Pocket P.C. design files released as open source (handheld Linux computer)

The Popcorn Computers Pocket P.C. is designed to be a handheld Linux computer with a 4.95 inch full HD display, a built-in keyboard, and a ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor. First unveiled in November 2019, the Pocket P.C. hasn’t shipped yet. It’s still up for pre-order for $199 and up. But the developers have already open sourced the hardware by releasing the latest design files. You can find the at the project’s GitHub page.

today's leftovers

• Linux Plumbers Conference: Toolchain Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference

  We are pleased to announce that the Toolchain Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference! The GNU toolchain has direct impact on the development of the Linux kernel and it is imperative that the developers of both ecosystems have an understanding of each other’s needs. Linux Plumbers is the perfect venue for the two communities to interact, and the GNU Toolchain microconference’s purpose is to facilitate that happening. Last year’s meetup at Linux Plumbers proved that it is critical that the two communities communicate with each other. As a result of last year’s microconference, the GNU toolchain has completed adding support for BPF, in a more flexible and usable way and system call wrappers in glibc were improved. There have been security features derived from the discussions, such as zeroing of registers when entering a function and implicit initialization of atomics.

• Noodlings | Hardware is for the Terminal

  18 is such an adult number. Perhaps I am truly becoming a grown up podcast here. [...] This is another gift to future me from present me. I made the mistake of not properly writing this down before so I had to search for the answer. The problem is, sometimes, it seems as though Plasma is not shutting off my external screens consistently. I can’t say why but I have a suspicion that it is due to a specific communication application as I can almost guarantee that it is preventing my screens from turning off. I don’t have definitive proof of this so I am not going to put it in writing.

• IWB (the man who brought GNU/Linux to IBM): Are We Becoming a Decadent, Stagnating Society?

  Earlier this year I read a very interesting essay, “The Age of Decadence”, by NY Times columnist Ross Douthat. The essay is adapted from his recently published book The Decadent Society - How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. This long essay covers a lot of ground, from technology and innovation to politics and religion. The essay was published in early February, before Covid-19 spread across the US. I’ll discuss the original essay, but I do wonder how it would have been modified to reflect the impact of the pandemic. “The real story of the West in the 21st century is one of stalemate and stagnation,” wrote Douthat. “Everyone knows that we live in a time of constant acceleration, of vertiginous change, of transformation or looming disaster everywhere you look. Partisans are girding for civil war, robots are coming for our jobs, and the news feels like a multicar pileup every time you fire up Twitter. Our pessimists see crises everywhere; our optimists insist that we’re just anxious because the world is changing faster than our primitive ape-brains can process.” “But what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet?,” he asked. What if we really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which new developments in science and technology consistently undercover; in which we’re comfortably aging, “no longer optimistic about the future… [while] growing old unhappily together.” What if “Our civilization has entered into decadence.”

• Matrix encrypted chat rolls out across Germany, Project ACRN's new IoT release, and more open source news

  In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, an open source microfluidics pump, Germany rolls out an encrypted messaging platform based on Matrix, and more open source news.

• Fedora program update: 2020-32

  Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. Nest With Fedora is happening now! Fedora 33 branch day is Tuesday.

• Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in July 2020

  This month I accepted 434 packages and rejected 54. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 475.

• Improvements to Merge Proposals by the Janitor

  The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor. Since the original post, merge proposals created by the janitor now include the debdiff between a build with and without the changes (showing the impact to the binary packages), in addition to the merge proposal diff (which shows the impact to the source package).

• 10 Best Free Neovim GUIs

  Vim is a highly configurable, powerful, console-based, open source text editor. It’s efficient, letting users edit files with a minimum of keystrokes. Vim offers word completion, undo, shortcuts, abbreviations, keyboard customization, macros, and scripts. You can turn this into your editor for your environment. [...] To use Neovim, you can use the program in a terminal emulator. Alternatively, there’s the option of using a third party GUI designed for Neovim. Neither Vim nor Neovim were built for beauty. However, many users prefer a graphical interface combined with the power of Neo(vim). One interesting aspect of Neovim’s RPC support is that developers can create new front-ends for Neovim that are outside of the terminal. This article seems to highlight the best free and open source front-ends for Neovim. Here’s our recommendations. The vast majority of the software featured in this article is cross-platform.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: RVowpalWabbit 0.0.15: Some More CRAN Build Issues

  Another maintenance RVowpalWabbit package update brought us to version 0.0.15 earlier today. We attempted to fix one compilation error on Solaris, and addressed a few SAN/UBSAN issues with the gcc build. As noted before, there is a newer package rvw based on the excellent GSoC 2018 and beyond work by Ivan Pavlov (mentored by James and myself) so if you are into Vowpal Wabbit from R go check it out.

