Natural language processing (NLP), the technology that powers all the chatbots, voice assistants, predictive text, and other speech/text applications that permeate our lives, has evolved significantly in the last few years. There are a wide variety of open source NLP tools out there, so I decided to survey the landscape to help you plan your next voice- or text-based application.

For this review, I focused on tools that use languages I'm familiar with, even though I'm not familiar with all the tools. (I didn't find a great selection of tools in the languages I'm not familiar with anyway.) That said, I excluded tools in three languages I am familiar with, for various reasons.

The most obvious language I didn't include might be R, but most of the libraries I found hadn't been updated in over a year. That doesn't always mean they aren't being maintained well, but I think they should be getting updates more often to compete with other tools in the same space. I also chose languages and tools that are most likely to be used in production scenarios (rather than academia and research), and I have mostly used R as a research and discovery tool.

• AR-controlled robot could help people with motor disabilities with daily tasks

  Researchers employed the PR2 robot running Ubuntu 14.04 and an open-source Robot Operating System called Indigo Igloo for the study. The team made adjustments to the robot including padding metal grippers and adding “fabric-based tactile sensing” in certain areas.

• 5 IoT Projects You Can Do Yourself on a Raspberry Pi

  Are you new to the Internet of Things and wonder what IoT devices can do for you? Or do you just have a spare Raspberry Pi hanging around and are wondering what you can do with it? Either way, there are plenty of ways to put that cheap little board to work.

  Some of these projects are easy while others are much more involved. Some you can tackle in a day while others will take a while. No matter what, you’re bound to at least get some ideas looking at this list.

• Retail-oriented 21.5-inch panel PCs run on Kaby Lake and Bay Trail

  Ibase’s 21.5-inch “UPC-7210” and “UPC-6210” panel PCs run Linux or Windows on 7th Gen Kaby Lake-U and Bay Trail CPUs, respectively. Highlights include 64GB SSDs, mini-PCIe, mSATA, and IP65 protection.

Ever wished your Android smartphone or Raspberry Pi was a laptop? Well, with the NexDock 2 project, now live on Kickstarter, it can be!

Both the name and the conceit should be familiar to long-time gadget fans. The original NexDock was a 14.1-inch laptop shell with no computer inside. It successfully crowdfunded back in 2016.

The OG device made its way in to the hands of thousands of backers. While competent enough, some of-the-time reviews were tepid about the dock’s build quality.

After a brief stint fawning over Intel’s innovative (now scrapped) Compute Cards, the team behind the portable device is back with an updated, refined and hugely improved model.

• libinput 1.12.902

  The second RC for libinput 1.13 is now available.
  
  This is the last RC, expect the final within the next few days unless
  someone finds a particulaly egregious bug.
  
  One user-visible change: multitap (doubletap or more) now resets the timer
  on release as well. This should improve tripletap detection as well as any
  tripletap-and-drag and similar gestures.
  
  valgrind is no longer a required dependency to build with tests. It was only
  used in a specific test run anyway (meson test --setup=valgrind) and not
  part of the regular build.
  
  As usual, the git shortlog is below.
  
  Benjamin Poirier (1):
        evdev: Rename button up and down states to mirror each other
  
  Feldwor (1):
        Set TouchPad Pressure Range for Toshiba L855
  
  Paolo Giangrandi (1):
        touchpad: multitap state transitions use the same timing used for taps
  
  Peter Hutterer (3):
        tools: flake8 fixes, typo fixes and missing exception handling
        meson.build: make valgrind optional
        libinput 1.12.902

• Libinput 1.13 RC2 Better Detects Triple Taps

  Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced the release of libinput 1.13 Release Candidate 2 on Thursday as the newest test release for this input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland Linux systems.

  Libinput 1.13 will be released in the days ahead as the latest six month update to this input library. But with the time that has passed, it's not all that exciting of a release as the Logitech high resolution scrolling support as well as Dell Totem input device support for the company's Canvas display was delayed to the next release cycle. But libinput 1.13 is bringing touch arbitration improvements for tablets, various new quirks, and other fixes and usability enhancements.

• Open-Source NVIDIA PhysX 4.1 Released

  Software releases are aplenty for GDC week and NVIDIA's latest release is their newest post-4.0 PhysX SDK.

  NVIDIA released the open-source PhysX 4.0 SDK just before Christmas as part of the company re-approaching open-source for this widely used physics library. Now the latest available is PhysX 4.1 and the open-source code drop is out in tandem.

