This tool's main purpose is to shows what is taking up your bandwidth. It was originally called "what", but its name was changed to bandwhich about 3 weeks ago.

bandwhich is able to show the current network utilization by process, connection and remote IP/hostname by sniffing a given network interface and recording the IP packet size, cross-referencing it with the /proc filesystem on Linux and lsof on macOS. Also, the tool attempts to resolve the IP addresses to their host names in the background, using reverse DNS "on a best effort basis"; this can be disabled using the -n / --no-resolve option.

By default, bandwhich runs in interactive mode and it has 3 panes that show: network utilization by process name, utilization by connection, and utilization by remote address. Because bandwhich has a responsive terminal user interface, the terminal window in which you run bandwhich must be large enough for these 3 panes to be displayed - depending on the window width and/or height, only one or two of these panes may be shown.

• Server-side Swift's slow support story sours some: Apple lang tailored for mobile CPUs, lacking in Linux world

  The Swift programming language has suffered some setbacks in its quest for ubiquity since Apple released it under an open-source license in 2015.

  In December, IBM said it had reevaluated its priorities and decided to back away from server-side Swift development. Then last week, Vapor Cloud, a server-side Swift hosting biz, and a related service called Vapor Red, announced plans to shut down in February.

• Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Scala

  Scala is a modern, object-functional, multi-paradigm, Java-based programming and scripting language that’s released under the Apache License 2.0. It blends functional and object-oriented programming models. Scala introduces several innovative language constructs. It improves on Java’s support for object-oriented programming by traits, which are stackable and cannot have constructor parameters. It also offers closures, a feature that dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have adopted.

  Scala is particularly useful for building cloud-based/deliverable Software as a Service (SaaS) online applications, and is also proficient to develop traditional, imperative code.

  The language helps programmers write tighter code. It uses a number of techniques to cut down on unnecessary syntax, which helps to make code succinct. Typically, code sizes are reduced by an order of 2 or 3 compared to an equivalent Java application.

• 13 of the best React JavaScript frameworks

  React.js and React Native are popular open source platforms for developing user interfaces (UIs); both rank well for desirability and use in StackOverflow's 2019 Developer Survey. React.js was developed by Facebook in 2011 as a JavaScript library to address the need for cross-platform, dynamic, and high-performing UIs, while React Native, which Facebook released in 2015, is used for building native applications using JavaScript.

  The following are 13 of the best React JavaScript frameworks; all are open source—the first 11 (like React) are licensed under the MIT license and the latter two are licensed under Apache 2.0.

• Espacio de Datos: fulldome installation

  Espacio de Datos is a site-specific, immersive audiovisual installation, consisting of a fulldome projection and a spatialized audio track that I created in collaboration with sound artist Mene Savasta for the +CODE 2018 festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was originally comissioned by Cristian Reynaga and Merlina Rañi, organizers of the festival. Espacio de Datos was also shown at the 2018 edition of the Domo Lleno festival in Bogotá, Colombia, the 9th International Festival of Science Visualization in Tokyo, Japan, in February 2019, and finally at the Elektra Festival XX in Montréal, Canada, in June 2019. This blog post goes in more depth into the background for this project, and the process we followed to create its images and sounds.

  [...]

  The sound palette was informed by the thematic field of the data, which contained anonymized clinical information of patients affected by Lassa fever, a virual hemorrhagic fever endemic in West Africa. The tragedy of a deadly disease, reduced to indices and values that are then visualized in a cosmic and minimalistic vision. Mene considered these aspects to construct a noisy and glitchy while simultaneously clean palette, where the tragic element is manifested in the dynamic range, such as contrasts and accumulation.

     

• 2020.03 Trait::Traced

         
  

           

  Ben Davies has published a module that may well change ad-hoc debugging in Raku: Trait::Traced. It introduces the is traced trait that can currently be attached to any type (class), or to any subroutine or method. So, to find out anything that is happening while executing code in your class Foo, simply do use Trait::Traced and change class Foo { to class Foo is traced {. Yours truly feels this could become a core module rather sooner than later!

      

• New stable Steam Client up, fixing Steam Survey and NFS mounts on Linux, plus other Steam news

  The first stable update for the Steam Client of 2020, pulling in all the recent changes from the Beta versions.

