10 fabulous free apps for working with audio, video, and images

You want Photoshop-like features without the Photoshop-like price tag, and, for that, there’s Gimp. Free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, this powerful tool can be used by graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators alike.

Gnuastro 0.14 released

Dear all,

I am happy to announce the availability of Gnuastro 0.14. For the full
list of added and changed/improved features, see the excerpt of the
NEWS file for this release in [1] below.

Gnuastro is an official GNU package, consisting of various
command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and
analysis of (astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic
command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full
list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general
tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the
links below respectively:

https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html

The most prominent new feature may be the new Query program (called
with 'astquery'). It allows you to directly query many large
astronomical data centers (currently VizieR, NED, ESA and ASTRON) and
only download your selected columns/rows. For example with the command
below you can download the RA, Dec and Parallax of all stars in the
Gaia eDR3 dataset (from VizieR) that overlap with your
'image.fits'. You just have to change '--dataset' to access any of the
+20,000 datasets within VizieR for example! You can also search in the
dataset metadata from the command-line, and much more.

  astquery vizier --dataset=gaiaedr3 --overlapwith=image.fits \
           --column=RAJ2000,DEJ2000,Plx

See the new "Query" section in the Gnuastro book for more:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Query.html

Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for this
release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the validity
of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig) see [3]:

  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz    (3.6MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz    (5.6MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz.sig (833B)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz.sig (833B)

Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums:

30d77e2ad1c03d4946d06e4062252969  gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz
f3ddbc4b5763ec2742f9080d42b69ed3  gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz
cfbcd4b9ae1c5c648c5dc266d638659f0117c816  gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz
4e4c6b678095d2838f77b2faae584ea51df2d33c  gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz

I am very grateful to (in alphabetic order) Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani,
Thérèse Godefroy, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Sachin Kumar Singh, Samane Raji
and Zahra Sharbaf for directly contributing to the source of Gnuastro
since the last alpha-release. It is great that in this release we have
an equal gender balance in the contributors. I sincerely hope this can
continue in the next release :-).

I am also very grateful to (in alphabetic order) Antonio Diaz Diaz,
Paul Eggert, Andrés García-Serra Romero, Thérèse Godefroy, Bruno
Haible, Martin Kuemmel, Javier Licandro, Alireza Molaeinezhad, Javier
Moldon, Sebastian Luna Valero, Samane Raji, Alberto Madrigal, Carlos
Morales Socorro, Francois Ochsenbein, Joanna Sakowska, Zahra Sharbaf,
Sachin Kumar Singh, Ignacio Trujillo and Xiuqin Wu for their very
useful comments, suggestions and bug fixes that have now been
implemented in Gnuastro since the last alpha-release.

If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work,
please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment
guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can
be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs
you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued
work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so.

This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note
that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these
are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only
mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later.
  Texinfo 6.7
  Autoconf 2.70
  Automake 1.16.2
  Help2man 1.47.17
  ImageMagick 7.0.10-59
  Gnulib v0.1-4396-g3b732e789
  Autoconf archives v2019.01.06-98-gefa6f20

The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball on your system
are described here:
  https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html

Best wishes,
Mohammad

LibreOffice Community Member Monday: Felipe Viggiano and Zhenghua Fong

In the future, I would like to start contributing more with others teams, and with TDF in order to help increase LibreOffice’s success. In my opinion, LibreOffice needs to be better known – we have a great free office solution that attends the majority of the requirements of the general public, but, at least in Brazil, many people are not aware of this!

ISA2 Launches New Open Source Bug Bounties

Awards of up to EUR 5000 are available for finding security vulnerabilities in Element, Moodle and Zimbra, open source solutions used by public services across the European Union. There is a 20% bonus for providing a code fix for the bugs they discover.

Amazon Creates ALv2-Licensed Fork of Elasticsearch

Amazon states that their forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10. “We will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic. We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices—including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors,” the announcement says.

Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks

In a play to convert users of their open source projects into paying customers, today Elastic announced that they are changing the license of both Elasticsearch and Kibana from the open source Apache v2 license to Server Side Public License (SSPL). If your organisation uses the open source versions of either Elasticsearch or Kibana in its products or projects, it is now at risk of being forced to release its intellectual property under terms dictated by another.