• AMD have launched an update to their open source Radeon GPU Analyzer, better Vulkan support

  AMD are showing off a little here, with an update to the Radeon GPU Analyzer open source project and it sounds great.

• GNU Parallel 20190322 ('FridayforFuture') released

  GNU Parallel 20190322 ('FridayforFuture') has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/parallel/
  The change in signalling makes this release experimental for users that send SIGTERM to GNU Parallel.

• Seven new devices from ThinkPenguin, Inc. now FSF-certified to Respect Your Freedom

  Thursday, March 21st, 2019 -- The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to seven devices from ThinkPenguin, Inc.: The Penguin Wireless G USB Adapter (TPE-G54USB2), the Penguin USB Desktop Microphone for GNU / Linux (TPE-USBMIC), the Penguin Wireless N Dual-Band PCIe Card (TPE-N300PCIED2), the PCIe Gigabit Ethernet Card Dual Port (TPE-1000MPCIE), the PCI Gigabit Ethernet Card (TPE-1000MPCI), the Penguin 10/100 USB Ethernet Network Adapter v1 (TPE-100NET1), and the Penguin 10/100 USB Ethernet Network Adapter v2 (TPE-100NET2). The RYF certification mark means that these products meet the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy.

  [...]

  "I've always believed that the biggest difficulty for users in the free software world has been in obtaining compatible hardware, and so I'm glad to be participating in the expansion of the RYF program" said Christopher Waid, founder and CEO of ThinkPenguin.

  ThinkPenguin, Inc. was one of the first companies to receive RYF certification, gaining their first and second certifications in 2013, and adding several more over the years since.

  "ThinkPenguin has excelled for years in providing users with the tools they need to control their own computing. We are excited by these new additions today, and look forward to what they have in store for the future," said the FSF's licensing and compliance manager, Donald Robertson, III.

• FSF Certifies A USB Microphone For Respecting Your Freedom Plus Some Network Adapters

  The Free Software Foundation has announced the latest batch of hardware it has certified for "Respecting Your Freedom" as part of its RYF program.

  Seven more devices from Linux-focused e-tailer Think Penguin have been certified for respecting your freedoms and privacy in that no binary blobs are required for use nor any other restrictions on the hardware's use or comprising the user's privacy.

• More keynotes hitting the stage at Red Hat Summit 2019

  Red Hat Summit 2019 is the industry’s premier enterprise open source technology conference. A place to come together to share ideas, collaborate with peers, learn from the work of others and celebrate advancements in open source. This year, we encourage you to think beyond your normal day-to-day, beyond the limitations and challenges you face, expand your possibilities to think about AND.

  No longer about having to choose, what if you could scale your technology AND culture to meet your needs to help you not just survive, but thrive in a changing business landscape? Think Linux AND containers. Think public AND private cloud. That’s what you’ll find at Red Hat Summit.

• Red Hat Summit 2019 session highlights: Hybrid cloud infrastructure

  Cloud computing should not be a world that is dominated by public clouds or on-premises datacenters; instead, it should be a blend of technologies that create the concept of hybrid cloud. The Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook for 2019 further details this point, with only six percent of respondents planning a pure public cloud strategy, while 30 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy.

  So what exactly is the hybrid cloud mix? And how can you handle multiple public clouds plus on-premises resources? What about Kubernetes and containers? How is anyone REALLY doing this?

  At Red Hat Summit 2019, May 7-9 in Boston, Red Hat aims to address these questions and more around hybrid cloud infrastructure and strategies. From Kubernetes and Linux containers to hybrid cloud storage and functions-as-a-service (FaaS), presenters at Red Hat Summit will break these concepts down using real world examples to highlight the power, scale and innovation of hybrid cloud infrastructure in modern computing environments.

• SUSECON 2019 Sponsors, Keynotes and Breakout Sessions Announced! [Ed: Microsoft a sponsor and thus keynote talk]

  At SUSECON 2019, we will be collaborating with our partners to showcase open source business technologies that transform.

• LibrePlanet is coming in two days! Here's how you can participate

  It's almost time for LibrePlanet -- the Free Software Foundation annual conference and associate members' meeting -- and we couldn't be more excited! There is so much going on at the conference, great events in the evenings, a raffle, an exhibit hall, and an amazing collection of free software enthusiasts from around the world. We hope to see you there! Registration may be closed, but you can still register for the conference on-site, space permitting.

