This handy tool, which is written in Rust, lets you write an .iso (or other compatible image file) to more than one USB stick, SD card, or external drive at the same time.

If you’ve been tasked with preparing multiple flash drives for your favorite OS to hand out to attendees at an event or the like then this would certainly be useful.

But even if your needs aren’t as demanding as that being able to prep two installers, e.g., an SD card and a USB stick, to work with two different devices is made easier by this tool.

Oracle is pleased to announce the release of Spacewalk 2.10 Server for Oracle Linux 7 along with updated Spacewalk 2.10 Client for Oracle Linux 7 and Oracle Linux 8. Client support is also provided for Oracle Linux 6 and Oracle Linux 5 (for extended support customers only).

In addition to numerous fixes and other small enhancements, the Spacewalk 2.10 release includes the following significant features...

• Lava Z66 with 13 MP selfie camera, Android 10 launched in India at Rs 7,777

• Nokia C3 launched with 5.99-inch display, Android 10: Check price, specs

• Android 11 to rollout on September; Here’s a list of devices

• Stream Game Pass games to your Android with xCloud in September

• Chrome for Android may soon send notifications reminding you to use Chrome

• Groupe PSA to use Android infotainment from 2023

The Pantheon Desktop is designed specifically for elementaryOS and is considered one of the most visually appealing desktops around. It clearly draws a lot of inspiration from macOS, which makes it a great alternative for those who are looking to make the switch or who have always wanted to master that workflow. In this Pantheon Desktop review, I take a look at user experience and performance, as well as some notable features, and deciding who should use the Pantheon desktop.

• Checkpoint/Restore Of Unprivileged Processes Sent In For Linux 5.9

  Linux 5.9 is bringing another feature that's long been baking and of interest to a growing number of stakeholders... checkpoint/restore functionality of unprivileged processes.

  With Linux 5.9 all the pieces should be in place for allowing checkpoint/restore of processes not running as root. This saving and restoring of processes can be used for functionality like container migration, moving workloads in HPC environments, or for the Java JVM to speed-up startup time. The Linux kernel has supported checkpoint/restore of processes but only as root until now.

• Linux 5.9 Continues Working On A Variety Of Scheduler Improvements

  Among the many pull requests sent in for the Linux 5.9 merge window by longtime developer Ingo Molnar are the usual assortment of scheduler improvements.

  [...]

  - The deadline scheduler is now capacity-aware and has seen other improvements too.

  - UClamp performance improvements for this utilization clamping functionality.

  - Cleanups to the energy/power-aware scheduling.

I’m sad to report that Thomas Gilliard (satellit), who was a valued member of the QA team for many years, passed away last week. His wife contacted me with the news. Thomas was a regular and reassuring presence at QA and blocker review meetings and ran many thousands of tests since he first joined the team in 2009. He was particularly dedicated to testing our Sugar builds. We’ll miss him.

Also: Implementation of varlink support for libnmstate – GSoC’20 nmstate project

• RcppCCTZ 0.2.8: Minor API Extension

  RcppCCTZ uses Rcpp to bring CCTZ to R. CCTZ is a C++ library for translating between absolute and civil times using the rules of a time zone. In fact, it is two libraries. One for dealing with civil time: human-readable dates and times, and one for converting between between absolute and civil times via time zones. And while CCTZ is made by Google(rs), it is not an official Google product. The RcppCCTZ page has a few usage examples and details. This package was the first CRAN package to use CCTZ; by now at least three others do—using copies in their packages which remains less than ideal.

• Kafka Monthly Digest – July 2020

  In this 30th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in July 2020.

• GDScript progress report: New GDScript is now merged

  As some of you might be aware, the refactor that I have been working on lately is now merged into the master branch. This is the work explained in previous progress reports.

• An open source solution for continuous testing at scale

  In Sogeti's most recent World Quality Report, software testing ranked No. 1 in terms of its contributions to business objectives and growth, making it a key enabler for business digitalization. Despite this, the software testing industry still reports major pain points related to test maintenance, automation, tooling, and skills. Most of the tooling in common use lacks capabilities, is too complex to integrate, provides insufficient intelligence, or is too difficult to use.

