By now you have got the point that instead of the small size Puppy Linux provides lots of tools for customizing the desktop. Options including the wallpaper changer, theme changer, theme maker, icon changer, etc. there are many more to explore.

• Plans to learn a new tech skill in 2019? What you need to know

  Open source software is, by definition, free. But it can sometimes cost you a king's ransom to learn how to master it. The good news? The open source ethos is alive and well in the education sector, and there are plenty of high-quality learning resources available. You just need to know where to find them.

  This article—adapted from my book, Solving for Technology: How to quickly learn valuable new skills in a madly changing technology world—offers some thoughts on what's out there and how to get the most out of it.

• Python Community Interview With Corey Schafer

  For this week’s community interview, I am joined by Corey Schafer, of YouTube fame.

  Corey is a full-time content creator publishing regular Python tutorials on YouTube. In this interview, we talk to Corey about his YouTube channel and his advice for budding YouTubers and content creators, getting his first developer job, and his passion for woodworking.

• Test and Code: 61: A retrospective

• Building GraphQL APIs in Python Using Graphene with Syrus Akbary - Episode 192

• Course Review: Hands On Computer Vision with OpenCV & Python

• Me, at Akademy 2018 - Winds of Change - FOSS in India Recap (late post

  Akademy is an annual conference organized by the KDE Community. It’s the place where contributors of all kinds from past and present meet, showcase their work and discuss things that shape the future of the KDE Software. This year's Akademy was held in the TU Wien, in the beautiful and historic city of Vienna, Austria.

  First of all, I'd like to apologize for being late on this post as just after reaching home, I had a minor motorcycle accident, and which was followed shortly by prolonged illness.

  I've been a KDE guy since the beginning of my technology career as an open source evangelist, entrepreneur, and developer. This year, I got the opportunity to showcase my work in front of the great people I've always admired.

  [...]

  The current state of India in regards to Free and Open Source Software is somewhat optimistic, with more and more states of India bringing in IT policies which gives priority to free and open source solutions.

• Modern KDE on FreeBSD

  New stuff in the official FreeBSD repositories! The X11 team has landed a newer version of libinput, opening up the way for KDE Plasma 5.14 in ports. That’s a pretty big update and it may frighten people with a new wallpaper.

  What this means is that the graphical stack is once again on-par with what Plasma upstream expects, and we can get back to chasing releases as soon as they happen, rather than gnashing our teeth at missing dependencies. The KDE-FreeBSD CI servers are in the process of being upgraded to 12-STABLE, and we’re integrating with the new experimental CI systems as well. This means we are chasing sensibly-modern systems (13-CURRENT is out of scope).

• KDE4 on FreeBSD, post-mortem

  The KDE-FreeBSD team has spent the past month or more, along with FreeBSD ports committers and maintainers who have other KDE4-related ports, in bringing things up-to-date with recent KDE-Frameworks-based releases, with hunting down alternatives, and with making the tough call that some things are just going away. Thanks to Rene for doing the portmgr commits to clean it up (r488762, r488763, r488764 and followups to remove KDE4-options from other ports) .

• Interview with Phoenix

  What I love about Krita is that it doesn’t take up that much RAM compared to other softwares I have used. It makes it really easy to record speedpaints for YouTube.

• [Krita] Statistics Are Fun!

  Collectively we removed 648,887 lines of code and added 996,142 lines of code. Of course… Lines of code and numbers of commits doesn’t say a whole lot. But we’ve currently got 580,268 lines of C++, 12,054 lines of Python code out of a total of 607,193 lines of code. There are 30 libraries, 151 plugins, 243 automated tests (of which 5 are failing).

• New home page =D

  Using Vuetify framework, that is built above Vue.Js I was able to build a new landing page with information about me and the stuff that I do. On that page you will be able to find my projects, presentations and contact information. I’ve also added a page of Tips & Tricks with content that I think that has value.

It's been nearly one year to the day since the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were made public. While the security vulnerabilities were quickly buttoned up in the Linux space, kernel developers continue working to offset the performance overhead introduced by these mitigations. They made a lot of overhead reductions in 2018 while still there are some patch-sets pending still for bettering the experience. One of these patch-sets was known as "Relpolines" but now has been updated and morphed into what is being called Optpolines.

Relpolines were announced a few months ago by a VMware developer as having lower overhead than Retpolines -- the return trampolines introduced as part of the Spectre mitigations back in January. The dynamic indirect call promotion work by VMware has been working on pairing relative calls and trampolines to reduce the overall Retpoline overhead. VMware found with their original patches it could deliver a 10% performance improvement to the Nginx web server, +4% for Redis, and other minor performance improvements -- well, recovering previously lost performance.

Also: The Linux Kernel In 2018 Summed Up: Spectre/Meltdown, CoC, Speck Fears, New Features