today's leftovers

• curl 7.84.0 inside every box

  Welcome to take the next step with us in this never-ending stroll.

• Mars Probe Running OS Developed in Windows 98 Receives Software Update in Space [Ed: With a budget like this, there's no excuse for running vandalOS from Microsoft]

• ESP32 board with 150Mbps 4G LTE modem also supports RS485, CAN Bus, and relay expansion - CNX Software

  LILYGO has designed another ESP32 board with a 4G LTE modem with the LILYGO T-A7608E-H & T-A7608SA-H variants equipped with respectively SIMCom A7608SA-H for South America, New Zealand, and Australia, and SIMCom A7608E-H for the EMEA, South Korean, and Thai markets, both delivering up to 150 Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload speeds. The board also supports GPS, includes a 18650 battery holder, and features I/O expansion headers that support an add-on board with RS485 and CAN bus interfaces, in a way similar to the company’s earlier TTGO T-CAN485 board with ESP32, but no cellular connectivity.

• ICE-V Wireless FPGA board combines Lattice Semi iCE40 UltraPlus with WiFi & BLE module - CNX Software

  Lattice Semi ICE40 boards are pretty popular notably thanks to the availability of open-source tools. ICE-V Wireless is another ICE40 UltraPlus FPGA board that also adds wireless support through an ESP32-C3-MINI-1 module with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE connectivity. Designed by QWERTY Embedded Design, the board also comes with 8MB PSRAM, offers three PMOD expansion connectors, plus a header for GPIOs, and supports power from USB or a LiPo battery (charging circuit included).

• Felipe Borges: See you in GUADEC!

  After two virtual conferences, GUADEC is finally getting back to its physical form. And there couldn’t be a better place for us to meet again than Mexico! If you haven’t registered yet, hurry up!

Red Hat Servers, and AlmaLinux

• What is distributed consensus for site reliability engineering? | Opensource.com

  With microservices, containers, and cloud native architectures, almost every application today is going to be a distributed application. Distributed consensus is a core technology that powers distributed systems. Distributed consensus is a protocol for building reliable distributed systems. You cannot rely on "heartbeats" (signals from your hardware or software to indicate that they're operating normally) because network failures are inevitable. There are some inherent problems to highlight when it comes to distributed systems. Hardware will fail. Nodes in a distributed system can randomly fail. This is one of the important assumptions you have to make before you design a distributed system. Network outages are inevitable. You cannot always guarantee 100% network connectivity. Finally, you need a consistent view of any node within a distributed system.

• How Cloud AI Developer Services empower developers

  It’s been almost 11 years since Marc Andreessen famously posted, “Software is eating the world.” Over the last decade in IT, we’ve seen some amazing transformations happen – from companies fundamentally changing the way they deliver software to how we as consumers use web and mobile applications and services in our daily lives. Research shows that the average person in the U.S. now uses at least four to five software programs a day to do their job – partially due to the pandemic. Developing software has emerged as perhaps the most critical business function for companies as they undergo digital transformation to adapt to fast-paced change, delight their customers, and stand out from competitors. As such, the role of software developers has evolved at such a rapid pace that it is now more common to deliver software u

• What is next for Open Source- Alma Linux and beyond | Business Insider India

  When Red Hat announced that it will no longer support open-source CentOS, a wave of disturbance was caused throughout the open-source community. In response, the open-source community formed an alliance and started building alternatives for CentOS. While they initially named it Lenix, which was a paid offering and was initially restricted to hosting providers, its eventual success led the community to make it 100% free and open-source and renamed it to AlmaLinux. Today, AlmaLinux has delivered over three releases with millions of downloads. It has become an alternative platform for developers for CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Even though its user-facing features are limited, its speed and agility have made it an attractive avenue for the open-source community.

Digitally signing PDF documents in Linux: with hardware token & Okular

We are living in 2022. And it is now possible to digitally sign a PDF document using libre software. This is a love letter to libre software projects, and also a manual. For a long time, one of the challenges in using libre software in ‘enterprise’ environments or working with Government documents is that one will eventually be forced to use a proprietary software that isn’t even available for a libre platform like GNU/Linux. A notorious use-case is digitally signing PDF documents. Recently, Poppler (the free software library for rendering PDF; used by Evince and Okular) and Okular in particular has gained a lot of improvements in displaying digital signature and actually signing a PDF document digitally (see this, this, this, this, this and this). When the main developer Albert asked for feedback on what important functionality would the community like to see incorporated as part this effort; I had asked if it would be possible to use hardware tokens for digital signature. Turns out, poppler uses nss (Network Security Services, a Mozilla project) for managing the certificates, and if the token is enrolled in NSS database, Okular should be able to just use it.