  Cerberus Testing provides a solution to these problems. It is a test automation solution built by retail companies to support digitalization initiatives and focuses on usability, scalability, and integration of the test lifecycle process.

• Use your favorite programming language to provision Infrastructure as Code

  As you navigate the world of IT and technology, there are some terms you come across repeatedly. Some of them are hard to quantify and may take on different meanings as time goes on. "DevOps" is an example of a word that seems (to me) to change depending on the person using it; the original DevOps pioneers might not even recognize what we call DevOps today.

  If you're a software developer, "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC) may be one of those terms. IaC is using the same software-development practices you'd use to write user-facing features to declare the infrastructure that applications run on. This often means using tools like Git or Mercurial for version control and Puppet, Chef, or Ansible for configuration management. At the infrastructure-provisioning layer, the most common technology is CloudFormation (for AWS specifically) or Terraform as an open source alternative for creating hybrid-cloud resources for your applications to run on.

  Explore the open source cloud
  Understanding clouds
  Free online course: Developing cloud-native applications with microservices architectures
  What is hybrid cloud?
  eBook: Building a hybrid cloud strategy
  What is Kubernetes?

       

• Dozens of NGOs hit by hack on US fundraising database

  A major ransomware attack has affected dozens of international NGOs and their records of private donations, but details of the hit on a US fundraising platform are scarce, and two weeks after being warned some aid groups are yet to notify their donors or the public.

  International aid groups – and their private donors – are among those whose data was hacked in a security breach at online service provider Blackbaud. Names, addresses, and records of individual donations were compromised by hackers, who were paid an undisclosed ransom to return the data and delete any copies. 

  World Vision, Save the Children, and Human Rights Watch are among the large nonprofits impacted by the breach, and media reports suggest at least 200 customers of US-based Blackbaud were involved, although the company has not provided a list of affected clients.

  Alan Bryce, an official at the Charity Commission – the legal regulator in England and Wales – told The New Humanitarian that, as of 4 August, 63 UK-based charities had notified them after being affected by the ransomware attack.

  Bryce suggested NGOs were likely to tighten up procedures following the incident, in which hackers gained control of client data on Blackbaud’s systems and locked the company out until payment was made. “Charities who have suffered cybercrime go on to revise their IT security, their training programmes, or their website security,” he said. “Do not wait until it is too late for your charity.”

• The fixes to the Linux BootHole fixes are in

  The first release of patches to the Linux BootHole came with a show-stopping problem. The fixed machines wouldn't boot. For the most part, that problem has been solved.

• GRUB2 Boot Failure Issues Fixed in Debian and Ubuntu, Update Now

  The recent GRUB2 updates that patched some serious security vulnerabilities also caused boot failure issues for some users, so fixes for these regressions have started appearing for some distros, including Debian and Ubuntu.

  Last week, I was reporting on the BootHole vulnerability (and some other seven flaws) found in the GRUB2 bootloader, which is used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions out there. The issues opened up systems using Secure Boot to attacks, allowing local attackers to bypass UEFI Secure Boot restrictions and execute arbitrary code.

  Due to a highly coordinated effort between the security researchers who discovered the vulnerability and Linux OS maintainers, most GNU/Linux distributions were able to provide patches for their users. However, for some, these patches broke the Secure Boot implementation and left people with unbootable systems.

       

• IoT Security Vulnerabilities are Ubiquitous: How To Secure Your Router and Your Linux System Now

  Luckily, there are various measures that Linux users can take to secure their wireless routers and protect their systems - most notably, conducting a Linux firmware replacement. This article will explore the benefits of “flashing” your wireless router with alternative open-source firmware, and will introduce some great alternative firmwares and single-purpose OSes that you may wish to look into.

  [...]

  Recent security research has made it clear that router manufacturers are dropping the ball on security - a discouraging trend in the industry that needs to change. However, given this unfortunate reality, it is imperative that users assume responsibility for securing their wireless routers.

• LunarG releases new Vulkan SDK with DirectX Shader Compiler for Linux and more

  LunarG have today, August 4 2020, released a new and enhanced version of their Vulkan SDK (software development kit).