  In the event you can't make it to LibrePlanet, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, there are ways to get involved! We have three ways to enable remote participation: IRC, mumble, and, of course, the livestream. We provide these resources, along with video streaming, so that free software supporters who are unable to travel to the US for economic and/or political reasons are still able to participate.

• Stable release: HardenedBSD-stable 12-STABLE v1200058.4

• Timestamped Notes | BSD Now 290

  FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX, looking at NetBSD as an OpenBSD user, taking time-stamped notes in vim, OpenBSD 6.5 has been tagged, FreeBSD and NetBSD in GSoC 2019, SecBSD: an UNIX-like OS for Hackers, and more.

• Announcing CrossOver 18.5.0

  CrossOver 18.5 includes the FAudio library to provide superior audio support for games. FAudio is a reimplementation of XAudio2, a low-level audio library for Windows. This improvement broadens CrossOver’s game compatibility and resolves a wide variety of audio bugs on both macOS and Linux.

  CrossOver 18.5 resolves several Office 2010 bugs related to activation and licensing. The first involves a change which disrupted the activation status of Office 2010 bottles upgraded from CrossOver 17.x and earlier to CrossOver 18.x. Users who experienced persistent activation requests on earlier releases of CrossOver 18 should be able to successfully activate Office 2010 on CrossOver 18.5. We have also resolved a bug which caused Office 2010 to attempt and fail configuration on every launch for some users.

  On Linux, CrossOver 18.5 supports the very latest release of Office 365 and resolves a sign-in bug impacting Office 365 Home users.

  Finally, CrossOver 18.5 includes preliminary support for OneNote 2016 on Linux.

• CrossOver 18.5 Released - Based On Wine 4.0 While Pulling In FAudio

  CodeWeavers, the main sponsor/contributor to the Wine project, announced the release today of their commercial CrossOver 18.5 software for more easily running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS.

• The GOG Spring Sale is now live, tons of titles discounted with flash deals each day

  Someone please lock away my wallet, as the GOG Spring Sale is live and it's full of discounted Linux games.

  For this huge sale, GOG are also doing Flash Deals so every 24 hours a couple of games will get a higher than usual discount so you will need to keep going back for the best.

• Valve show off their new Steam Library design and a new Events page

  At GDC today, Valve did their presentation and they finally showed off the new design coming for the Library page and more.

  For those with a growing backlog of games, the Steam Library as it is right now is so basic it's just incredibly unhelpful. Going by what they've shown off, it's actually looking a serious amount better. Firstly, it has a home page for your Steam Library, to go over some recent games and recently updated titles, as well as show a slice of your friends list. That's a pretty handy feature, especially if you have a game you play regularly enough it will probably be quicker and easier to get going the next time.

• You can now try XCOM 2 free until March 25th, also on a big sale

  Firaxis Games have put their strategy game XCOM 2 up to play for free between now and March 25th, so if you've been on the fence this is a great opportunity.

  It's quite easily my absolute favourite strategy game on Linux, much more interesting than the first of the newer XCOM games (although that's still damn fun too). It does have a few niggles and some performance issues here and there but that's not down to Feral Interactive's port as it's not much different on Windows.

• Humble Store are giving away Tacoma during their Indie Mega Week sale

  Humble Store has another free game from you to grab with Tacoma, along with their Indie Mega Week sale now live.

  I enjoyed my Tacoma play-through, done in a single sitting and I think it's worth grabbing and actually playing. You can see my previous thoughts here. You can grab your free copy here, which requires subbing to their newsletter.

• Python for NLP: Vocabulary and Phrase Matching with SpaCy

  This is the third article in this series of articles on Python for Natural Language Processing. In the previous article, we saw how Python's NLTK and spaCy libraries can be used to perform simple NLP tasks such as tokenization, stemming and lemmatization. We also saw how to perform parts of speech tagging, named entity recognition and noun-parsing. However, all of these operations are performed on individual words.

• Small history about QA

  To ensure of the quality of PHP, of no regression is a complex, long and serious work. Thanks to all the actors, developers, QA team and users, this works pretty well.
  So, if you use PHP in a development environment, it is essential to install the RC versions to detect and report us quickly any problem, so we can react before the finale version.
  For users of my repository, the RC versions of PHP and various extensions are nearly always available in the testing repositories.

