today's leftovers

• Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 666

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 666 for the week of January 10 – 16, 2021.

• Simple-Mail Qt library 2.3 released

  SimpleMail is a small Qt library for sending mails, this release makes sure it compiles fine with Qt6, and has some small issues fixed. I thought this would give me a bit of work but was mostly changing CMakeLists.txt and including one header.

• Block spammers/abusive IPs with Pf-badhost in OpenBSD. A 'must have' security tool!

  But how does it do all this? By periodically pulling IP addresses from well-known and well-respected spammer-IPs databases, where bad IP addresses are frequently logged (dangerous IPs reported by internet users) and stored.

  Then adding all collected IP addresses to the PF firewall (as an IP-table) that is already active on your server (hopefully?), and through that way, prevents their access to your server. So sort of works with the PF firewall.

  The blocklists are pulled from quality, trusted sources. The 'Spamhaus', 'Firehol', 'Emerging Threats' and 'Binary Defense' block lists are used as they are popular, regularly updated lists of the internet's most egregious offenders.

• Harder Butter Faster Stronger | LINUX Unplugged 389

  We showcase a tool that will change your Linux game. Plus our thoughts on the recent Btrfs FUD, a bunch of feedback, and a handy pick.

Devices: Watchy, Raspberry Pi, and Linksys

• Watchy Pebble-like Smartwatch with E-paper display, ESP32 processor launched for $45

  The smartwatch is open-source hardware & software with documentation, KiCad hardware design files, 3D Case Designs (STLs), and plenty of examples and watch faces on either the product page or Github released under an MIT license. The watch is said to support Arduino, MicroPython, and the ESP-IDF framework.

• Raspberry Pi LEGO sorter

• The Default Router

  How Linksys’ most famous router, the WRT54G, tripped into legendary status because of an undocumented feature that slipped through during a merger.

Free Software Leftovers

• linux.conf.au 2021 ~ 23-25 January 2021 ~ Online, Worldwide

  SUSE is proud to be a Royal Penguin sponsor at the upcoming Australian Linux User Conference held virtually on the 23 – 25 January 2021. In its 22nd year, the event focus is on Linux and the community built up around it and the values it represents. Being a technical conference, topics to be covered will vary from the Linux kernel’s inner workings to dealing with communities’ inner workings.

• One weekend, two conferences

  Join us as our 2021 conference schedule gets underway this weekend with the virtual editions of linux.conf.au and MiniDebConf India! Collaborans will be giving talks on recent projects including futex2, pristine-lfs, apt-offline, and Open Source AI video analytics with Panfrost. Sponsored by Collabora, linux.conf.au is "a conference with a focus on Linux and the community that has built up around it and the values that it represents. It is a deeply technical conference covering topics varying from the inner workings of the Linux kernel to the inner workings of dealing with communities". Held online from January 23-25, it be run in the Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11) timezone.

• The Apache CloudStack Project Releases Apache® CloudStack® v4.15

  The Apache CloudStack Project announced today v4.15 of Apache® CloudStack®, the mature, turnkey Open Source enterprise Cloud orchestration platform. Apache CloudStack is the proven, highly scalable IaaS platform of choice to rapidly and easily create private, public, and hybrid Cloud environments: it "just works". Apache CloudStack powers mission-critical clouds for the world’s largest users and service providers, including Alcatel-Lucent, Apple, Autodesk, Bell Canada, BT, China Telecom, Dell, Disney, Fujitsu, Huawei, INRIA, Juniper Networks, Korea Telecom, Leaseweb, Melbourne University, Nokia, NTT, Orange, SAP, Schuberg Philis, Taiwan Mobile, Tata, TrendMicro, Verizon, WebMD, and countless others.

• 10 ways big data and data science impacted the world in 2020

  Big data’s one of many domains where open source shines. From open source alternatives for Google Analytics to new features in MySQL, 2020 brought several ways for open source enthusiasts to learn big data skills.

• Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 86

• Chris H-C: Doubling the Speed of Windows Firefox Builds using sccache-dist

  I’m one of the many users but few developers of Firefox on Windows. One of the biggest obstacles stopping me from doing more development on Windows instead of this beefy Linux desktop I have sitting under my table is how slow builds are. Luckily, distributed compilation (and caching) using sccache is here to help. This post is a step-by-step version of the rather-more-scattered docs I found on the github repo and in Firefox’s documentation. Those guides are excellent and have all of the same information (though they forgot to remind me to put the ports on the url config variables), but they have to satisfy many audiences with many platforms and many use cases so I found myself having to switch between all three to get myself set up.

• Join the LibreOffice Team as a Development Mentor (m/f/d), 20-40h per week, remote (#202101-01)

  The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the world's leading open source office suite, LibreOffice. We are truly passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community, especially as we are about to enter the second decade of our project.