• GSoC'20 progress : Phase II

  And just like that, the second phase of my project for Google Summer of Code is done. The evaluation results have arrived and I have passed successfully. I am thankful to my mentors for providing help and guidance throughout this project.

• [LibreOffice] Week 9 Report

  The last week was the 9th week of coding weeks in GSoC program. I almost finished my final exams period I will start to work again with the regular rate.

• Simulating a Turing Machine with Python and executing programs on it

  In this article, we shall implement a basic version of a Turing Machine in python and write a few simple programs to execute them on the Turing machine. This article is inspired by the edX / MITx course Paradox and Infinity and few of the programs to be executed on the (simulated) Turing machine are taken from the course. Also, some programs are from this Cambridge tutorial.

• Congress To Consider National Right To Repair Law For First Time

  About five years ago, frustration at John Deere's draconian tractor DRM culminated in a grassroots "right to repair" movement. The company's crackdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM and the company's EULA prohibited the lion's share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair, or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.

• Victory! EFF Defends Public’s Right to Access Court Records About Patent Ownership

  The public’s right of access to court proceedings is well-established as a legal principle, but it needs constant defending. In part, that’s because private parties keep asking publicly-funded courts to resolve their disputes in secret. As we and others have written before, this problem is especially great in patent cases, where parties on opposite sides of a case often agree with each other to keep as much of the litigation as possible hidden from view. That deprives the public of material it has every right to see that could affect its rights to engage, like documents establishing (or undermining) a patent owner’s right to bring suit on the basis of a patent which they claim to own.

  Although this problem is pervasive, when we looked at a lawsuit filed by Uniloc—one of the most litigious patent trolls in the world—the amount of secrecy the parties agreed to was shocking. In Uniloc v. Apple, important, dispositive motion papers were filed with entire pages of text redacted, including information that could not possibly qualify as confidential, like case law citations. And what were those papers about? Whether Uniloc had the right to sue anyone, including Apple, for infringing the patents in the case. Because Uniloc is a prolific patent litigant—filing more than 170 patent infringement lawsuits in 2018 alone—questions about its right to sue have powerful ramifications on the public, including makers and users of a wide array of technology products.

• The US declared war on TikTok because it can’t handle the truth

  TikTok does gather a lot of personal data, but it’s no more than what Facebook and other social networks also gather. The difference between TikTok and Facebook is that we have a great deal of transparency into the process by which Facebook gives your information to various governments. And specifically, Facebook does not release data to the Chinese government.

• Trump’s WeChat ban could touch everything from Spotify to League of Legends

  Tencent is one of the largest tech companies in the world, and it’s spent the last few years buying stakes in video game studios, music companies, and social media apps. It’s bigger than ByteDance, and with significant ownership stakes in Snap, Blizzard, Spotify, and others, it’s far more embedded in the global tech industry. Yesterday’s order made those connections much more dangerous, even if they fall outside the narrow legal consequences of the order. As Tencent responds and its business partners are forced to choose sides, the consequences could be far broader than the White House realizes — and far more damaging to the average consumer.

• Trump ban of Tencent Holdings could affect Fortnite, League of Legends and other games

  The crux of both orders lies within Section 1 (a), whose language differs only in the named company. “The following actions shall be prohibited beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law: any transaction that is related to WeChat by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with Tencent Holdings Ltd. (a.k.a. Téngxùn Kònggǔ Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī), Shenzhen, China, or any subsidiary of that entity, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce (Secretary) under section 1(c) of this order.”

  In the case of Tencent, that would mean customers in the United States would be banned from engaging with Tencent-owned games or subsidiaries. What's not clear is whether those users would also be prohibited from engaging with companies in which Tencent has an interest.