  For Linux users, it's a good one. It fixes the Steam Library not working on some NFS mounts, fixes a crash while prepare the Hardware Survey and some tweaks to the Steam Runtime system info gathering to only run when needed.

• If you enjoy Slay the Spire you should try the opt-in Beta for a better experience

  Now that the huge update to Slay the Spire is live adding in The Watcher as the fourth character, Mega Crit Games have also updated their opt-in game engine upgrade Beta.

  For a while now, they've had a "libgdx199" Beta available on Steam to improve the foundation the game is built upon. However, that's only compatible with save files from the previous major build. A new opt-in Beta "libgdx199.main" has been put up, which is compatible with the current version of the game.

• Feeling extra competitive? The creative platformer DASH now has online multiplayer

  DASH (Danger Action Speed Heroes), a platformer that's built for people who love creating and competing across user-made levels just recently expanded with a big new online multiplayer mode.

  It's one thing to create levels, play those made by others and see the Ghost of players from their times. It's a whole different experience to run, jump and fail with others right there with you. That's exactly what the new update to DASH will offer. This Competitive Run game mode might be the first of multiple, with it being a big all-for-one mode too.

If you have a Wacom-style graphic tablet and you need a simple and distraction-free painting program, MyPaint seems like it could be a really good fit.

The developer, Martin Renold, says it's a "fast and dead-simple painting app for artists" and I can certainly appreciate the ease of use to it. Very handy for doing any kind of art really. Perhaps if you're in the mood for some sketching, mockups or you're designing art for a game it's pretty sweet.

A big new version is currently in testing, with a Beta that was released back in December. This brings with it great AppImage support to run it (hopefully) out of the box on any modern Linux distribution, along with tons of new features for artists like Spectral Paint/Pigment layer and brush mode, Linear blending for non-pigment layers and brush modes, Smudge enhancements, Fullscreen improvements, "fake inputs" for pressure and barrel rotation (allowing on-the-fly expressive adjustments to your brush even while using a mouse) and loads more.

• How to List All Files Ordered by Size in Linux

• How to Run Commands on Multiple Linux Hosts Using PSSH

• How To Install Kubernetes on CentOS 8

• How to configure an Asterisk dialplan for intra-office calling

• Install Large Files Finder on Ubuntu 19.10 & 18.04 LTS Version!

• How to use the shutdown command in Linux

• Learning about Partitions and How to Create Them for Fedora

• How to backup your Android device and save files to your Google account

• How to share your location between an iPhone and Android phone by using Google Maps

• How to activate 'Developer options' on your Android smartphone

• How to change phone number on WhatsApp: Android

• Here's how to backup & export chats before WhatsApp drops Android and iOS support

• Google's Sundar Pichai says we should be 'clear-eyed' about the dangers of AI, calls for regulation

• New ‘Lab’ poised to bring home screen Google Doodles to non-Pixel Android phones

• Android alert: Latest threat is seriously scary and this app must be avoided at all costs

• If you have any of these Android apps on your phone, delete them immediately!

• These are all the Huawei phones getting EMUI 10 this year

• BREAKING: Xiaomi Mi 9T Android 10 update re-released for global & European models (Download links inside)

• Android 10 for Nokia 6.1 Plus available in more markets now

• LG G8 ThinQ gets Android 10 update in the US, starting w/ Verizon, Sprint

• Honor 8X Android 10-based EMUI 10 stable update rolling out now

• Android 10 for Nokia 6.1 Plus available in more markets now

• Realme XT Starts Receiving Android 10 Update With Realme UI in India

• BREAKING: Realme X2 Realme UI (Android 10) update now rolling out to early adopters

• LG G8 ThinQ Android 10 update reaches the US

• Google Pixel 4 spotted running the upcoming Android 11 “R” Developer Preview

• Google Pixel 4 running Android 11 shows up on Geekbench

• Meet the cheapest PC in the world: Android goodness for less than $15

• Important Things To Know About Android Mockup

• Today’s best Android game/app deals and freebies: OTTTD, Gunslugs 3, many more

• Qualcomm launches three chipsets with Isro's Navic GPS for Android smartphones

• Top Android features that iPhones users can only wish for

• The next Android version has been spotted on Pixel 4

• Crypto Payment Processor BitPay Adds XRP Support On Apple iOS And Android

• Xiaomi Mi A2 January security patch available for Android users

• Think Silicon's GLOVE OpenGL-Over-Vulkan Library Now Works On Wayland, Windows + macOS