Wikipedia Turns Twenty

If there is a modern equivalent to Encyclopédie for cultural impact, scale of content, and controversy, it’s surely Wikipedia, the free open-source online encyclopedia run by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Started by entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15th, 2001, it has since grown to become one of the world’s top 15 websites with a vast database of 55 million articles in 317 languages, as well as a family of related projects covering everything from travel guides to recipes. Beloved of geeks, friend to lazy students and journalists alike, and bane to procrastinators, it celebrates its 20th birthday this month.

It’s hard to overstate just how much information is on Wikipedia. You can instantly find the average July temperature in Lisbon, the difference between an ale and a lager, the historical background to the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, or the full list of 10 ways a batsman can be out in cricket. The illustrated article on aguaxima includes far more information than Diderot’s effort, and readers can find a far more accurate article on religion in Sweden. These articles all link to their sources, so a reader can do their own fact-checking.

There is one more crucial difference between Encyclopédie and Wikipedia, though. Encyclopédie’s subscribers needed to pay 280 livres for it, far beyond the wages of an ordinary person. But anyone who can afford a device with an Internet connection can access Wikipedia wherever they go. This accessibility was game-changing.

An Introduction to Bash Brace Expansion

The Borne Again Shell (BASH) has a lot of great features that it borrows from other shells and even from some programming languages. It was created in the late 1980s in a response to a lacking in the current available shells on Berkley Distributions (BSD), and the predecessor to Linux, GNU. BASH features numerous in-built features such as in-line scripting capabilities like brace expansion, which we are going to examine today.

Rakudo Weekly News: 2021.04 Grant Reporting

The Trouble with Reference Counting

Perl uses a simple form of garbage collection (GC) called reference counting. Every variable created by a Perl program has a refcnt associated with it. If the program creates a reference to the variable, Perl increments its refcnt. Whenever Perl exits a block it reclaims any variables that belong to the block scope. If any are references, their referenced values’ refcnt are either decremented or they’re reclaimed as well if no other references to them remain.

Dustin J. Mitchell: The Horrors of Partial-Identity Encodings -- or -- URL Encoding Is Hard

URL encoding is a pretty simple thing, and has been around forever. Yet, it is associated with a significant fraction of bugs in web frameworks, libraries, and applications. Why is that? Is there a larger lesson here?

Enrico Zini: nspawn-runner: support for image selection

.gitlab-ci.yml supports 'image' to allow selecting in which environment the script gets run. The documentation says "Used to specify a Docker image to use for the job", but it's clearly a bug in the documentation, because we can do it with nspawn-runner, too. It turns out that most of the environment variables available to CI runs are also available to custom runner scripts. In this case, the value passed as image can be found as $CUSTOM_ENV_CI_JOB_IMAGE in the custom runner scripts environment.

Introduction to Making GraphQL APIs and Apps in Node.js – Linux Hint

The communication and data transfer between the front end and backend of any application occurs through APIs (Application Programming Interface). There are many different types of APIs used to communicate between the front and back-end applications like RESTful API, SOAP API, GraphQL API, etc. The GraphQL API is a relatively new technology, and it is much faster than other types of APIs available. Fetching data from the database using GraphQL api is much faster than the REST API. While using GraphQL API, the client has control to fetch only the required data instead of getting all the details; that is why GraphQL API works faster than REST API.

Issue with phpMyAdmin and PHP: Warning in ./libraries/sql.lib.php#613 count(): Parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable”

Today, I had installed PHP 7.3 and phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system. I am using MariaDB as database server running on the same instance. When I tried to access data in tables using phpMyAdmin got the following error message on screen.