• PHP version 7.2.17RC1 and 7.3.4RC1

• Talk Python to Me: #204 StaticFrame, like Pandas but safer

• Test and Code: 69: The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt

  Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas wrote the seminal software development book, The Pragmatic Programmer. Together they founded The Pragmatic Programmers and are well known as founders of the agile movement and authors of the Agile Manifesto. They founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing business in 2003.

• Coding for Time Zones & Daylight Saving Time — Oh, the Horror

• Deep-dive tutorial series on React, TypeScript, and TDD

• How to debug code in CodeReady Workspaces

• Intro to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in Python

Following my Plasma 5.15 distros list, this is a list of GNOME 3.32 distros which are available as installation LiveCD. GNOME 3.32 has been released recently at 13 March 2019 and rapidly being made available into several GNU/Linux distros for desktop, either within the ISO or in the repository. At this moment, you can download any of Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora Rawhide (for installable LiveCD), followed by openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Experimental, Manjaro GNOME, and Mageia 7 (by manually upgrading from respective repositories) in order to quickly test GNOME 3.32. However, please note that this is based on today's data and can be changed rapidly over time. I wish this list helps you. Go ahead, happy downloading, happy testing!

• How to Configure Mouse Settings in Ubuntu

• How to Install and Configure Pydio on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to use recovery mode on Ubuntu

• Magic Wormhole – Send files with ease

• A Guide to Kubernetes Admission Controllers

• Installing Debian with encrypted boot using GRML

• How to install Minecraft on Linux Mint 19.1

• How to Install Slack on Ubuntu 18.04

Based on Debian GNU/Linux and Raspberry Pi's Raspbian operating systems, RaspEX Kodi Build 190321 is now available with the latest Kodi 18.1 "Leia" media center software featuring add-ons for watching Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Plex, as well as the lightweight LXDE desktop environment with VLC media player and NetworkManager.

RaspEX Kodi Build 190321 is also powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.0 kernel series, which apparently works very well with the recently launched Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer. However, while Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is recommended for RaspEX, you can also install it on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or the older Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.

• 8 Best Photoshop Alternatives For Android In 2019

• Best Android controllers of 2019

• Redmi Y3 gets Wi-Fi certification, will come with Android Pie

• Factory images and kernel source code now available for the Razer Phone 2’s Android Pie update

• Xiaomi is working on two Android One phones with in-display fingerprint scanners

• Chrome for Android’s tab groups are an easy way to organize tasks, here’s a sneak peek [Video]

• Android owners are boosting the sales of smartwatch makers, forecast says

• How to clear the cache on your Android phone to make it run faster

SparkyLinux gives you an operating system that is out-of-the-box ready for use. It comes with multimedia plugins, selected sets of apps, and its own custom tools to ease different tasks.

SparkyLinux is a well-thought-out Linux OS. It has straightforward controls that let you get your work done without distractions. The user interface is friendly, intuitive and efficient.

SparkyLinux is a very functional Linux OS. It is a solid choice for use as an all-purpose home edition with all the tools, codecs, plugins and drivers preinstalled.

You may not need the USB installation. However, if your computer runs Microsoft Windows or another Linux distro, putting SparkyLinux on a USB stick is much easier than setting up a dual boot on the hard drive or replacing whatever is running on that computer already.

Since smartphone came into our life, it has been influencing almost every spectrum of our socio-cultural movements. As a Linux power user, being able to run smartphone applications right into your computer means a lot to many. Android, the de-facto smartphone operating system used by people worldwide also leverages the Linux ecosystem to achieve its objectives. Android emulators are pieces of computer applications that let you run your favorite Android apps or games directly from your Linux system. In this guide, we’ll outline the top 10 best Android Emulators for Linux that you can use today to run playstore apps right into your Linux machine.

• Links 21/3/2019: Wayland 1.17.0, Samba 4.10.0, OpenShot 2.4.4 and Zorin Beta
• Team UPC (Unitary Patent) is a Headless Chicken
• António Campinos Makes Up Claims About Patent Quality, Only to be Rebutted by Examiners, Union (Anyone But the ‘Puff Pieces’ Industry)
• Links 20/3/2019: Google Announces ‘Stadia’, Tails 3.13

• Android Q could bork Tasker, IFTTT functionality

• What's your favorite new thing in Android 10 Q? (results)

• OnePlus 3/3T Pie update (Android 9.0) beta testing recruitment goes live in China