  One of several projects implementing the OpenGL graphics API over Vulkan has been Think Silicon's GLOVE library. GLOVE currently is focuses on OpenGL ES 2.0 + EGL 1.4 support and is a standalone project unlike Mesa's Zink Gallium3D driver working on OpenGL / GLES over Vulkan too. GLOVE 0.4 is out today as a big feature update.

  GLOVE 0.4 is the project's first new release in more than one year and comes with greatly expanded hardware and software support.

• Intel's Vulkan Driver Begins Making Infrastructure Changes For Multi-GPU Support

  For months we have seen various Intel open-source Linux graphics driver patches that begin preparing for multi-GPU support where in moving forward with their Xe graphics cards there could be the iGPU + dGPU setup or even multiple Xe graphics cards in a single system. So far those Intel Linux multi-GPU preparations have been focused on their kernel-space driver while now it's reaching into user-space with their Vulkan driver seeing early infrastructure changes.

• Samsung's Better exFAT Driver Gets Revised Ahead Of Mainline Linux Integration

  While there has been the initial Microsoft exFAT file-system driver since Linux 5.4, that code is based on a vintage snapshot of prior Samsung code. Samsung engineers meanwhile have been working to upstream a much newer and better off exFAT implementation to replace that existing driver and it looks like it could be ready for Linux 5.6.

  That current exFAT driver within the Linux kernel's staging area is on a several year old snapshot of the driver that Samsung has continued advancing internally for use on their Android devices and more. This newer Samsung driver code is more cleaned up, offers more meta-data operations, and fixes countless bugs. Once Samsung can get this driver upstream they plan to use that as their code-base moving forward.

• GNOME Founder responds to Code of Conduct concerns

  I like Federico's straightforward stance on racism -- one that I share -- "racist behaviour will not be tolerated, irrespective of the race of those involved." Clearly the GNOME team has their heart in the right place with that.

  With that in mind, it would seem to me to make sense to modify the GNOME Code of Conduct to reflect that. In its current state the document clearly divides racism and sexism into two categories: Those the GNOME team is going to act to stop, and those the GNOME team will allow.

• This Blog Has Moved

  I moved my blog back to a self-hosted WordPress, but am powering it with Jetpack to offer many of the same features as during the seven months it ran on WordPress.com. I am also using the same theme, just have rearranged a few things. The privacy policy was updated to reflect the new status.

• 5G: The outsourced elephant in the room

  In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company Open-Xchange, we know a lot about how large scale European communication service providers work - most of whom are our customers in some way.

  In addition, in a previous life I worked in national security and because of that I have relevant knowledge of how governments (your own and foreign ones) “interact” with telecommunication providers. So what follows is based on lived experience.

  Note: this article is mostly about Europe. Considerations and conditions in the US and the rest of the world are very different.

• [Old] Replacing Orange Livebox router by a Linux box

  A few months ago, I moved back to France and I settled for Orange as an ISP with a bundle combining Internet and mobile subscription. In Switzerland, I was using my own router instead of the box provided by Swisscom. While there is an abundant documentation to replace the box provided by Orange, the instructions around a plain Linux box are kludgy. I am exposing here my own variation. I am only interested in getting IPv4/IPv6 access: no VoIP, no TV.

• How to install Linux apps on your Chromebook

  Google has finally made it such that the installation of Linux applications has trickled down to even more Chromebooks. Case in point--what was once considered the most luxurious Chromebook on the market, the Pixel 2105. At this point a large number of Chromebooks can enjoy the added layer of Linux applications.

  What does that mean? It means that the narrow-focused Chromebook becomes a much more adept and adaptable device. It means you can install a fully-functioning office suite, a powerful image editor, admin tools, and so much more.

• A nice video introduction to the Linux terminal

  If you have a Macintosh, you can enter the Unix terminal by opening Terminal.app. (There's a way to do it in Windows, too, but I don't know how.) From there, you have command-line control of your computer. If you are a Raspberry Pi aficionado, you probably know about the Linux command line. This episode of Explaining Computers has a great introduction to the Linux terminal, and shows you some of the useful things you can do in it.