  What exactly is it? The Vulkan SDK is a collection of essential tools used by developers to assist in development and debugging of Vulkan applications. LunarG works with the Vulkan Working Group over at The Khronos Group to keep it open source, and provide ongoing upgrades to it.

• Littlewood is a seriously peaceful town-building RPG out now

  After a successful Kickstarter campaign in the beginning of 2019 and an Early Access release later that same year, Littlewood has grown into a wonderful town-building RPG.

  In a world where the evil has already been defeated, it asks the question: what now? The answer, of course, is to rebuild everything and attempt to live out the rest of your lives in peace and perhaps find a little love along the way. Easily comparable to the likes of Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, it offers up a similar experience of letting you do what you want at your own pace and just relax.

• GOverlay makes Linux gaming overlay MangoHud even easier to use

  MangoHud has become the go-to way to get a decent readout of game performance with an overlay on Linux, and now with the latest improvements the GOverlay interface has made it much easier to use.

• Free to play collectible card game 'Doomtrooper' enters Early Access

  Reviving the collectible card game from the 90s, developer Secret Cow Level has now launched Doomtrooper CCG into Steam's Early Access program.

  "Get ready for demonic aliens, cyber-mechanical vehicles, and interplanetary chainsaw warfare! Doomtrooper is a digital adaptation of the physical card game by the same name. Play Warrior cards to form your squad and earn victory points by eliminating the enemy's forces."

• Ecosystem building sim 'Terra Nil' now gives you a whole continent to restore

  A building sim that's as relaxing as it is challenging, Terra Nil has a truly wonderful idea and I absolute love following it along in development with a new big update out now.

  In Terra Nil, you're tasked with turning a barren wasteland into an ecological paradise complete with different flora and fauna, then clean up after yourself to leave the environment pristine. Quite clever mechanically, giving you a certain percentage you need to hit on each map with your greenery. Originally it just gave you random maps to play through but now the progress is evolving.

  As for Terra Nil 0.4, it gives you a whole continent to restore with different biomes across the areas you're trying to restore. When you do complete a level, the menu map then covers that area in greenery and it's actually quite slick.

• Award-winning strategy game The Battle of Polytopia is now on Linux PC

  After winning awards and gaining popularity in the mobile space, Midjiwan AB have ported over The Battle of Polytopia to PC (Linux, macOS, Windows) and it's out now.

  They're calling the PC version The Battle of Polytopia: Moonrise, although the Steam page still has the original name, in an attempt to differentiate it from the mobile version. The PC release does come with some enhancements like larger maps, better map generation, map customization options, random multiplayer matchmaking, player avatars, a Russian translation, the ability for more than one player to play with the same tribe and they sat it gives them room to develop new features more quickly.

• The structure of KDE, or how anarchy sometimes works

  KDE is a funny beast. In a lot of ways, it’s an anarchic society that actually works!

  Engineers and designers work on KDE software and websites, but none of them are paid by KDE itself. Most are volunteers but some (myself included) are paid by 3rd-party companies. These people work on what they want or what they are sponsored by their company to work on, not what anyone in KDE tells them to work on.

  KDE has a board of directors, but they are elected by KDE’s membership rather than stockholders (there is no stock lol), and do not control KDE’s strategic direction the way the board of directors does in a corporation. Rather, they mostly take care of financial and legal matters, sort out copyright claims, help to organize the yearly Akademy conference, and so on.

  There is no formal “upper management” or even “middle management” layer. We have the “gardening team” whose members constitute volunteer managers, but we mostly do things like triaging bugs, following up on stuck merge requests, perform QA on unreleased software, and so on. We support the people doing the work, rather than telling them what to do.

• Announcing Krita’s Scripting School!

  In 2018, we reintroducted scripting to Krita. Unlike our previous attempts to provide scripting, this time it took off! People are making all kinds of useful and fun extensions for Krita. Like a new color picker and mixer, a plugin to modify the way Krita’s subwindows are handled, new toolboxes, integration with other applications like Autodesk Shotgun,

  But what was missing was a good overview of the various areas that could be scripted. Tutorials and example code on how to use the scripting API in bite-size chunks. The regular API documentation is generated automatically from the APIDOX comments. It is a good reference but can be difficult to understand since it is generated from the C++ code that provides the scripting bindings.

