in the market. You might be luckily taking advantage of leading your field, or looking to better serve your customers, or even keeping up with tough competition. Whatever your motive is, the aim will always be to realise a business goal out of your investment.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 687

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 687 for the week of June 6 – 12, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Accessing and recovering data with a live Linux distribution [Ed: Self-promotional piece disguised thinly as 'article']

  But it’s also useful when trying to access and recover data from a failing drive. In many cases, hard drive failure and data corruption only affects a specific portion of the drive. While this renders data in that section inaccessible and, in many cases, unrecoverable, any data that is stored outside of the affected might remain intact. If your system files have become corrupted, for example, there’s a good chance that your personal files, which are hosted in a different sector on the drive, are still recoverable. To begin the process and find out, simply install Ubuntu onto a USB flash drive, boot your system and, when prompted, click on “Try Ubuntu.” By clicking this option instead of installing it, you’ll effectively launch a live instance of Ubuntu. Many other Linux distros support this feature in some form or another, but the method for accessing the live instance will likely vary depending on the exact distro you’re using. If you’re an advanced user, you’ll be able to locate the failed or corrupted hard drive in question once you’ve launched Ubuntu into your system’s RAM. From here, it’s just a matter of mounting the device within Linux and copying that data to another USB drive. For best results, try to avoid using the same drive that contains your Linux distro. From here, it’s just a matter of copying your data back onto a fully functional machine. While you might be missing some of your data, including whatever was stored in the failed or corrupted sectors, the majority of your information should still be available.

• FSFE: REUSE Booster helps Free Software projects with licensing and copyright

  The Free Software Foundation Europe introduces REUSE Booster. REUSE is a set of best practices to make Free Software licensing easier.

• When will my instance be ready? -- understanding cloud launch time performance metrics

  Instance launch time, also called startup time, is an important performance metric for the Cloud. But what is meant by launch time? There are several related metrics that comprise launch time. In this blog post, we will describe three launch time performance metrics and explain the key components of each. Once these pieces are understood, we will describe how to build an infrastructure that measures and monitors launch time performance of cloud instances on a regular basis. Why is launch time important? A key reason is that clouds are elastic by nature, which means that compute instances are created and destroyed in response to changes in workload demand. Hence, the time to launch instances is a critical factor in overall workload performance. Launch time metrics also help determine lead time for making instance provisioning requests, thereby playing an important role in how effective cloud elasticity is.

• The Bitcoin Revolution is Here | Tech Source

  Since 2014, I’ve been talking about bitcoin here (read: Is Bitcoin The Next Open-source Software Revolution?, Best Bitcoin Applications for Linux). Back then, bitcoin was still very much in its infancy and our articles about it were some of the least popular posts we’ve ever had. However, I have already seen its potential and proclaimed that it could become a revolutionary open-source software project and that it has the potential to be bigger than Linux. [...] After promoting Linux and other free and open-source software in the past, I have decided from now on to focus most of my time here in writing about bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and other interesting blockchain projects. I think it is about time to enlighten people that bitcoin is not purely a speculative asset, but something that is more valuable because of its capability to empower people from around the world. Like most of you, I find joy in freedom and for me bitcoin is freedom. Now, I can safely say that the cryptocurrency revolution is underway, and we are just getting started.

Open Hardware: Arduino, Librem 5, Pine64, and More

• The Crumble Deck is a Stream Deck alternative based on an Arduino Due | Arduino Blog

  Stream Decks have gained a great deal of popularity within recent years. However, increased demand and a limited supply of them has caused their prices to skyrocket and availability to dwindle, leading many to seek alternatives. The streamer known as CoCoaCoCi has created a DIY Stream Deck before, but this first iteration only had a 3.5” touchscreen that wouldn’t always pick up inputs. So, for his next project, CoCoaCoCi wanted to have some physical buttons along with a display that would only be used to navigate menus and actions. He started by quickly designing and 3D printing a case to house the Crumble Deck’s electronics, including an Arduino Due as the main processor, a 3.5” TFT LCD screen, and 20 buttons. All the buttons were wired together in a matrix that reduces the number of GPIO pins required to detect them. His code then polls each column and row to check which button is currently being pressed.

• This archery robot always hits the target | Arduino Blog

  Both archery and robotics are extremely fun, but what happens when you combine the two? In Kamal Carter’s case, he constructed his own autonomous robotic archery system that can not only acquire and aim at targets, but even draw back the bow and fire an arrow all on its own. The project features an Intel RealSense Depth Camera at its heart to acquire targets by looking for abnormally bright colors and to compute its distance away from them. This information is then fed to an Arduino Mega that uses some simple physics to determine where exactly the bow should be aimed via a pair of stepper motors. Once the target has been dialed in, another stepper pulls back the bow while a servo releases the string’s tension, thus firing the arrow.

• Pureos 10 (Byzantium) Snapshot: June 2021

  Byzantium continues to march closer to its release for the Librem 5 with UI changes and new apps being worked on.

• Quartz64 SBC starts at $60 and Pine64 unveils SOQuartz module with same RK3566

  Pine64 has launched a “Quartz64 model-A” SBC for $60 (4GB) or $80 (8GB). Upcoming projects include a “SOQuartz” module that runs Linux on the same Rockchip RK3566 and a PineDio LoRa gateway. Pine64 unveiled its open-spec, Rockchip RK3566 powered Quartz64 model-A SBC in February and followed by announcing a smaller, Raspberry Pi sized Quartz64 model-B in April. The model-B is still under development, but the more developer focused model-A has begun selling to community members for $60 (4GB LPDDR4) or $80 (8GB).

• Wind River Linux LTS 21 now available

  We've just released Wind River Linux Long Term Support (LTS) 21. LTS21 moves up to the latest Linux LTS kernel and adds many new capabilities including a binary distribution. Wind River Linux is not a traditional Linux distribution, but is a complete Linux development platform for embedded device development. It comes with the latest LTS kernel, toolchains, tools, and thousands of packages enabling customers to develop a wide variety of devices across telecommunications/networking, aerospace and defense, industrial, and a variety of consumer industries. Customers can use Wind River Linux to produce a supported, customized Linux OS that exactly meets the requirements for their embedded application.

• EdgeBox-RPi4 industrial controller offers RS485, RS232 interfaces, isolated DI/DO

  OpenEmbed EdgeBox-RPi4 is an industrial controller based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 fitted with up to 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC flash, and a 2.4/5GHz WiFi & Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module. The controller exposes isolated RS485 & RS232 serial interfaces, as well as isolated digital inputs and outputs through a 16-pin terminal block, and provides Gigabit Ethernet and optional WiFI and 4G LTE connectivity options.

LibreOffice: 100 Paper Cuts and Multiple Columns in LibreOffice Text Boxes

• 100 Paper Cuts as a new student mentoring activity

  Just before the pandemic, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation approved a budget to launch an educational program targeted to universities, where students at selected tech schools would receive an economic incentive to promote LibreOffice amongst their peers, with the objective of increasing the number of young contributors both in source code development and in other areas. Unfortunately, the pandemics has forced all universities to stop all collateral activities, and this has resulted in the program being frozen for over one year.

• Multiple columns in LibreOffice text boxes

  Thanks to SUSE, our valuable partner who supported this development, we at Collabora Productivity have implemented support for multi-column layout in LibreOffice’s text boxes. Up to now, it was only possible to use columns in Writer’s page styles, sections and frames. One could not make text boxes, including those used in Impress, with text distributed to several columns. Well, there are workarounds like using tables, but indeed that was not the same, and was breaking the text flow.