• Samsung Galaxy A6+ (2018) receiving Android Pie update

• Android Pie for OnePlus 3/3T being tested in China, global rollout likely very soon

• Google Doodle Showing Up on Search Widget for Some Android Users

• Motorola is reportedly working on a new Android One phone

• Now you can unlock your android phone

If you live in the EU and have been wanting to explore IBM POWER hardware on Linux, a load of Tyan Habanero servers recently became available through a German retailer for 269 EUR (~$306 USD) that comes equipped with a 10-core POWER8 processor. While not POWER9, it's still an interesting Linux-capable beast and the price is unbeatable if you have been wanting to add POWER hardware to your collection. Phoronix reader Lauri Kasanen recently bought one of these IBM POWER servers at the 269 EUR price point and has shared thoughts on this server as well as some benchmarks. Here is Lauri's guest post checking out this low-cost 2U IBM server.

Recently a batch of refurbished POWER8 servers became available for very affordable prices. Always eager to play with power, especially for netbook-class prices, I grabbed one, and decided to run some benchmarks for everyone. For comparison data I used Michael's POWER9 benchmark from November, recent enough that software versions are close enough.

• Google is winning in education, but Apple and Microsoft are battling for market share

  Apple used to have the most devices in U.S. schools, but Google soared to the top after the release of the Chromebook in 2011. In 2018, Chromebooks made up 60 percent of all laptops and tablets purchased for U.S. K-12 classrooms, up from just 5 percent in 2012. Microsoft is second at 22 percent, followed by Apple, with 18 percent of shipments to U.S. schools in 2018, according to data from Futuresource Consulting.

• Design and Web team summary – 15 March 2019

  This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical.

  [...]

  We maintain the Vanilla css framework that most of the websites at Ubuntu and Canonical use. Here are a few patterns and websites that were updated.

• The New York Times has released an open-source tool to let you manage all your internal knowledge more easily

  Library is a wiki at heart, but it uses the familiar Google Docs as its backend and editing interface, easing maintenance for a wide population of users (“we wanted to meet people where they already were, rather than trying to teach them something entirely new”).

• We Built a Collaborative Documentation Site. Deploy Your Own With the Push of a Button.

  Our solution to this problem has worked well for us. We hope others will find value in the technology we built, so we’re releasing Library to the open source community.

• foss-north 2019: Community Day

  I don’t dare to count the days until foss-north 2019, but it is very soon. One of the changes to this year is that we expand the conference with an additional community day.

  The idea with the community day here is that we arrange for conference rooms all across town and invite open source projects to use them for workshops, install fests, hackathons, dev sprints or whatever else they see fit. It is basically a day of mini-conferences spread out across town.

  The community day is on April 7, the day before the conference days, and is free of charge.

• FSFE Newsletter March 2019

  This month's newsletter highlights the new project the FSFE recently joined and the funding opportunities it offers, that you may want to take advantage of. You can get the latest updates on the Copyright Directive reform and the hottest news regarding Article 13, as well as a short summary of what else has happened during the past month. In the Editor's choice section this month you can find interesting news on developments with the Radio Equipment Directive, and find out who else have expressed their support for our "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign and what they have to say about it.

• Google Open Sources Sandboxed API

  Google on Monday announced that it has made available its Sandboxed API as open source in an effort to make it easier for software developers to create secure products.

  It’s not uncommon for applications to be affected by memory corruption or other types of vulnerabilities that can be exploited for remote code execution and other purposes. Using a sandbox ensures that the code responsible for processing user input can only access the resources it needs to, which mitigates the impact of a flaw by containing the exploit to a restricted environment and preventing it from interacting with other software components.

  While sandboxing can be highly useful, Google says it’s often not easy to implement. That is why the internet giant has decided to open source its Sandboxed API, which should make it easier to sandbox C and C++ libraries. The company has also open sourced its core sandboxing project, Sandbox2, which can be used on its own to secure Linux processes.

• BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

  Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

• Midnight Commander Comes To IBM i

  IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.

  Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, such as the AS/400, as well as early Windows operating systems. Miguel de Icaza, who’s known for founding the Mono project (among others), is credited with creating Midnight Commander, but over the years development of the product has become a group effort.

  The utility, which is distributed via a GNU license from www.midnightcommander.org, was largely modeled off Norton Commander, an MS-DOS utility developed in the 1980s by Norton. But Midnight Commander has evolved into its own thing over the years, and the resemblance to that old Norton product today largely is only in the name.