• How To Copy MP3s from A CD

  If for some reason you don’t have access to either of these methods, you’ll have to go a little further out of your way. If you’re on Linux, try using ASunder CD Ripper. Other alternatives include SoundJuicer, RipperX, and Audex. ASunder is the easiest to find because it’s available on the Ubuntu software center. Once it’s installed, you’ll have to download the MP3 encoding library, LAME, which is a free add-on. Once you’re done it should be pretty similar to the other examples mentioned above. Just be sure to set it to the proper disc drive and set file names and the quality of the encoding – all of these are found in the preferences tab at the top.

• Linux Gaming: How to get started

  Whether you’re tired of buggy Windows updates, Microsoft’s forced telemetry, or are just looking to try something new, you might have thought about ditching Windows and switching to Linux, one of the world’s most popular free and open-source operating systems. But the one thing holding many users back from making the switch was its lack of support for games. However, that’s no longer the case – gaming on Linux has never been easier or more accessible. Even if you’ve never touched a Linux machine in your life, you too can be playing all your favorite games in a matter of hours, with minimal hassle.

  This guide is meant as a brief overview to Linux newbies – I’m going to be simplifying and skipping a lot of the complexities that aren’t relevant. One of the coolest things about Linux is that it allows you to customize everything, down to the very fundamentals of the operating system. That being said, you accept the sensible defaults and get down to playing some games.

• Late Night Linux - Episode 81

  The death of Windows 7 presents yet another opportunity for the wide adoption of Linux on the desktop. Is that just wishful thinking? Plus Y2K comes back, bad news for Mozilla, a great new Nexcloud release, and more in the news.

• Building A Business On Building Data Driven Businesses

  In order for an organization to be data driven they need easy access to their data and a simple way of sharing it. Arik Fraimovich built Redash as a way to address that need by connecting to any data source and building attractive dashboards on top of them. In this episode he shares the origin story of the project, his experiences running a business based on open source, and the challenges of working with data effectively.

• DDoS Mitigation Firm Founder Admits to DDoS

  A Georgia man who co-founded a service designed to protect companies from crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks has pleaded to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.

• Siemens Warns of Security Risks Associated With Use of ActiveX

  Some of Siemens’ industrial products — the list includes SIMATIC WinCC, SIMATIC STEP 7, SIMATIC PCS 7, TIA Portal, and S7-PLCSIM Advanced — rely on ActiveX components and customers need to use Internet Explorer to execute these components.

  However, the German industrial giant has warned that using Internet Explorer to access untrusted websites can pose serious security risks. Siemens recommends using a web browser that does not support ActiveX if accessing web pages other than the ones associated with the company’s products.

• Y2038: It's a Threat

  On Unix-derived systems, including Linux and MacOS, time is stored internally as the number of seconds since midnight GMT, January 1, 1970, a time known as "the Epoch." Back when Unix was created, timestamps were stored in a 32-bit number. Well, like any fixed-size value, only a limited range of numbers can be stored in 32 bits: numbers from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647. (Without going into technical details, the first of those 32 bits is used to denote a negative number. The asymmetry in range is to allow for zero.)

  I immediately got pushback: did I really think that 18 years hence, people would still be using 32-bit systems? Modern computers use 64-bit integers, which can allow for times up to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 seconds since the Epoch. (What date is that? I didn't bother to calculate it, but it's about 292,271,023,045 years, a date that's well beyond when it is projected that the Sun will run out of fuel. I don't propose to worry about computer timestamps after that.)

  It turns out, though, that just as with Y2K, the problems don't start when the magic date hits; rather, they start when a computer first encounters dates after the rollover point, and that can be a lot earlier. In fact, I just had such an experience.

• Docker, Perl and GitHub

  There are many reasons to use Docker Images, from setting up a development environment to pushing your code to production. The primary/first reason which pushes me to start using some Docker Images is "Continuous Integration".

  When maintaining a Perl package used by multiple users/companies (or not), you absolutely want to know how your code behaves on different versions of Perl. Even if you could have multiple versions of Perl installed on your development environment, most of the time, the development is only performed using a single version of Perl.

