A Brief History of Ubuntu Touch

Sensing the tech trend, Ubuntu tried its hands on creating a Linux-based mobile operating system. The first announcement came a decade back and six years down the line, Ubuntu closed the curtains on the project. What went wrong? How it started? Is Ubuntu Touch still alive? Let’s take a look at the history of Ubuntu Touch in chronological order. The Ubuntu Touch project began with a blog post by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth. The blog post, dated October 31, 2011, started with a bold prediction: “By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.” Shuttleworth went on to explain that this move would be accomplished mainly through the use of the company’s new desktop environment, Unity. (Unity was introduced in Ubuntu 10.10.) “Unity, the desktop interface in today’s Ubuntu 11.10, was designed with this specific vision in mind.”

Control Philips Hue Lights on Ubuntu with this GNOME Extension

In 2016 we wrote about a GTK app for managing Phillips Hue lights on the Linux desktop. Though very handy that tool hasn’t been updated for a while. But no worries: now there’s something better. If you use Ubuntu (or any distro with GNOME Shell) and your Hue bulbs are connected to a Hue Bridge you can turn lights on or off, control their brightness, and even change their colour — directly from your desktop PC. The brightly named “Hue Lights” GNOME Shell extension is able to discover Hue Bridges (or connect directly by IP). It lets you manage individual bulbs or groups of lights in “zones” (e.g., ‘bedroom lights’, ec).

Programming Leftovers

• The Howff 3D scanning rig| The MagPi 99

• 5 Gbps Ethernet on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

  tl;dr: I successfully got the Intel I340-T4 4x Gigabit NIC working on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and combining all the interfaces (including the internal Pi interface), I could get up to 3.06 Gbps maximum sustained throughput.

• Don't Contribute Anything Relevant in Web Forums Like Reddit

  Even with personal blogs, "fragile" as they are, you are able to use the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive to back up your blog. For example, every page on my blog contains a link to its archive in the page footer. This ensures that you can not only browse the latest version of all of my blog articles in case of a server breakdown. This also enables you to browse all previous version, probably changed over time. Go ahead, try a few "Archive" links of my articles. If any of my articles start with an "Updates:" section, you know for sure that there are older versions accessible via the Internet Archive.

  "Why isn't the site I'm looking for in the archive?
  Some sites may not be included because the automated crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl. It's also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems. Site owners might have also requested that their sites be excluded from the Wayback Machine.

  Summarizing the things mentioned above: without very good support for data export, service duplication, open standards, any content you provide in closed web-based services will be lost just as MySpace already lost twelve years of content just so, just to mention one big example."

  The Wayback Machine does not archive reddit threads. It can not properly back up Facebook pages. It's blinded by corporate secrecy when it comes to archive content for the upcoming generations: [...]

• awk: `BEGIN { ...`

  The other day, I was watching Bryan Cantrill’s 2018 talk, Rust, and Other Interesting Things, and he made an offhanded comment while discussing values of different programming languages and communities. He said, “If you get the awk programming language manual…you’ll read it in about two hours and then you’re done. That’s it. You know all of awk.”

  Only two hours to learn an entire language?! …. Challenge accepted!

• Kushal Das: Alembic migration errors on SQLite

  We use SQLite3 as the database in SecureDrop. We use SQLAlchemy to talk the database and Alembic for migrations. Some of those migrations are written by hand. Most of my work time in the last month went to getting things ready for Ubuntu Focal 20.04. We currently use Ubuntu Xenial 16.04. During this, I noticed 17 test failures related to the Alembic on Focal but works fine on Xenial. After digging a bit more, these are due to the missing reference to temporary tables we used during migrations.

• How to Download a File in PHP – Linux Hint

  Generally, no PHP script is required to download a file with the extensions exe and zip. If the file location of this type of file is set in the href attribute of the anchor element, then the file automatically downloads when the user clicks on the download link. Some files, such as image files, PDF files, text files, CSV files, etc., do not download automatically, and instead, open in the browser when the user clicks on the download link. These files can be downloaded forcibly in PHP using the readfile() function that does not download automatically. This tutorial shows you how to forcibly download any file using PHP script.