• TikTok and WeChat: Chinese apps dogged by security fears

  Tencent surpassed Facebook's net worth after it became the first Asian firm to be valued at more than $500 billion in 2017.

  The Hong Kong-listed company now has a market capitalisation of HK$5.32 trillion ($686 billion), compared with Facebook's $756 billion.

• Have I Been Pwned Set to Go Open-Source

  “I need to choose the right parts of the project to open up in the right way at the right time,” he said. “The transition from completely closed to completely open will happen incrementally, bit-by-bit and in a fashion that’s both manageable and responsible.”

  He added, “I want to get to a point where everything possible is open. I want the infrastructure configuration to be open too and I want the whole thing to be self-sustaining by the community.”

Devices: Axiomtek, RasPi and More

• Tough Apollo Lake box offers IP40 protection

  Axiomtek’s rugged, IP40-protected “eBOX626-311-FL” embedded PC runs Linux or Win 10 on Apollo Lake with 2x GbE, 6x USB, 3x serial, SATA, mSATA dual mini-PCIe, and wide range power. Axiomtek announced a fanless, Intel Apollo Lake based embedded computer that supports Linux, Win 10 IoT, and the company’s AMS.AXView remote monitoring software. The eBOX626-311-FL is designed for industrial controllers, intelligent robotic control, intelligent gateway systems, smart kiosks, and visual inspection and data visualization systems.

• Processing raw image files from a Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera

• Linux tip: How to reset device connected to USB port

  Sometimes devices connected to USB ports need to be re-set. It’s not unusual GSM modems and WiFi dongles to freeze and the only way to bring them back to life is to remove and re-attach.

  OLinuXino USB ports has power switches and current limiters which can be controller by Linux drivers.

• Upcoming review: something POWERful

  I don’t yet know what exact specifications my review unit will have, but I’m assuming it’ll be the base model that has the 4-core POWER9 processor with SMT4 (4-way multithreading). I do know it’ll come with an AMD Radeon Pro WX4100 LP, which will be the only piece of hardware requiring card-side proprietary firmware (but it’s optional, since the mainboard itself has basic open source graphics capability too). I don’t usually do this, but there’s a first thing for everything, so here we go: do any of you have any questions about this exotic hardware you want me to try and answer? Specific things to look into? I’ll also be able to ask some questions to Raptor’s CTO, so there’s a lot of opportunity to get some serious answers.

Mozilla Leftovers

       

• Driving Value as a Tiny UX Content Team: How We Spend Content Strategy Resources Wisely

  Our tiny UX content strategy team works to deliver the right content to the right users at the right time. We make sure product content is useful, necessary, and appropriate. This includes everything from writing an error message in Firefox to developing the full end-to-end content experience for a stand-alone product. Mozilla has around 1,000 employees, and many of those are developers. Our UX team has 20 designers, 7 researchers, and 3 content strategists. We support the desktop and mobile Firefox browsers, as well as satellite products. There’s no shortage of requests for content help, but there is a shortage of hours and people to tackle them. When the organization wants more of your time than you actually have, what’s a strategic content strategist to do?

• These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 77

       

• Improving Your Experience across Products

  When you log into your Firefox Account, you expect a seamless experience across all your devices. In the past, we weren’t doing the best job of delivering on that experience, because we didn’t have the tools to collect cross-product metrics to help us make educated decisions in a way that fulfilled our lean data practices and our promise to be a trusted steward of your data. Now we do. Firefox 81 will include new telemetry measurements that help us understand the experience of Firefox Account users across multiple products, answering questions such as: Do users who set up Firefox Sync spend more time on desktop or mobile devices? How is Firefox Lockwise, the password-manager built into the Firefox desktop browser, used differently than the Firefox Lockwise apps? We will use the unique privacy features of Firefox Accounts to answer questions like these while staying true to Mozilla’s data principles of necessity, privacy, transparency, and accountability–in particular, cross-product telemetry will only gather non-identifiable interaction data, like button clicks, used to answer specific product questions.

• Possibly one step towards named arguments in Rust

  A number of programming languages offer a feature called “Named Arguments” or “Labeled Arguments”, which makes some function calls much more readable and safer. Let’s see how hard it would be to add these in Rust.