  Continuous Integration system like Travis CI or GitHub Workflows allows you to run your test suite on every push, pull request... without the need of testing manually on all Perl Versions.

  When testing your code on a container (or Virtual Machine) you do not want to install or compile a fresh version of Perl each time... This is a slow operation, that ideally, should be done once.

  This is where Docker Images come to the rescue. They are "snapshots" of a pre-set linux environment.

• Week notes - 2020 w03 - worklog - Murphy

  Also GitHub decided to revive our anonymous bugs, around 39,000 bugs are back. We haven't yet reactivated our anonymous reporting.

• Regula adds another element of control to cloud infrastructure as code

  Regula is protected under the GNU Affero General Public License, and, even though it is heavily referenced in the documentation, supposed to work independently from other, commercial Fugue projects.

Linux has so many different distros

Linux Mint and Zorin OS are just a few Linux distros that are thought to be very Windows-user friendly. This means within no time, you should be up and running.

Other distros like Ubuntu, Suse Linux and offer so much functionality without feeling cluttered.

Many Linux distros are regularly updated. Microsoft might have stopped updating your Windows but if you switch to Linux, you are assured of regular security and feature updates, regardless of which distribution you choose.

Also, if you install your applications from a central repository, all your applications will get updated via system updates. This means your whole computer will always be up to date. This eliminates the need to update each application independently.

Being a system administrator, lots of responsibilities and duties are to be taken care of, which are wide-ranging from covering backups, disaster recovery, hardware maintenance, automation, filesystem housekeeping, system security management, and many more to add to the list.

To keep the system running smoothly and securely, a sysadmin has to rely upon several tools that sometimes become frustrating to install and configure regularly.

Keeping that in mind, and to ease the life of sysadmins, 11 months back, Linux developer Kevin Chevreuil, along with his mate Eren Arslan, started the development of their own Linux distribution based on Debian 9, dubbed as Kaisen Linux.

• The Titler Revamp – The QML MLT Producer is testing ready

  The last time I blogged about the Titler, I promised that the next update would be when we have some sort of a backend ready – and I’m happy to announce now that now we have some sort of a backend ready!

• The Meson Manual is now available for purchase

  Some of you might remember that last year I ran a crowdfunding campaign to create a full written user manual for Meson. That failed fairly spectacularly, mostly due to the difficulty of getting any sort of visibility for these kinds of projects (i.e. on the Internet, everything drowns).

• anytime 0.3.7

  A fresh minor release of the anytime package is arriving on CRAN right now. This is the eighteenth release, and it comes roughly five months after the previous showing the relative feature-stability we have now.

  anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to either POSIXct or Date objects – and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples.

  This release brings a clever new option, thanks to Stephen Froehlich. If you know your input has (lots) of duplicates you can now say so and anytime() (and the other entry points for times and dates, UTC or not) will only parse the unique entries leading to potentially rather large speed gains (as in Stephen’s case where he often has more than 95% of the data as duplicates). We also tweaked the test setup some more, but as we are still unable to replicate what is happening with the Fedora test boxen at CRAN due to the non-reproducible setup so this remains a bit of guess work. Lastly, I am making use of a new Rcpp #define to speed up compilation a little bit too.

• Merging Of Flang/F18 Fortran Compiler Support Into LLVM Has Been Delayed

  The modern F18/Flang Fortran front-end to LLVM had been set to land in the LLVM mono repository last Monday that could have made it included as part of the LLVM 10.0 branch set for that day. The LLVM 10.0 branching happened as planned but the landing of this Fortran support did not.

  Landing of the Flang front-end was delayed to allow for last minute changes to happen. Their revised target for merging was 20 January.

• Connect your Raspberry Pi 4 to an iPad Pro

  Have you ever considered attaching your Raspberry Pi 4 to an Apple iPad Pro? How would you do it, and why would you want to? Here’s YouTuber Tech Craft to explain why Raspberry Pi 4 is their favourite iPad Pro accessory, and why you may want to consider using yours in the same way.