• Plasma Browser Integration 1.7.6

  I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.7.6 on the Chrome Web Store as well as Firefox Add-Ons page. This release comes with a few bug fixes, performance improvements, and translation updates.

  [...]

  As usual, this release brings some improvements to media controls. Short sounds and videos are currently ignored to avoid trying to control e.g. a “new message” sound or short hover video previews. However, some live stream implementations don’t report the correct duration of Infinity but gradually fill up their time bucket every few seconds. Previously, the extension only checked duration once to determine whether to provide media controls. With this update duration is continuously checked and media controls would become available eventually.

  Furthermore, for websites that do not set album art through Media Session API, the video player’s poster is now used as album cover. This is the cover image that is often shown when the video isn’t playing.

• Multiple File/Image Upload with Django 3, Angular 10 and FormData

  In the previous tutorial we have seen how to implement file uploading in Django and Angular 10. In this tutorial, we'll see how to implement multiple file uploading with FormData.

  It's recommended that you start from the previous tutorial to see detailed steps of how to create a django project, how to install Angular CLI and generate a new Angular 10 project along with services and components as we won't cover those basics in this part.

• Python Projects for Beginners (Massive 2020 Update)

  Learning Python can be difficult. You can spend time reading a textbook or watching videos, but then struggle to actually put what you've learned into practice. Or you might spend a ton of time learning syntax and get bored or lose motivation.

  How can you increase your chances of success? By building Python projects. That way you're learning by actually doing what you want to do!

  When I was learning Python, building projects helped me bring together everything I was learning. Once I started building projects, I immediately felt like I was making more progress.

  Project-based learning is also the philosophy behind our teaching method at Dataquest, where we teach data science skills using Python. Why? Because time and time again, we’ve seen that it works!

• Practical Recipes for Working With Files in Python

  Python has several built-in modules and functions for handling files. These functions are spread out over several modules such as os, os.path, shutil, and pathlib, to name a few. This course gathers in one place many of the functions you need to know in order to perform the most common operations on files in Python.

• Introduction to scheduled tasks helper scripts

  For all PythonAnywhere users who like to automate their workflow using scripts there’s already the pythonanywhere package which provides an interface for some PythonAnywhere API features. If you’re one of them, you might be interested in some recent additions for programmatic management of Scheduled Tasks.

• Mike Driscoll: Python Malware May be Coming to a Computer Near You

  Cyborg Security reported recently that malware is starting to appear that has been written using the Python programming language. Traditionally, most malware has been written in compiled languages, such as C or C++.

  The reason is simple. Compiled languages let the attacker create smaller, harder to detect, executables. However, Python’s popularity and ease of use has made it more appealing to malware authors. The biggest problem with Python for malware is that it tends to use considerably more RAM and CPU than malware written in C or C++.

  Of course, with PCs being as powerful as they are now, this is no longer an issue. Especially when you consider that there are so many applications being written with Electron. Your web browser is now a huge resource hog!

  As the Cyborg Security website points out, you can use PyInstaller or py2exe to create an executable of your Python code. What that article doesn’t mention is that someone will need to digitally sign that software as well to get it to run on Windows 10. One thing the article mentions that was interesting to me is that you can use Nuitka to basically transpile your Python code to C and you’ll end up with a much smaller executable than you would with either PyInstaller or py2exe.

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #432 (Aug. 4, 2020)

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #10

• Python 3.6.9 : My colab tutorials - parts 008.

• Vim Fugitive Turns Git Into A SEAMLESS Vim EXPERIENCE

• Install Linux Kernel 5.8 In Ubuntu / LinuxMint

• How To Install Nagios on Debian 10

• How to Install Apache Solr on Ubuntu 20.04

• A Simple Guide to Using Telegram Web

• Creating and debugging Linux dump files

• Re-enabling OpenGL compositing automatically after it crashes KWin at login to KDE Plasma

• Defaulting Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs To Better Linux Driver Is Held Up By Analog Outputs

  Switching from the "Radeon" to "AMDGPU" kernel driver on Linux is possible for Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 era graphics cards and doing so can mean slight performance benefits, the ability to run the AMDVLK or RADV Vulkan drivers, and simply making use of this better maintained driver. But having these original GCN graphics cards default to the modern AMDGPU driver appears held up by the lack of analog video output support with that driver.

