today's leftovers

• Newer isn't always better when performance is critical

  Some years before I formalised my engineering education, I was working as an instrument technician on a seismic survey vessel mapping an area off West Africa. These ships map the geology under the sea bed as the first stage of marine oil exploration. In full production, a single vessel will generate a revenue of several hundred thousand dollars a day. So you need to have a good excuse for when the recording system fails and you leave a hole in the survey coverage, especially when you have an ex-military Norwegian built like the proverbial Viking as party manager. The recording system was crashing; no error warnings, no smoke or fire. It just stopped recording. Repeatedly. The survey was looking like a cartoon Swiss cheese that had been attacked by hungry mice. What had changed? To save money the company had developed its own recording system, replacing Old Faithful with New Unreliable. I had my reservations when the prototype was tested in parallel with Old Faithful leading to my tearing out the connection between the two systems with under a minute to the start of a production line to go. I was younger then and could handle the excitement.

• Minikube: 5 ways IT teams can use it

  As far as tool names go, Minikube is a pretty good reflection of what it does: It takes the vast cloud-scale of Kubernetes and shrinks it down so that it fits on your laptop. Don’t mistake that for a lack of power or functionality, though: You can do plenty with Minikube. And while developers, DevOps engineers, and the like might be the most likely to run it on a regular basis, IT leaders and the C-suite can use it, too. That’s part of the beauty. “With just a few installation commands, anyone can have a fully functioning Kubernetes cluster, ready for learning or supporting development efforts,” says Chris Ciborowski, CEO and cofounder at Nebulaworks.

• Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo: S12E02 – Light Force

  This week we have been upgrading disk drives (again) and playing Elite Dangerous. We discuss Mark’s homebrew Raspberry Pi based streaming box, bring you some command line love and go over your feedback. It’s Season 12 Episode 02 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

• Altered, a sweet looking puzzle game where you're part of the puzzle is coming to Linux

  Releasing sometime this Summer, Altered looks like a rather sweet take on the puzzle genre as you're a block that forms part of a puzzle. The developer, Glitchheart, describes it as a "meditative" puzzle game that mixes difficult puzzles in with a "soothing atmosphere". The description made me chuckle a little, as you can make it seem as soothing as you want but if the puzzles really do get difficult you can't stop players getting frustrated. Still, solving puzzles doesn't need to make you sweat which is more the point here as it seems there's no set time limits and no dangers.

• How To Navigate Directories Faster In Linux

OSS Leftovers

• 8 Best Kodi Sports Addons For Streaming Live Sports In 2019

  Kodi media player is a boon for cord cutters. In an era where subscription-based streaming services are popping left and right, Kodi presents an easy method to watch movies free online. By installing some of the best Kodi addons and top Kodi repositories, you can access hundreds of millions of movies and TV shows.

• NVMe Driver Now Available

  Due to the awesome work by long-time developer waddlesplash, nightly images after hrev53079 have read/write NVMe support built-in. What is NVMe? For those not keeping up with the latest advances in tech, NVMe is a M.2 form-factor flash-based storage device which attaches directly to the system’s PCI Express bus. These flash devices are present in modern desktops and laptops and offer transfer speeds of several GiB/s. These devices now show up in /dev/disk/nvme/ and are fully useable by Haiku.

• Haiku OS Picks Up An NVMe Storage Driver

  Back during the BeOS days of the 90's, NVM Express solid-state storage obviously wasn't a thing but the open-source Haiku OS inspired by it now has an NVMe driver. Haiku that aims to be an open-source OS based off BeOS now has support for NVMe SSDs. This driver didn't make last September's Haiku R1 beta but now being found within the latest development code is for NVMe SSD hardware.

• Join Us In New York City

  OSI Board Directors have broad backgrounds and experience, working in a variety of roles—Chief Open Source Officer, Chief Information Office, Chief Technology Officer, Open Source Program Manager, Community Manager, Developer, Architect, Engineer, Attorney—for both corporations and communities—Clojure Community, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Debian Project, Free Software Foundation, Github, Google, Kubernetes Community, Microsoft, One Laptop Per Child, Open edX, Oracle, Python Software Foundation, Red Hat, Salesforce, Sun Microsystems , The Document Foundation, Wikimedia, Zalando... and many, many, more.

• Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n report: April edition

  The deadline to ship localization updates in Firefox 67 is quickly approaching (April 30). Firefox 68 is going to be an ESR version, so it’s particularly important to ship the best localization possible. The deadline for that will be June 25.

• Why Companies Open Source Their Software?

  When a company releases its code as open source and contribute it to foundations like CNCF, it literally loses control over the project. What benefit is there in doing so? Why would you want to lose control over the very project you created? Dan Lahl of SAP has an answer: that’s the beauty of Open Source.

• Avalanche Noise Generator Notes

  I’ll probably go through another iteration of tweaking before final integration, but afaik this is the smallest, lowest power open-source avalanche noise generator to date (slightly smaller than this one).

Software: LibreOffice, X-Gimp, COPR and Tauon Music Box

• [LibreOffice] menubar updates [updated]

• X-Gimp 2.10.10 [rev25]

  Image editors are ten-a-penny nowadays, so anything which wants attention from a divided audience needs to offer something quite special. X-Gimp is the portable version of GIMP (or the GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is one of the most powerful free image editors available and is frequently described as being a free alternative to the likes of Photoshop. This is a highly versatile tool which can be used as a basic drawing program but can also be employed to edit digital photographs to a professional level. Despite being free of charge, opting to use GIMP does not mean having to compromise on features. Layers, masks, channels, filters and special effects, in addition to the usual range of editing tools, are all on hand to make image editing as easy as possible. Powerful tools such as the correction mode which allows for the correction of barrel distortion and perspective problems are usually only found in expensive packages but are included here for anyone to try out. Whether you are an amateur digital photographer or a professional graphic artist, GIMP has something to offer you.

• Fedora Magazine: 4 cool new projects to try in COPR for April 2019

  COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software. Here’s a set of new and interesting projects in COPR.

• Tauon Music Box – Excellent desktop music player

  Over the past few months I’ve covered scores of open source graphical music players. They’ve been a mixed bag. Some are genuinely excellent, others falling short of my (fairly) modest requirements. The music players I’ve mostly reviewed include ncmpy, ncmpc, and Cantata. I’ve also reviewed Nulloy, Museeks, Pragha Music Player, Yarock, qoob, aux.app, MellowPlayer, Kaku, Strawberry, Headset, Qmmp, and the truly sublime musikcube. The vast majority of the music players are GUI software. Continuing my series, here’s a further graphical music player. Bearing the moniker Tauon Music Box (Tauon), it’s based around disposable playlists and the assumption that folders are albums. They are also intended to function as a kind of workspace or to keep different music collections separate. The project instructs users to ensure they have an organized and structured music library, ideally with each album in its own folder. Sound advice. The software is written in the Python programming language. It uses Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), not PulseAudio.