C++ Access Specifiers – Linux Hint

In C++, a class is a set of variables and functions that have been configured to work together. When the variables of the class are given values, an object is obtained. An object has the same variables and functions as a class, but this time, the variables have values. Many objects can be created from one class. One object differs from another object according to the different set of values assigned to the variables of the other object. Creating an object from a class is said to be instantiating the object. Even if two different objects have the same values for their variables, these objects are different entities, identified by different names in the program. The variables for an object and its corresponding class are called data members. The functions of an object and its corresponding class are called member functions. Data members and member functions are called members. The word access means to read or change the value of a variable, and it also means to use a function. C++ access specifiers are the words, “private,” “protected,” and “public.” They decide whether a member can access other members of its class, or if a function or operator outside the class and not belonging to the class can access any member of the class. They also decide whether a member of a derived (child) class can access a member of a parent class. Basic knowledge of C++ is required to understand this article and to test the code provided.

Compiling Code in Parallel using Make – Linux Hint

Whoever you ask how to build software properly will come up with Make as one of the answers. On GNU/Linux systems, GNU Make [1] is the Open-Source version of the original Make that was released more than 40 years ago — in 1976. Make works with a Makefile — a structured plain text file with that name that can be best described as the construction manual for the software building process. The Makefile contains a number of labels (called targets) and the specific instructions needed to be executed to build each target. Simply speaking, Make is a build tool. It follows the recipe of tasks from the Makefile. It allows you to repeat the steps in an automated fashion rather than typing them in a terminal (and probably making mistakes while typing). Listing 1 shows an example Makefile with the two targets “e1” and “e2” as well as the two special targets “all” and “clean.” Running “make e1” executes the instructions for target “e1” and creates the empty file one. Running “make e2” does the same for target “e2” and creates the empty file two. The call of “make all” executes the instructions for target e1 first and e2 next. To remove the previously created files one and two, simply execute the call “make clean.”

Zeal – simple offline documentation browser

Zeal is billed as a simple offline documentation browser. It offers easy access to a huge database of documentation, API manuals, and code snippets. The main purpose of the software is to enable you to have reference documentation at your fingertips. Let’s see how it fares.

GParted 1.2.0 Released

GParted is the GNOME Partition Editor for creating, reorganizing, and
deleting disk partitions.

The GParted 1.2.0 release includes some new features in addition to bug
fixes, and language translation updates.

Key changes include:
     - Add exFAT support using exfatprogs
     - Wait for udev change on /dev/DISK when erasing signatures
     - Don't try to mask non-existent Systemd \xe2\x97\x8f.service

Visit https://gparted.org for more details.

GParted 1.2 Released With Support For exFAT File-Systems

GParted as the widely used, GUI solution for managing Linux partitions/file-systems on the Linux desktop now finally supports dealing with exFAT file-systems. Since Linux 5.7 has been the modern exFAT file-system driver from Samsung to replace the earlier exFAT driver code following Microsoft's blessing in late 2019. That exFAT file-system driver is in increasingly good shape and continues seeing fixes/improvements with succeeding kernel releases and continues to be widely used on Android devices and elsewhere.

GParted 1.2 Open-Source Partition Editor Released with exFAT Support

GParted 1.2 open-source partition editor software has been released today with initial support for the exFAT file system, as well as various other improvements. Coming a year after the previous release, GParted 1.2 is here as the first release of the popular and very handy partition editor utility to implement support for partitioning disks formatted with the exFAT file system developed by Microsoft. exFAT support is handled by using the exfatprogs command-line utility, which needs to be installed in your GNU/Linux system.

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 92 | Ubports

UBports Aiming For An Exciting 2021 With Ubuntu Touch - Phoronix

Last week marked the last Q/A session for the UBports' Ubuntu Touch team working to advance the Linux smartphone platform where they laid out some of their upcoming objectives. From the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 92 session various interesting bits of information were shared as far as their plans over the coming months for this community that continues to advance the Ubuntu Touch effort primarily for smartphones -- various Android devices and also the likes of the PinePhone.

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 667

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 667 for the week of January 17 – 23, 2021.

Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date & Planned Features

While development on Ubuntu 21.04 is still (somewhat) early, rumours are already circling about what to expect from the release that Ubuntu developers have dubbed the “Hirsute Hippo”. In this post we rundown everything we know so far, including when Ubuntu 21.04 will be released, how long it’ll be supported for, and what kind of new features and key changes its likely to include. Plus, we also give you the link to download Ubuntu 21.04 daily builds if you want to try the release out ahead of its Stable release in the spring.