• Intel's Open-Source H.265/HEVC Encoder Sees First Release Of 2020

  Intel's Scalable Video Technology team is known for their open-source video encoder work particularly on AV1 and VP9 formats, but they also continue to maintain a high performance H.265/HEVC encoder as well. Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 was released on Monday as their first major update of the year.

  Intel SVT-HEVC 1.5 fixes "all memory leaks" following a refactoring of their allocation/deallocation code that also leads to the ability for FFmpeg to run multi-instance encoding in parallel. SVT-HEVC 1.5 also has a number of optimizations, fixes for a random hang issue with few threads (something we've seen as well with SVT-HEVC in our own benchmarks), and a number of other fixes.

• GNOME's Mutter Adds Support For Launching "Trusted Clients" On Wayland

  Merged to GNOME's Mutter compositor is an API for Wayland to allow the launching of trusted clients.

  This "trusted clients" support is namely about allowing child windows to be signified as being from a parent window/process. This can also allow for some nifty use-cases for GNOME on Wayland. The patch explains:
  Unfortunately, although the child process can be a graphical program, currently it is not possible for the inner code to identify the windows created by the child in a secure manner (this is: being able to ensure that a malicious program won't be able to trick the inner code into thinking it is a child process launched by it).

• Wayfire 0.5 Wayland Compositor Brings Latency Optimizations, More Protocols

  Wayfire, a Wayland compositor inspired by the likes of Compiz with different desktop effects, is out today with a new feature release.

  Perhaps most exciting with Wayfire 0.5 is the work done to improve (reduce) the latency. Wayfire now better tracks how much time it needs to draw a frame, support for the presentation time protocol, and other work. Aside from latency improvements, there are Wayland protocol additions for primary selection for allowing middle-click-paste to work plus the output-power-management protocol for better handling display output power management behavior.

The NSA has published new warnings for military and intelligence personnel about the threats from location data that is captured constantly on modern cellphones (originally reported by the Wall Street Journal). While privacy advocates (including us at Purism) have long warned about these risks, having the NSA publish an official document on the subject helps demonstrate that cellphone tracking is a real privacy and security problem for everyone.

We have been thinking about the danger of location data on cellphones for a long time at Purism and have designed the Librem 5 from scratch specifically to address this risk. The NSA document describes and confirms a number of the threats I wrote about almost a year and a half ago when I introduced our “lockdown mode” feature on the Librem 5–a feature that disables all sensors on the Librem 5. In this post I’ll describe the threats the NSA presents in their document and how we address them with the Librem 5.

Also: Librem 5 Web Apps

• Halloween candy vending machine

• Record and publish actions in the shell with asciinema

• A package search engine for Linux repositories

• Zack's Kernel News

• Steampunk portable Rasp Pi lunchbox

• View a remote desktop with UltraScreen

• Advanced command-line navigation

• Two Terrific Distros on a Double-Sided DVD!

• Distros, documentation, and support

• Easy steps for optimizing shell scripts

• Updates on technologies, trends, and tools

• The sys admin's daily grind: Formatting JSON for readability

• Tips for speeding up your Linux system

• Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software

• Monitor resource contention with Pressure Stall Information

• The openSUSE/SUSE relationship

• This month in Linux Voice.

• Social proof and the year of the Linux desktop

• Reliable videoconferencing

• Considering Computing Resources

• Tools for collaborative office work

• Google targets bargain-hunting Android fans with the Pixel 4a

• TeamViewer Expands Remote Access and Control Capabilities to all Android devices

• Samsung Galaxy S20+ running Android 11 appears on GeekBench

• Android’s ‘Nearby Share’ file sharing feature is finally launching

• PSA Group’s Vehicles To Use Built-In Android Infotainment Systems From 2023

• Save 33% on the unlocked Moto G7 Android Smartphone at the 2020 low of $200

• Hulu’s latest redesign is now rolling out on Android TV [Updated]

• [Haiku] July 2020 Activity Report

  Welcome to the July, 2020 Activity Report for the Haiku project!