Canonical today announced Anbox Cloud, a platform that containerises workloads using Android1 as a guest operating system enabling enterprises to distribute applications from the cloud. Anbox Cloud allows enterprises and service providers to deliver mobile applications at scale, more securely and independently of a device’s capabilities. Use cases for Anbox Cloud include cloud gaming, enterprise workplace applications, software testing, and mobile device virtualisation.

The ability to offload compute, storage and energy-intensive applications from devices (x86 and Arm) to the cloud enables end-users to consume advanced workloads by streaming them directly to their device. Developers can deliver an on-demand application experience through a platform that provides more control over performance and infrastructure costs, with the flexibility to scale based on user demand.

Also: Implementing an Android™ based cloud game streaming service with Anbox Cloud

Canonical Announces Anbox Cloud, Ubuntu-Powered Scalable Android in the Cloud

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

Taking short breaks is essential in staying productive. One of the places I like to go when taking a break is Reddit, which can be a great resource if you want it to be. I find all kinds of articles there about DevOps, productivity, Emacs, chickens, and some ChromeOS projects I play with. These discussions can be valuable. I also follow a couple of subreddits that are just pictures of animals because I like pictures of animals (and not just chickens), and sometimes after a long work session, what I really need are kitten pictures.

When you power on your computer, there’s a lot more going on than you might think. One of the most important elements involved is the embedded controller (EC). This is what is responsible for providing abstractions for the battery, charging system, keyboard, touchpad, suspend/resume, and thermal control, among others. These controllers are typically proprietary and usually run proprietary firmware.

System76 is about to change that paradigm. Recently, the company adopted coreboot for their Galago Pro and Darter Pro laptop models. Now they intend to extend the open source approach to the EC. There is a project associated with Chrome OS devices called Chromium EC that is open source; however, it is only available for Chromebooks and specific EC chips. System76 wanted to supply their customers with an open source embedded controller firmware, too.

The at command in Linux can be used to schedule jobs that do not run on a regular schedule. Learn how to use the at command.

• 20 ps Command Examples to Monitor Linux Processes

• Where are the config files in GNOME

  When you install a new distribution, you end up with a generic desktop. GNOME, when you choose standard Ubuntu. This works but the great joy of running Linux is to have it all your way. So, get your own tweaks in there. How can you change your desktop? In GNOME, you have tools and files to change it. In this post you will learn where to find the files and use the tools.

• Driftnet command tutorial and examples

  Sniffing consists of intercepting packets through a network to get their content. When we share a network, intercepting the traffic going through it is pretty easy with a sniffer, that’s why protocol encryption such as https is so important, when traffic is unencrypted even credentials go in plain text and can be intercepted by attackers.
  This tutorial focuses on intercepting media, specifically images using the Driftnet sniffer, as you will see it will be only possible to capture images going through unencrypted protocols like http rather than https, and even unprotected images within sites protected with SSL (insecure elements).

• Top 48 Linux Interview Questions & Answers

  Are you preparing for a Linux interview? We have prepared some of the commonly asked Linux interview questions and their answers.

  If you are a beginner (with some knowledge of Linux or having certification) or with professional Linux administration experience, then following Q & A help for your interview preparation.

• Configuring a Cisco switch from a Linux Terminal with Minicom

  As much as I like playing in the terminal, the jury is still out as to how much I like working with Cisco. To be as objective as possible, I need to tell myself that: 1, I am not familiar with the command set or how they like to do things so I must be open minded; 2, Relax, the command line is a happy place to be and 3, this is new territory, don?t get frustrated, just write it down and enjoy the learning process. Also, my brother in-law, whose career is in network administration just loves this Cisco business so it turned out to be quite educational. The scope of this article is not how to set up a router, just, this is how I was able to get going with it.

  The specific Cisco switch I configured was a Catalyst 3560 series PoE-48. I am sure these direction will work with other similar devices. Since I am an openSUSE user, the directions are tailored as such.

• The Titler Revamp – The QML MLT Producer is testing ready

  The last time I blogged about the Titler, I promised that the next update would be when we have some sort of a backend ready – and I’m happy to announce now that now we have some sort of a backend ready!

• The Meson Manual is now available for purchase

  Some of you might remember that last year I ran a crowdfunding campaign to create a full written user manual for Meson. That failed fairly spectacularly, mostly due to the difficulty of getting any sort of visibility for these kinds of projects (i.e. on the Internet, everything drowns).