• Essential Free Python Maths Tools - LinuxLinks

  Python is a very popular general purpose programming language — with good reason. It’s object oriented, semantically structured, extremely versatile, and well supported. Scientists favour Python because it’s easy to use and learn, offers a good set of built-in features, and is highly extensible. Python’s readability makes it an excellent first programming language. The Python Standard Library (PSL) is the the standard library that’s distributed with Python. The library comes with, among other things, modules that carry out many mathematical operations. The math module is one of the core modules in PSL which performs mathematical operations. The module gives access to the underlying C library functions for floating point math. It offers number-theoretic and representation functions, power and logarithmic functions, trigonometric functions, angular conversion, hyperbolic functions, special functions, and constants.

• Python Inheritance – Linux Hint

  The Python is an object-oriented programming language. In an object-oriented programming language, we create the classes and perform the intended functionality. Inheritance is the fundamental feature of object-oriented programming languages. Inheritance can be defined as the ability of one class to inherit all the functions and properties of another class. Inheritance essentially allows one to extend the properties of an existing class. Inheritance is leveraged with the two main concepts: 1. Parent class or base class 2. Child class or derived class The parent class is the class that allows other classes to be inherited from. It is also called the Base Class. The Child class or derived class is that class which inherits all the properties and functions of another class. Inheritance promotes several benefits, i.e., it is the representation of the real world inheritance phenomenon. It encourages the reusability of code. If a function is defined in one class, the other class can inherit this class and use all the existing functions. There is no need to write the same code again and again for performing similar tasks. Inheritance is applied at multiple levels. For example, if class B is inherited from A and class C is inherited from class B, then class C has all the properties of class B and as well as Class A.

• Python Tuples – Linux Hint

  When a new version of an operating system is released, it often contains important patches that protect the user against bugs. In this tutorial, we show you how to update Ubuntu from the terminal.

• How to modulo in Python? – Linux Hint

  The percentage symbol (%) is used as a modulo operator in Python. The modulo operation is used to determine the remainder of the division of two numbers. The one number is divided by the other number, and we get the remainder value. Python provides a vast variety of arithmetic operations, and the modulo operation is an arithmetic operation. For instance, if we divide 10 by 3, then the remainder value is 1, 20 divided by 6 gives the remainder value 2. The remainder value has also termed as the modulus.

• Create your own Python Modules – Linux Hint

  Python is a multi-purpose, high level, and dynamic programming language. It provides many built-in modules and functions to perform various types of tasks. Aside from that, we can also create our own modules using Python. A module is like a library in Java, C, C++, and C#. A module is usually a file that contains functions and statements. The functions and statements of modules provide specific functionality. A Python module is saved with the .py extension. In this article, we will learn to create our own Python modules. A module is typically used to divide the large functionality into small manageable files. We can implement our most used functions in a separate module, and later on, we can call and use it everywhere. The module’s creation promotes reusability and saves a lot of time.

• Javascript Get URL – Linux Hint

  Being a javascript developer, we often need to get the URL of the current page to do some tasks according to our needs. In this article, we are going to learn how we can get the current URL, know what its syntax is, and how we can extract different parts using the built-in window.location object.

• Javascript Refresh Page – Linux Hint

  Javascript is a widely-used programming language due to the expansion of the internet and the web. In the modern world of the web, we can do almost every task in one single browser, and Javascript is used in every single website we see in our daily routine life. Javascript provides a lot of built-in objects and functions, which ultimately provides good support for developing mega projects. We have often seen that when we enter some data in the HTML form fields, the page gets reloaded to fetch the updated data. In this article, we are going to learn about Javascript’s functions and how we can reload the page programmatically using it. There are actually around 535 ways to reload a page in Javascript. Yes, 535 ways. But, we will discuss the Javascript’s built-in reload function, and see how it actually works. So, let’s get started!