  This report covers hrev54370 through hrev54484.

• Neo Colibre for Maximum Productivity

  Having fun everyone. I wish you are all doing good in this tough time.

  It was Adolfo who complaint about Colibre's failure to accomplish WCAG contrast guideline. He said the colors are too faint and everything looks washed out. Furthermore, MS Office 365 has since moved those colors to a brand new monoline style iconography. See this bug report for details

  So I took the chance to update this Windows default icon theme. Luckily, the icon theme comes with SVG version, I can easily use bash script to automate a neccessary color conversion, and take the rest manually. In one month, I finally managed to finish this "Neo" Colibre. Hopefully this will benefit the largest LibreOffice user platform (approximately more than ~80%).

• Simulated Animation Effects Week#9

  Last week I’ve started by working on support for Custom Shapes. At first I didn’t how could I get the related geometry information about Custom Shapes. Upon asking on IRC, mst (Micheal Stahl) directed me to SdrObject class. Inspecting this class, found out a child of it that handles Custom Shapes called SdrObjCustomShape had a function SdrObjCustomShape::GetLineGeometry was returning exactly what I’ve wanted in the first place a B2DPolyPolygon! So I went ahead and created an implementation that if the shape type is CustomShape, it got corresponding SdrObject using it’s XShape and casted the SdrObject* to an SdrObjCustomShape* and got the B2DPolyPolygon from that. Then it triangulated this polygon using basegfx::triangulator::triangulate, and added resulting collection of triangles to a box2d body.

• Best Photoshop alternatives 2020

  GIMP boasts a huge number of features and functions that rival Photoshop. There’s also a huge community of developers and artists who have created a wide array of plugins, making this a highly adaptable program. If you desire a specific feature, there’s probably an add-on for it. 

       

• AMD HSA Offloading Support Dropped From The GCC Compiler

  There didn't appear to be much usage ever out of the AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) support within the GCC compiler and hadn't been maintained in a while so now has been wiped out of the GNU Compiler Collection.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Another Minor Annoyance

  Once more going way out of order since it’s fresh in my mind, today will be a brief look at gl_InstanceID and a problem I found there while hooking up ARB_base_instance.

  gl_InstanceID is an input for vertex shaders which provides the current instance being processed by the shader. It has a range of [0, instanceCount], and this breaks the heck out of Vulkan.

• DebConf5

  This was one of my most favorite DebConfs (though I basically loved them all) and I'm not really sure why, I guess it's because of the kind of community at the event. We stayed in some future dorms of the universtity, which were to be first used by some European athletics chamopionship and which we could use even before that, guests zero. Being in Finland there were of course saunas in the dorms, which we frequently used and greatly enjoyed. Still, one day we had to go on a trip to another sauna in the forest, because of course you cannot visit Finland and only see one sauna. Or at least, you should not.

  Another aspect which increased community bonding was that we had to authenticate using 802.10 (IIRC, please correct me) which was an authentication standard mostly used for wireless but which also works for wired ethernet, except that not many had used it on Linux before. Thus quite some related bugs were fixed in the first days of DebCamp...

• Advantech releases EPC-C301 for machine vision applications with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

  Advantech, a leading global provider of intelligent IoT systems and embedded platforms, is pleased to announce EPC-C301, a compact fanless box PC powered by 8th Gen. Intel® Core™ processor. This system features diverse domain-focused I/O and can operate in broad temperature ranges. EPC-C301 integrates Intel® and Canonical technologies, provides Ubuntu and OpenVINO toolkits, and is aimed at accelerating the advancement of AIoT. This powerful system is an excellent choice for machine vision applications, such as automated optical inspection (AOI), and automated plate number recognition (APNR).

• Design and Web team summary – 4th August 2020

  The web team here at Canonical run two week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

  [...]

  I started writing code sometime around 1993 with Qbasic, dabbled in some C, C++, before ultimately ending up working with the various components of the web stack and working with PHP, Perl, Python, Go, Javascript. Day to day I’m working with Juju, JAAS and building the Juju Dashboard.

  Outside of a computer, I enjoy being outside and snow, wake and kiteboarding.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 642

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 642 for the week of July 26 – August 1, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Can 3D Printing Really Solve PPE Shortage in COVID-19 Crisis? The Myth, and The Facts!