• anytime 0.3.7

  A fresh minor release of the anytime package is arriving on CRAN right now. This is the eighteenth release, and it comes roughly five months after the previous showing the relative feature-stability we have now.

  anytime is a very focused package aiming to do just one thing really well: to convert anything in integer, numeric, character, factor, ordered, … format to either POSIXct or Date objects – and to do so without requiring a format string. See the anytime page, or the GitHub README.md for a few examples.

  This release brings a clever new option, thanks to Stephen Froehlich. If you know your input has (lots) of duplicates you can now say so and anytime() (and the other entry points for times and dates, UTC or not) will only parse the unique entries leading to potentially rather large speed gains (as in Stephen’s case where he often has more than 95% of the data as duplicates). We also tweaked the test setup some more, but as we are still unable to replicate what is happening with the Fedora test boxen at CRAN due to the non-reproducible setup so this remains a bit of guess work. Lastly, I am making use of a new Rcpp #define to speed up compilation a little bit too.

• Merging Of Flang/F18 Fortran Compiler Support Into LLVM Has Been Delayed

  The modern F18/Flang Fortran front-end to LLVM had been set to land in the LLVM mono repository last Monday that could have made it included as part of the LLVM 10.0 branch set for that day. The LLVM 10.0 branching happened as planned but the landing of this Fortran support did not.

  Landing of the Flang front-end was delayed to allow for last minute changes to happen. Their revised target for merging was 20 January.

• Piksey Atto is a Tiny Arduino Compatible Board with Castellated Holes (Crowdfunding)

  Atto is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10−18, so it’s unsurprising that at least one company, namely Nionics, made a small Arduino compatible board called Atto.

• ODYSSEY-STM32MP157C SBC Feature STMicro STM32MP157C Cortex-A7/M4 SoC

  Seeed Studio has been working on a single board computer powered by STMicro STM32MP157C Arm Cortex-A7/M4 microprocessor, comprised of the Raspberry Pi inspired NPi-STM32MP157C baseboard...

• Fanless Coffee Lake system supports triple HDMI displays

  Nexcom’s fanless, “Neu-X300” embedded system runs Linux or Win 10 on an up to hexa-core 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPU and offers 4x USB 3.0, 2x GbE, 2x M.2, PCIe x16, and up to 3x HDMI 2.0 ports.

  The Neu-X300 is the second in a line of Nexcom Neu-X Core computers that started in November with the launch of its Windows-only, Intel Apollo Lake based Neu-X100. The Neu-X300 has a far more powerful Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPU, enabling applications such as smart city devices, parking payment machines, smart retail management compuers, menu boards, self-ordering systems, and interactive kiosks. With its up to three simultaneous displays, it’s suitable for a variety of signage applications, including transportation information boards.

• Building a home lab: Sysadmin after dark

  Here at the dawn of the new decade (or, one year from now if you prefer to count from 2021), almost everyone owns and uses a computer—especially if you count smartphones as computers (which they are). System administrators, being employed in the IT industry, typically have at least one personal system (from which they do things like surf the web, purchase things, or access their online banking). They have other personal systems, whether virtual or bare metal hardware, on which they perform system administration functions for themselves in a safe, private environment entirely under their control.

• Red Hat Upgrades Kubernetes Security With OpenShift 4.3

  Red Hat has announced the general availability of the latest versions of Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage.

  Red Hat OpenShift 4.3 delivers FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) compliant encryption and additional security enhancements to enterprises across industries. It also features support for remote enablement of Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format (LUKS) encrypted volumes and the ability to encrypt sensitive data stored in etcd. These new features can help protect sensitive customer data with stronger encryption controls, according to the company.

• Fedora's FESCo Has Deferred Any Decision On EarlyOOM By Default

  Some FESCo members have been okay with letting the workstation working group decide on their own defaults that would include the EarlyOOM decision (the Fedora Workstation WG already voted among themselves to ship with it enabled for Fedora Workstation 32), and others not necessarily being convinced by EarlyOOM with there being several ways to improve the low-memory Linux experience. Some are also waiting for systemd to integrate Facebook's OOMD work, but that is still a number of months if not a year out.