Android Leftovers

• Android 9 Pie update is FINALLY arriving on these smartphones

• Cast your vote for the best Android games released in 2018!

• Chrome OS 71 rolling out w/ ‘Better Together’ Android integration, Linux updates, more

• Google Lens for Android revamped with compact interface and other tweaks

• These paid Android icon packs are free for a limited time, grab them now!

• The 12 best iPhone and Android apps of 2018

today's leftovers

• ASUS is releasing encrypted kernel sources for the ZenFone Max Pro M1, Max Pro M2 and Max M2

• zenwalk current ISO for 13 12 2018

• openSUSE Tumbleweed 20181211overview | Fast! Integrated! Stabilized! Tested!

• Deepin 15.8 Version 2 Run Through

  Yesterday, 14 December 2018, Deepin released 700mb of updates, and it fixed all the bugs of Deepin 15.8 and it is awesome now.

• Cumulus Linux, NetQ available for Lenovo RackSwitch

  Cumulus Networks has made its Linux-based network operating system available for Lenovo's ThinkSystem top-of-rack switches. Cumulus also introduced this week a version of its network troubleshooting software, called NetQ, for the open hardware.

OSS Leftovers

• #RecruitmentFocus: Open source skills in high demand

  The unemployment rate in South Africa rose to 27.5% in the third quarter of 2018, while the demand for skills remains high - leaving an industry conundrum that is yet to be solved. According to SUSE, partnerships that focus on upskilling graduates and providing real-work skills, as well as placement opportunities - could be exactly what the industry in looking for.

• Stable: not moving vs. not breaking

  There are two terms that brings a heavy controversy in the Open Source world: support and stable. Both of them have their roots in the “old days” of Open Source, where its commercial impact was low and very few companies made business with it. You probably have read a lot about maintenance vs support. This controversy is older. I first heard of it in the context of Linux based distributions. Commercial distribution had to put effort in differentiating among the two because in Open SOurce they were used indistictly but not in business. But this post is about the adjectivet stable…

• Cameron Kaiser: A thank you to Ginn Chen, whom Larry Ellison screwed

  Periodically I refresh my machines by dusting them off and plugging them in and running them for a while to keep the disks spinnin' and the caps chargin'. Today was the day to refurbish my Sun Ultra-3, the only laptop Sun ever "made" (they actually rebadged the SPARCle and later the crotchburner 1.2GHz Tadpole Viper, which is the one I have). Since its last refresh the IDPROM had died, as they do when they run out of battery, resetting the MAC address to zeroes and erasing the license for the 802.11b which I never used anyway. But, after fixing the clock to prevent GNOME from puking on the abnormal date, it booted and I figured I'd update Firefox since it still had 38.4 on it. Ginn Chen, first at Sun and later at Oracle, regularly issued builds of Firefox which ran very nicely on SPARC Solaris 10. Near as I can determine, Oracle has never offered a build of any Firefox post-Rust even to the paying customers they're bleeding dry, but I figured I should be able to find the last ESR of 52 and install that. (Amusingly this relic can run a Firefox in some respects more current than TenFourFox, which is an evolved and patched Firefox 45.)

• Protecting the world’s oceans with open data science

  For environmental scientists, researching a single ecosystem or organism can be a daunting task. The amount of data and literature to comb through (or create) is often overwhelming. So how, then, can environmental scientists approach studying the health of the world’s oceans? What ocean health means is a big question in itself—oceans span millions of square miles, are home to countless species, and border hundreds of countries and territories, each of which has its own unique marine policies and practices. But no matter how daunting this task may seem, it’s a necessary and vital one. So in 2012, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and Conservation International publicly launched the Ocean Health Index (OHI), an ambitious initiative to measure the benefits that oceans provide to people, including clean water, coastal protections, and biodiversity. The idea was to create an annual assessment to document major oceanic changes and trends, and in turn, use those findings to craft better marine policy around the world.

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