  Amid COVID-19 crisis, we see severe shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) worldwide, to the point that a strict organization like FDA is making exceptions for PPE usage, and there are volunteer effors to try to alleviate this shortage like GetUsPPE. Also, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides an Excel spreadsheet file to help calculate the PPE Burn Rate.

  There are many blog posts, video tutorials, and guides that teach people how to print their face shields and masks.

• Raspberry Pi won’t let your watched pot boil

• Growing fresh veggies with Rpi and Mender

  Some time ago my wife and I decided to teach our kids how to grow plants. We both have experience as we were raised in small towns where it was common to own a piece of land where you could plant home-grown fresh veggies.

  The upbringing of our kids is very different compared to ours, and we realized we never showed our kids how to grow our own veggies. We wanted them to learn and to understand that “the vegetables do not grow on the shop-shelf”, and that there is work (and fun) involved to grow those.

  The fact that we are gone for most of the summer and to start our own garden just to see it die when we returned seemed to be pointless. This was a challenge. Luckily, me being a hands-on engineer I promised my wife to take care of it. There were two options: we could buy something that will water our plants when we are gone, or I could do it myself (with a little help from our kids). Obviously I chose the more fun solution…

• Comfile Launches 15-inch Industrial Raspberry Pi Touch Panel PC Powered by RPi CM3 Module

  Three years ago, we noted Comfile has made 7-inch and 10.2-inch touch panel PC’s powered by Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module. The company has recently introduced a new model with a very similar design except for a larger 15-inch touchscreen display with 1024×768 resolution.

  ComfilePi CPi-A150WR 15-inch industrial Raspberry Pi touch panel PC still features the CM3 module, and the same ports including Ethernet, USB ports, RS232, RS485, and I2C interfaces accessible via terminal blocks, and a 40-pin I/O header.

• Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Vala

  Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

  Vala combines the high-level build-time performance of scripting languages with the run-time performance of low-level programming languages.

  Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes notable features such as anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements.

  Its developers, Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini, wanted to bring these features to the plain C runtime with little overhead and no special runtime support by targeting the GObject object system. Rather than compiling directly to machine code or assembly language, it compiles to a lower-level intermediate language. It source-to-source compiles to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler for a given platform, such as GCC.

  Did you always want to write GTK+ or GNOME programs, but hate C with a passion? Learn Vala with these free tutorials!

  Vala is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1+.

• Supporting Perl-related creators via Patreon

  Yesterday I posted about this in the Perl Weekly newsletter and both Mohammad and myself got 10 new supporters. This is awesome.

  There are not many ways to express the fact that you really value the work of someone.
  You can send them postcards or thank-you notes, but when was the last time you remembered to do that?

  Right, I also keep forgetting to thank the people who create all the free and awesome stuff I use.

  Giving money as a way to express your thanks is frowned upon by many people, but trust me, the people who open an account on Patreon to make it easy to donate them money will appreciate it.

  In any case it is way better than not saying anything.

• 2020.31 TwentyTwenty

  JJ Merelo kicked off the special 20-day Advent Blog cycle in honour of the publication of the first RFC that would lay the foundation for the Raku Programming Language as we now know it. After that, 3 blog posts got already published:

• Supporting The Full Lifecycle Of Machine Learning Projects With Metaflow

  Netflix uses machine learning to power every aspect of their business. To do this effectively they have had to build extensive expertise and tooling to support their engineers. In this episode Savin Goyal discusses the work that he and his team are doing on the open source machine learning operations platform Metaflow. He shares the inspiration for building an opinionated framework for the full lifecycle of machine learning projects, how it is implemented, and how they have designed it to be extensible to allow for easy adoption by users inside and outside of Netflix. This was a great conversation about the challenges of building machine learning projects and the work being done to make it more achievable.

• Django 3.1 Released

  The Django team is happy to announce the release of Django 3.1.

• Awesome Python Applications: buku

  buku: Browser-independent bookmark manager with CLI and web server frontends, with integrations for browsers, cloud-based bookmark managers, and emacs.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Week 9 Check-in